September 13, 2017 • 44 mins
From the Billy Bookcase to the air conditioner, the gramophone to the stacks of paper we needed for the Guttenberg press to work, history is filled with important-but-overlooked inventions. Will and Mango spend this episode giving some less glamorous ideas their due (did you know a bag of concrete is one of the best weapons against poverty?). Featuring a big assist from economist Tim Harford.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Guess what, Mango? What's that? Will? All Right? So, I
know we're doing this episode on inventions, and I wanted
to give you an update. I'm not giving up on
my invention, and tell me about that again. You know
the pudding truck. We talked about this putting ruck. So
this is the one where you take one of those
cement trucks with this huge spinny things on the back
and fill it with pudding, right, yeah, exactly. I mean
I've had this vision for years and one day, I mean,
(00:22):
this is probably when I retire, but I'm determined to
do this. I don't know how much it costs to
buy one of these trucks new, but we'll figure that
out in the future. But I'm determined to make this
thing work. And you know, I'm planning to compete with
the ice cream truck. I mean, go head to head
with the ice cream truck. I want to drive around neighborhoods,
but you know, instead, the pudding will come pouring down
that cement shoot. Kids will just hold their hands out
(00:44):
and the pudding will just like rush into them, and
the people are gonna love it. I've just I've got
to figure out how to pass the health code stuff first,
but but again I'll figure that out later. Yeah, those
minor details. So I know it's brilliant, but it seems
like a bit of a stretch to call it an invention,
and especially when I think about all the cool stuff
we read about this week. I mean, I I certainly
don't want to crush your dreams. You should, you should
(01:06):
definitely pursue this, but we should probably also talk about
some of the most important inventions that shaped the modern economy.
What do you say? All right, well, one day I
think you'll understand more mango, But all right, let's get started. Hey,
(01:34):
their podcast listeners, welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will
Pearson and as always I'm joined by my good friend
men Guestow, Ticketter and the man on the other side
of the soundproof class who's giving us not one but
two thumbs up. Thanks Tristan as our producer, Tristan McNeil.
And today we're looking at some of the revolutionary ideas
and breakthrough innovations that have helped make our economy what
(01:54):
it is today. I mean, it's kind of crazy when
you stop and think about how quickly humanity has gone
from scattered, nomadic tribe to this current information based age,
and of course a few things have happened in between.
But it's pretty amazing to think about all this progress.
Even the concept of money is, you know, what it
looks like, what it can buy for us, All that
(02:15):
has changed along the way too. And all this rapid
evolution is due in no small part to some very
unexpected consequences, you know, the surprising, often life changing impacts
of a few key people and ideas and inventions. And
so that's what we're planning to cover today. Yeah, and
we should definitely say upfront that today's episode is a
little different than most. The theme and content is directly
(02:37):
inspired by a new book out this month called Fifty
Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy, and our guest is
actually the best selling author of that book, Tim Harford.
So Tim is a rare cripple threat. He's an author, broadcaster,
and an economists so we're super excited to talk to
him and see what juicy details he has about about
the world economy. Yeah, and it probably sounds a little
(02:57):
strange to some of our listeners to hear us talking
about the juicy details. I mean, it sounds a little
strange to me, to be honest. Yeah, so you mean
the fact that economics can be interesting pretty much? Yeah.
I mean a lot of people assume economics is this
extremely complex and therefore unapproachable science, and you know, people
feel like it's too abstract of a concept to truly
(03:18):
wrap your head around and make it real to us,
you know, for us to really understand it. And it
has this reputation of being kind of boring or tedious,
and some people even call it the dismal science for
this reason. Yeah, which is true. A lot of people
call it that because economics can lead to some pretty
upsetting outcomes, like the idea that robot labor will one
day supplant the need for human workers. But I actually
(03:40):
read about how that nickname originated, and the funny thing
is it really points to the merits of economics rather
than his drawbacks. Oh really, I haven't. I haven't read this.
What did you read? Yes? So, according to this article
in The Atlantic, Thomas Carlyle, a Scottish writer and philosopher,
called economics the dismal science when he was writing in
defense of the slave trade in the West Indies, and
he was actual arguing that white plantation owners should be
(04:02):
able to force black plantation workers to be their slaves.
But to Carlins chagrin, he wasn't able to justify this
by looking at the economics. Apparently, like supply and demand
are more in favor of leaving people alone rather than
forcing them in to do labor. Wow, I don't think
i'd heard that. So, so Carlisle called economics a dismal
science because it wouldn't back up slavery. Is that what
(04:22):
you're saying, Yeah, And then he railed against political economy,
calling it a jury, desolate and indeed quite adject and
distressing science, what we might call the dismal science. Yeah.
So if you really trace the term back to its root,
it's a nickname that connects economics with morality, and it's
also this argument against racism and slavery. Like Carlo considered
(04:44):
that to be a failing of economic thought. But obviously
for any decent person that's a really good thing. That's
pretty cool that that's where that came from. So the
dismal science is actually a tool for making the world
less dismal. Exactly. So, well, why don't we go ahead
and talk about one of the big inventions and and
one that also made life less dismal, especially during the
hot summers. We're talking about air conditioning, yeah, I mean,
(05:07):
you know, you know, we all know air conditioning was
a big deal, but sometimes you do have to stop
and really consider the impact of an invention like this. Yeah,
so I'd say air conditioning is one of those inventions
whose impact is always staring you right in the face,
yet you never really quite make the connection. And and
I remember hearing how much like how much less legislation
was passed by the founding fathers and and future congresses
(05:27):
because of the summer heat. But uh, you know, just
think about skyscrapers, like they're these beautiful bastions of finance
and commerce. But without air conditioning, we'd never be able
to occupy those buildings, and people on the higher floors
they'd be baked live. You know, it's weird. I had
never really thought about that, But that's a good point.
And air conditioning is definitely good for all kinds of business.
(05:47):
I mean, actually, one when you were saying skyscrapers, I
was thinking about shopping malls. I mean, there's no way
those would exist. No one would want to walk around
in them because it would just be too hot in there,
but they were a huge part of the American economy
for deck aids. Yeah, and even if you look at
online shopping, like remember computers stopped working all together if
they get too hot. So really, without air conditioning, we
wouldn't have the vast server farms that make online shopping
(06:10):
and really the Internet itself possible. Yeah, that's very true.
And it's hard to imagine cities in the Nations Sun Belt,
you know, ever, of really emerging without air conditioning. We
just think about how hot it's been here this summer
in Atlanta. I can't imagine there's anyway you would have
made the move to Atlanta if we didn't have air conditioning,
not when I looked at it, like all the states
(06:30):
in the Sun Belt, so there's Georgia, but also like Arizona,
New Mexico, Texas, Southern California. It's amazing to think they
all experienced population booms during the second half of the
twentieth century, you know, when air conditioning became commonplace and
people's homes and offices, so they it's a boom. But
like how big of a boom are we talking? Well?
Pretty big. I mean between nineteen fifty and two thousand,
(06:52):
the sun belts share of the national population shot up
from twenty percent to Oh wow, that's pretty huge, all right,
So the economic effect of air conditioning are definitely coming
into focus now. But I want to back up a
little bit. I mean, what's the story behind air conditioning,
you know, the origins of it. I know Tim included
it on his list, but there's got to be some good,
you know, background stories there. Absolutely, so finding a way
(07:14):
to cool down in hot weather has been on humanity's
mind forever and and in fact, there was this eccentric
Roman emperor named Ella Gabalus who sent a thousand slaves
into the mountains to fetch huge amounts of snow, which
he then had them pile up in his garden. And
and that way it was just when the wind kicked up,
the cooler air would blow inside his palace. So it
took a thousand people to try to cool this one dude,
(07:37):
Ella Gables. And I'm not sure that I remember that name.
I would have to imagine that would not be easy
to implement, though on like a wider scale, though definitely not.
The concept was revived in the nineteenth century by an
entrepreneur from Boston named Frederick Tudor. In winter, Tutor harvested
blocks of ice from frozen New England lakes. Then he
packed the blocks and sawdust which served his installation, and
(07:59):
he shipped the warmer regions in the summer. And the
practice grew so popular that a mild New England winter
like it would cause this panic all over and people
would worry about a potential ice famine next summer. But
my favorite revival of this Roman emperor's methods happened in
one after a President Garfield took a bullet from a
would be assassin. He had naval engineers construct this makeshift
(08:20):
cooling device to keep him comfortable while he slowly died.
That summer, so sad, but following the Romans lead, the
device cooled the room down by blowing air over a
cold material. So you know, Garfield was super smart and
and these naval officers are bright, and they got cotton
sheets that have been soaked in ice water, and that's
how they created the coldness. That's the best the Navy
could come up with. I have to be honest, that
(08:42):
doesn't seem that impressive. Well it's kind of impressive, but
just like with the Emperor's snow Mountain. It was incredibly
wasteful and impractical, and Garfield's caretakers supposedly went through half
a million pounds of ice in just two one. Oh wow,
that is insane. All right, well, why don't you tell
us how proper air conditioning then became a reality. I
appreciated all that background information, but let's talk about more
(09:04):
modern form. This is not how it happens right now.
I said, no, people aren't carrying snowback. Actually, before I
do that, I didn't want to go on a little
tangent about how smart Garfield was. He was this president
that could write Latin with one hand and Greek with
the other. Um, but he was also too smart for
his own good. Like you know, when he caught that bullet,
he had doctors used a metal detector to locate it,
(09:26):
which is really a smart idea, but they forgot to
count for the bed springs. So the doctors went all
these exploratory missions, like trying to find things they thought
were the bullet, but I thought just bullets. Tangent, that's
a good one. But back to air conditioning. So the
air conditioning we know today got its start in nineteen two,
(09:48):
following the much needed advent of electricity, and and uh, surprisingly,
the invention of a C had nothing to do with
making people more comfortable. It was actually invented by Willis Carrier.
