Technology in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy - Personal Items - Towels

Towels

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy states that a towel is the most important item a hitchhiker can have. It also mentions that "to know where one's towel is" means to be in control of one's own life. It describes the towel as a multipurpose tool which can be converted into such things as a sail for a makeshift raft, a gas mask, a blindfold and a weapon for hand-to-hand combat. Resourceful hitchhikers have enhanced their towels in highly exotic ways, including embedding complex circuitry; Roosta, who Ford Prefect says "really knows where his towel is", fortified his towel with yellow stripes high in protein, green stripes with vitamin supplements, pink flowers of wheatgerm extract, and other areas containing barbecue sauce and anti-depressants. Ford Prefect, a traditionalist, has so far only reinforced his towel's seams, which enabled him to use it as a rope to stop himself from falling to his death. In the TV series, towels move of their own accord during hyperspatial jumps, and the amount they've moved allows an experienced hitchhiker to calculate the distance he has travelled. The towel was useful in the film version a handful of times mainly by Ford. When he started to wave it around in front of a group of Vogons, who screamed and ran away, on the homeworld of the Vogons while attempting to cross the beach infested with the shovel-like creatures that feed on thought, pulling the pipe from the Vogon ship attempting to increase the range of his ring, to name a few.

The emphasis on towels is a reference to Hitch-hiker's Guide to Europe by Ken Walsh, which inspired Adams' fictional guidebook and also stresses the importance of towels.