Slashdot Mirror
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."
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."
The Most Disruptive Technology of the Last 100 Years Isn't What You Think
Don't tell me what I think. You don't know what I think.
You don't want to know what I think.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Electrification!
...and continue to consume great quantities of cheese, whiskey and hard cider.
-----
Sorry, I'm only a 1336 h4x0r.
Yes the advent of white goods and decrease in the need for manual labour had a million times more to do with changing gender roles in western societies than feminism ever did.
is fire .. eating raw meat .. munching forever .. strong digestion .. its all gone.. sniff ..
You can just live in a bubble, and avoid anything dangerous. Oh wait, we found that we need a good supply of microorganisms to keep our body healthy, so living in a bubble is bad for our health too.
Our body can deal with with many of these "Bad" things when at the correct level. And with the amounts ideal, you are probably overall healthier than without them.
We americans trend towards excess, and will even go with excess of absence. Our body is designed to process many of these things, and without ingesting these harmful things, those part of our bodies atrophy and weaken our ability to protect against it. But that doesn't mean go hog while and base your diet strictly on foods with harmful elements. Just take things in moderation. A Balanced Diet, not an extreme one.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
the atom bomb was still pretty disruptive.
Aeroplanes. The use of aircraft in war has basically driven every other development, refrigerators included.
He did not invent the flushing toilet. Even the bloody link in the OP's click-bait "article" points this out.
For the sake of my family name, do NOT invent a disruptive technology involving fecal matter.
The entire comments section here is predictable. Clickbait sells ads, even to Slashdotters.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Agreed that the refrigerator (along with birth control) is one of the most disruptive technologies in the past 100 years. However, this is not yet the case for the world at large. Only 27% of people in India own a refrigerator. In the West we take things like refrigeration and toilets for granted...
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
The AK-47. Bringing armed revolution to the masses!
I had a dream, bright and carefree, but now there's doubt and gravity
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.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Housework falls not only because of more efficient and work flows but also for many other reasons which aren't well studied. Housework continues to suffer fall off partly because, as it cannot for most households be profited by or taxed by private or public institutions, we don't include it in measurements like GDP and so we favor policies which transform time spent doing housework into time spent doing work more financally accessible to the IRS and Wall St.
No doubt certain inventions contributed to this by increasing housework productivity, but we also continue to implement social and economic policies that deprioritize housework entirely.
"... the flush toilet developed and popularized by Thomas Crapper"
No, contrary to widespread misconceptions, Crapper did not invent the flush toilet.
Via snopes and wikipedia:
Wikipedia: It has often been claimed in popular culture that the slang term for human bodily waste, crap, originated with Thomas Crapper because of his association with lavatories. A common version of this story is that American servicemen stationed in England during World War I saw his name on cisterns and used it as army slang, i.e. "I'm going to the crapper".
Snopes: Alexander Cummings is generally credited with inventing the first flush mechanism in 1775 (more than 50 years before Crapper was born), and plumbers Joseph Bramah and Thomas Twyford further developed the technology with improvements such as the float-and-valve system. Thomas Crapper, said an article in Plumbing and Mechanical Magazine, "should best be remembered as a merchant of plumbing products, a terrific salesman and advertising genius."
I guess it's too much to hope that slashdot editors do even the most rudimentary fact-checking, eh?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Since when did whiskey have to be consumed if it wasn't refrigerated? I mean any excuse will do, but I think that example is taking things a little too far.
Smoking = carcinogens Pickling = excessive salt Canning = Preservatives Refrigeration = lower temperature I choose refrigeration .
Of course, if there exists the luxury of such a choice.
An even easier conundrum? Carcinogens, salt, and preservatives or starvation...
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Canning = Preservatives
Say what? No preservatives in anything I've canned.
Step 1: Buy pork
Step 2: Cut pork into smaller pieces
Step 3: Pack pork in canning jar
Step 4: Put lid on
Step 5: Process through pressure canner (~1.5 hours)
Step 6: Put on shelf for up to 5-10 years
Step 7: Serve and enjoy!
Pressure canning is one of the easiest things I've ever done.
But failure to do so results in starvation or death by food borne illness. It sounds like a good trade off to me. also note that food was more expensive due to lack of refrigeration, which is why it is the primary focus of what constitutes poverty in the US. It could also be argued that cheap food means obesity. If food was more expensive, less would be wasted and portions smaller.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
1915-2015?