He's this young engineer at a heating company called Buffalo Forge,
and it was this big printing company had actually tasked
Buffalo Forge with creating a system to help control the
heat and humidity and their factories. So they needed something
(10:10):
to help prevent paper from wrinkling and from their ink
from running down the paper like during the printing process.
And so Carrier was put in charge of the project
and he's quickly figured out that circulating air over coils
that were chilled by compressed ammonia, that that could help
keep the humidity at a constant and as you might guess,
this thrilled the printers to no end. Wow, that's interesting
(10:32):
that it really wasn't about people at first. So how
did this transition happen, you know, going from printing factories
to people's homes. Well, it was kind of slow because
Carrier's original model was pretty massive, and at first the
company just stuck to the other industrial clients, like you know,
other places have been plagued by humidity. Uh, you can
think about like flour mills, or even like the Gillette
(10:53):
Corporation was a client. The moisture from humidity was just
as bad for razor blades as it was for paper.
But um Still, Carrier knew his invention had wider applications,
so four years later, in nineteen o six, he started
looking into possibilities for adding a C to public buildings,
but instead of government buildings or offices, he decided to
target theaters, which traditionally shut down during the summer months. Yeah,
(11:15):
I mean, I can imagine. You can imagine all these
packed bodies and one room the windows no a C.
And it's definitely not a great recipe for getting people
in there, not at all, and especially considering the best
option for cooling a theater at the time was the
way Tutor used to do it, Like some theaters had
used large fans to blow air over ice and help
cool the audience. I mean the downside was, you forget
(11:36):
about this, that pollution was on the rise, and especially
in New England's lakes, so so the damp air from
the melting ice it's sometimes made the whole place reek
and so um so so Carrier's new device, which which
he called the weather Maker, was this obvious upgrade, you know.
I mean, I've heard this before about people's first exposured
air conditioning being in the nineteen twenties, you know, back
(11:58):
when movie theaters started popping up ball over the country.
But it actually never occurred to me to think about
the economic upheam that would have occurred here. I mean,
you know, look at where we are now with summer
blockbusters raking in billions every year, and you figure a
lot of this has to do with people wanting to
get a break from the heat. Absolutely, And and when
home model Lacey's started being produced on mass like in
(12:19):
in the post war nineteen fifties, they completely changed the
way we live and the boom was insane. So I
just looked at these figures and I saw that there
were seventy four thousand units sold in ninety versts a
million units sold in nineteen fifty three. So that's like
a crazy economic boom. But you know, the thing I
always think when I think of economic booms, like, I've
(12:40):
got to mention this is the mini golf craze in
the they put like one course on a rooftop and
in four years there were a hundred fifty courses on rooftops,
like but actually there's a course on the roof of
our building here, I know, one of the few remaining.
I guess. Yeah. So it's impressive, but but the A
C is way more actical. Wow, it's it's interesting to
(13:01):
think about it. And I know we want to talk
about a lot more inventions, but first I feel like
we need to get Tim Harford himself on the line
to give us a rundown of some of his favorite inventions.
So our guest today as an award winning journalist, economist,
and broadcaster triple threat. As we mentioned earlier in the episode,
(13:23):
he's the author of the best selling The Undercover Economists,
as well as Messy. But today we're going to be
talking to him about this terrific book that we've been
speaking about all episode long, and that's fifty inventions that
shape the modern economy. Tim Harford, welcome to Part Time Genius.
It's great to be on the show. Thank you. Now.
I know that, um, when we asked you to come
(13:44):
on the show, you said that you would only appear
if both Manguesh and I were on the line, and
I've got bad news. This uh, this hurricane now tropical
storm has thrown us for a bit of a loop.
So I appreciate your willingness still to come on despite
what we'd agreed to earlier. It's I felt it was
the least I could do. Although you see, my familiarity
with American geography is is not as hot as it
(14:07):
might be. So for all I know you, you guys
are actually speaking in Alaska and there aren't any hurricanes there.
But in all seriousness, I hope that that you and
all your colleagues are safe. Thank you very much. Everyone
has done fine. Our our studios are in Atlanta, and
for our listeners, let you in on a little bit
of a secret. We don't always record our interviews on
the same days as the rest of our episode, and
(14:27):
so our offices have been closed for a couple of days.
But everyone seems to be okay, and so our thoughts
are obviously with all of those affected by Hurricane Irma
over the past few days in Florida and everywhere else.
But let's get started to talk about this book that
we've really fallen in love with, Fifty inventions that shape
the modern economy, One of the things I love about
(14:48):
it is that even though it's really structured as this
really kind of a massive list and we love list,
there's still such a terrific narrative quality throughout the book,
and you feel like you can follow the these stories.
And I was just wondering, you know how much time
it took to try to pull this off, because you
could just say, here are fifty inventions and facts about them,
(15:10):
but you really took such great efforts to weave then
such terrific narrative through all of this. I was just
curious to hear about the process of writing this book.
You're very kind, thank you. I mean, one of the
great things about um the way that I wrote the
book was there's also a BBC series based on the book,
and it's it's nine minute episodes, and each episode has
(15:33):
got to stand alone because somebody might just tune in,
they might just listen to that one story and there's
no context for anything, and so you've you've got to
make the story work. And nine minutes he is about words.
It's long enough to say some interesting stuff, but it's
it's never long enough to say everything you might want
to say, And so you've got to pick a good
(15:55):
hook and drive towards a particular point, and there's loads
and loads that that you always leave out. And I
found actually incredibly fun to write like that. I had
never really quite written a book in that style before,
but it worked, It worked nicely. So yeah, the story
is always the thing. Well, it was terrific. And part
(16:17):
of the fun is is seeing chapters that you don't
always realize just how entertaining or interesting they're going to be.
Just just as an example, you know, a chapter on
concrete where you're talking about the influence that it had.
And I have to mean, when I first saw you'd
listed concrete as one of these inventions that had shaped
the modern economy, I really thought it was going to
(16:37):
be about I don't know, maybe communist structures and Edison.
But you know, you talk about how concrete is influencing education,
so I was hoping maybe you could tell us a
little bit about that, and and also why you find
concrete so interesting. Yeah, I mean I should say, Chushia
of form of Soviet Premier did once give a two
hour lecture on the subject of concrete and what good
(16:58):
Soviet concrete should be like, So it's there is there
is some Soviet brutalism in there, but yeah. So I
began with a great story that I heard from the
development economist Charles Kenny about using a concrete ready mixed
concrete as an anti poverty program in rural Mexico about
(17:18):
fifteen years ago. So development organizations and governments are always
trying to figure out where if we throw some money
at the problem of poverty, is there something we can do.
Maybe we should give people cash, maybe we should give
people vaccinations, maybe we should provide schools. This particular poverty
program anti poverty program said, we are going to provide
ready mixed concrete. We're going to drive through these low
(17:41):
income townships right up to people's doors. Obviously, it's it's
pre arranged whore you're going to go to. And then
they opened the door and you just pour the ready
mixed concrete from the mixer lorry the mixer truck straight
into the front room. And the people who live there
have been given instructions as to how to smooth it
(18:02):
out and look after it themselves, and they just wait
and give it a few hours and it cures and
then you have a concrete floor and the truck drives
off to the next household, and it turns out to
be fantastically effective as an anti poverty intervention because these
floors are they're much more clean, they're much more hygieneq.
(18:23):
In particular, there's a problem with parasitic worms that the
kids will pick up through their their bare feet, and
they make them sick they missed school. Put the concrete
floor in and this problem largely goes away, and so
the whole health of the household, the mental health of
the parents, the physical health of the children all improves.
And it's incredibly cheap. And so I was just trying
(18:45):
to get people to look at this really unromantic substance
in a different way. If we use it wisely, it
can do a tremendous amount of good. Another invention that
you talk about, and something that we actually covered a
bit in an episode we did a few weeks ago
on ike and their Secrets of IKEA. I'm curious to
hear from, you know, including the Billy bookcase and a
(19:05):
list of the inventions you know what makes it so
special and worthy of being on a list like this.
I'm totally going to download that episode. By the way,
that sounds great. The reason I put the Billy Bookcase
in was because I wanted people to think about what
innovation looks like in a modern economy. We get very
fixated on certain particularly sexy, eye catching innovations, so things
(19:28):
like the latest iPhone, m Google algorithms, big data, and
actually a lot of the innovation that that makes the
modern economy what it is is very simple. It's unromantic.
It's all about process. It's all about shaving off a
bit of cost here, a bit of cost. They're getting
the supply chains working a bit more smoothly, maybe trying
(19:50):
to get the logistics reduced transport costs. It's it's not sexy,
it's not exciting, but it is the reason why the
you know, the dollar in your wallet goes so much further.
You know, for an hour's work, you can buy much
more than you could thirty, forty, fifty hundred years ago.
(20:11):
And a lot of that is just this very a straightforward, unromantic,
unheralded logistical innovation. And the Billy bookcase stands as the
representative of all of that kind of stuff. That and
of course the shipping container, which gets gets his own chapter.
I was curious to hear a few. If you had
a favorite overlooked older invention, you know, maybe something older
(20:33):
than you know, fifty sixty years that that maybe you
didn't realize would be quite so interesting when you dived in. Yeah,
there is one, the one that I have a really
soft spot for. I mean, while I was writing the book,
I went all the way back to the plow, which
is maybe five six, seven thousand years old and bang
up to date inventions like the sell of feedback mechanism
(20:56):
used by Uber. But the invention that I have a
really soft spot four is well, let me keep you
hanging for a second. Everybody said, as I was working
on the book, you've got to do the Guttenberg Press.
It transformed Europe, put Europe at the center of world civilization,
gave us the textbook, the newspaper, the novel, mass literacy,
(21:17):
the Reformation is completely transformative. But when you look at
the products of the Guttenberg Press, these beautiful Guttenberg Bibles,
you have to ask what they're printed on. And most
of them, not all of them, but most of them
are printed on paper. And the printing press doesn't make
economic sense without paper. I mean, as a practical matter,
(21:39):
you can print on animal skin parchment, but you have
to kill two and fifty thousand sheep. Literally, I counted
your law fall up. You have to kill two fifty
sheep in order to get enough parchment to do an
economically viable print run, say sort of four or five
thousand copies or something. So you need to mass produce
(22:00):
paper before it makes any sense whatsoever to mass produce
writing with The Chinese invented paper two thousand years ago.
