Introduction

 A Brief History of Normal

I don’t know who discovered water but I doubt it was a fish.  Unknown

           In order begin a conversation about our current beliefs, customs, mores, and practices, I would like you to read a brief history of some of the things that we currently consider to be “normal” in our society.  In research on the Internet (something many of us consider to be “normal” - like books - that did not exist until relatively recently and may not exist at some time in the future), many of the things that we consider to be “normal” - in the forms that they currently exist - are esoteric to Western Judeo-Christian-based capitalistic society and even within our own society did not exist or have changed dramatically in just a few hundred years.  This is simply a partial list of some things that I have noticed are often considered to be completely “normal” in our culture; however, if you look at these things historically you may find that they were tantamount to science fiction until quite recently and will most likely be replaced or made extinct for various reasons at some time in the future.  This is what is known as evolution.  Raising your consciousness to comprehend that our way of life, our beliefs, and our assumptions are constantly evolving and are culturally and historically contingent is the first step we need to take to loosen up our attachments to individual and cultural paradigms and prepare them to shift to the next stage of evolution.

AIR CONDITIONING

When Willis Haviland Carrier patented his original idea to condition air by controlling humidity in 1906, his aim was to improve the atmosphere of certain factories that handled products whose sensitivity to temperature and moisture created manufacturing problems, such as printers, tobacconists, textile weavers, and photographers, so he could not foresee the enormous impact air conditioning would have on residences, offices, and shopping centers.  He founded the Carrier Engineering Corporation to successfully design and build a centrifugal chiller using refrigerant and fans to circulate and cool air in industrial warehouses during the 30s and 40s, such as department stores, theaters, and finally houses and newly designed office buildings.  Of course, the technology of coolants and fans has changed, so we now enjoy small yet efficient window-units for apartments, but air conditioning profoundly influenced architecture, enabling comfortable multi-floor offices, larger schools, compact suburban housing developments without verandahs or vaulted ceilings, to the extent that population in warmer areas, such as the Southwest and South, saw significant growth in the latter half of the 20th century.

ANESTHESIA

Mandragora, a plant-derived opiate, had been discovered by a prolific Greek herbalist/pharmacologist, Dioscorides, and remained the only common drug used to numb people during surgery far into the Middle Ages. The next major anesthetic discovery came in 1772 when a tinkering chemist, Joseph Priestley, made a gas called nitrous oxide, and in the 1790s, Sir Humphry Davy established that it could be safely inhaled during dental surgery to numb pain, where it is still used today.  W.T. Morton preferred the drug ether to ease the pain of a tooth extraction in 1846, and the next year, chloroform, was applied to a patient during childbirth by Dr. James Simpson.  In the 20th century, doctors and chemists questioned the safety of both ether and chloroform, so they developed injected anesthetics that could be used generally or locally and focused as much on relaxing muscles as reducing pain to enable longer, more complex surgeries.

ASPHALT

Although asphalt seems like a manmade substance, it actually occurs naturally when mineral deposits mix with oil in the ground to create a sticky substance that Babylonians, Greeks, and Romans mined to pave roads and aqueducts.  This natural asphalt was spread across roads and sidewalks in cities like Newark and Washington D.C. in the late 1800s to make walking and carriage-riding smoother, and keep gravel roads from degenerating or turning to mud during the rainy season.  With thousands of automobiles hitting the roads in the 20s, citizens demanded reliable, flat, durable autoways made from “refined” or artificial asphalt mixed from crude oil processed with other compounds.

ASPIRIN

In the fourth century, BCE, the famous herbalist and physiologist Hippocrates studied many plant extracts and discovered than when crushed and fed to those suffering from pain, the bark of Greece’s native willow tree eased aches and fevers.  However, more than two thousand years elapsed before the medicinal power of the willow was revisited when chemists and physicians isolated a chemical they named salicin and created salicylic acid in 1829.  Unfortunately, this primitive “aspirin” (from acetyl chloride and spiraea ulmaria) caused extreme digestive discomfort, and after one man casually gave up on “buffering” the compound, the company Bayer took the formula for a consumer-friendly aspirin in 1897 and successfully marketed it as a mild painkiller.  Since Bayer was a German company during WWI, it was subject to war reparations and had to release the trademark and recipe for their Aspirin, thus today it is possibly the most common “generic,” over-the-counter medicine.

AUTOMATED TELLER MACHINES

A prescient immigrant, Luther George Simjian, filed numerous patents for his person-less teller experience involving a machine installed in the exterior wall of a bank that would allow anonymous or all-hours transactions, such as deposits and withdrawals, and even convinced one bank to install prototypes in several banks in 1939, yet they were removed due to public disinterest.  Almost thirty years later, people were apparently more familiar with machines replacing human occupations, so when Barclays Bank in London allowed customers to make cash withdrawals from a dispenser in 1967, and a docuteller at New York’s Chemical Bank utilized a reusable “bankcard” in 1969, people flocked to the convenient automated tellers.  Although originally designed to save money on teller salaries and extend the hours of personal banking, technology such as magnetic strips, internet communication, and PINs expanded the ATM system into stores, and banks soon capitalized on the profitability of charging fees to customers to use their ATMs.

BEER

Sumerians are credited with recognizing that grain left in water would ferment to create a thick drink that caused its imbiber to feel part of the divine, thus the recipe was passed on to Egyptians through the Babylonians, who became adept at brewing beer because it was a safe, bacteria-free beverage that preserved some of the nutrition of grain.  Where grain, especially barley and hops, grew easily, beer production flourished unhampered by the Rome’s disdain (they preferred wine) in colder parts of Europe, such as Germany starting around 800 BCE and continuing to thrive into the Medieval period. Not much changed in local breweries for centuries, until steam engines and refrigeration allowed large-scale operations to take advantage of their recent knowledge, courtesy of Louis Pasteur, regarding the chemical process of fermentation, and created a huge gap between national brands of beer and “microbrewed” specialties.

BICYCLES

The bicycle went through many evolutionary stages, with contributions from dozens of inventors, before becoming a safe, lightweight, reliable, fast, and convenient method of human-powered transit with the ability to steer, shift gears, and brake. The Draisienne or Laufmaschine, elongated two-wheeled chairs pushed by foot, were drastically improved when Pierre Michaux attached pedals to the front wheel and created the Velocipede, and again when James Starley combined recently developed rubber tires with a much larger, steerable front wheel to form the Penny Farthing bicycle. Gradually, innovators contributed useful additions, such as a rear-drive gear system which allowed the rider to choose between power or speed, equal-sized tires, better brakes, more comfortable handlebars, and tires with inflatable tubes in the 30s to compete with motorcycles and automobiles.

BIPOLAR DISORDER

Although manic-depressive, or bipolar, disorder wasn’t entered into the Diagnostic Statistical Manual until its second edition (1968), philosophers were linking energetic mania with melancholic apathy in the writings of Aretaeus of Alexandria around 100 BCE because he believed the two extreme states shared a common cause. As an illness, perhaps Emil Kraepelin, a German doctor, contributed the most to our modern concept of a bipolar disorder by describing the psychosis of manic depression with specific symptoms, patterns, and possible paths of treatment, including medication, shock treatments, psychotherapy, and institutionalization. Similarly to other psychological disorders, the preferred treatment during the latter half of the 20th century turned almost entirely to medication as pharmaceutical aggressively tested and marketed antipsychotic or mood stabilization drugs such as bromides, narcotics, MAOIs, and SRIs, until they proved profitable.

