Let us now praise paper clips. Twentieth-century manufacturing may have produced some junk, but let's not overlook all those elegantly simple, everlastingly ingenious products that made life better. Ten standouts:

Paper clips: The century wasn't a year old when Johan Vaaler, a Norwegian living in Germany, solved the age-old problem of corralling fly-away papers.

Ice-cream cones: At the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, food venders Arnold Fornachou (ice cream) and Ernest Hamwi (sweet, rolled wafers) collaborated in a way that seems inevitable now.

Neon light: Two English chemists had discovered neon 11 years earlier, but in 1909 French physicist Georges Claude captured the gas in a glass tube. In a year, his "liquid fire" was used to illuminate a Paris building.

Cellophane: Developed in 1912 by Jacques Brandenberger, to protect Paris cafe tablecloths from wine and coffee stains.

Zipper: "The Judson C-curity Fastener" was a forerunner, but in 1913 Gideon Sundback patented an easy-to-use design. "Z-z-zip," it went, fastening rubber galoshes for B.F. Goodrich Co., which coined the name zipper.

Band-Aid: Marriage made Earle Dickson an inventor. He was a cotton buyer for the Johnson gauze bandage company; his bride kept hurting herself in minor ways. So he devised a small, ready-made sterile bandage strip. Since 1921, Johnson & Johnson estimates 100 billion Band-Aids have covered skinned knees, cuts and scrapes.

Photocopier: Think about what once was involved in making a copy. Monks toiling over medieval manuscripts. Smudgy carbon paper. Enter Chester F. Carlson. In a neighborhood in Queens, N.Y., he used powdered ink and an electrical charge to create a photocopy. "10-28-38 Astoria," the reproduced page said, identifying the date and place.

Ballpoint pen: World War II could not stop Laszlo Biro's invention; indeed it hastened production. He was working on a ballpoint when he fled his native Hungary. The patent came in 1943 from Argentina. Some 30,000 pens were soon manufactured in England so RAF navigators could write in unpressurized cockpits where fountain pens failed.

Frisbee: Working independently at mid-century, Bill Robes in New Hampshire and Frederick Morrison in Los Angeles created the "Space Saucer" and the "Pluto Platter," respectively.

Sticky notes: First came Spencer Silver's 1973 invention of an indifferently sticky stuff. But what to do with it? His 3M colleague, Arthur Fry, had the application: He first used paper gummed with the stuff to mark songs in his choir book.

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