It moved to the Middle East, the Islantic world, and
at six or seven hundred years a d they have
mass literacy in that society, and the Europeans just were
not interested. The idea that you have a cheap material
(22:22):
to write your bibles on is like saying we're going
to have a cheap metal to make crowns out of.
It felt like you were violating this this sacred thing
so nobody can. And it was only when Europeans started
getting more and more sophisticated commercial culture, to contracts, accounts, receipts,
that sort of thing, that you start getting this demand
(22:43):
for a cheap writing surface, and that's when paper finally
starts to take off, maybe the thirteenth century, and then
Shortly after that you get the Goods and book press. Wow,
that's incredible. You've taught us so many things. But we
can't let you leave without putting you to the test.
And even though mangas the author many of our quizzes,
is unable to be here, he did send me a
quiz to excellent excellent to test you with today. And
(23:06):
it's called real invention from the U. S. Patent Office
or something we made up. Okay, so what I'll do
is I'll give you a ridiculous invention and you have
to tell me whether it's something uh that's actually in
the U. S. Patent Office or something we just made up.
Simple as that, you're ready to go, alright? Question one.
Jet propulsion golf clubs. This gas powered high pressure water
(23:28):
pump and tank forces water through a hose and into
your hollow club. When you're ready to swing, just press
the red button and hang on, and highly pressurized water
shoots out the back of your club and propels your
swing forward. Is this something that was actually at the U. S.
Patent Office or something we made up? I know there's
some truly ridiculous patents, but I'm going to guess that
(23:49):
you made that one up. We actually did not make
that one up. That is true, and that that one
did in fact happen. So all right, I got a
chance to make up for a number two, the aquarium vest.
If you love your fish bowl but hate leaving it
at home on walks, the aquarium vest is for you.
Just fill it up with water, PLoP in your fish,
(24:10):
and get out and go. Okay, that's got to be
made up. It is. Yeah, good gauge on that one. Okay.
Question number three the bananas suitcase. No one likes a
bruised banana. That's why the banana suitcase offers a protective
plastic case for carrying a single banana around. Something tells
me I have actually seen that invention. I'm pretty sure
(24:34):
I've seen that invention and so on, And if the
invention exists, the pattern probably also exists. So I'm gonna
say that that is real. You are absolutely right. It
was patented in two thousand three. Okay, here we go
to the last question is the pogo stick weed whacker.
I have to ask, are you familiar with the pogo stick?
Is that something that exam familiar with the pogo stick?
My daughter, in fact, has a pogo stick, but she
(24:55):
doesn't have a weed whackers and I was gonna say, yeah,
you could, you could put her to even more use.
Let's at the description here is if you want to
put the fund back into thankless gardening chores, the poco
stick weed whacker is for you. With every bounce, a
monofilament line spins out, helping to edge grass and trim weeds.
Is this something with a real patent or something we
just made up a mono for them, So it's it
(25:20):
until you're just going to I was gonna say, yeah,
it's real, but now I can't possibly imagine how it
could work, so I'm gonna guess it's made up. And
you are absolutely right. It is something that we just
made up. And I believe that makes you three out
of four, which wins you our top prize, which is
a note to your mom or boss singing your praises.
So Tim, congratulations for the win. Here. Oh that's that's
(25:41):
it's real, it's real less and that's a that's a
good time. That's right. Well, I hope all of our
listeners will check out Fifty Inventions that Shape the Modern Economy.
It really is a terrific book. And Tim Harford, thanks
so much for joining us on Part Time Genius. My pleasure. Thanks.
(26:09):
You're listening to Part Time Genius, and we're talking about
a few of the surprising inventions that have shaped the
modern world economy. So mego before the break. You mentioned
how air conditioning paved the way for an economy where
movies and television are big business, and so now I
want to talk about an invention that forever changed the
music industry, and that is the grammophone. I just feel
(26:30):
like this is a tough sell, Like air conditioners aren't
going anywhere, but the gramophone gonna be big. I mean,
it seems like it had an effect on an economy
at a time, but like that feels like a long
time ago. All right, Well, we'll get to the lingering
impact of the grammophone, but I do want to give
you a sense of why it was such a game
changer in the first place. And to do that, we've
got to get acquainted with one miss Elizabeth billing traits.
(26:54):
Do you are you familiar with No, not at all? All. Right, Well,
over two hundred years ago, well before recorded sound was
a thing, she was actually the highest paid solo singer
in the world. Some even said she was the most
talented English soprano of all time, and yet nobody knows
who she is now. In fact, when the composer Joseph
Hyden saw a painting that showed Billington's being serenaded by
(27:15):
a choir of angels, he actually got irritated with us
and he said the angels should be listening to her. God,
And I don't think of Hyden is such a super fan.
It's yeah, well he was definitely had some steep competition
even for for that as well. I mean outside the
concert halls. Billington's was every bit as famous. There was
even this scandalous biography written about her. So it sounds
(27:36):
like a lot of the you know, the modern day
celebrities that we would think of. And so, just like
with today's pop stars, the public went wild for her
offstage annex, you know, prompting a very pricey bidding war
for her performances. This was between London's top opera houses,
so I'm sure Elizabeth appreciated the pay day. But so
you've got to help me out. What does a singer
(27:56):
who pre dates recorded sound have to do with the
grand fun alright? Well, you know, so Tim uses her
story to help underscore the different levels of success as
singer could attain before and after an artist was able
to produce recordings of their songs. So, in Billington's case,
you know, the most she ever made in a year
was the equivalent of about a million dollars today. I mean,
can you even imagine trying to live on only a
(28:18):
million dollars and just bless her heart? As Mama would say,
you know, well, it definitely doesn't sound like a small sum.
I'm sure it's nowhere near what today's musicians. No, it's true.
I was looking at the list from Forbes, and the
highest paid solo singer in two thousand fifteen was this
guy named Elton John. I don't know if you're familiar
with this John, gentlemen, but he reportedly netted a hundred
(28:41):
million dollars that year. It actually, it's crazy to imagine
that in two thousand, still making a hundred million dollars
a year all in two thousand and sixteen, This one
won't be a surprise. Can you guess who this probably was?
Taylor Swift? She told them a hundred and seventy million dollars,
making her actually not just the highest paid musician, but
the highest paid celebrity of any kind. Well, you're saying
(29:03):
there was a huge disparity between Billington's take and Taylor
Swift's is because of the gramophone, Well, I mean sort of.
So nearly sixty years after Billington died, there was this
economist named Alfred Marshall, and he was taking stock of
how the electric telegraph had drastically affected the world's top industrialists.
And so basically, you know, he was saying that the
rapid communication of telegraphs gave successful businessman an even bigger
(29:26):
field to operate in. So you know, now they weren't
just limited to where they were from, but they could
make money in Europe or Australia or wherever. And and
so Marshall recognized that the new technology wouldn't benefit the
cream of the crop in other professional fields, so you know,
say the performing arts. And so Marshall wrote, the number
of persons who can be reached by a human voice
is strictly limited. So Billington's earning power was capped by
(29:49):
the fact that you could only give so many performances
and and only so many people could fit into a
concert Hall at one time, which makes sense. But but
Marshall is right, like the telegraph isn't going to help
with that. Sure, So enter the grammophone or or actually
enter the phonograph. And this was the first machine that
could both record and reproduce the human voice. Right. So
(30:09):
that's one of Edison's inventions, the one that used like
wax cylinders or whatever instead does right. Right. So Edison
patent to this in eighteen seventy seven, And this was
just a couple of years after Marshall's musings on the
Limitation of the human voice. And it wasn't long after
that that people realized the real economic potential of this invention,
you know, namely the ability to record the best singers
(30:30):
and sell their recordings. So here's what I understand, Like,
why are we talking about the gramophone when we should
be talking about the phonograph? Well, because patients here, I'm
gonna get to it. Because revolutionary as it was, the
phonograph had some considerable weakness. So not only was the
sound quality of its cylinder's poor, they also couldn't be
mass produced and a performance could only be captured on
(30:53):
a maximum of three or four phonographs at once, and
so that means that even if a singer wanted to
exhaust their voice by singing the same song fifty times
in a day, they'd still only have two recordings to
show for this trouble. Actually, you want to know something weird.
I actually have one of these in my house. This
is one of my favorite things I've ever owned. My
(31:14):
grandfather he was an antique dealer, and he had gotten
one of these, was called an Edison amber all and
it's got these wax cylinders and I kind of get it.
Maybe why it didn't catch on? Do you want to
hear one of these? Okay, so check this one out.
This one's called um, I Don't Want to Get Well,
and it's about a man that goes off to war,
gets injured, he's being cared for, and then of course
(31:37):
he falls in love with a nurse and doesn't want
to get well. I don't. Yeah, I think it's uh,
(32:06):
it's duper a remix. But the photograph expanded the number
of years that could be reached by human voice, but
not nearly as much as the gramophone. Yeah, I mean
it was only with Emile Berliner's invention of the gramophone
in seven that true mass production became possible, you know,
the reason being that Berliners recording machine used these flat
(32:26):
zinc discs to hold the recordings, and so you know,
these were suddenly portable and stackable and easier and cheaper,
and you could produce these in large numbers and much
more so than the phonographs cylinders. And they sounded better too,
oh man. So think of how much more dope Billington
could have made if if the gramophone had been invented
like eighty years earlier. Yeah, it's really true, I mean
so much more. She would have been one of the
(32:48):
big winners of this breakthrough, you know, much like the
top industrialist that Alfred Marshal lauded before. And and you know,
still this is something that Tim also points out in
the book several times that every impact invention it creates
both economic winners and economic losers. And it's something that
you don't often stop to think about. So in this case,
you know, thinking about recorded sound, the losers were actually
(33:11):
what we're called as these these journeymen singers or these
lesser known B level acts who actually did pretty well
for themselves when choices were limited. And let's say one
of Billington's concerts was already sold out. But as Tim
puts it, when you can listen to the best performers
in the world at home, why pay to here a
merely competent act in person, you know. So Thomas Edison's
(33:31):
phonograph led the way towards this winner take all dynamic
in the industry, and so the top performers went from
learning like Billington too much more like Elton John And
then these slightly less good performers went from a pretty
comfortable living actually to really struggling to pay their bills.
