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Batteries. Right?
Below are 15 more things we totally take for granted, even though our lives would be totally different if they had never been invented.
#15. Ba-dum-ching.
“You don’t hear a lot of love for sewage pipes, but city life would be hell shitty without them.
(Edited by popular request.)”
#14. The greatest thing to come along.
“The fact that we have a numerical representation of the absence of a quantity.
0 (zero) as a concept in mathematics was the greatest thing to come along in the history of the world.”
#13. Who’s Norm?
“GMOs, which have saved billions of lives and are constantly hated on and misunderstood
Thanks, Norm.”
#12. Transistors.
“Transistors. Without them, limited electronics, limited miniaturization.”
#11. Nope.
“Plunger. I ain’t digging shit out with my hand, nope.”
#10. It’s done wonders.
“The process of canning food. It’s done wonders for increasing the shelf life of food and feeding the masses, but commercials always bash canned food: “Our food is always fresh and never from a can.”
#9. Glass.
“Glass.
No glass, no chemistry. No glass, no modern medicine. No glass, no airplane cockpits. No glass, no skyscrapers. No glass, no microscopes or telescopes.
Everything we know about things that are very very big and very very small would remain unconfirmed without glass.”
#8. Fewer accidents.
“In 1887, a man named Granville T. Woods got a patent for a “Synchronous Multiplex Railway Telegraph” which enables trains and train stations to communicate to each other while operating, resulting in fewer accidents among other things.
Fun fact: Thomas Edison, being who he was, tried to steal his patent saying it was his idea. Granville was able to win the legal argument two times at which point Edison conceded and offered Granville a position at his company.”
#7. Modern computing.
“The Jacquard loom. Not only did it revolutionize making textiles in complex patterns, it was a huge and important step towards modern computing.”
#6. Good stuff.
“Central air, that’s the good stuff.”
#5. Pretty amazing.
“Modern dentistry is pretty amazing but it gets a bad wrap because of how uncomfortable it is. Still a lot more comfortable than it used to be!”
#4. Your house is stinky without it.
“The S-Trap – The shape of the pipe inside of a toilet. Before this was invented and widely used toilets smelled awful, which is why they were often outside of the house in “out houses” (like porta-potties). The S-Trap allows for all the poo smell to be corked by a barrier of water, but still allows for the poo to slide down the pipe whenever the water level rises above the top of the curve. Your house would be stinky without it.
example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flush_toilet#/media/File:Four_types_of_pedestal_WC.svg”
#3. Period products.
“Reliable feminine hygiene products. Before pads in particular, women had to use rags which did not work, or be forced to stay home from school or work. In the developing world where sanitary products are not available, literally millions of girls are forced out of school early because they have no means of managing their periods. Pads make it possible for women and girls to participate in public life.”
#2. Thank goodness.
“The Discovery of Zinc. Thank goodness we live in a world of telephones, car batteries, handguns, and many things made of zinc.”
#1. Literally.
“Trains.
They literally changed the entire world. They kickstarted the second wave of the Industrial Revolution. They allowed people to travel, they allowed for a better diet (people would have only eaten what was available locally but the railways changed that).
But the biggest thing? The GWR had a problem. Towns and cities set their clocks to the sun. London and Bath had a significant time difference, so of someone were to travel to Bath and have thier pocketwatch still set to London time they would miss their train.
The GWR adopted GMT for thier timetables and it spread to other rail companies too, and eventually it was adopted worldwide. All because of the railways.”
Kind of makes you want to back some more Kickstarters, doesn’t it?
