The salt shaker is proof we've solved at least one thing completely. Perfected somewhere around 1920 and basically unchanged since.
Every restaurant has them. Every home. They're refillable, nearly indestructible, and when they do break, they cost a dollar to replace. The salt shaker represents functional design winning: no planned obsolescence, no proprietary refills, no app to download. Just a thing that does its job reliably, forever.
It turned the most valuable commodity in human history into something so abundant and accessible we don't think twice about it. The salt shaker sits on your table as a small monument to problems we actually fixed.