And so these these gaps in quality became these huge
gaps and income. That's fascinating to think about. So the
(33:54):
B level performers still had the same skill set, but
suddenly it's worth a whole lot less. And I wonder
if that's change much now with digital formats like m
P three's, because like for a lot of people, they
either buy new music like that or they simply stream
it online for free. And it seems like there might
be fewer ways to make money off music recordings now
without the struggle for sales, Maybe a bigger variety of
(34:15):
musicians get a chance to shine well. I mean, it's
a nice thought. But Tim also covers this and and
talks about the fact that, you know, the inequality between
big and small musical acts is actually still pretty much
in full effect. And in fact, I thought this statistic
was really interesting. The top one percent of artists make
more than five times more money than the bottom nine
(34:37):
put together, so it's pretty staggering. And the catches that
all these profits aren't coming from mass produced recordings anymore.
They're coming from live concerts, which is crazy because it's
like we've gone full circle now, right, like from Billington's
days to live performances being back on top. Yeah, you know,
except those lucrative concert tours are driven by demand that
sparked from these recordings, so it's still a huge part
(34:58):
of it. And and that whole economic system, for better
or worse, it owes a huge debt of gratitude to
the Gramophone. See and I guess we owed a that
too since since we're podcast hosts, So so thank you, Granmophone.
That's right, life with you, okay. So, so we've looked
at two big ease and and one thing they have
in common besides being economic shapers, is that they're both
(35:21):
physical products, but they're also a fair amount of inventions
that are totally conceptual or abstract. So what do you
see we give those ideas to do all right, Well,
the conceptual inventions were definitely some of my favorites from
this book. You know, for example, the cold chain, And
have you ever heard of the cold chain? I had
not really thought known it as this term, but it
(35:42):
actually is pretty interesting to think about. This is this
is the term for the global you know, temperature controlled
supply system that keeps all these perishable goods and low
temperatures while they're being shipped and stored around the world.
So so think about the fact that, you know, we
wouldn't be able to transport blood or drugs or vaccines
without them going bad and transit if we didn't have
some way to keep them consistently cold, or you know,
(36:04):
safely ship fish or meat for more than a day
or two away from where their packaged. Or even think
about things like fruits, you know, bananas, pineapples, all these
things that get to our local grocery stores. None of
these things would be possible. And it's as far as
getting them to us without the cold chain, I know,
it's so weird that we get bananas like completely yellow, right,
But but the cold chain is pretty special and and
(36:27):
I like how it isn't the invention of anyone person,
like instead, it's this amazing result of like a bunch
of different people in different countries, on different continents, and
they're all meeting this like need in society and stepping
up to meet it like whatever they can. I mean,
just think about it, like how it braced down, Like
an engineer in France builds a ship with an onboard
refrigerator system and uh, and then a mechanic and Cincinnati
(36:49):
starts outfitting trucks with the system of his own, and
little by little it's all linked together. It's kind of amazing. Yeah,
it really is. I mean, it's one of the most
influential inventions of the last century. And so you know,
the full chain came together really, I guess it was
in the late nineteen thirties around that time, and it's
odd to think of how even things like World War
two might have been completely different without it. Definitely, But
(37:11):
you know, there was one abstract invention I wanted to
mention that's even newer than the cold chain. And Tim's
book covers things like insurance and intellectual property. But one
of my favorite entries was on seller feedback. Yeah, yeah,
I actually I thought that was an incredible section of that.
So this stuff that helps you determine whether that eBay
listing is too good to be true, or whether you're
Uber driver can be trusted, or things like this exactly.
(37:34):
And we don't really think of those star based ranking
systems and hundred character reviews as these like influencers of
the economy, but but maybe we should. So, so why
would you say that? Well, Tim describes seller feedback as
this necessary component of online platforms that offer what's called quote,
collaborative consumption. You know, I've heard that term thrown around recently.
(37:55):
I feel like it's one of these, and there's a
bunch of these. I mean, it's like crowd based capitalism
and the sharing a economy. That's another big one I
feel like I hear over and over. I guess. I mean,
it feels like they're all just different ways of describing
stuff like Airbnb or Uber, right, I mean, that's that's
kind of what that is. Yeah, Like the services like
ride sharing, dog walking or doing some odd job around
(38:15):
the house, like anything that involves matching people who have
these coincidental wants. So, for example, like, so you need
to spend the next hour working on a business proposal
instead of walking your dog, and I want to make
some money during a spare hour. Like in a traditional marketplace,
like both of those wants would probably go unmet for
one reason or another. But with the Internet, of course,
and this is obvious, the instant access to a digital
(38:37):
marketplace that provides suddenly we can find each other and
you can finish your proposal and I can walk your
dog right right right, Yeah, I mean it actually kind
of feels like a whole new kind of commerce. Though, really,
if you think about it. Yeah, so, I think Tim
really sums it up nicely when he says this, and
this is a quote. Uh. This function of matching people
(38:57):
who have coincidental wants is among the most powerful ways
the Internet is reshaping the economy. Platforms such as Uber, Airbnb, eBay,
and task rabbit create real value. They tap into capacity
that would have gone to waste. A spare room, a
spare hour, a spare car seat. You know, think about
this though, it it makes sense. What you're saying makes sense,
(39:19):
but it kind of feels like the Internet is the
real economy shape or here. So how does this relate
to seller feedback? Yeah? So I actually wondered that too.
But it's all about trust, right Like. Without trust, you
can't have a legitimate marketplace, and and no one would
be able to choose to do business with each other
if we were all potential enemies. But that trust, like
the kind that traditional markets provide in the form of
(39:41):
well known brands or immovable store fronts or just personal relationships,
that's so much harder to come by online, or at
least it was before eBay, right like, and and eBay
really changed this. They introduced seller feedback to the world,
and once people had a system that gave them the
reason to trust each other on the Internet, they overcame
their natural caution and this new type of industry was
(40:04):
off to the races. I guess we're celebrating the twentieth
anniversary of seller feedback. I don't know why this isn't
being talked about more. Actually, I saw this fact the
other day. Do you know what the first item ever
sold on eBay was. I'm not like like a pezz dispenser.
I knew that, good guest, but it was actually a
broken laser pointer. Was that your next guest. It was
this guy Mark Frasier that he was. He decided to
(40:25):
take this fifteen dollar gamble or something like that because
he was looking for one of these laser pointers for work.
He was giving presentations all the time, and he decided
to try to find one that was broken and fix
it himself so he could get a deal. And he did.
That's so crazy, Like, I don't think about laser pointers enough.
He really don't. I meant to tell you that I
meant to have an intervention until you need to talk
(40:46):
about It's all about coincidental wants again, right right, and
it's it's a beautiful thing. But now it's time for
something truly stunning. Are you ready for this? Mango for
the part times fact off always all right, since we've
(41:08):
talked about some of the most influential inventions in modern times,
we agreed for the fact off, and I hope you're
still planning to do this, that we share some of
our favorite ridiculous inventions that you know, maybe they won't
revolutionize any industry, but we still kind of like to
own them for one reason or another. So I'm gonna
start and I want to talk about the mobile toilet
paper dispenser. Have you seen this? It's this old Japanese
(41:31):
invention of like headgear with the toilet paper roll over
your head and you just pull it down, like wait,
when you need to blow your nose. I want to
strap into my kids so badly. Wow, So you go ahead,
you if you've got this helmet on, I guess you
can go anywhere with that. Okay, what agrees anywhere? I guess.
I guess I can get behind that. All right, Well,
I'm gonna go with the dog Brella. I mean, honestly,
(41:53):
I may order one of these. So when I take
our dog out and it's raining, I try to hold
the umbrella over both of us, but usually that just
results in me getting wet, and there's no way to
do this effectively. And of course these like doggy ponchos
and things like that are kind of silly. So the
dog Brella has this rod that serves as a leash,
but with an umbrella on the end of it so
you can keep your pup dry. It's pretty smart. Yeah,
(42:16):
I mean, it's no sneezing on the go, No, that's right.
So so the next thing I want is like one
of these hand choppers, and and uh, you know, I
love chopping veggies, but I'm terrified of sharp knives. So
this is basically a zombie hand where you hold the
rubber fingers where your fingers should go on the edge
of a carrot or whatever, and then you chop away.
It's like outsourcing a hand, except you've got to use
(42:39):
your hand to make that work. That's still that's still
pretty interesting. Okay, all right, Well the next one I
was going to come up with was the chork, and
it's chopsticks at one end and a fork on the other,
which is just brilliant or maybe it's stupid. I don't know,
but I just like saying chork. So I'm going to
get one of these. So, speaking of stupid, I want
one of these hand buggers. It's a mold with the
(43:01):
press to make hamburger meat into hot dog shapes. And
it's called a ham dog Yeah, but you don't even
eat hot dogs, I know, or hamburgers, but it's called
a ham dogger. All right. Well, if you're willing to
buy a ham dogger, I'm gonna have to give you
this week's fact Off trophy. And I can't wait for
our next cookout. Thank you and thank you all for listening.
