The nail, says Daedalus, is a brilliant and versatile fastener, but with a fundamental contradiction. While being hammered in, it is a strut, loaded in compression. It must be thick enough to resist buckling. Yet once in place it is a tie, loaded in tension, and should be thin and flexible to bear its load efficiently. He is now resolving this contradiction.

An ideal nail, he says, should be driven in by a force applied, not to its head, but to its point. Its shaft would then be drawn in under tension; it could not buckle, and would form a perfect tie. But how to apply a force to the point of a nail? Well, suppose the blow on its head lasted only a microsecond. In this time, the shock would travel only a millimetre or so down the nail. The compressed region would be far too short to buckle. The pulse would travel down the nail, and would force the point into the material being fastened. Any reflected energy would travel safely back up the nail as a tension.

Now only the most rigid materials could have an impact time of a microsecond. A diamond hammer driving a diamond nail would be wonderful engineering but disastrous economics. But in electronics, microseconds are positively leisurely. A piezoelectric transducer could hit a nail thousands of times a second. Quartz is piezoelectric, and quartz fibres have amazing tensile strength. So Daedalus is now inventing the quartz-fibre piezoelectric nail.

His ‘piezonail’ will be a fine, flexible fibre with plated electrodes, and embedded in a plastic reinforcing jacket. You will fit it into a recess in its pulse-generator ‘hammer’, hold it firmly against the object to be nailed, and switch on. The burst of pulses will force it silently and instantly into the material, giving a strong, tensioned, firmly bound tie. In thick or hard materials, the piezonail will not even need a head; friction will hold it firmly enough. Many thin ties are superior to one thick one, so the hammer will also accept a ‘polynail’ containing many parallel piezonails in one jacket.

Construction will be transformed. The global toll of bent nails, bruised thumbs and ringing ears will plummet as the piezonail spreads through engineering, carpentry and DIY bodging. A piezonailed structure will be strong, stable, secure — and somewhat enigmatic. Its myriads of fine fixing fibres will be almost invisible, giving no clue as to what holds it together, or how to get it apart again.