BOTTLED WATER

Aristocrats of the 19th century frequently traveled up to spa retreats to bathe in bubbling mineral springs, enjoy fresh air, stay in peaceful cabins, and ultimately bring home a corked bottle of mineral spring water that they believed had restorative power and health benefits.  Evian and Perrier, two such mountain spring resorts in France, realized they could bottle the water and sell it to people in their hometowns wealthy enough to prefer special water to well water. Bottled water still remained fairly uncommon until the natural health craze of the 70s and environmentalism of the 80s, when people fell under the misconception that since water sources were contaminated, bottled water was a “pure” alternative to tainted tap water. However, bottled water in the United States, which may legally fall under the categories of artesian, purified, spring, mineral, distilled, sterile, or deionized, is not subject to the same rigorous standards of purity as ordinary municipal water, so although the US is the leading consumer of bottled water, it is dubious whether it is safer, purer, or even tastes better.

BRASSIER

For millennia, women wore bra-like clothing only as a costume or ritual dress, without depending on the underclothing as a necessary undergarment. According to the eccentric Hoag Levins’ American Sex Machines, at the turn of the century, two women patented similar articles to update the dangerous and restrictive corset. In 1893, Marie Tucek received a patent for a “breast supporter” designed to hold the weight of the breasts on the shoulders and increase comfort, whereas Mary Phelps Jacobs’ idea, in 1914, was a “brassiere” (French for upper arm) that separated and flattened breasts in keeping with 20s flapper fashion. When corsets were forced out of fashion because of the metal ban in World War I, Ida Rosenthal took the opportunity to found Maidenform and universalize bras with cup and bust sizes that persist to this day.

BUTTER

Cheese developed as a way to preserve milk, but butter made from sheep or goat milk 10,000 years ago was more of a luxury because it would spoil quickly in the warm climates of Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome. Colder areas, like Scandinavia and Western Europe enjoyed butter in the Middle Ages, churning skimmed cream from cows by hand and trading it in larger cities, as the English enjoyed slathering their bread, meat, and vegetables with the rich sauce. Not much changed for hundreds of years, until spinning vats were built around 1880 to forcefully separate milk from cream so that milk could be processed separately for drinking, and only cream sent to a factory to be churned by machine into salted or sweet butter.

CAESAREAN SECTION

The first caesarean sections date from Rome (though not including Caesar himself) as a last resort on a dying or dead woman to potentially save her baby, since doctors and midwives realized such a major surgery would surely result in death anyway. Due to the multiple risks associated with caesarian sections, such as bleeding to death or succumbing to subsequent infection, it was only sporadically attempted through the 1800s. No doubt, innovations in surgery that allowed caesarian sections to more reliably save the life of the mother and child lowered mortality at birth in the last century, however the extremely high rate of such deliveries at certain hospitals, compared to vaginal births, leads advocates to question unnecessary, even elective, procedures as motivated by profit, fear of malpractice suits, or rushing the new mother home as soon as possible.

CHAIR

Many cultures built various folding stools and benches, the predecessors of the chair, out of wood and skins to aid laborers, such as smiths and horsemen, because they were practical, light, and portable. Across the world, true chairs with four legs, an upright back, and arms (the subsellium and solium in Greece, the huang huali in China, the kyokuroku in Japan) were heavily ornamented and purely intended for royalty or upper classes, such as warriors and court justices, because they lifted the occupant above the level of the lower classes. Galen Cranz’s, revolutionary book The Chair: Rethinking Culture, Body and Design compares those in the West who spend much of the day in chairs, and those across Asia and Africa who generally sit on the floor. She suggests that sitting on pillows or mats, like afus, zabutons, and seiza benches, promotes good posture and better health.

CHEESE

Today, cheese is such a popular snack and garnish that giant dairy farms reserve a large portion of milk for cheese in America, even though there are also oil-based cheeses made with artificial rennet competing with aged cheese. Originally, people made cheese out of necessity, because cows and goats only provided milk in spring, it only stayed fresh a few days, and many cultures, such as Sumerians, Egyptians, and Arabs developed a taste for dairy foods; thus they strained curdled milk, added rennet (derived from a cow’s stomach) to the yogurt-like substance, and later salted and aged it to develop a more exaggerated bite. Between the Romans, who dedicated entire kitchens and pantries to the mixing and aging of cheese, and the French, whom introduced cheese moulds that gave unique varieties a recognizable shape, texture, and hardness, cheesemakers have invented and perfected thousands of kinds of cheese which we now enjoy for their taste, not because we lack fresh dairy.

CHICKEN EGGS

Since an egg, like a seed, must provide all the nutrients a bird embryo needs as it is developing, the egg was a natural, protein-rich, and renewable food for tribes that had recently domesticated animals like the dog, pig, rat, and chicken in Oceania, India, China, and Egypt.  As a common source of complete protein, chicken eggs remained important because chickens could be coaxed to lay infertile eggs for an extended period of time, rather than being slaughtered once for meat, and many religions celebrated fasts during which no meat could be consumed, or other ceremonies that relied on the symbolic fertility of the egg, such as dyeing eggs at the beginning of spring. After the explosion in domesticated cows for beef and milk, and chickens for meat and eggs, modern ranches rely on such inhumane conditions to maximize profit that many nutritionists and animal rights activists have pointed out that we no longer suffer from a protein-poor diet and need not be so reliant on chicken eggs.

CHOCOLATE

Most common foods originated in the Mesopotamian cradle of civilization, yet cacao trees grew natively only in South and Central America where Mayas ground the dark seeds into a powder they could mix with cold water, chile, and other spices to form a soupy, flavorful drink, xocoatl, they considered both medicinal and divine. Two thousand years later, Aztecs conquered the Mayas of the Yucatan Peninsula, turned cacao into a cash crop complete with a tax structure, and were ironically, in turn, colonized by the Spanish conquistadors eager to introduce the strange chocolate beverage to Europe. It took milk and sugar to sweeten chocolate enough to appeal to European palettes and encourage candymakers to create hard chocolate bars, hot cocoa, and truffles with the help of a grinding mill (1780), cocoa butter press (1828), a mixer that added additional cocoa butter to increase richness (1847), and a dropper that could make individual filled chocolates (1913).

CITIES

As soon as nomadic tribes discovered agriculture and domesticated animals, they arranged themselves in settlements or encampments that, as predecessors to the city, indicated shared interests, an economic unit, geographical ownership, and meeting challenges from other settlements that sought to overtake them. Small, fortified towns that were independent and hierarchical were formed by Medieval changes that politically united “boroughs” which shared fortification, laws, an economy of farming, craft, and trade, and a relationship to the increasing authority of the local burgess, the Manor House of the noble lord, and finally the King. Only with extensive transportation, steel mills, telecommunication, extreme specialization of labor, and automation of production (in short, the Industrial Revolution) were modern cities possible, defined by their size, population density, skyscrapers, and cultural diversity, such that more than half of the people in the world now live in cities.

