Hate email? Getting rid of it wouldn’t make you happy | Andre Spicer

Email's inventor, Ray Tomlinson, died last week, and though his gift to humanity has proved a mixed blessing, it is not what makes us slaves to the smartphone

If you ask anyone what the worst part of their job is, they are likely to respond with one word: email. Over the weekend, the inventor of this contemporary curse, Ray Tomlinson, died. Tomlinson came up with the idea while developing the Arpanet - the predecessor of today's internet - in 1971. He and his colleagues were scratching their heads about what to do with their new invention, wherein one application eventually became email. "Don't tell anyone!" he told a colleague. "This isn't what we're supposed to be working on."

Related: How did email grow from messages between academics to a global epidemic?

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