I'm late and I can't find my keys

The kids are buckled in, and I've checked the same coat pocket three times. — Parent on a school morning, 2005

Romans often wore a key on a finger ring. Their clothes mostly had no pockets, and a key on your finger doesn't wander off. Sensible people. Linus Yale Jr. patented the small flat key we carry, and we've been setting it down ever since. In a 2017 survey by Pixie, a tracker company, Americans said they spent about two and a half days a year hunting for lost things. Over half said it made them late. Now a tag rides on the key ring, and your phone can make it beep wherever in the house the keys landed. If it's on your keys. If the battery's good. The Romans just wore theirs.

Noted: a 2011 tag needed a charge about once a week. Now one can run about a year on a coin battery.

The full file

Those Roman finger keys had a smaller job than you'd think. They mostly opened little boxes, the kind that held jewelry, not the front door. The key guarded the jewelry. The ring guarded the key.

Linus Yale Jr. meant to be a portrait painter. He put the brushes down around 1850, when his father, a lock maker, died, and took up the family trade. The painting world got along without him.

The tag came before the names you know. In 2010 a company called Phone Halo was selling a Bluetooth tag about the size of an eraser to hang on your keys. It worked with BlackBerry and Android phones. The iPhone had to wait.

Tile is the one that made it ordinary. Two engineers, Nick Evans and Mike Farley, quit their software jobs in late 2012 and took orders on their own website the next summer instead of on Kickstarter. They took in more than $2.5 million in a month, then needed about a year and a new manufacturer to deliver. People waited. That tells you how much they hated looking.

Relates to No. 07600.