COCA COLA

A schooled pharmacist, Dr. John Smith Pemberton, mixed a (not yet carbonated) beverage out of syrup, kola nut flavoring, and a dash of coca leaf extract, otherwise known as cocaine, to create a tasty beverage he wanted to sell at drug stores as a medicinal tonic to calm nerves and ease headaches. Coca Cola’s explosive popularity was due entirely to advertising ingenuity by its patent holders, exploiting ideas such as painting billboards on the sides of barns, bottling locally through candy stores, selling the syrup wholesale to soda fountains for a discount, offering coupons in magazines, promotional calendars, bottles, and the Coca Cola Santa. Even when they had to remove the cocaine extract in 1903, and temporarily faltered with “New Coke” in the 80s, Coca Cola successfully marketed a sweet, zippy, carbonated drink that has introduced numerous global markets to the quintessentially American experience.

COFFEE

Roasted coffee beans look nothing like the rosy bush berries from which they come, yet it was these berries that monks brought to Yemen from Ethiopia, to chew or steep in hot water because the beverage perked them up during long evening prayer vigils. Actual liquid coffee brewed from roasted and simmered beans and leaves becomes a common beverage, qahwa, in Turkish Arabia around 1100, traveling to Constantinople, Venice, and the rest of Europe over the next few hundred years. Almost more for political reasons than taste, coffee competes with tea for popularity in Virginia, Venice, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna, as coffeehouses create places for philosophical and cultural debates over government policy, and this socializing angered authorities, from the Catholic church to British colonial representatives in America to the Ottoman Empire’s Grand Vizier, yet no amount of legislation could keep people away from their beloved coffee.

COTTON

Though we usually associate cotton with Eli Whitney’s cotton gin (1790s) that mechanized the picking and separating of cotton fibers, or the “cotton is king” economy driven by slavery in the American South, spinning and weaving cotton took a long time to replace other textiles, like flax and wool, in the Western world. Around 4,500 years ago, in India, the Harrapan people learned how to harvest, spin, and weave cotton into light, comfortable, fine cloth worn by nobility and warriors that was so impressive, word spread to China and the Mediterranean. Arabs sold the woven and dyed material for an immense profit to rich Romans, Greeks, and Chinese from 200 BCE to 500 CE. Soon after, the production (and cultural) center shifted to the Islamic Empire, and it was able to maintain the luxury status of cotton muslin in order to sell it to nobility in Europe, though even peasants wore cotton locally.

CREDIT CARDS

19th century businesses realized the convenience of extending credit accounts to customers using tokens and imprinted receipts, then collecting the amount owed at the end of the month. New York’s Hamilton Credit Corporation, in 1950, or the Franklin National Bank, in 1951, (depending on the source) introduced the first card which extended credit on a “revolving” basis for a set amount, to be borrowed and repaid each month, or redeemed through participating merchants, such as the Diners Club card for restaurants. In the following decades, numerous banks and credit bureaus distributed credit cards, such as Master Charge (MasterCard) and Bank of America (BankAmericard, Visa), that were accepted at untold numbers of stores and service centers, such that the creditors increased their profitability by taking advantage of lax government regulation to charge higher interest fees and penalties.

CURRENCY

When people could be in direct contact with each other, the barter system sufficed as a fair method of exchanging goods, yet even when trade expanded, people could establish a third item, such as rare cowry or wampum shells, as symbolizing a certain value in goats or baskets. It wasn’t a large step to move from this kind of currency to actual coinage. However, early minting of metal coins had less to do with economic necessity than cultural imperialism as Romans distributed their bronze, silver, and gold coins in Italy around the time of the Punic Wars, 200 BCE, until Caesar becomes the first person to put his own face on a coin. Another symbolic leap occurred when, for example in Massachusetts Bay Colony, the government decided that a piece of paper could represented “real” gold money in the National Treasury, which caused much debate, devaluation, inflation, going on and off the gold standard, and bank checks.

DATING

The precursor to dating, courting, an improvement on the exchange of a wife as property for a dowry, followed precise principles and formal rules, such that a suitor waits to be introduced, then presents a calling card, gets formally invited to her house, where they were closely chaperoned by concerned parents while enjoying pastimes such as playing piano, talking, or exchanging small gifts, but never allowed to be alone together.  The first shift towards private, intimate, unrestrained dating was motivated by the economic reality of Industrialization, where youth often went to the city to earn a living apart from their parents, so their independence and freedom caused them to meet in public, become friends, and discuss the practicalities of beginning a family. In some ways, dating and courtship became more conservative post-WWII, as parents became increasing controlling over their daughters, and men exerted more power by deciding on restaurants and paying for dates, so that etiquette shifted to accommodate the assertive man and passive woman.

DEBT

As soon as societies began circulating currency and taxing trade, they developed the concept of loans, for example provided by landowners to farmers borrowing against their anticipated crop yield and being charged interest, as far back as 2000 BCE in Uruk, a city in Mesopotamia.  In select circumstances, this arrangement benefited both the lender and the borrower, however, merchants and banks often charged exorbitant interest rates, upwards of 30%, and if the farmer, herder, or tradesman could not repay the debt, they were thrown in prison or tortured. Gradually, as banking systems grew in scope and services, debt became common for even ordinary workers, so although debtor’s prison was outlawed in the United States in the 1830s, some argue the actual burden of debt, due to mortgages and credit cards, is worse now than it has ever been.

DIAMOND ENGAGEMENT/WEDDING RINGS

Indians unearthed sparkling diamonds as early as 800 BCE, but they were not usually attached to jewelry until the Renaissance, which provided the seed of an idea to a 19th century company, DeBeers, to exploit their constructed association between diamonds and eternity.  In 1477, the Archduke of Hamburg presented a betrothal ring set with a diamond to Mary of Burgundy, and this trend, together with diamond wedding bands, only spread to royalty and aristocracy, because diamonds were still very rare though the 1700s.  The Industrial Revolution, credited with forming a middle class, influenced young Victorian couples to save up and buy diamond engagement rings mined in South Africa and Brazil, yet such rings became mandatory for any suitor on his knee when DeBeers, which holds a monopoly on worldwide diamond mining, launched the advertising campaign in the 1940s which intoned, “A diamond is forever.”

DICTIONARY

Although we take for granted the dictionary as an instrument of learning, the first books which listed words and their associated meanings were not intended for the common classes, but specifically for physicians (learning Greek and Latin derived terms) and other scholars. In 1604, Robert Cawdrey printed the first, modern dictionary, A Table Alphabeticall, which elucidated a few thousand words to help the rare, literate “Ladies, Gentlewomen, or any other unskilfull persons” in England the chance to expand their vocabulary during a time when spelling and grammar were not fixed or universal. After widespread literacy and the Age of Enlightenment emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries among the middle classes, dictionaries (e.g. Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language, 1755) were more of a vehicle for regulating Victorian morals and enforcing positivist rationalism than a democratic dissemination of knowledge.

ELECTRIC GUITARS

Before anyone knew how electric guitars would transform 20th century music through visionaries like Jimi Hendrix, the early Hawaiian musicians, unlike blues “rhythm” guitar, used the instrument for its melody and were frustrated by its unamplified volume when heard alongside percussion. String instruments create sound by pushing the air around vibrating strings, so to amplify those vibrations, inventors Lloyd Loar, George Beauchamp, and Adolph Rickenbacker mounted a magnet that sensed the electromagnetic vibrations and passed them, through a coil, to an amplifier using electricity in the 30s. Les Paul and Leo Fender refined the design to create the particular sound they wanted by changing the hollow-body of an acoustic guitar into a solid body, embedding the magnet into a solid wood pickup, and vastly improving the sound, all but eliminating unpredictable feedback with the famous Fender Stratocaster.