See you next time. Thanks again for listening. Part Time
(43:37):
Genius is a production of how stuff works and wouldn't
be possible without several brilliant people who do the important
things we couldn't even begin to understand. Christa McNeil does
the editing thing. Noel Brown made the theme song and
does the MIXI mixy sound thing. Jerry Rowland does the
exact producer thing. Gay Bluesier is our lead researcher, with
support from the Research Army including Austin Thompson, Nolan Brown
and Lucas Adams and Eve. Jeff Cook gets the show
(43:59):
to your ear. It's a good job, Eaves. If you
like what you heard, we hope you'll subscribe, And if
you really really like what you've heard, maybe you could
leave a good review for us. Do we do? We
forget Jason Jason who
Guess what, Mango? What's that? Will? All Right? So, I
know we're doing this episode on inventions, and I wanted
to give you an update. I'm not giving up on
my invention, and tell me about that again. You know
the pudding truck. We talked about this putting ruck. So
this is the one where you take one of those
cement trucks with this huge spinny things on the back
and fill it with pudding, right, yeah, exactly. I mean
I've had this vision for years and one day, I mean,
(00:22):
this is probably when I retire, but I'm determined to
do this. I don't know how much it costs to
buy one of these trucks new, but we'll figure that
out in the future. But I'm determined to make this
thing work. And you know, I'm planning to compete with
the ice cream truck. I mean, go head to head
with the ice cream truck. I want to drive around neighborhoods,
but you know, instead, the pudding will come pouring down
that cement shoot. Kids will just hold their hands out
(00:44):
and the pudding will just like rush into them, and
the people are gonna love it. I've just I've got
to figure out how to pass the health code stuff first,
but but again I'll figure that out later. Yeah, those
minor details. So I know it's brilliant, but it seems
like a bit of a stretch to call it an invention,
and especially when I think about all the cool stuff
we read about this week. I mean, I I certainly
don't want to crush your dreams. You should, you should
(01:06):
definitely pursue this, but we should probably also talk about
some of the most important inventions that shaped the modern economy.
What do you say? All right, well, one day I
think you'll understand more mango, But all right, let's get started. Hey,
(01:34):
their podcast listeners, welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will
Pearson and as always I'm joined by my good friend
men Guestow, Ticketter and the man on the other side
of the soundproof class who's giving us not one but
two thumbs up. Thanks Tristan as our producer, Tristan McNeil.
And today we're looking at some of the revolutionary ideas
and breakthrough innovations that have helped make our economy what
(01:54):
it is today. I mean, it's kind of crazy when
you stop and think about how quickly humanity has gone
from scattered, nomadic tribe to this current information based age,
and of course a few things have happened in between.
But it's pretty amazing to think about all this progress.
Even the concept of money is, you know, what it
looks like, what it can buy for us, All that
(02:15):
has changed along the way too. And all this rapid
evolution is due in no small part to some very
unexpected consequences, you know, the surprising, often life changing impacts
of a few key people and ideas and inventions. And
so that's what we're planning to cover today. Yeah, and
we should definitely say upfront that today's episode is a
little different than most. The theme and content is directly
(02:37):
inspired by a new book out this month called Fifty
Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy, and our guest is
actually the best selling author of that book, Tim Harford.
So Tim is a rare cripple threat. He's an author, broadcaster,
and an economists so we're super excited to talk to
him and see what juicy details he has about about
the world economy. Yeah, and it probably sounds a little
(02:57):
strange to some of our listeners to hear us talking
about the juicy details. I mean, it sounds a little
strange to me, to be honest. Yeah, so you mean
the fact that economics can be interesting pretty much? Yeah.
I mean a lot of people assume economics is this
extremely complex and therefore unapproachable science, and you know, people
feel like it's too abstract of a concept to truly
(03:18):
wrap your head around and make it real to us,
you know, for us to really understand it. And it
has this reputation of being kind of boring or tedious,
and some people even call it the dismal science for
this reason. Yeah, which is true. A lot of people
call it that because economics can lead to some pretty
upsetting outcomes, like the idea that robot labor will one
day supplant the need for human workers. But I actually
(03:40):
read about how that nickname originated, and the funny thing
is it really points to the merits of economics rather
than his drawbacks. Oh really, I haven't. I haven't read this.
What did you read? Yes? So, according to this article
in The Atlantic, Thomas Carlyle, a Scottish writer and philosopher,
called economics the dismal science when he was writing in
defense of the slave trade in the West Indies, and
he was actual arguing that white plantation owners should be
(04:02):
able to force black plantation workers to be their slaves.
But to Carlins chagrin, he wasn't able to justify this
by looking at the economics. Apparently, like supply and demand
are more in favor of leaving people alone rather than
forcing them in to do labor. Wow, I don't think
i'd heard that. So, so Carlisle called economics a dismal
science because it wouldn't back up slavery. Is that what
(04:22):
you're saying, Yeah, And then he railed against political economy,
calling it a jury, desolate and indeed quite adject and
distressing science, what we might call the dismal science. Yeah.
So if you really trace the term back to its root,
it's a nickname that connects economics with morality, and it's
also this argument against racism and slavery. Like Carlo considered
(04:44):
that to be a failing of economic thought. But obviously
for any decent person that's a really good thing. That's
pretty cool that that's where that came from. So the
dismal science is actually a tool for making the world
less dismal. Exactly. So, well, why don't we go ahead
and talk about one of the big inventions and and
one that also made life less dismal, especially during the
hot summers. We're talking about air conditioning, yeah, I mean,
(05:07):
you know, you know, we all know air conditioning was
a big deal, but sometimes you do have to stop
and really consider the impact of an invention like this. Yeah,
so I'd say air conditioning is one of those inventions
whose impact is always staring you right in the face,
yet you never really quite make the connection. And and
I remember hearing how much like how much less legislation
was passed by the founding fathers and and future congresses
(05:27):
because of the summer heat. But uh, you know, just
think about skyscrapers, like they're these beautiful bastions of finance
and commerce. But without air conditioning, we'd never be able
to occupy those buildings, and people on the higher floors
they'd be baked live. You know, it's weird. I had
never really thought about that, But that's a good point.
And air conditioning is definitely good for all kinds of business.
(05:47):
I mean, actually, one when you were saying skyscrapers, I
was thinking about shopping malls. I mean, there's no way
those would exist. No one would want to walk around
in them because it would just be too hot in there,
but they were a huge part of the American economy
for deck aids. Yeah, and even if you look at
online shopping, like remember computers stopped working all together if
they get too hot. So really, without air conditioning, we
wouldn't have the vast server farms that make online shopping
(06:10):
and really the Internet itself possible. Yeah, that's very true.
And it's hard to imagine cities in the Nations Sun Belt,
you know, ever, of really emerging without air conditioning. We
just think about how hot it's been here this summer
in Atlanta. I can't imagine there's anyway you would have
made the move to Atlanta if we didn't have air conditioning,
not when I looked at it, like all the states
(06:30):
in the Sun Belt, so there's Georgia, but also like Arizona,
New Mexico, Texas, Southern California. It's amazing to think they
all experienced population booms during the second half of the
twentieth century, you know, when air conditioning became commonplace and
people's homes and offices, so they it's a boom. But
like how big of a boom are we talking? Well?
Pretty big. I mean between nineteen fifty and two thousand,
(06:52):
the sun belts share of the national population shot up
from twenty percent to Oh wow, that's pretty huge, all right,
So the economic effect of air conditioning are definitely coming
into focus now. But I want to back up a
little bit. I mean, what's the story behind air conditioning,
you know, the origins of it. I know Tim included
it on his list, but there's got to be some good,
you know, background stories there. Absolutely, so finding a way
(07:14):
to cool down in hot weather has been on humanity's
mind forever and and in fact, there was this eccentric
Roman emperor named Ella Gabalus who sent a thousand slaves
into the mountains to fetch huge amounts of snow, which
he then had them pile up in his garden. And
and that way it was just when the wind kicked up,
the cooler air would blow inside his palace. So it
took a thousand people to try to cool this one dude,
(07:37):
Ella Gables. And I'm not sure that I remember that name.
I would have to imagine that would not be easy
to implement, though on like a wider scale, though definitely not.
The concept was revived in the nineteenth century by an
entrepreneur from Boston named Frederick Tudor. In winter, Tutor harvested
blocks of ice from frozen New England lakes. Then he
packed the blocks and sawdust which served his installation, and
(07:59):
he shipped the warmer regions in the summer. And the
practice grew so popular that a mild New England winter
like it would cause this panic all over and people
would worry about a potential ice famine next summer. But
my favorite revival of this Roman emperor's methods happened in
one after a President Garfield took a bullet from a
would be assassin. He had naval engineers construct this makeshift
(08:20):
cooling device to keep him comfortable while he slowly died.
That summer, so sad, but following the Romans lead, the
device cooled the room down by blowing air over a
cold material. So you know, Garfield was super smart and
and these naval officers are bright, and they got cotton
sheets that have been soaked in ice water, and that's
how they created the coldness. That's the best the Navy
could come up with. I have to be honest, that
(08:42):
doesn't seem that impressive. Well it's kind of impressive, but
just like with the Emperor's snow Mountain. It was incredibly
wasteful and impractical, and Garfield's caretakers supposedly went through half
a million pounds of ice in just two one. Oh wow,
that is insane. All right, well, why don't you tell
us how proper air conditioning then became a reality. I
appreciated all that background information, but let's talk about more
(09:04):
modern form. This is not how it happens right now.
I said, no, people aren't carrying snowback. Actually, before I
do that, I didn't want to go on a little
tangent about how smart Garfield was. He was this president
that could write Latin with one hand and Greek with
the other. Um, but he was also too smart for
his own good. Like you know, when he caught that bullet,
he had doctors used a metal detector to locate it,
(09:26):
which is really a smart idea, but they forgot to
count for the bed springs. So the doctors went all
these exploratory missions, like trying to find things they thought
were the bullet, but I thought just bullets. Tangent, that's
a good one. But back to air conditioning. So the
air conditioning we know today got its start in nineteen two,
(09:48):
following the much needed advent of electricity, and and uh, surprisingly,
the invention of a C had nothing to do with
making people more comfortable. It was actually invented by Willis Carrier.
