Our best-selling ideas come down to earth

Coming along nicely

There has been a bumper response to our request for help in writing BBC News Online's first best-selling novel.

Inspired by the runaway success of dramatised accounts of apparently humdrum scientific discoveries and historic backwaters, here is what we hope might form BBC News Online's first interactive best-selling book.

Examples of the form have included Cod - A History of the Fish that Changed the World, and the unrelated Mauve: How One Man Invented a Colour that Changed the World.

We asked you to send in similar subjects and titles for books and there were some cracking suggestions including:

• Dewey Decimal - the Classification System that Changed the world,
• numerous suggestions featuring paperclips, rubber bands, staples and Tippex,
• and the idea of producing a tome entitled: Tweed Throughout the Ages: Insidious Garment or Medicinal Properties?, from Lemon J. Farrarlington, Luxembourg

Other titles suggested by users

From Sand to Silicon. Society is built upon a foundation of sand. Almost as common as dirt, it is used in glass, art, toys, cement, music, and, of course, silicon - Christopher Coleman, USA

Life Before the Loaf: How Sliced Bread Became the Yardstick for Excellence - Michaela, UK

How the Edible Parts of the Highly Poisonous Puffer fish came to be Discovered, and How Many Food Tasters Gave their Lives for this Delicacy - Dave, UK

Other potential winners included

• The Wheel: The Right Tool at the Right Time, suggested by Malcolm Saunders of the Cayman Islands
• A Brief History of Thyme, proposed by Martyn of London, and
• Crouching For England - the Many Ways in Which England's History Would Have Been Radically Different Had Someone not Crouched at a Vital Moment.

But the one that took our fancy most of all was suggested by Andrew Mark from the UK.

And here is our attempt, as promised, at the first chapter of the book, by BBC News Online's Chris Horrie. It is, of course, a work of pure fiction.

Earthwire: A History of the Little Yellow and Green Wire

May we plug our new book?

CHAPTER ONE

At first glance, the stooped figure of Alfredo Clack did not seem to have about him the air of greatness.

The rounded shoulders, chronic dandruff, dark teeth, gnarled face and madly swivelling bloodshot eyes which women found so irresistible, all attested to the ordinariness of his life as a technician in the vast, faceless, warren-like laboratories of Conglomerated Electrical.

But first glances can be deceptive. And beneath the filthy lab coat, inept manner and general shiftlessness, there ran through Alfredo Clack - this third generation son of a family of Istrian mandolin makers (they had supplied the instrument later played by Captain Corelli) - a streak of greatness so wide and so deep that it would have swamped the great Adriatic Sea which had once been sailed upon, probably, by generations of his forefathers.

For on a hot, humid day in August 1932, in the middle of a New York thunder storm, with lightening flashing all around him, Alfredo Clack - "Ugly Stupid Features" as his workmates cruelly called him - achieved a feat which in three million years of human evolution and in, what, 10,000 years of civilisation, no other man or woman had ever achieved ever before.

Alfredo Clack - this unimposing scion of a family of immigrant New York central European artisan instrument makers - steeped in centuries of carving instruments out of the ancient Circastia trees of the northern Adriatic coast - invented the yellow and green rubber-clad electrical earth wire.

Things would never again be quite the same for Alfredo or - for that matter - civilisation as we know it.

It came to him, quite literally, in a flash. Or rather - a series of flashes. Alfredo had been trying for years to produce an electrically amplified mandolin. In the process he had suffered so many electrical accidents and shocks that he had been driven to the very brink of madness.

Then, after a particularly nasty bout of self-imposed electrocution, Alfredo - hair standing on end - watched with wrapped attention as one of the instrument's metal strings snapped and connected with the metal sheathing of a waste-paper basket. The electricity arced harmlessly to the floor along the mandolin wire and bin -thus giving him The Great Idea.

In the decades that followed Alfredo's chance discovery men walked on the moon, Hitler came and went, England won the World Cup, the internet arrived, and the lives of hundreds of millions of people from Lapland to Patagonia, from Beijing to Baltimore, were transformed thanks in very large measure to the use of properly insulated electrical earth wire and the three-pin plug it made possible.

And yet little or nothing is known of Alfredo Clack and his dramatic, tempestuous role in revolutionising the modern world as we know it. Until one day....(etc, etc, continues for another 120,000 words).

So that's it. Thanks for your help. Any publishers out there who are interested in a lucrative book and film deal can contact us on the usual e-mail address.