ENGLISH LANGUAGE

With roots in Indo-European language, English borrows heavily from several languages, but owes most of its structure to West Germanic dialects that had plural and singular nouns and gendered grammar.  The evolution of the English language is generally broken down into distinct periods: Old English (450-1100), when Latin from Rome blended with German variants, Celtic dialects, and Norse, yet settled on a Latin alphabet; Middle English (1100-1500) was transformed when Normans (French) conquered an area occupied by the Anglo Saxons and influenced their vocabulary, grammar, spelling, and vowel sounds; Early Middle English (1500-1800) is the language to which Shakespeare contributed untold words and idioms, and it is distinguished by a fixed word order between verb and noun, and increasingly fixed spelling. We are familiar with Latin roots of many of our words, but we may be less aware than Latin also contributed an alphabet that was used to spell words phonetically, hence different spellings actually indicated different pronunciations that might account for regional variations, and only recently did English create many “silent” letters, such as the g in gnat.

FOOD AND DRUG ADMINISTRATION

The Food and Drug Administration came into being in 1906 due to public outcry over the quality and ingredients of foods from fresh meat containing rat feces to grain mixed with dirt, so Roosevelt decided the federal government needed a way to hold businesses accountable for the way they prepared, packaged, mixed, and sold food to make sure it was pure, healthy, and as advertised. After passing the Wiley Act, the FDA grew in power and scope to regulate prescription and over-the-counter drugs, ensuring that they had been through minimal human testing, were labeled with appropriate dosages, and/or were approved for use by a physician, but most people know of the FDA’s infamous involvement in the process of evaluating drugs as to their “medical benefits,” in an attempt to regulate drugs such as amphetamines, barbiturates, and hallucinogens by naming them illegal and using the Drug Enforcement Administration to wage the “war against drugs” at enormous cost to the taxpayer. Other criticism questions the process and motivations behind approving new drugs for public release, including their exorbitant cost, patents extended to pharmaceutical companies, relationship to health insurance claims, creation of new diseases and disorders for marketing, and relative safety.

FOOTBALL

Football owes its origins to numerous games involving both kicking and throwing a ball, most directly rugby in Scotland and England, which includes Chinese tsu’chu, Roman harpastum, Greek episkyros, Viking knappan, and Japanese kemari. Rugby and football remained blended as similar games, first codified at the Rugby School in 1823-1871, notable for its two teams fighting violently to throw and kick a ball into their opposite goals, with no set number of players, size of ball, size of field, length of game, etc. Modern football itself dates to 1867 when Princeton University and Rutgers recognized the popularity of the game among youth and sought to form an intercollegiate association that could solidify game play and eliminate certain kinds of tackles and strategies that caused injury and even death.

FORMICA

Electricity had spawned thousands of devices, all of which needed reliable electrical insulation along wires or in circuit housing, so Dan O’Conor, from Westinghouse, fabricated a new material in 1913 by “laminating” fabric with heavy resin and pressing it flat to dry. Forming a new company with interested investors, O’Conor realized that his inexpensive, flexible product would replace mica in most electrical insulation, so he called it “Formica.” Only when other, less expensive, more adaptable insulators came along did the Formica company find a lucrative market in kitchen counters and tabletops because Formica could be dyed various colors, coved, and was durable and easy to clean.

GLASS

In Mesopotamia, ceramicists living around 3500 BCE may have accidentally discovered that certain kinds of sand, when heated to extreme temperatures, created a strange substance they could use to glaze pots or form small beads, somehow learning to control this natural substance and spread the craft to Phoenicians, Greeks, and Chinese.  After working with simple hollowed shapes, Syrians found that blowing into molten glass with a metal tube would make it bubble in a symmetrical, thin, and delicate way, thus Roman “glassblowers” exported vessels and trade secrets to the north, until Venice emerged as a bustling center of creativity and skill. Another significant innovation was the invention of leaded glass, or crystal, in 1676, by George Ravenscroft, which created a clearer, diamond-like surface that could be faceted in great detail, but a more practical contribution would be natural gas-powered heaters in the early 1900s that enabled mass-production of glass bottles and sheet glass windows in factories without destroying whole forests for charcoal. 

GOLD

Compared to iron or bronze, gold has little practical use because it is so soft and relatively rare, however gold has been considered by many empires, trade routes, and governments as a reliable unit of currency, an important marker of wealth, and a beautiful source for jewelry.  Since gold can be found above-ground in rock or water deposits, no doubt it was discovered by accident, then deeper veins were mined by skilled laborers in Ethiopia, Egypt, Sumeria, Rumania, Peru, and Mexico, so goldsmiths could fashion intricate jewelry to decorate nobility or bless religious ceremonies, and enable trade when stamped into coins like the Middle Eastern shekel, Venetian ducat, or British florin and crown. Modern gold rushes, attracting speculators and miners to California, Australia, South Africa, and Canada in the mid-1800s introduced vast amounts of gold to the market, yet the precious metal was still not stable or plentiful enough to allow the continuation of a “gold standard” (where paper currency represented a specific amount of gold reserve held in government storage) and most countries went off the gold standard in the mid-20th century.

HAMBURGERS

Perhaps because the hamburger became quintessentially American during the 50s era of drive-ins, french fries, and milkshakes, the origin of the first hamburger, a ground beef patty served on a bun, is a highly contentious claim for which several cooks and restaurants in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Texas, take responsibility. From the name “hamburger,” we know that that ground beef came from the Tartars in Mongolia to the Germans, who spiced the meat with herbs so poorer people in Hamburg could be fed for less cost than steak.  Whoever decided to cook this mixture into a patty and make a sandwich, the hamburger became known to the public during the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904 because it was hardy and could be eaten without a plate as the festivalgoers gawked at other exhibits. From there, the hamburger was mass-marketed by such “fast food” chains as White Castle, and became synonymous with youth, automobile culture, and convenience.

HEALTH INSURANCE

Privately managed health insurance began as “disability” insurance, rather than comprehensive health care, right before the Civil War when the Massachusetts Health Insurance of Boston sold people policies that would offer protection if they suffered major accidents, such as injury during a train ride, but did not support routine doctor’s visits or the cost of medication.  Broader health insurance plans, offered to groups of workers under the same conditions, emerged in the 30s as teachers and factory laborers campaigned for standard medical care for a monthly fee, and this private negotiation was taken on by life insurance companies such as Blue Cross because they worked with both patients and doctors to get reduced prices.  During the post-war boom, employers developed better benefits packages, including providing health care at their own expense, to compete for the best employees whose baby boomer families took frequent visits to pediatricians and dentists. The perceived battle between public and privately supported health insurance is a relatively recent medical and political debate, as the introduction of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965 led to other state and city employees receiving insurance, and the “burden” of insurance rose in proportion to the skyrocketing costs of hospital visits, laboratory tests, and medication.

HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP

High fructose corn syrup’s convoluted and alarming history begins when the federal government increased subsidies to corn farmers in the early 70s, which happened to coincide with the discovery of a method of enzyme-induced refinement that could turn the (not very sweet) glucose into (extremely sweet) fructose.  Even with the cost of growing and harvesting corn, and the process of converting the sugar, the resultant corn syrup was still less expensive than cane sugar, so it moved from sweetening cookies and soda into sweetening surprising items like ketchup, cereal, bread, and toothpaste. Astonishingly, high fructose corn syrup and other corn derivatives are the most popular additive in ordinary foods, which has not only exponentially raised the average American’s fructose consumption, but created ripples as far reaching as corn-fed cows and agribusiness welfare.