I can see the argument for refrigeration and it's interesting to contemplate, but the transistor takes the prize for "most disruptive technology" hands down. It's nice to go home and have fresh milk, veggies and leftovers in the fridge as opposed to opening a bag of flour and having a winter squash with some smoked meat, but transistors changed absolutely everything.
If medicine is considered "technology", the other major contender is antibiotics. For 100s of years, injuries and diseases which are now easily treatable were very often deadly because of bacteria. Antibiotics changed all that.
You could also make an argument for plastics if you group them all together as a single technology. After all, what would we do without the salad shooter and clamshell packaging?
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.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
"Pickling = excessive salt "
Brine is only one of the pickling solutions. Vinegar or an oil solution is more common. There's also fermentation pickling.
"Canning = Preservatives"
What? Canning means cooking the product (often in the can) and sealing it while it's still hot enough to be sterile. You don't add preservatives, well not under traditional processes anyway.
I think they are possibly right but didn't generalize it enough. Refrigeration is fundamentally the same technology as air conditioning. Both just move heat from one room to another. (a small room in the case of refrigeration) And air conditioning is almost entirely responsible for the migration of huge numbers of people south and huge demographic changes. Same technology with different application and similarly huge results.
So the answer is correct if you include air conditioning as a subset of refrigeration (or vice-versa).
Smoking = carcinogens .
Pickling = excessive salt
Canning = Preservatives
Refrigeration = lower temperature
I choose refrigeration
I'm not sure you understand what the work disruptive means. One of the reasons refrigeration was disruptive is because everyone chose it over all of the previous methods. That's exactly what disruptive means.
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.
Close but incorrect.
The most disruptive technology of the last 100 years was . . .
Ta da . . .
Northern Toilet Tissue. Introduced in 1935. The very first splinter free toilet tissue.
Now that's innovation we take for granted.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
There are alternatives to Taco Bellyache
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
I just started canning but with a water bath canner that also does the steam method. This means I'm more limited in what I am able to can. Anything has to be in a acidic liquid or sugar syrup or similar state (such as apple sauce). I can't do items such as meat or plain vegetables as I could if I had a pressure canner. Foods prepared this way are at their best for one year though are still good for longer.
Smoking = carcinogens Pickling = excessive salt Canning = Preservatives Refrigeration = lower temperature I choose refrigeration .
Come on mods. "Insightful"? Bunch of stupid millennials ya'll are.
Smoking is not the same as barbecue or burned meat juice/flesh and doesn't contain the same level alleged carcinogens.
Pickling or lacto-fermentation doesn't require high levels of salt necessarily, and it's a lot less than some of the crap people shovel into their mouths now days, how much salt do you think is in chinese take out? Sushi, or even pizza? Back then, much of the pickling was also done to get something tasty with some water to people who needed both because they were doing physical labor. Salt is a very required mineral for humans that are actually _doing_ something.
Lastly, preservatives? This is total complete utter ignorance. Here's what goes in fruit preserves: fruit, water, sugar. Which one is the alleged "preservative"? Water bath canning and pressure canning used.... salt, maybe a few spices, sometimes pectin. Ooooh, plants boiled down to some other parts.Scary!
Refrigeration is good, it opens up all sorts of doors. The parent poster, is however, completely ignorant and using baseless "facts" for it's "reasoning."
This is about as useful as arguing about the most important person of the 20th century. The refrigerator was huge. So was the mass-produced automobile, the atomic bomb, the television, the transistor, digital communications, the list goes on. And all of these things enabled and depended on each other, so singling out one as the key to everything is stupid.
I do agree that refrigeration deserves more attention, though.
I think the combine and other heavy machinery would be a contender. Heavy machinery has reduced the number of farm and construction workers by more than 90% allowing those other people to take up new jobs. The computer, the service industry, cities, etc... wouldn't exist as they are today if 90% of our workforce still worked on the farm. The article says that refrigeration and other household technologies made household work drop from 58 to 18 hours (a 69% reduction). Farm machinery has the beat by a long shot with something close to a 90% reduction in labor.
Other runner ups for other reasons would include birth control, antibiotics, plastic, the internal combustion engine, and factory automation.
I thought this would have been at the top of the list. Before street lamps people had to continually worry about their own personal illumination. That's 'torches' for those who have never seen a Hammer film. It also had a great deal of impact on the environment. Wild animals who could freely roam now had to learn new instincts and survival skills.
