Frozen Pizza did more for women than the washing machine!

From the S-bend to Selfridges, a fascinating book identifies inventions that shaped our world

THE PLOUGH

Just imagine, for a moment, the end of civilisation. Don’t worry about why. Perhaps it was swine flu or nuclear war, or maybe even killer robots. And now imagine that you — lucky you — are one of the few survivors.

You have no internet. No electricity. No fuel. surrounded by the wreckage of modernity, without access to the lifeblood of modern technology, where do you start again? What do you need to keep yourself, and the embers of civilisation, alive? the answer may surprise you. It is a plough. It was the plough, you see, that kickstarted civilisation in the first place. the plough made farming possible, which led in turn to more food produced by fewer people, so freeing up others to specialise in other things — firing bricks, felling trees, building houses, mining ore, smelting metals, constructing roads. In other words, building civilisation. the plough also reshaped family life. It was heavy, so ploughing was seen as men’s work. But wheat needed more preparation than nuts and berries, so women increasingly found themselves at home preparing food.

And since women no longer had to carry toddlers around while foraging, they breastfed less and therefore had more pregnancies.

the plough, then, did much more than increase crop yields. It changed everything.

THE S-BEND

For anyone living in a city with modern sanitation, it’s hard to imagine daily life being permeated with the suffocating stench of human excrement. For this, we have a number of people to thank — but perhaps none more so than the unlikely figure of Alexander Cumming, a London watchmaker renowned for his mastery of intricate mechanics.

But his world- changing invention in 1775 owed nothing to precision engineering. It was a bit of pipe with a curve in it.

Flushing toilets had previously foundered on the problem of smell: the pipe that connects the toilet to the sewer will also let odours waft back up — unless you can create some kind of airtight seal.

Cumming’s solution was simple. Water settles in the dip, stopping smells coming up; flushing the toilet replenishes the water. the s-bend became the missing ingredient to create the flushing toilet — and, with it, public sanitation as we know it.

While we’ve moved on alphabetically from the s-bend to the u-bend, flushing toilets still deploy the same insight: Cumming’s invention was unimprovable.

roll- out, however, came slowly: by 1851, flushing toilets remained novel enough in London to cause mass excitement when they were introduced at the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace.

use of the facilities cost one penny, giving the English language an enduring euphemism for emptying one’s bladder: ‘to spend a penny.’

BANKS

ON LONDON’S busy Fleet street, opposite Chancery Lane, there is a stone arch through which anyone may step, and travel back in time.

Just a few yards south, in a quiet courtyard, there is a strange, circular chapel — temple Church, consecrated in 1185 as the London home of the Knights templar, a religious order.

But temple Church is not just an important architectural, historical and religious site. It is also London’s first bank.

the Knights templar were monks, but they were also heavily armed and dedicated to the defence of Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem. If you’re a pilgrim, you have a problem: you need somehow to fund months of food and transport and accommodation, yet you also want to avoid carrying huge sums of cash around, because it makes you a target for robbers.

Fortunately, the templars had that covered. A pilgrim could leave his cash at temple Church in London, and withdraw it in Jerusalem. Instead of carrying cash, he’d carry a letter of credit. In short, the Knights templar were the Western union of the Crusades. our financial system today has a lot in common with this process.

An Australian can walk into a supermarket in France to buy groceries with a credit card.

the supermarket checks with a French bank, the French bank talks to an Australian bank, the Australian bank approves the payment, and the Australian leaves with their groceries.

TV DINNERS

CONVENTIONAL wisdom says that the washing machine has done more than any other invention to change people’s home lives. But conventional wisdom is forgetting about the frozen pizza.

A washing machine is clean and efficient, and removes work that was always drudgery. But all the research data proves it didn’t save a lot of time, because before the washing machine we didn’t wash our clothes very often.

When it took all day to wash and dry a few shirts, people would use replaceable collars and cuffs to hide the grime.

