The Most Disruptive Technology of the Last 100 Years Isn't What You Think

HughPickens.com writes: Ana Swanson writes in the Washington Post that when people talk about "disruptive technologies," they're usually thinking of the latest thing out of Silicon Valley but some of the most historically disruptive technologies aren't exactly what you would expect and arguably, the most disruptive technologiy of the last century is the refrigerator. In the 1920s, only about a third of households reported having a washer or a vacuum, and refrigerators were even rarer. But just 20 years later, refrigerator ownership was common, with more than two-thirds of Americans owning an icebox. According to Helen Veit, the surge in refrigerator ownership totally changed the way that Americans cooked. "Before reliable refrigeration, cooking and food preservation were barely distinguishable tasks" and techniques like pickling, smoking and canning were common in nearly every American kitchen. With the arrival of the icebox and then the electric refrigerator, foods could now be kept and consumed in the same form for days. Americans no longer had to make and consume great quantities of cheese, whiskey and hard cider — some of the only ways to keep foods edible through the winter. "A whole arsenal of home preservation techniques, from cheese-making to meat-smoking to egg-pickling to ketchup-making, receded from daily use within a single generation," writes Veit.

Technologies like the smartphone, the computer and the Internet have, of course, dramatically changed the ways we live and work but consider the spread of electricity, running water, the flush toilet developed and popularized by Thomas Crapper and central heating and the changes these have wrought. "These technologies were so disruptive because they massively reduced the time spent on housework," concludes Swanson. "The number of hours that people spent per week preparing meals, doing laundry and cleaning fell from 58 in 1900 to only 18 hours in 1970, and it has declined further since then."

Comments

Truly disruptive

[chrism238]

The contraceptive pill.
It's saved trillions of dollars, saved trillions of hours of work, reduced poverty, childhood deaths, and the threat of countries being invaded for their land.

Re:Truly disruptive

[serviscope_minor]

It's saved trillions of dollars, saved trillions of hours of work, reduced poverty, childhood deaths, and the threat of countries being invaded for their land.

It also rendered obsolete massive amounts of social convention. We're still working on purging those obsolete ones from the system of society, it seems.

Re:Truly disruptive

[BitZtream]

... except the places where that is most true and would apply if they used the pill ... don't use the pill.

Re:Truly disruptive

[jellomizer]

In general a larger population is better for the economy. It is just most of us think of an economy as something in a fixed supply. So more people will just mean more jobs that are filled and less for others. That isn't true, as the population grows the economy will grow to meet the increased demand, by matching its increased supply of workforce.
The problem is our culture has values that are in conflict with itself. If someone has a child outside of wedlock we still have them considered as an outcast, and prefer not to give them or their child extra assistance, because "She shouldn't have done the act"
This was less of an issue in the older days, as people got married at a younger age, and often had a tight family structure to cover up such shame, such as the 40 year old grandmother, saying it is her child. In this modern age, we need to realize that people are getting married much later in life, this causes us much more time to avoid our natural urges, which causes a lot more failures.
Contraceptive is one part of the problem. Allowing the family to plan when they have a child, but the bigger cultural issue is still at play.

Kalashnikov's Baby

[Oxygen99]

The AK-47. Bringing armed revolution to the masses!

Effect on Nutrition

[trout007]

Those preserving techniques provided major sources of nutrients. Sauerkraut (and other fermented vegetables) has lots of Vitamin A, C, B-6, K as byproducts of the fermentation.

Not just food

[plopez]

It also changed how people socialized. Instead of popping down to the corner store where you often met people from the neighborhood, you now have mega-marts. Instead of canning parties of in-season veggies, you have frozen foods. Small truck farms were driven out of business.

Also in the field of medicine. Some medicines are very temperature sensitive, insulin comes to mind. Easier blood storage. Easier organ storage and corpse storage.

  It changed so many things besides just food storage and preparation.

Dude-centric

[Anonymous Coward]

The most disruptive tech of the last 100 years was the washing machine. Because it gave women some actual time to DO something during the day. Before the washing machine, women washed clothes all day. It was the most laborious thing they did, and it was a constant process. Yes, refrigeration REALLY changed a lot of things, but it didn't make life drastically more worth living for half the population. Washing machines. No question at all. Without them, women didn't need the vote, because they didn't have time to read, or work on getting educated. We're talking about half the population becoming part of the population, as opposed to beasts of burden.