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
So, back then, because refrigerator where uncommon, people had to be creative and found various cooking techniques that improved conservation. For the same reason, local ingredients where likely to be preferred and seasons had to be observed. This resulted in a lot of diversity and interesting recipes.
The refrigerator is certainly a big advance, so are modern sterilization techniques but it also lead to the hopelessly bland diet of many people today.
Proof that disruptive isn't all good.
The most disruptive technology I recall was certainly Windows 3.1
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Er... refrigeration preserves the microorganisms in food, it just slows down their metabolism. Smoking, pickling and canning are all designed to sterilize food so that it can be stored at room temperature. And I'm fairly certain we eat more salt, smoke and preservatives than hunter-gatherers ever did.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
So you don't like your food to taste good? Smoking and pickling can add substantial flavor to food. Jams and jellies and other products that are canned are fantastic. Canning does not require preservatives as it was developed as a way of storing foods aseptically. If you enjoy BBQ then you are enjoying the benefits of smoking. Preservation methods often have awesome side benefits in making food taste good. Cured meats, pickled vegetables, canned fruits, salting, etc all result in some pretty awesome food products. People developed those techniques out of necessity and elevated them to an art form.
Oh, and starvation is worse than any side effect of any preservation method.
Foods prepared this way are at their best for one year though are still good for longer.
Generally speaking, as long as the jar is still sealed the food texture and flavor will degrade long before it starts to lose much nutritional value. Everything that was in the jar at the time it was sealed is still there when you open it.
That said I like eating food that tastes good, so it's good to use FIFO when consuming. My pork canned in 2011 is still tasty today though.
But here is the issue, as part of balance, if we have too much bacteria or the wrong type we get sick too. Refrigeration slows down the spoiling process however it doesn't stop it, thus giving us a false sense of security, while eating spoiled food, just because a particular strand seems to thrive better in colder temperatures than the others. While the food is sterilized to serve at room temperature still isn't sterilized, and sometimes fermentation takes advantage of microorganisms to create the flavor we like.
We like the flavor from smoked, salted, and preserved foods. Why? Because we were evolved to like those, because we knew that it wasn't spoiled food and those side effect we can deal with.
I am not contradicting myself BALANCE is the keyword. Pining on all the bad stuff we face in our environment isn't healthy. Taking normal precautions and finding what your body feels as a good balance will probably help you live longer than picking up on the weekly buzzword diet trend. Or trying to do what that pretty girl is trying this week.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The big ones include but aren't limited to:
Transistors & Integrated circuits
Refrigeration/air conditioning
Jet engines
Mass air travel
Nuclear power/weapons
Birth control pills
Antibiotics & vaccines
Genetic analysis and therapy
Telecom networks (including the internet)
Containerized shipping
Email
Lasers
Electrical grids
Superhighways
Nitrogen based fertilizers
Pesticides/herbicides
And some more I've forgotten
Can you rank these? Not meaningfully. I suppose you could study economic impact but that's going to be very imprecise and is only one measure of disruption. If I had to vote for just one it would probably be either the transistor or birth control. But it really doesn't matter.
The thermostat. It provides the feedback control system which automated everything from heating and cooling to cooking and manufacturing and chemical processing.
The refrigerator is a great disruptive technology for the early 20th Century, here is a list of others by the century they gained wider use and what they disrupted:-
Mid 19th Century: The Flush Toilet: replaced in a stroke the use of pit drop toilets when coupled to a sewer and disrupted completely the work of Gong Scourers, who's job it was to be paid to regularly clean out cesspits, cart away the waste and sell it to market gardeners outside of the growing cities. Hence the phrase "Where there's much there's brass"
Mid to late 19th Century: Municipal long distance sewers an sewage treatment: In London UK disrupted the spread of waterborne disease and the livelyhood of any physician or peddler selling posies and possets to cover the smell on the mistaken belief that these diseases were airborne or Miasmic Diseases.
Mid 15th Century: Movable Type Printing Press: Initially disrupted the hand written indulgence business the church had going by drastically reducing the costs of buying your way out of purgatory, then disrupted practically everything to do with knowledge transfer.
That is a good start I'm sure others can continue the thread. You know there may be a book in this!