He's this young engineer at a heating company called Buffalo Forge,
and it was this big printing company had actually tasked
Buffalo Forge with creating a system to help control the
heat and humidity and their factories. So they needed something
(10:10):
to help prevent paper from wrinkling and from their ink
from running down the paper like during the printing process.
And so Carrier was put in charge of the project
and he's quickly figured out that circulating air over coils
that were chilled by compressed ammonia, that that could help
keep the humidity at a constant and as you might guess,
this thrilled the printers to no end. Wow, that's interesting
(10:32):
that it really wasn't about people at first. So how
did this transition happen, you know, going from printing factories
to people's homes. Well, it was kind of slow because
Carrier's original model was pretty massive, and at first the
company just stuck to the other industrial clients, like you know,
other places have been plagued by humidity. Uh, you can
think about like flour mills, or even like the Gillette
(10:53):
Corporation was a client. The moisture from humidity was just
as bad for razor blades as it was for paper.
But um Still, Carrier knew his invention had wider applications,
so four years later, in nineteen o six, he started
looking into possibilities for adding a C to public buildings,
but instead of government buildings or offices, he decided to
target theaters, which traditionally shut down during the summer months. Yeah,
(11:15):
I mean, I can imagine. You can imagine all these
packed bodies and one room the windows no a C.
And it's definitely not a great recipe for getting people
in there, not at all, and especially considering the best
option for cooling a theater at the time was the
way Tutor used to do it, Like some theaters had
used large fans to blow air over ice and help
cool the audience. I mean the downside was, you forget
(11:36):
about this, that pollution was on the rise, and especially
in New England's lakes, so so the damp air from
the melting ice it's sometimes made the whole place reek
and so um so so Carrier's new device, which which
he called the weather Maker, was this obvious upgrade, you know.
I mean, I've heard this before about people's first exposured
air conditioning being in the nineteen twenties, you know, back
(11:58):
when movie theaters started popping up ball over the country.
But it actually never occurred to me to think about
the economic upheam that would have occurred here. I mean,
you know, look at where we are now with summer
blockbusters raking in billions every year, and you figure a
lot of this has to do with people wanting to
get a break from the heat. Absolutely, And and when
home model Lacey's started being produced on mass like in
(12:19):
in the post war nineteen fifties, they completely changed the
way we live and the boom was insane. So I
just looked at these figures and I saw that there
were seventy four thousand units sold in ninety versts a
million units sold in nineteen fifty three. So that's like
a crazy economic boom. But you know, the thing I
always think when I think of economic booms, like, I've
(12:40):
got to mention this is the mini golf craze in
the they put like one course on a rooftop and
in four years there were a hundred fifty courses on rooftops,
like but actually there's a course on the roof of
our building here, I know, one of the few remaining.
I guess. Yeah. So it's impressive, but but the A
C is way more actical. Wow, it's it's interesting to
(13:01):
think about it. And I know we want to talk
about a lot more inventions, but first I feel like
we need to get Tim Harford himself on the line
to give us a rundown of some of his favorite inventions.
So our guest today as an award winning journalist, economist,
and broadcaster triple threat. As we mentioned earlier in the episode,
(13:23):
he's the author of the best selling The Undercover Economists,
as well as Messy. But today we're going to be
talking to him about this terrific book that we've been
speaking about all episode long, and that's fifty inventions that
shape the modern economy. Tim Harford, welcome to Part Time Genius.
It's great to be on the show. Thank you. Now.
I know that, um, when we asked you to come
(13:44):
on the show, you said that you would only appear
if both Manguesh and I were on the line, and
I've got bad news. This uh, this hurricane now tropical
storm has thrown us for a bit of a loop.
So I appreciate your willingness still to come on despite
what we'd agreed to earlier. It's I felt it was
the least I could do. Although you see, my familiarity
with American geography is is not as hot as it
(14:07):
might be. So for all I know you, you guys
are actually speaking in Alaska and there aren't any hurricanes there.
But in all seriousness, I hope that that you and
all your colleagues are safe. Thank you very much. Everyone
has done fine. Our our studios are in Atlanta, and
for our listeners, let you in on a little bit
of a secret. We don't always record our interviews on
the same days as the rest of our episode, and
(14:27):
so our offices have been closed for a couple of days.
But everyone seems to be okay, and so our thoughts
are obviously with all of those affected by Hurricane Irma
over the past few days in Florida and everywhere else.
But let's get started to talk about this book that
we've really fallen in love with, Fifty inventions that shape
the modern economy, One of the things I love about
(14:48):
it is that even though it's really structured as this
really kind of a massive list and we love list,
there's still such a terrific narrative quality throughout the book,
and you feel like you can follow the these stories.
And I was just wondering, you know how much time
it took to try to pull this off, because you
could just say, here are fifty inventions and facts about them,
(15:10):
but you really took such great efforts to weave then
such terrific narrative through all of this. I was just
curious to hear about the process of writing this book.
You're very kind, thank you. I mean, one of the
great things about um the way that I wrote the
book was there's also a BBC series based on the book,
and it's it's nine minute episodes, and each episode has
(15:33):
got to stand alone because somebody might just tune in,
they might just listen to that one story and there's
no context for anything, and so you've you've got to
make the story work. And nine minutes he is about words.
It's long enough to say some interesting stuff, but it's
it's never long enough to say everything you might want
to say, And so you've got to pick a good
(15:55):
hook and drive towards a particular point, and there's loads
and loads that that you always leave out. And I
found actually incredibly fun to write like that. I had
never really quite written a book in that style before,
but it worked, It worked nicely. So yeah, the story
is always the thing. Well, it was terrific. And part
(16:17):
of the fun is is seeing chapters that you don't
always realize just how entertaining or interesting they're going to be.
Just just as an example, you know, a chapter on
concrete where you're talking about the influence that it had.
And I have to mean, when I first saw you'd
listed concrete as one of these inventions that had shaped
the modern economy, I really thought it was going to
(16:37):
be about I don't know, maybe communist structures and Edison.
But you know, you talk about how concrete is influencing education,
so I was hoping maybe you could tell us a
little bit about that, and and also why you find
concrete so interesting. Yeah, I mean I should say, Chushia
of form of Soviet Premier did once give a two
hour lecture on the subject of concrete and what good
(16:58):
Soviet concrete should be like, So it's there is there
is some Soviet brutalism in there, but yeah. So I
began with a great story that I heard from the
development economist Charles Kenny about using a concrete ready mixed
concrete as an anti poverty program in rural Mexico about
(17:18):
fifteen years ago. So development organizations and governments are always
trying to figure out where if we throw some money
at the problem of poverty, is there something we can do.
Maybe we should give people cash, maybe we should give
people vaccinations, maybe we should provide schools. This particular poverty
program anti poverty program said, we are going to provide
ready mixed concrete. We're going to drive through these low
(17:41):
income townships right up to people's doors. Obviously, it's it's
pre arranged whore you're going to go to. And then
they opened the door and you just pour the ready
mixed concrete from the mixer lorry the mixer truck straight
into the front room. And the people who live there
have been given instructions as to how to smooth it
(18:02):
out and look after it themselves, and they just wait
and give it a few hours and it cures and
then you have a concrete floor and the truck drives
off to the next household, and it turns out to
be fantastically effective as an anti poverty intervention because these
floors are they're much more clean, they're much more hygieneq.
(18:23):
In particular, there's a problem with parasitic worms that the
kids will pick up through their their bare feet, and
they make them sick they missed school. Put the concrete
floor in and this problem largely goes away, and so
the whole health of the household, the mental health of
the parents, the physical health of the children all improves.
And it's incredibly cheap. And so I was just trying
(18:45):
to get people to look at this really unromantic substance
in a different way. If we use it wisely, it
can do a tremendous amount of good. Another invention that
you talk about, and something that we actually covered a
bit in an episode we did a few weeks ago
on ike and their Secrets of IKEA. I'm curious to
hear from, you know, including the Billy bookcase and a
(19:05):
list of the inventions you know what makes it so
special and worthy of being on a list like this.
I'm totally going to download that episode. By the way,
that sounds great. The reason I put the Billy Bookcase
in was because I wanted people to think about what
innovation looks like in a modern economy. We get very
fixated on certain particularly sexy, eye catching innovations, so things
(19:28):
like the latest iPhone, m Google algorithms, big data, and
actually a lot of the innovation that that makes the
modern economy what it is is very simple. It's unromantic.
It's all about process. It's all about shaving off a
bit of cost here, a bit of cost. They're getting
the supply chains working a bit more smoothly, maybe trying
(19:50):
to get the logistics reduced transport costs. It's it's not sexy,
it's not exciting, but it is the reason why the
you know, the dollar in your wallet goes so much further.
You know, for an hour's work, you can buy much
more than you could thirty, forty, fifty hundred years ago.
(20:11):
And a lot of that is just this very a straightforward, unromantic,
unheralded logistical innovation. And the Billy bookcase stands as the
representative of all of that kind of stuff. That and
of course the shipping container, which gets gets his own chapter.
I was curious to hear a few. If you had
a favorite overlooked older invention, you know, maybe something older
(20:33):
than you know, fifty sixty years that that maybe you
didn't realize would be quite so interesting when you dived in. Yeah,
there is one, the one that I have a really
soft spot for. I mean, while I was writing the book,
I went all the way back to the plow, which
is maybe five six, seven thousand years old and bang
up to date inventions like the sell of feedback mechanism
(20:56):
used by Uber. But the invention that I have a
really soft spot four is well, let me keep you
hanging for a second. Everybody said, as I was working
on the book, you've got to do the Guttenberg Press.
It transformed Europe, put Europe at the center of world civilization,
gave us the textbook, the newspaper, the novel, mass literacy,
(21:17):
the Reformation is completely transformative. But when you look at
the products of the Guttenberg Press, these beautiful Guttenberg Bibles,
you have to ask what they're printed on. And most
of them, not all of them, but most of them
are printed on paper. And the printing press doesn't make
economic sense without paper. I mean, as a practical matter,
(21:39):
you can print on animal skin parchment, but you have
to kill two and fifty thousand sheep. Literally, I counted
your law fall up. You have to kill two fifty
sheep in order to get enough parchment to do an
economically viable print run, say sort of four or five
thousand copies or something. So you need to mass produce
(22:00):
paper before it makes any sense whatsoever to mass produce
writing with The Chinese invented paper two thousand years ago.