HIGH HEELS

Along with other clothing and accessories, the shape, height, design, and edicts regulating high heels identified the wearer according to class, profession, moral standards, etc. Early high heels were really shoe attachments resembling platforms, like the chopine in Renaissance Venice or bejeweled indoor slippers in Elizabethan England, which raised women several inches to over a foot into the air because those women were clearly wealthy enough to let someone else do the walking. Ironically, during the next centuries, high heels became dangerous and obnoxious to women and instead heralded by men since Louis XIV of France created sturdier heels still practical for walking yet glamorous, only allowed to cover the blue-blooded feet of nobility.

HOT DOGS

Though not as spicy or fat as sausages, hot dogs are clearly derived from such German foods that immigrants probably adapted when they arrived in the late 1800s to appeal to blander American palettes. Unfortunately, the clever story that the nickname “hot dog” originated when a cartoonist drew a caricature of someone eating a sausage resembling a dachshund in a bun at a baseball game, could not be true, least of all because this cartoon doesn’t exist, and secondly, because “dog” was slang for numerous things already, including sausages, franks, and dandies. However, it is documented that vendors began selling hot dogs in long buns with condiments at public events such as New York Giants baseball games, the Coney Island boardwalk, and the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis.

INK

All ancient civilizations with a written language eventually sought methods of writing that were faster and more precise than scratching rock or imprinting clay, so they mixed inks out of crushed charcoal or the sepia ink of the cuttlefish (Hebrews and Romans), burnt oil and gum (Egyptians and Arabians), powdered iron oxide (Greeks), or blended iron sulfur with sap (Chinese). Early recipes for ink, usually comprised of a colored pigment or dye and a resin that keeps the mixture sticky yet flowing, crisscrossed the literate world until the Dark ages when “gall” ink, made of iron salt and tannic acid, was widely used throughout the Renaissance and up until the invention of the printing press. Modern ink ingredients are mostly artificial to achieve flow, various colors, and to resist fading, discoloration, or degradation, especially since ink fills fax machine cartridges and cash register receipt printers, as well as pens.

INSANE ASYLUMS

Long replaced by more humane and medical facilities called mental health institutions, insane asylums were the dumping ground for all of society’s unwanted members for centuries, including the mentally disabled, poor, disturbed, morally deviant, criminal, or abandoned, treated more as a method of segregating dangerous people from the normal, functional community. Insane asylums, often just a wing of medical hospitals, flourished during the otherwise rationalist Age of Reason as prison-like institutions (Bedlam in London being the most notorious since lunatics were shown off like circus freak shows) run by nuns, doctors, or bureaucrats, with “treatments” as varied as religious conversion, shock therapy, medication, hydrotherapy, but often including abusive care. When psychology, psychiatry, and neurology emerged as separate fields of medicine at the dawn of the 20th century, insane asylums, or psychiatric wards, could concentrate on truly mentally ill patients that might need ongoing treatment, medication, talk therapy, drug abuse programs, etc., and these institutions offered care differing along economic lines, such that an upper-class family could send their unstable teenager to a hotel-like sanitarium for individual care, while working class people relied on sub par state care.

LEATHER

As a byproduct of meat, animal skin was used by nomadic people for clothes, shoes, and blankets before they could perfect the tanning technique to stretch the leather, treat it with ammonia or tannin, scrape off all the fat, and let it cure so it wouldn’t disintegrate as quickly. The Moors, in the Middle Ages, preferred goatskin to cows for their soft, durable, leather, yet guild members in England managed to make high quality cow leather into saddles, belts, bottles, shoes, harnesses, straps, and even clothes by apprenticing young men to masters sharing trade techniques. However, other materials such as cotton, linen, glass, and ceramics soon outperformed leather in making water vessels and clothing, so later innovations in leather making, such as synthetic tanning chemicals, decorative elements, dye, strengtheners, or sealers are primarily aimed at specific fashion applications like boots, belts, and purses.

LINEN

Older than cotton and wool, flax linen remnants have been perfectly preserved inside Egyptian tombs, so we can trace its history from 6000 BCE to a trade in flax between the Phoenicians, through the Mediterranean region, and far up into Ireland. The Middle Ages saw a spread in the local production of simple linen tunics worn underneath other clothes in India, West Asia, and Europe, but it was between Ireland and England that a trade war developed between producers of wool and linen. The Wool Act of 1699 heavily regulated Irish wool, so they turned to spinning and weaving much more linen, even forming guilds, bleach yards along rivers, and eventually automated mills. When cotton became convenient and inexpensive to manufacture around the Industrial Revolution, linen factories closed, and now China produces only a small amount for heirloom-quality linens.

LINOLEUM

In England, Frederick Walton patented his unique floor covering in 1863 that he had developed by mixing cork or pine grounds, rosin, and oxidized linseed oil into a thick cement that spreads over a canvas backing to form durable, rubbery sheets. He successfully marketed the sheets to Victorian England as a decorative, clean, inexpensive answer to luxurious marble or hardwood flooring, especially since he oversaw factories that could oxidize linseed oil and press linoleum automatically. When plastic flooring entered the market in the 60s, linoleum lost residential popularity to the flexible, adhesive sheets, yet recently it has been making a comeback because it is environmentally friendly, biodegradable, and feels a bit warmer and more natural than vinyl.

MAYONNAISE

Great chefs, the French were especially adept as sauces, so they created mayonnaise in 1756 during the Seven Years War when they seized a city named Fort Mahón and emulsified oil and vinegar using chicken egg yolk to celebrate the success. Often flavored with lemon juice, pepper, and other herbs, mayonnaise was a delicious, creamy sauce ladled all over Europe until a German chef, Richard Hellmann, immigrated to New York City and opened his own restaurant delicatessen, serving popular mayonnaise with egg salad and sandwiches. A few years after opening their booming business, he and his wife began bottling the mayonnaise in 1913 at his own factory as Hellmann’s Blue Ribbon brand, before a rival brand Best Foods bought him out and distributed the condiment nationwide.

MILK

Although the Food and Drug Administration identifies milk and other dairy products as important, if not essential, sources of calcium and protein, the North American and European consumption of cow’s milk is a culturally specific and economically-motivated phenomenon that probably causes numerous health problems, including anemia, colic, lactose intolerance, osteoporosis, food allergies, and diabetes according to recent medical studies.  When most Americans lived on farms and homesteads, they had access to small amounts of fresh milk and butter, yet when industrialization drew the population into cities, people’s nostalgia for provincial life caused them to consume far more dairy than ever before.  Seeing an opportunity to profit, dairies worked a multi-prong approach, first attributing infant mortality in the city to a lack of fresh, pure milk, secondly reforming and modernizing milk processing plants to incorporate pasteurization, and thirdly taking advantage of government sponsorship to accept generous subsidies and infiltrate public schools with pro-milk educational campaigns.

MUSTARD

Like many condiments, mustard originally began as a medicinal treatment in Ancient Greece to treat aches and pains as the seeds of the white Brassica hirta variety of the mustard plant were ground into a plaster and applied to the skin.  Later, Romans soaked mustard seed in vinegar, and the resulting spicy mixture was found to prevent certain foods from going rancid due to its anti-bacterial qualities.  Not until the mid-1700s did the English town of Durham popularize the flavorful, delicious mustard sauce of Mrs. Clements, flavored with herbs, that is closest to the yellow, bottled mustard we enjoy today.