Before 2/3rds of Americans owned an icebox, we also didn't have a huge great hole in the ozone layer. Skin cancer is very disruptive, don't you know?
The Crossbow was once considered such a horrific weapon, and such a huge advance that "man might never make war again" because of sheer amount of death this device could bring to the battlefield.
So, it's all relative....
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
God, if only there were ways that the human body could survive cooked food, eating salt, etc.. It's almost like we weren't BUILT to be able to survive things like that.
Honestly, this is outside the bounds of health-freak and into complete paranoia.
Ironically, refrigeration has probably been responsible for more deaths on Earth - including cancers - than any amount of food-smoking.
Why you thinking smoking is somehow worse than cooking, I don't know - are you sitting there deeply-inhaling all the smoke constantly while your food smokes or are you normal? That's before we get into the cherry-picking of types of pickling and canning to support your argument at the expense of all the other (more normal) ways.
P.S. A salted ham won't kill you. Nor will a smoked salmon. Or a tin of meat. What will is the stress on your body of worrying about all this stuff and avoiding it to this level.
And I'd say running water, followed by toilets, and then electricity. Everything else flows from there.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
For my money, the most disruptive technology of the last century - the one that has genuinely done THE most to change the society we live in and the lives of everyone in it - is the humble standardized shipping container. Containers and the infrastructure to handle them mean that we can now ship immense quantities of goods of all shapes, sizes and types from one side of the planet to the other, at a cost per mile per item that's so small it's barely measurable. They mean that it is, literally, cheaper now to move many manufactured goods from one side of the planet to the other, than it used to be to ship them 10 miles down the road. As a manufacturer, it means that, in principle, you can source your materials and parts from anywhere on the globe. Want to manufacture part of your product in Europe, but assemble it in Asia? Do it. Ban shipping containers tomorrow, and the global economy would grind to a shuddering halt in days. And it doesn't matter what other technology you care to point to as a candidate - it's shipping containers that make it globally available. Head and shoulders the winner.
I was just discussing something similar with a few of my tech buddies, a few weeks ago. Despite all of us working in I.T. for decades and being up on the latest trends -- we universally agreed that it feels like real innovation is slowing down. There were so many inventions in the last 100 or so years that clearly changed society, but in the last 10 or 20? Not so much. Almost everything heralded as the next big thing is really an incremental revision of existing tech, in recent years.
I mean sure, the Internet itself is a huge game-changer, but even that really goes all the way back to DARPANET, started in the early 1970's. The microcomputer is also really a child of the 70's. In fact, a lot happened in the 70's, invention-wise! The Bic disposable lighter was invented, as well as gene splicing. The VCR was invented, forever changing how people watched television. Post it notes, the laser printer, ethernet networking and cellular phones all came from the 70's too, plus the artificial heart and MRI machines.
The current generation is going to be remembered for creating a whole bunch of social media web sites that came and went and for popularizing the digital streaming of content you "rent" on monthly plans instead of buy on pre-packaged media. Oh, and multiple attempts to incrementally improve existing televisions by adding a curve to the flat panels, by adding 3D technologies to them that never really caught on, and by upping the resolutions every so often. I mean, ok ... I'm purposely being a little sarcastic here. But I think you get my point. We might still have a big game-changer on the horizon with self-driving vehicles, mind you. But this doesn't appear to be going down as a particularly trans-formative era in history.....
splinter free toilet tissue.
Not sure which is more awful, taking chances with splinters or living in Roman times and having to use a brine-soaked sponge that was fastened to a stick and used communally.
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.
Hold on a second, so in the 1920s, fewer than 1/3 of Americans owned a refrigerator. By the 1940s, more than 2/3 of Americans owned an icebox. How many owned iceboxes in the 1920s? How many owned refrigerators in the 1940s? These items served the same purpose, but are most certainly not the same thing.
Neither of which being "of the last 100 years".
The Romans had running water and toilets. Electricity was used in the 1800s (DC mostly but it was used nevertheless).
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
How many people had running water, toilets, and electricity in 1915?
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I'll throw air conditioning in there under the heading of "refrigeration". A/C has turned baking deserts (e.g. Arizona, Saudi Arabia) and humid swamps (e.g. Florida) into popular places to live.
We've been able to generate heat since the harnessing of fire, but generating cool took a lot longer.