But we cannot skip many meals in the way we can skip the laundry. We might be willing to stink, but we were never willing to starve.

Fifty years ago, many married women spent two or three hours a day preparing food, compared with the 45 minutes they spend today (although that is still much more than men, who spend just 15 minutes a day). the reason for this shift is because of a radical change in the way the food we eat is prepared. And the symbol of this change is the introduction, in 1954, of the TV dinner.

Presented in a space-age aluminium tray, and made so that the meat and vegetables all require the same cooking time, the ‘frozen turkey tray TV dinner’ was developed by bacteriologist Betty Cronin, who worked for a food processing company looking for ways to keep profitable after the business of supplying rations to u.s. troops had dried up.

today we have not just the TV dinner but also chopped salad in

bags, sliced bread, grated cheese, jars of pasta sauce, and chicken that comes plucked, gutted and full of sage and onion stuffing mix.

Each innovation would seem bizarre to the older generation, but I’ve never plucked a chicken, and perhaps my children will never have to chop their own salads.

CONTAINERS

THE most obvious feature of the global economy is that it’s global. Toys from China, copper from Chile, tomatoes from Spain, coffee from Ethiopia . . .

According to historian Marc Levinson, the biggest enabler of globalisation is a corrugated steel box measuring 8ft wide, 8ft 6in high, and 40ft long. The shipping container.

To understand why this unprepossessing steel box is so important, consider how a typical trade journey looked before it was invented.

In 1954, a cargo ship, the SS Warrior, sailed from New York to Germany carrying nearly 200,000 items, from vehicles to letters to food, weighing 5,000 tonnes in total.

Loading the ship was dangerous work. There were cranes available, but much of the merchandise, from bags of sugar heavier than a man to metal bars the weight of a small car, needed to be shifted with muscle power and then skilfully packed against the bulkheads of the hold so they would not shift on high seas.

In a large port, a crewman or stevedore would be killed every few weeks or so. Researchers who were studying the SS Warrior’ s voyage to Bremerhaven concluded that the ship had taken ten days to load and unload, and the cargo had cost around £325 a tonne to move, in today’s money. There had to be a better way of shipping goods. And indeed there was: put all of the cargo into big standard boxes, and move the boxes. As a result, a shipping port today would be unrecognisable to a hardworking longshoreman of the Fifties.

Even a modest container ship might carry 20 times as much cargo as the SS Warrior did, yet disgorge its cargo in hours rather than days, and at a fifth of the cost.

As a result, manufacturers are less and less interested in positioning their factories close to their customers — or even their suppliers.

What matters instead is finding a location where the workforce, the regulations, the tax regime and the going wage all help make production as efficient as possible.

Workers in China enjoy new opportunities, while those in more developed countries experience new threats to their jobs; and governments anywhere feel that they’re competing with governments everywhere to attract vital business investment.

On top of it all, in a sense, is the consumer, who now enjoys the greatest possible range of the cheapest possible products — toys, phones, clothes . . . in fact, anything.

DEPT. STORES

NO THANK you, I’m just looking: these are words most of us have said in a store while casually browsing. We certainly don’t expect the sales assistant to snarl back at us: ‘Then hop it, mate!’

So when a shop assistant said just that to American harry Gordon Selfridge, who in 1888 was touring the great shops of Europe to see what tips he could pick up, they made quite an impression.

Two decades later, Selfridge opened his eponymous department store on London’s Oxford Street, then a backwater.

What set Selfridges apart was attitude. harry Gordon Selfridge was introducing Londoners to a new shopping experience. ‘Just looking’ was positively encouraged.

And that wasn’t all. Realising that most of his customers were women, he introduced a facility that other shopkeepers had neglected: a ladies’ lavatory.

Department stores became cathedrals of commerce. And although the glory days of the city centre department store have faded a little — thanks to the internet, retail malls and discount outlets — the experience of going shopping has changed little since harry Gordon Selfridge’s day.