NAMES

Onomastics, the study of the origin and derivation of first and last names, has determined several common trends where even people with different languages adopted similar logical systems for naming that incorporated one’s family, location, appearance, or occupation.  As one would expect, ancient people were named after nouns and adjectives in their local dialect that bore some resemblance to them, but during the Christian era, extending from the Roman Empire, people were named after saints, apostles, or martyrs. As populations became denser, first names were no longer unique enough to be useful, so bynames or surnames developed that generally fall into categories: the name of your father, e.g. Mathew Paulson (Paul’s son); the name of where you live, either a town or a notable element of the landscape, e.g. Hill; another word than might describe your appearance; and the name of your craft or trade, e.g. Smith. Eventually, the population became too mobile and flexible to allow such names to have meaning, as young people moved away from their families and pursued their own careers, so while our modern names have roots in such traditions, they are often chosen for their sound, not meaning.

NEWSPAPERS

Though handwritten newsletters and pamphlets were circulated in small numbers in the 15th and 16th century, true newspapers had to wait until the printing press to be distributed in larger numbers covering public events, spreading scandalous rumors, and exchanging political and academic opinions. Historically, America always had a high rate of literacy, thus it was here, in 1690, that Boston, Philadelphia, and New York spawned dozens of newspapers aimed toward fueling revolutionary uprising and countering British propaganda, eventually leading to a successful revolution and a constitution that protected the freedom of the press. Sadly, these pure motivations led to an era of sensationalist, entertaining, and outright false coverage known as “yellow journalism” of the 1890s, where printers, out to make a profit, encouraged shocking headlines and political cartoons that neatly segued into the media consolidation of publishers into corporate outlets also involved in radio and television in the 30s and 40s.

PAPER

Even though the word paper is derived from Egyptian papyrus, the Egyptians merely fused two sheets of thin fibrous plant together and didn’t invent paper at all, which was first formed by Ts’ai Lun in China around 100 CE by making a pulp out of mulberry bark and bamboo that he spread over cloth to dry into a light, flat surface he could write on. From China, the method for making paper eagerly spread to Korea, Japan, then (by stealing the secret during warfare) through the Arabs to Damascus, south to Egypt and Morocco, and north to France, England, and all of Europe, over the course of 1300 years. Luckily, the printing press was soon to encourage methods of mass producing inexpensive and light paper to replace expensive and time-consuming vellum or parchment, thus printers and papermakers turned to cotton, linen, rags, straw, bark, and finally wood as the best raw material for pulp. With its seemingly unending forests, America became a center for papermaking, with mills springing up in New England to feed the Fourdrinier machine starting in 1804, creating long, continuous sheets of paper over wire mesh.

PAPER BAGS

Paper bags were in greatest demand in grocery stores, so shopkeepers would generally roll or fold their own bags for customers who didn’t bring a canvas satchel or basket, and, like almost every other consumer item, they were cut, folded, and glued automatically during the Industrial Revolution.  Possibly, the first person to build a machine to make paper bags was Francis Wolle in 1844, with S.E. Petee improving it in the 60s, the Union Company improving it further in 1869, all culminating in a flat-bottomed (as opposed to a sleeve) bag invented by Margaret Knight in 1870, made from a long roll of kraft paper trimmed, glued, and folded so it could be stored flat.  We still use these bags more than a hundred years later to carry our groceries home, even though the 70s saw a battle between paper and plastic because environmentally-conscious believed plastic bags were easier to recycle and less expensive to produce.

PASSPORT

Ostensibly, a passport functions as a document used to establish one’s place of residence, legal status, ability to travel out of the area or country, and the freedom to return “home,” but the passport has had stints as a travel diary or souvenir when a European leisure class began frequenting exotic colonized locales, or as legal proof of citizenship and all the privileges it confers, or as a method of surveillance over a society’s threatening populations, such as immigrants, suspected Communists, etc. The first passports enabled their holders to pass through portes, or gates, of certain cities within the same region, not between countries, in Europe, but more specifically in France, King Louis XIV required documentation, with personal description and birthplace, to enter or leave the boundaries of his country.  Over time, the passport evolved into a global phenomenon, often used to regulate taxes, military eligibility, and place of birth, so that the League of Nations decided to standardize and universalize laws on travel and passports, like including dated stamps and photographs, in the 1920s.

PERIODIC TABLE

Undoubtedly, the ingenious Herman Mendeleev made the most profound contributions to the modern periodic table, thanks to contributions from John Newland’s triads and Béguyer de Chancourtois’ theory of periodicity, when he recognized that it was not coincidence that certain seemingly-unrelated elements share traits (bondability, behavior) and recorded his table in 1869.  Rather than a convenient, random arrangement of chemicals, like the alphabet, the placement of elements in the periodic table intrinsically depends upon the elements’ essential physical properties, such as atomic weight, the number of electrons in the outermost valence, and atomic mass. Mendeleev’s table was so precisely arranged, he was able to predict the necessary existence of certain elements, among them germanium and gallium, and unite elements along a diagonal, vertical, and horizontal with common properties.

PICKLES

Similar to many garnishes and condiments, pickling developed around 2000 BCE in India as a practical way to preserve vegetables, such as cucumbers, edible roots, or beets, in vinegar so they could be enjoyed during the long winter months when no fresh, vitamin-rich produce was available. In particular, pickled cucumbers, or pickles, spread from Europe to the New World via Amerigo Vespucci (America’s namesake) because they prevented scurvy with Vitamin C, traveled well in oak barrels, and leant a spicy, tangy flavor to bland food. Eventually, in 1820, Nicholas Appert began the business venture of bottling whole pickles in brine and dill, and today the United States’ average consumption is 9 lbs. of pickles per person!

PIZZA

Plain, pizza-like flatbread was eaten by the Greeks, and these round pies were enjoyed all over Europe, yet particularly popular among street vendors in Renaissance Naples, Italy, after being cooked in brick ovens and flavored with herbs, not expensive cheese or meat.  This changed in 1889 when a baker designed a special pizza with tomato sauce, melted mozzarella cheese, and basil leaves to represent the red, white, and green of the flag for the visiting King and Queen of Italy. Naturally, Italian immigrants continued to bake pizzas after relocating to America, opening the first pizzeria in 1905, yet pizza didn’t become a national favorite until post-WWII when veterans, accustomed to eating Italian pizza, encouraged the burgeoning fast food craze, and frequently took their families out to eat pizza with alternative, trendy toppings such as bacon, pineapple, mushroom, anchovies, and even barbecued chicken.

PLUMBING (Hot and Cold Running Water)

Draining away used water into sewers proved easier than bringing cold water into palaces, baths, or homes, but the Romans’ impressive engineering allowed them to lay leaden or ceramic pipes that brought fresh water from distant aqueducts into fountains and enormous bathhouses, where some was diverted into vats where it was heated over fire to create warm baths and steam rooms. Unfortunately, although modern cities were built right over this inventive Roman plumbing, bathing and fresh water were not valued by most of Europe through the Dark Ages, since they were content pumping buckets of contaminated water from shared pumps and heating it in their homes, emptying chamber pots out their window into the street, and frequently not bathing once in their entire lives, which led to ravaging plagues. When people developed a sense of the risks of unhygienic water supplies in the 1800s, they renewed interests in piping water, using gravity, into municipalities and linking them to separate faucets inside first-floor homes, so it was only technological developments, such as pumps to counteract gravity, and onsite gas-powered heaters to replace furnaces, that brought us to modern hot and cold running water.