I do all three. I grow and hunt (or fish for) my own food or know where it came from. Almost all of it, actually. Well, except when I'm on the road and then I find that other food tastes a bit different than I'm used to. I still eat it - it's not like I'm picky. I do it because I enjoy it, not any health or ethical reasons. Of course, freezing and refrigeration are also involved. I've learned to do all of these things and how to butcher my own meat from a neighbor and his wife. I usually buy a pig and a half a cow at a time and now I can do most of the cuts on my own and have learned a whole bunch of tasty preservation methods.
I don't really grow my own grains. I have the land but not the equipment to harvest efficiently. I've given it some thought but I just don't think I'll ever do it unless I'm forced to and that seems rather unlikely.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Smoking = carcinogens Pickling = excessive salt Canning = Preservatives Refrigeration = lower temperature I choose refrigeration .
Come on mods. "Insightful"? Bunch of stupid millennials ya'll are.
Smoking is not the same as barbecue or burned meat juice/flesh and doesn't contain the same level alleged carcinogens.
Maybe the OP thought that you made a smoked ham by getting the pig addicted to Marlboros.
Dark Reflection
Sure there is some salt, but you only have to do enough of a ratio to ensure that the healthy bacteria are able to culture and ferment you food with the acid by products and CO2.
Heck, many of the old natural ways of preserving aided with "friendly" bacteria...beer for instance, when not pasteurized and filtered, has great live yeast in there that help with your B vitamins.
IN many ways, modern conveniences have caused some problems.
Hell, living TOO cleanly has likely put our present day children at health risks....they aren't exposed like we were in my day to microbes in the environment and were able to build our immune systems. Too sterile an environment is not good for kids today (do any of them actually PLAY outside in the dirt anymore?)....as that their immune systems may be weaker than should be...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I dunno. Between my stick burner smoker and my latest toy, a Big Green Egg XL....i'm eating plenty of grilled and smoked foods (meats, seafood AND veggies).
I like to cook out a lot....and no gas grills for me, I like real wood and charcoal for my foods cooked outside.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I was born in 1926 and well remember the ice box that really was an ice box with a good sized hunk of ice at the top and regular deliveries of ice from the ice man. We dodn'thave a refrigerator but had fresh vegetables and fresh mead from the butcher shop daily. And the toilet paper was just fine even in 1930.I lived in Brooklyn, NYC and even had an electric toaster and a well designed vacuum cleaner and a radio with Charlie McCarthy and Fred Allen and Jack Benny and the Columbia Workshop. Better than the Bulk of TV today.
The shipping container, you say? Dubious? Read Marc Levinson's excellent _The Box_
Also, maybe many don't know the distiction between BBQ and grilling. When you grill things like burgers, steaks, etc...over hot, high quick heat, that is grilling...it is NOT Barbecue.
I know the difference very well. BBQ is as your say low and slow and it routinely ALSO involves utilizing smoke. BBQ pork and one of the hallmarks can be the pink smoke ring that permeates the meat. There is little better to eat in this world than some BBQ with a nice smokey crust.
Not sure why you went off on that tangent since nothing I said had anything to do with calling grilling BBQ or vice-versa.
No. The dimwit just doesn't know anything because he's probably never done so much as boil water in his life.
The summary noted that the time spent on "chores" is down. I was originally going to comment that this is probably because people mostly eat out now or indulge in pre-packaged snacks.
People aren't enjoying home automation, they are avoiding the process entirely and just "outsourcing" it all.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
About the only true innovation I can see lately is in the "maker" culture. In particular, amateur 3D printing is making the average person (as in income more so than skills) create small custom parts. Likewise, cheap easy-to-program micro-controller boards (Arduino, mbed, etc.) allow small custom embedded control of stuff for the person of average means, even in these days where the individual parts are too small to easily assemble without specialized equipment.
Remember, when the refrigerator was new, people weren't exactly expecting it to cause a major change in society, so whatever might be disruptive from now might not be obvious for a few decades. And I would argue that the internet is quite valid as a candidate, even though it was "invented" in the 1970s. Refrigeration was available through the 1800s, but it wasn't until the early 20th century that average people could afford to have one at home.
The internet and mobile communications have really changed things over the past 20 years. I'm old enough to remember when TV drama plots used the lack of communication as a plot point, where a cell phone would have ended the story quickly. Now they have to use being out of range as a plot point, but you still can't justify that in a city setting.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Penicillin and antibiotics in the last hundred years basically changed the entire civilized world from "you live until you die of an infection" to "you live until you die of cancer or heart failure." Which is pretty significant.