It moved to the Middle East, the Islantic world, and
at six or seven hundred years a d they have
mass literacy in that society, and the Europeans just were
not interested. The idea that you have a cheap material
(22:22):
to write your bibles on is like saying we're going
to have a cheap metal to make crowns out of.
It felt like you were violating this this sacred thing
so nobody can. And it was only when Europeans started
getting more and more sophisticated commercial culture, to contracts, accounts, receipts,
that sort of thing, that you start getting this demand
(22:43):
for a cheap writing surface, and that's when paper finally
starts to take off, maybe the thirteenth century, and then
Shortly after that you get the Goods and book press. Wow,
that's incredible. You've taught us so many things. But we
can't let you leave without putting you to the test.
And even though mangas the author many of our quizzes,
is unable to be here, he did send me a
quiz to excellent excellent to test you with today. And
(23:06):
it's called real invention from the U. S. Patent Office
or something we made up. Okay, so what I'll do
is I'll give you a ridiculous invention and you have
to tell me whether it's something uh that's actually in
the U. S. Patent Office or something we just made up.
Simple as that, you're ready to go, alright? Question one.
Jet propulsion golf clubs. This gas powered high pressure water
(23:28):
pump and tank forces water through a hose and into
your hollow club. When you're ready to swing, just press
the red button and hang on, and highly pressurized water
shoots out the back of your club and propels your
swing forward. Is this something that was actually at the U. S.
Patent Office or something we made up? I know there's
some truly ridiculous patents, but I'm going to guess that
(23:49):
you made that one up. We actually did not make
that one up. That is true, and that that one
did in fact happen. So all right, I got a
chance to make up for a number two, the aquarium vest.
If you love your fish bowl but hate leaving it
at home on walks, the aquarium vest is for you.
Just fill it up with water, PLoP in your fish,
(24:10):
and get out and go. Okay, that's got to be
made up. It is. Yeah, good gauge on that one. Okay.
Question number three the bananas suitcase. No one likes a
bruised banana. That's why the banana suitcase offers a protective
plastic case for carrying a single banana around. Something tells
me I have actually seen that invention. I'm pretty sure
(24:34):
I've seen that invention and so on, And if the
invention exists, the pattern probably also exists. So I'm gonna
say that that is real. You are absolutely right. It
was patented in two thousand three. Okay, here we go
to the last question is the pogo stick weed whacker.
I have to ask, are you familiar with the pogo stick?
Is that something that exam familiar with the pogo stick?
My daughter, in fact, has a pogo stick, but she
(24:55):
doesn't have a weed whackers and I was gonna say, yeah,
you could, you could put her to even more use.
Let's at the description here is if you want to
put the fund back into thankless gardening chores, the poco
stick weed whacker is for you. With every bounce, a
monofilament line spins out, helping to edge grass and trim weeds.
Is this something with a real patent or something we
just made up a mono for them, So it's it
(25:20):
until you're just going to I was gonna say, yeah,
it's real, but now I can't possibly imagine how it
could work, so I'm gonna guess it's made up. And
you are absolutely right. It is something that we just
made up. And I believe that makes you three out
of four, which wins you our top prize, which is
a note to your mom or boss singing your praises.
So Tim, congratulations for the win. Here. Oh that's that's
(25:41):
it's real, it's real less and that's a that's a
good time. That's right. Well, I hope all of our
listeners will check out Fifty Inventions that Shape the Modern Economy.
It really is a terrific book. And Tim Harford, thanks
so much for joining us on Part Time Genius. My pleasure. Thanks.
(26:09):
You're listening to Part Time Genius, and we're talking about
a few of the surprising inventions that have shaped the
modern world economy. So mego before the break. You mentioned
how air conditioning paved the way for an economy where
movies and television are big business, and so now I
want to talk about an invention that forever changed the
music industry, and that is the grammophone. I just feel
(26:30):
like this is a tough sell, Like air conditioners aren't
going anywhere, but the gramophone gonna be big. I mean,
it seems like it had an effect on an economy
at a time, but like that feels like a long
time ago. All right, Well, we'll get to the lingering
impact of the grammophone, but I do want to give
you a sense of why it was such a game
changer in the first place. And to do that, we've
got to get acquainted with one miss Elizabeth billing traits.
(26:54):
Do you are you familiar with No, not at all? All. Right, Well,
over two hundred years ago, well before recorded sound was
a thing, she was actually the highest paid solo singer
in the world. Some even said she was the most
talented English soprano of all time, and yet nobody knows
who she is now. In fact, when the composer Joseph
Hyden saw a painting that showed Billington's being serenaded by
(27:15):
a choir of angels, he actually got irritated with us
and he said the angels should be listening to her. God,
And I don't think of Hyden is such a super fan.
It's yeah, well he was definitely had some steep competition
even for for that as well. I mean outside the
concert halls. Billington's was every bit as famous. There was
even this scandalous biography written about her. So it sounds
(27:36):
like a lot of the you know, the modern day
celebrities that we would think of. And so, just like
with today's pop stars, the public went wild for her
offstage annex, you know, prompting a very pricey bidding war
for her performances. This was between London's top opera houses,
so I'm sure Elizabeth appreciated the pay day. But so
you've got to help me out. What does a singer
(27:56):
who pre dates recorded sound have to do with the
grand fun alright? Well, you know, so Tim uses her
story to help underscore the different levels of success as
singer could attain before and after an artist was able
to produce recordings of their songs. So, in Billington's case,
you know, the most she ever made in a year
was the equivalent of about a million dollars today. I mean,
can you even imagine trying to live on only a
(28:18):
million dollars and just bless her heart? As Mama would say,
you know, well, it definitely doesn't sound like a small sum.
I'm sure it's nowhere near what today's musicians. No, it's true.
I was looking at the list from Forbes, and the
highest paid solo singer in two thousand fifteen was this
guy named Elton John. I don't know if you're familiar
with this John, gentlemen, but he reportedly netted a hundred
(28:41):
million dollars that year. It actually, it's crazy to imagine
that in two thousand, still making a hundred million dollars
a year all in two thousand and sixteen, This one
won't be a surprise. Can you guess who this probably was?
Taylor Swift? She told them a hundred and seventy million dollars,
making her actually not just the highest paid musician, but
the highest paid celebrity of any kind. Well, you're saying
(29:03):
there was a huge disparity between Billington's take and Taylor
Swift's is because of the gramophone, Well, I mean sort of.
So nearly sixty years after Billington died, there was this
economist named Alfred Marshall, and he was taking stock of
how the electric telegraph had drastically affected the world's top industrialists.
And so basically, you know, he was saying that the
rapid communication of telegraphs gave successful businessman an even bigger
(29:26):
field to operate in. So you know, now they weren't
just limited to where they were from, but they could
make money in Europe or Australia or wherever. And and
so Marshall recognized that the new technology wouldn't benefit the
cream of the crop in other professional fields, so you know,
say the performing arts. And so Marshall wrote, the number
of persons who can be reached by a human voice
is strictly limited. So Billington's earning power was capped by
(29:49):
the fact that you could only give so many performances
and and only so many people could fit into a
concert Hall at one time, which makes sense. But but
Marshall is right, like the telegraph isn't going to help
with that. Sure, So enter the grammophone or or actually
enter the phonograph. And this was the first machine that
could both record and reproduce the human voice. Right. So
(30:09):
that's one of Edison's inventions, the one that used like
wax cylinders or whatever instead does right. Right. So Edison
patent to this in eighteen seventy seven, And this was
just a couple of years after Marshall's musings on the
Limitation of the human voice. And it wasn't long after
that that people realized the real economic potential of this invention,
you know, namely the ability to record the best singers
(30:30):
and sell their recordings. So here's what I understand, Like,
why are we talking about the gramophone when we should
be talking about the phonograph? Well, because patients here, I'm
gonna get to it. Because revolutionary as it was, the
phonograph had some considerable weakness. So not only was the
sound quality of its cylinder's poor, they also couldn't be
mass produced and a performance could only be captured on
(30:53):
a maximum of three or four phonographs at once, and
so that means that even if a singer wanted to
exhaust their voice by singing the same song fifty times
in a day, they'd still only have two recordings to
show for this trouble. Actually, you want to know something weird.
I actually have one of these in my house. This
is one of my favorite things I've ever owned. My
(31:14):
grandfather he was an antique dealer, and he had gotten
one of these, was called an Edison amber all and
it's got these wax cylinders and I kind of get it.
Maybe why it didn't catch on? Do you want to
hear one of these? Okay, so check this one out.
This one's called um, I Don't Want to Get Well,
and it's about a man that goes off to war,
gets injured, he's being cared for, and then of course
(31:37):
he falls in love with a nurse and doesn't want
to get well. I don't. Yeah, I think it's uh,
(32:06):
it's duper a remix. But the photograph expanded the number
of years that could be reached by human voice, but
not nearly as much as the gramophone. Yeah, I mean
it was only with Emile Berliner's invention of the gramophone
in seven that true mass production became possible, you know,
the reason being that Berliners recording machine used these flat
(32:26):
zinc discs to hold the recordings, and so you know,
these were suddenly portable and stackable and easier and cheaper,
and you could produce these in large numbers and much
more so than the phonographs cylinders. And they sounded better too,
oh man. So think of how much more dope Billington
could have made if if the gramophone had been invented
like eighty years earlier. Yeah, it's really true, I mean
so much more. She would have been one of the
(32:48):
big winners of this breakthrough, you know, much like the
top industrialist that Alfred Marshal lauded before. And and you know,
still this is something that Tim also points out in
the book several times that every impact invention it creates
both economic winners and economic losers. And it's something that
you don't often stop to think about. So in this case,
you know, thinking about recorded sound, the losers were actually
(33:11):
what we're called as these these journeymen singers or these
lesser known B level acts who actually did pretty well
for themselves when choices were limited. And let's say one
of Billington's concerts was already sold out. But as Tim
puts it, when you can listen to the best performers
in the world at home, why pay to here a
merely competent act in person, you know. So Thomas Edison's
(33:31):
phonograph led the way towards this winner take all dynamic
in the industry, and so the top performers went from
learning like Billington too much more like Elton John And
then these slightly less good performers went from a pretty
comfortable living actually to really struggling to pay their bills.