POLYESTER

A few synthetic fibers, like nylon, acrylic, rayon, and acetate, predate polyester, but none proved as adaptive or attractive as polyester, whose popularity peaked in the 60s and 70s when wrinkle-free, inexpensive pantsuits and shirts clothed businessmen and young people alike.  Through various experiments in the early 1900s, different chemists found that polyester results from a chemical reaction with two monomers, such as a diacid with a diol, to create long polymer fibers later patented under the names Terylene, Dacron, Mylar, etc. Even though we commonly think of clothing, polyester is an adaptive substance used in applications from video tape to water bottles because polymers resist damage by chemicals, don’t react to water, and remain strong when stretched or dropped.

POST OFFICE

In the early days of sending letters and packages through an organized system of distribution, there were no post offices at all, as only the King or nobility could afford to send anything via messenger, and the first post office was located inside another business, a tavern managed by Richard Fairbanks in Boston, who agreed to handle overseas deliveries in 1639.  Postal service history often centers on methods of address, postal rates, transportation, and sorting, but post offices themselves are a relatively late development, as people generally gave their outgoing mail to the carrier when receiving their incoming mail, or traveled to railroad stations when railways carried the majority of mail. In 1858, cities along the eastern seaboard enjoyed letter boxes on the street where you conveniently slipped a letter through a slot and let the receiver pay the post, or alternatively you could go to the location where the mail was sorted by neighborhood and drop off your stamped letter. It was in conjunction with a more complicated system (paying by weight, zip codes, special handling, preprinted stamps) in the mid-20th century that the necessity for storefronts handling mail, named post offices, emerged to weigh packages, determine cost, and answer questions.

PRINTING PRESS

Before Gutenberg irreversibly changed literate civilization with his invention of the moveable type press in 1452, variations of block printing had been used for centuries in China and Korea, where clay, wood, and even metals characters were carved and stamped by hand into small books, playing cards, and paper money. Nevertheless, since the English alphabet had so few characters (compared to pictographs), the printing press was an enormous success which enabled mass production of scientific treatises, Bibles, newsletters, poetry, medical texts, travel advice, etc., and these printed pages played a major role in theater, the Protestant Reformation, the French Revolution, and practically all aspects of social change.  In the 1800s, improvements on the Gutenberg Press increased efficiency, such as attaching it to a steam-powered motor, using rolls of paper rather than individual sheets, developing cheaper paper, and being able to set the movable type using a machine rather than by hand, the Linotype.  So reliable and efficient was the basic printing press, that its reign lasted 500 years practically unchanged, until 1956 when type could be set onto film rather than metal pieces, which paved the way for “desktop” publishing using computers and dot-matrix printers.

RECORDED MUSIC

Although the history of recorded sound technology through the gramophone, phonograph, and eventually compact disc, is fascinating unto itself, the drive to record and distribute popular music was never the intention of revolutionary inventors Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison. When stenographers and businessmen didn’t use early phonographs for dictation, investors began installing them at fairs, arcades, and dance halls where “Juke Boxes” reaped an incredible profit, as well as the more refined Victrola which played opera and classical music in people’s own parlors. After the record industry survived the introduction of free music on the radio, the fuzzy, fragile shellac disks were replaced by crisper “stereo” vinyl disks in the 50s, then 78s replaced by Lps in the 60s to exploit the growing youth market with rock ‘n’ roll.

REFRIGERATION

In the early 19th century, since the only way to artificially cool food to keep it from spoiling was by storing it on ice, a rare commodity, entrepreneurs like Nathanial Wyeth and Frederick Tudor developed insulating chambers that could fit on railroad cars using circulating air, ice, and thick walls.  Yet the end consumer was not as interested in refrigeration as were the commercial meat packing houses, dairies, and breweries who depended on cooling methods to produce a reliable, fresh product. Chemical refrigeration, which compressed gases like ammonia and sulfur dioxide into a liquid so the mixture could absorb heat, was introduced in the 1910s, and refrigerators became gradually safer (CFCs, Freon), smaller, and more efficient to appeal to household consumers.

RESTAURANTS

English inns always offered a prepared, communal meal known as an ordinary, to its occupants, but the menu-based, cooked-to-order food served at individual tables was created by Boulanger when he opened a soup business in Paris in 1765 and named it after restaurer, meaning restorative.  The French economy drastically changed after the Revolution ending in 1799, because aristocrats fled from the cities, leaving their cooks and chefs to open various restaurants serving newly arrived bachelor farmers and craftsman from the country.  Gradually expanding throughout Europe, the restaurant changed again in the 20s in America in the form of cafeterias, diners, railroad car counters, and finally “drive-ins” where one could order “fast food” from a window and eat it in the car.

ROADS

Metropolitan centers, as far back as ancient times, tried to make transportation easier by lining paths and roadways with gravel, sand, wood, cobblestone, and other simple paving methods that made it more comfortable for horses, people, and carriages to travel short distances. Since these roads often flooded or degraded and were in need of constant repair, the discovery and manufacture of asphalt cement, along with the popularity of transport such as bicycles, automobiles, and military vehicles that couldn’t traverse bumpy roads, led to the development of thousands of miles of highways within and between cities. Demand for a reliable, publicly funded system of roadways encouraged Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower to pass legislation and allocate funds to lay roads, thus boosting employment, complementing the car boom, and uniting urban centers with suburban neighborhoods.

ROMANTIC LOVE

Many philosophers and sociologists, notably Joseph Campbell, maintain that our contemporary concept of “falling in love” and romantic love had to be constructed and refined, rather than emerge organically, because the drive to mate may not be connected to the drive to develop spiritually satisfying romantic relationships. Before the Medieval period, love had been relegated to filial or pious love, and marriage was treated as a convenient business arrangement, yet courtly love, the love between a knight and a lady, as expressed through sonnets and verse by troubadours, created lasting tropes, such as the delicious pain of unrequited love and unabashed admiration from afar.  Romanticism, a movement emphasizing individualism and independence, equated romantic love with marriage and encouraged both men and women to marry the one they desired, not the accomplished, secure one approved by their parents, so love became synonymous with friendship, compatibility, and a mutual perspective on life.

SALT

Since sodium chloride is an essential nutrient to all living things, humans have long been seeking reliable sources of salt, first through meat, and then by itself as they discovered the amazing result that salt added to various food prevented them from spoiling, molding, or turning rancid, in addition to enabling the curing of hide and dyeing of cloth. It can be said that, compared to any other spice or invention, tracing the worldwide trade of salt can tell you more about exploration, cultural exchange, and political alliances, as the Chinese, Romans, and Celts extracted rare salt through mining or evaporation and heavily regulated its price and trade through taxes. Even after other kinds of food preservation had developed, such as canning and refrigeration, salt remained an important ingredient in processed foods, like potato chips, because of its flavor, so much so that high-sodium diets threaten health.