Although it is pretty hard to argue with the refrigerator, it just gives me the cold shoulder.
Ice boxes worked fine. My father believes the most disruptive technology is closely related to refrigerators: air conditioning, which allowed the industrialization of the south, and is the enabling technology behind modern skyscrapers, especially those huge greenhouses in the middle of the desert e.g. in Dubai. We don't build huge buildings with opening windows or air shafts any more; that is kind of a major change. (An extremely energy inefficient change - build a greenhouse, then expend huge amounts of energy pumping accumulated heat out of the greenhouse.)
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
You're right, you take your refrigerator for granted until it fails unexpectedly. But now imagine this: the air conditioning at your workplace fails in July or August. Which is more disruptive?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Obama managed to get elected president, he's obviously smarter than you are!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Nothing has altered the framework of the US like the automobile. Manufacturing, finance, marketing, engineering, regulations, architecture, social mating..... All of them have undergone revolutionary transformations in the post WWII years. Only the existence of the internet has come close (and may someday surpass) to being as disruptive.
I'm not crazy,I'm actively irresponsible.
Bitcoin will come to the rescue of this money printing machine!
Because doesn't the definition of disruption have a negative connotation?
If you had asked me the question without prompting, it would have been a tough choice between electricity and automobiles. The fridge isn't there without reliable electricity in the home. Another guy cited the washing machine, since it saved so much labor for women. Same thing. It doesn't happen if you can't plug it in. In a world with cars but no home electric, I think life would still be pretty rough. OTOH, we build "streetcar suburbs" that ran with overhead electric, which solved transit for a lot of people. Car companies killed the street-cars, but nobody could kill electric so I'm going to go with "reliable electricity to the home" as the most disruptive technology even though electrification started well over 100 years ago. For rural people in the USA, 1930-1950 were the swing decades which puts us well in that time-frame.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Even I don't get to BBQ every day. Then again, they likely only got to BBQ when they had food.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I just puked in my mouth a little.
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
My cheese goes bad in the refrigerator if I don't eat it fast enough. How did they manage to keep it around all winter?
Prior to the development of the sanitary napkin, most women between the ages of approximately thirteen and somewhere in their fifties had to at least partially withdraw from society on a monthly basis. Now the participation limits on women are societal norms and part of pregnancy / infancy. I suspect the societal norms are the more restrictive of the two.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
How many people had running water, toilets, and electricity in 1915?
Toilets, most people in the 1st world. At worst if you lived in a worker area of a big city you shared the toilets with you neighbour. Electricity is more recent, many rural areas didn't get that until the 1960s, and running water in rural areas depends on pumps and often came with electricity, in cities running water goes back to the Ancient rome.
Everyone? My refrigerator has been turned off for years, and serves the quiet and inexpensive task of holding up the sourdough starter. The space where the ice box used to be has fermenting lemons, mead, kohlrabi, kraut, etc. Any actual productive use for a refrigerator (extending the life of beet kvaas, for instance) would need to be weighed against the noise and energy wasted on that giant of flavor, iceberg lettuce.
Yes curiously, women seem to bitch more than ever about how miserable they are.
Because, no matter how many hours are saved by novel and curious devices, men are still the same?
None of us actually knows how much bitching was going on back then.
I'm going to guess: a lot.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Pickling in brine is very unhealthy as it increases sodium content of the food. Similarly smoking produces chemicals which not only control microbial growth but are harmful for human beings. Refrigeration is in fact a constructive technology. There is no benefit of labeling it as a destructive one.
Fresh mead from the butcher? That's quite medieval. Lucky guy. I have to make my own mead these days.
Then "electrification" instead of electricity. Both my parents were raised in houses that didn't have electricity. It wasn't as long ago when the REA was changing lives. The REA started in 1935, because the US trailed the (industrialized) world in rural electrification. Yes, my parents are old and born in rural areas.
Learn to love Alaska
I remember the horrible toilet paper the schools had in the 70s. Thin, crinkly, single-ply, waxed, utterly unsuitable for its intended purpose.