And so these these gaps in quality became these huge
gaps and income. That's fascinating to think about. So the
(33:54):
B level performers still had the same skill set, but
suddenly it's worth a whole lot less. And I wonder
if that's change much now with digital formats like m
P three's, because like for a lot of people, they
either buy new music like that or they simply stream
it online for free. And it seems like there might
be fewer ways to make money off music recordings now
without the struggle for sales, Maybe a bigger variety of
(34:15):
musicians get a chance to shine well. I mean, it's
a nice thought. But Tim also covers this and and
talks about the fact that, you know, the inequality between
big and small musical acts is actually still pretty much
in full effect. And in fact, I thought this statistic
was really interesting. The top one percent of artists make
more than five times more money than the bottom nine
(34:37):
put together, so it's pretty staggering. And the catches that
all these profits aren't coming from mass produced recordings anymore.
They're coming from live concerts, which is crazy because it's
like we've gone full circle now, right, like from Billington's
days to live performances being back on top. Yeah, you know,
except those lucrative concert tours are driven by demand that
sparked from these recordings, so it's still a huge part
(34:58):
of it. And and that whole economic system, for better
or worse, it owes a huge debt of gratitude to
the Gramophone. See and I guess we owed a that
too since since we're podcast hosts, So so thank you, Granmophone.
That's right, life with you, okay. So, so we've looked
at two big ease and and one thing they have
in common besides being economic shapers, is that they're both
(35:21):
physical products, but they're also a fair amount of inventions
that are totally conceptual or abstract. So what do you
see we give those ideas to do all right, Well,
the conceptual inventions were definitely some of my favorites from
this book. You know, for example, the cold chain, And
have you ever heard of the cold chain? I had
not really thought known it as this term, but it
(35:42):
actually is pretty interesting to think about. This is this
is the term for the global you know, temperature controlled
supply system that keeps all these perishable goods and low
temperatures while they're being shipped and stored around the world.
So so think about the fact that, you know, we
wouldn't be able to transport blood or drugs or vaccines
without them going bad and transit if we didn't have
some way to keep them consistently cold, or you know,
(36:04):
safely ship fish or meat for more than a day
or two away from where their packaged. Or even think
about things like fruits, you know, bananas, pineapples, all these
things that get to our local grocery stores. None of
these things would be possible. And it's as far as
getting them to us without the cold chain, I know,
it's so weird that we get bananas like completely yellow, right,
But but the cold chain is pretty special and and
(36:27):
I like how it isn't the invention of anyone person,
like instead, it's this amazing result of like a bunch
of different people in different countries, on different continents, and
they're all meeting this like need in society and stepping
up to meet it like whatever they can. I mean,
just think about it, like how it braced down, Like
an engineer in France builds a ship with an onboard
refrigerator system and uh, and then a mechanic and Cincinnati
(36:49):
starts outfitting trucks with the system of his own, and
little by little it's all linked together. It's kind of amazing. Yeah,
it really is. I mean, it's one of the most
influential inventions of the last century. And so you know,
the full chain came together really, I guess it was
in the late nineteen thirties around that time, and it's
odd to think of how even things like World War
two might have been completely different without it. Definitely, But
(37:11):
you know, there was one abstract invention I wanted to
mention that's even newer than the cold chain. And Tim's
book covers things like insurance and intellectual property. But one
of my favorite entries was on seller feedback. Yeah, yeah,
I actually I thought that was an incredible section of that.
So this stuff that helps you determine whether that eBay
listing is too good to be true, or whether you're
Uber driver can be trusted, or things like this exactly.
(37:34):
And we don't really think of those star based ranking
systems and hundred character reviews as these like influencers of
the economy, but but maybe we should. So, so why
would you say that? Well, Tim describes seller feedback as
this necessary component of online platforms that offer what's called quote,
collaborative consumption. You know, I've heard that term thrown around recently.
(37:55):
I feel like it's one of these, and there's a
bunch of these. I mean, it's like crowd based capitalism
and the sharing a economy. That's another big one I
feel like I hear over and over. I guess. I mean,
it feels like they're all just different ways of describing
stuff like Airbnb or Uber, right, I mean, that's that's
kind of what that is. Yeah, Like the services like
ride sharing, dog walking or doing some odd job around
(38:15):
the house, like anything that involves matching people who have
these coincidental wants. So, for example, like, so you need
to spend the next hour working on a business proposal
instead of walking your dog, and I want to make
some money during a spare hour. Like in a traditional marketplace,
like both of those wants would probably go unmet for
one reason or another. But with the Internet, of course,
and this is obvious, the instant access to a digital
(38:37):
marketplace that provides suddenly we can find each other and
you can finish your proposal and I can walk your
dog right right right, Yeah, I mean it actually kind
of feels like a whole new kind of commerce. Though, really,
if you think about it. Yeah, so, I think Tim
really sums it up nicely when he says this, and
this is a quote. Uh. This function of matching people
(38:57):
who have coincidental wants is among the most powerful ways
the Internet is reshaping the economy. Platforms such as Uber, Airbnb, eBay,
and task rabbit create real value. They tap into capacity
that would have gone to waste. A spare room, a
spare hour, a spare car seat. You know, think about
this though, it it makes sense. What you're saying makes sense,
(39:19):
but it kind of feels like the Internet is the
real economy shape or here. So how does this relate
to seller feedback? Yeah? So I actually wondered that too.
But it's all about trust, right Like. Without trust, you
can't have a legitimate marketplace, and and no one would
be able to choose to do business with each other
if we were all potential enemies. But that trust, like
the kind that traditional markets provide in the form of
(39:41):
well known brands or immovable store fronts or just personal relationships,
that's so much harder to come by online, or at
least it was before eBay, right like, and and eBay
really changed this. They introduced seller feedback to the world,
and once people had a system that gave them the
reason to trust each other on the Internet, they overcame
their natural caution and this new type of industry was
(40:04):
off to the races. I guess we're celebrating the twentieth
anniversary of seller feedback. I don't know why this isn't
being talked about more. Actually, I saw this fact the
other day. Do you know what the first item ever
sold on eBay was. I'm not like like a pezz dispenser.
I knew that, good guest, but it was actually a
broken laser pointer. Was that your next guest. It was
this guy Mark Frasier that he was. He decided to
(40:25):
take this fifteen dollar gamble or something like that because
he was looking for one of these laser pointers for work.
He was giving presentations all the time, and he decided
to try to find one that was broken and fix
it himself so he could get a deal. And he did.
That's so crazy, Like, I don't think about laser pointers enough.
He really don't. I meant to tell you that I
meant to have an intervention until you need to talk
(40:46):
about It's all about coincidental wants again, right right, and
it's it's a beautiful thing. But now it's time for
something truly stunning. Are you ready for this? Mango for
the part times fact off always all right, since we've
(41:08):
talked about some of the most influential inventions in modern times,
we agreed for the fact off, and I hope you're
still planning to do this, that we share some of
our favorite ridiculous inventions that you know, maybe they won't
revolutionize any industry, but we still kind of like to
own them for one reason or another. So I'm gonna
start and I want to talk about the mobile toilet
paper dispenser. Have you seen this? It's this old Japanese
(41:31):
invention of like headgear with the toilet paper roll over
your head and you just pull it down, like wait,
when you need to blow your nose. I want to
strap into my kids so badly. Wow, So you go ahead,
you if you've got this helmet on, I guess you
can go anywhere with that. Okay, what agrees anywhere? I guess.
I guess I can get behind that. All right, Well,
I'm gonna go with the dog Brella. I mean, honestly,
(41:53):
I may order one of these. So when I take
our dog out and it's raining, I try to hold
the umbrella over both of us, but usually that just
results in me getting wet, and there's no way to
do this effectively. And of course these like doggy ponchos
and things like that are kind of silly. So the
dog Brella has this rod that serves as a leash,
but with an umbrella on the end of it so
you can keep your pup dry. It's pretty smart. Yeah,
(42:16):
I mean, it's no sneezing on the go, No, that's right.
So so the next thing I want is like one
of these hand choppers, and and uh, you know, I
love chopping veggies, but I'm terrified of sharp knives. So
this is basically a zombie hand where you hold the
rubber fingers where your fingers should go on the edge
of a carrot or whatever, and then you chop away.
It's like outsourcing a hand, except you've got to use
(42:39):
your hand to make that work. That's still that's still
pretty interesting. Okay, all right, Well the next one I
was going to come up with was the chork, and
it's chopsticks at one end and a fork on the other,
which is just brilliant or maybe it's stupid. I don't know,
but I just like saying chork. So I'm going to
get one of these. So, speaking of stupid, I want
one of these hand buggers. It's a mold with the
(43:01):
press to make hamburger meat into hot dog shapes. And
it's called a ham dog Yeah, but you don't even
eat hot dogs, I know, or hamburgers, but it's called
a ham dogger. All right. Well, if you're willing to
buy a ham dogger, I'm gonna have to give you
this week's fact Off trophy. And I can't wait for
our next cookout. Thank you and thank you all for listening.
See you next time. Thanks again for listening. Part Time
(43:37):
Genius is a production of how stuff works and wouldn't
be possible without several brilliant people who do the important
things we couldn't even begin to understand. Christa McNeil does
the editing thing. Noel Brown made the theme song and
does the MIXI mixy sound thing. Jerry Rowland does the
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support from the Research Army including Austin Thompson, Nolan Brown
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(43:59):
to your ear. It's a good job, Eaves. If you
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