The story that some guy named Thomas Crapper invented the flush toilet started with Martin Gardner's monthly column in the Scientific American, when suckers failed to note that it was for the April edition. That April Fool's joke spread so fast, showing that even pre-internet people would believe pretty much anything.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Icebox is a vernacular word for refrigerator (as is Frigidaire, in some locations). The language changed and absorbed the previous term, rendering it obsolete and meaningless. Much like you could argue a dashboard in a car is used technically incorrectly, as well as a cupboard that holds plates. It's too late, the language has changed. Fighting it is pointless.
Learn to love Alaska
Diversity, only kinda.
Before refrigeration you'd likely be stuck eating mostly the same things over and over again in cycles based on the season. Refrigeration opens up more diversity because you can eat all kinds of stuff out of season, and from other parts of the world. Of course that added diversity though is purely potential, people don't have to eat those different things, and many probably just stick to what they like best.
That reminds me of those mimeograph copies, back before laser and jet printers. I remember getting handouts all the time at school that were copied that way, almost always having some of the pigment/paint stuff spattered at various random places on the page, and often one corner of the page wasn't aligned correctly and sort of faded away.
Sadly too stomach cancer rates are higher in countries like Japan where pickled items are still enjoyed by a large percentage of the population.
What makes you think government issued toilet paper is any better today? :-)
Thanks for the clue. According to wikipedia, flush toilets have been in development for several centuries. Thomas Crapper was a manufacturer of flush toilets with a number of patents to his credit that advanced the state of the art. It looks like Gardner was either ignorant or stretched the truth, but he was close enough that his story really doesn't qualify as a joke.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Actually, with regard to pickling, it is ONLY to get rid of and protect against BAD micros. There are plenty of good gut bacteria grown and and promoted by pickled foods, if you're talking about natural fermentation pickling like with kraut, kimchee, cucumber pickles. You can actually replenish your good gut bacteria with these foods after you might lose them due to having to take antibiotics for an illness.
Sure there is some salt, but you only have to do enough of a ratio to ensure that the healthy bacteria are able to culture and ferment you food with the acid by products and CO2.
"Kimchi, which is allegedly believed to have anti-carcinogenic properties, accounts for approximately 20% of sodium intake. Case-control studies on the intake level of kimchi and gastric [and esophageal ]cancer risk generally showed an increased risk among subjects with high or frequent intakes of kimchi."
In a doco I saw this was blamed on carcinogenic nitrosamines caused by the fermentation breakdown of proteins. It was suggested that more vitamin C with the meal would help neutralize them
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3204471/
Tracks have a problem with low coefficient of friction. The technology of putting an automated and reliable spur into every driveway and parking space would be ugly, dangerous, and expensive. Tracks do not and cannot offer a small turning radius. Routing around accidents is difficult to impossible. This technology will never see widespread use.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
I suppose this may be regional, but I'm hearing the term "icebox" turn to its meaning as "a cabinet once used to hold ice for cooling food", whereas "fridge" and "freezer" refer to the obvious mechanical contraptions.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Busy people don't have time to bitch. Productive people aren't at "Occupy" meetings.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
The VCR is a 1960s invention.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Yeah, I guess you could say that. There was apparently a video recorder made in 1963 in the U.K, sold in kit form, that could record 20 minutes at a time in black and white. (It cost about $1,600 in today's U.S. currency too.)
But the device actually called VCR that used video cassettes was a Phillips invention sold to TV stations in 1970, and made available to consumers in 1972.
Toilets, most people in the 1st world.
By toilet you mean hole in the ground, or spetic tank maybe? The modern, inside flushable toilet connected to a mains sewer only became mainstream after the war. My parents who were kids in the 40's and 50's still remember having to shit in an 'outhouse'.
Electricity is more recent, many rural areas didn't get that until the 1960s, and running water in rural areas depends on pumps and often came with electricity,
along with toilets.
in cities running water goes back to the Ancient rome.
They also had toilets, but I don't think that really counts.
Despite all of us working in I.T. for decades and being up on the latest trends -- we universally agreed that it feels like real innovation is slowing down.
My great grandparents saw the industrial revolution, my grandparents experienced world wars, my parents brought about social revolution and the digital age, and I played computer games and watched porn.
My kids also play computer games and are probably watching porn too. It seems we've reached a plateau in human development.
Neither salt nor preservatives are inherently bad. First, preservatives could be pretty much anything, including a lot of natural substances with no harmful effects, eg. vinegar. Second, there is increasing evidence that the demonizing of salt is ill-founded. Each person likely has a different salt requirement to function optimally and the links to high blood pressure and other cardiovascular issues are based on questionable studies some of which have already been disproven.
So my question is really, what was your point?
What's so butt-sex stupid is just how much higher the price-point on those diets is compared to the junk ones, often pricing them out of the range of those who need them the most -- the poor and lower classes who cannot afford expensive treatment and so for whom prevention is paramount. 200 years ago, the "good" diets were all you could get (at least insofar as food types were concerned, not everyone could necessarily get the right food amounts so there was malnutrition in many places). Yet all the "junk" stuff which takes more steps between the ground and the consumer costs less.
Many people still have septic tank systems, but they also have indoor flush toilets. Connecting to city sewer is a different question and is only really needed in the cities.
Water pumps don't have to be electric, what do you think all of those windmills out west did? 8-)
By the way, running water is not the same as sewer systems. Some had one without the other.
A vernacular is just a local technical jargon, "technical" being what ever they are talking about.
We need technical jargon for specific things, but everyone needs to also know "standard". Alse, there will be radical misunderstandings between people in different areas. I have heard so many arguments where people were both on the same side, but didn't know it because they defined a word different.
"Icebox" is a cooling box that uses a large block of ice.
"Refrigerator" is a cooling box that uses a compression refrigeration system.
But if you swap them people will still probably know what you mean ... mostly. 8-)
A vernacular is just a local technical jargon,
I was using it to mean "casual use, not necessarily proper use".
"Icebox" is a cooling box[...] "Refrigerator" is a cooling box [...]
The operational details are irrelevant to most. People don't use words accurately. They use them accurately enough. Someone who walks into their house with groceries, and shouts out "Bobby, come put the milk in the icebox" there is a 0% chance that Bobby will respond "But Mother, we don't have an icebox, we have a compression cycle cooling box." She could probably say "put it in the cooler" and Bobby would infer she meant the reefer, unless they were in the process of packing for a camping trip, even if they owned an icebox/ice chest/cooler/insulated container/chillybin/whatever they call it where you are.
My example for this language is "broadband". Under the technical definition of "broadband", 14.4k modem is broadband, and 10GE isn't. Though broadband in common usage means "fast" so 10G is more broadband than 14.4k, despite 14.4k being explicitly broadband, and 10GE being explicitly baseband. I'd use 100G as the example, but the official standards aren't set in stone on it, and some are using broadband, and others baseband for the same speeds, something else confusing to the people who only use the common usage of the word, not the technical use of it.
Learn to love Alaska
I'm so confused. I like to barbecue on my grill, or a hibachi at my girlfriends house. I use hardwood briquets exclusively because they make my food taste magical. It takes about 30 mins to cook corn or these nice sausages from the butcher, less than that for fish or asparagus. I cover things so they come out tasting quite smoky.
Technically speaking, in the US what you are describing is is grilling rather than barbecue. If it doesn't take a long time at low heat it isn't technically correct to call it barbecue. But don't worry about it too much. Most people use the terms interchangeably and (almost) nobody really cares.
Interestingly the British use the term barbecue for what the Americans call broiling - high direct heat. They also use grilling as something close to a synonym. But barbecue (in the low and slow American sense) is really an American style of cooking and I think it's useful to allow for the distinction because the cooking methods are hugely different. Grilling doesn't work well for cuts of meat with a lot of connective tissue.
What am I allowed to call this? I'm scared to think about it too much, what I do now is fun, comes naturally, and tastes super amazing.
Call it whatever you want. It doesn't really matter. But if you want to be pedantic you are grilling and/or smoking.
That's why I used the phrase "Local technical jargon". Jargon is not necessarily more detailed, just specialized to the local needs.
But if you are talking to the antique collector and you say you want an "icebox", you may very well get a wooden box that needs a hundred pound block of ice to work! That's what I mean by problems when talking to a non-local person.
I spend half my work time translating jargon of various types from one state or company to another. It's a headache! 8-)
If you trace back all the stories, they all originated with Gardener's April Fools joke. He even created a face ISBN number for a book and "quoted" from it, citing "Thomas Crapper" (a made-up name) in the book. Of course, most people never bothered to verity that the book didn't exist. Flush toilets existed more than two millenia ago.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I remember reading the original article in SciAm, and the follow-up that said "It was a joke, people." Thanks for the extra info :-)
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.