SCHIZOPHRENIA

In 1911, at the dawn of psychoanalysis, Eugen Bleuler derived the diagnosis “schizophrenia” from Greek words meaning “split mind” to describe a category of mental illness whose sufferers had some hallucinations, paranoia, disordered thinking, selfishness, and inhibited empathy, which built on the work of Emile Kraepin, whom, a generation earlier, noticed a relationship between these symptoms. Post-Freud, the psychology community became interested in the relationships between schizophrenics and their childhood environments, especially maternal relationships, in order to discover an origin in dysfunctional parenting that might cause a “double-bind” that, according to Dr. Bateson, created a division between feelings, thoughts, and actions. The first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the handbook for psychological illness, issued in 1952 had subtypes of schizophrenia that still persist today, including paranoid, catatonic, and the general Undifferentiated. It is worth note that the word schizophrenic has come to colloquially or pejoratively signify a multi-personality, quirky contradiction, or opposite impulses, but this has nothing to do with the psychiatric diagnosis.

SCIENCE

Science, the process of acquiring knowledge empirically and objectively that illuminates observable phenomena in nature, has roots in Greek philosophers, such as Aristotle, but wasn’t established as a separate field until the Age of Reason and Enlightenment, saw many thinkers using models, hypotheses, and repeatable experiments to explain conditions such as gravity, chemical reactions, planetary motion, and inertia using mathematics.  Most notably, Sir Isaac Newton, in his work on mechanical physics and astronomy, epitomizes the kind of new thinking of the period that valued rationality, reproducible experiments, logical inferences, and skepticism over subjective perspective, superstition, and unverifiable conclusions.  Of course, although science today means both a means of study and an authoritative body of knowledge, it is not without error or cultural specificity; in fact, it is a primary tenet of science that theories can be disproved, overthrown, or adapted to suit emerging results, changing values, or questions posed in a new light.

SHAVING

Up until the last century, shaven or full beards have been worn according to social and religious custom to indicate some trait of the wearer, such as chastity, marriage, victory in battle, mourning, reliability, virtue, manhood, vanity, etc. In Rome, Persia, Macedonia, Greece, and later Protestant England, hair was charged with a supernatural power as well as a convenient visual indicator of a man’s status or occupation.  Only rarely (in combat when a clean-shaven face allowed a gas mask to fit tightly over the nose, or in places where lice and ticks posed a health risk) was shaving a practical matter, but was more often linked to the prevailing culture and counterculture, like government workers versus Beatniks during the 50s.  In women, body hair (leg, underarm, and pubic) has been long viewed as a potent symbol for sexual power, and its presence or absence has indicated debauchery, promiscuity, purity, sanctity, or virtue. As opposed to men in regards to facial hair, women shaving their legs and armpits is largely a recent practice linked to Victorian values of cleanliness, beauty and youth that emerged in repressive American patriarchy, but would take the rest of the century to infiltrate the entire world.  Hairless legs and armpits were propagated by clever advertisements in 1920s ladies’ magazines (like Harper’s Bazaar) for depilatories and razors which featured carefree, modern women dancing or driving with upraised arms and bare legs, sometimes in bathing suits, when nylon stockings had been banned as part of the war effort.

SHOES

To protect their feet from rocks so they could march long distances, Romans sewed simple leather sandals, while Native North Americans crafted warm, wrapping moccasins practical in winter, whereas Japanese and Greeks treated shoes as ornamental luxuries for the upper classes. These twin tracks of shoe design, practicality versus decoration, persists in the history of development of shoes, from the spiky soles that allowed greater grip to the ridiculously long, pointed toes of Medieval nobility, from the comfortable but unfashionable Oxford of students to the platform slippers so unstable that women could not walk without aid. Technically, shoes changed a great deal in 1794 when soles and uppers were formed separately and then joined together (around the same time mirrored shapes distinguished the right and left shoe) and shoe manufacturing became automated in 1858 with a machine that quickly joined soles and uppers of boots for Civil War soldiers.

SHOELACES

Compared to buckles (Elizabethan England and Colonial America), buttons (Middle Ages), pins, and straps, shoelaces were a relatively late development in fastening methods, partly due to fashion and partly to shoemaking crafts. Many men considered buckles to be cultured and decorative, yet masculine, so they preferred them to the more feminine, dapper ribbon or textile laces and eyelets (the holes that the laces weave through) when they were introduced in 1790 in England.  A shoe similar to the Oxford finally became popular in New England during the Civil War, with metal eyelets and woven laces, but shoelaces didn’t rise to ubiquity until the advent of rubber soled “sneakers” by Keds, Chuck Taylor, and Spaulding appealed to athletic youngsters post-WWI.

SHOWERING

Soon after soiled people stood under waterfalls or requested that their servants pour heated water over them in the bath, the search for a fresh, warm, comforting, and practical shower was born, despite most of Europe’s aversion to bathing in any way, since they equated dirt with holiness and cleanliness with sinful vanity. Early showers were merely an elevated tank full of lukewarm or cold water that could funnel through a sieve-like head and sprinkle the bather with (often reused) reservoir water, such as the arrangement of the English Regency Shower.  Not until houses were equipped with simple plumbing of cold and warm water could showers evolve to be freestanding units, like the American Virginia Stool Shower, as a separate chamber or incorporated into bathtubs, with the bather maintaining water pressure using a hand or foot crank.

SPICES (as preservatives)

Without knowing exactly why, cultures in hot climates, particularly the Caribbean, Malaysia, and Southeast Asia, traditionally spiced foods heavily, including soup, cooked meat, and fresh vegetables because spices have a notable bacteriostatic effect that inhibits the growth of dangerous bacteria. As far back as anyone can determine, meat especially was always flavored with a strong, native spice, such as garlic, oregano, cumin, ginger, pepper, chile pepper, cinnamon, thyme, and peppermint.  In the centuries before refrigeration, the spice trade between the East and West was possibly responsible for spurring the Age of Exploration, the European discovery of the American continents, and the sharing of numerous inventions, such as paper and gunpowder.

SPOKEN LANGUAGE

Other evolutionary leaps, such as tool-making or written language, leave some evidence like primitive tools or cave paintings, yet the beginning of spoken language is so vague and intangible that linguists, paleontologists, and neurologists must use indirect and tangential paths of study to conjecture where, why, and how language first emerged.  For example, when social groups of humans created complex tools, burial rituals, or explorative ocean journeys, some conjecture that language was necessary to create or sustain such behaviors.  Since this research field is still in its infancy, other scientists study present language diversity in order to step back through time and examine how similar or different languages indicate a shared history, the roots of language in the Indo-European or Australasian populations, and migration routes.

STREETLAMPS

From animal fat to whale oil to kerosene, early streetlamps in upscale neighborhoods of London indicated the inhabitants’ conspicuous wealth because they had to be refilled, lit by hand, and extinguished each morning. Colonial America brought the fashion to Philadelphia when Benjamin Franklin popularized simple candle lanterns along public streets (soon to be replaced by natural gas lamps and installed in urban centers throughout the 1800s) because city dwellers no longer followed a farmer’s schedule dictated by sunlight. Not until paved streets and automobiles necessitated safer, lit roadways in the 1930s did local governments line major highways with the recent invention of electric, incandescent light bulbs.

SUBURBS

A relatively recent development, suburbs now house the majority of the population of the United States through a process known as “suburbanization,” fueled by the notions of commuting to an urban job, owning a home, and escaping the perceived ills of city dwelling, such as violence, pollution, traffic, and noise.  The Industrial Revolution saw a massive migration from the country to the growing metropolis, yet soon the opportunity of gainful employment, convenient multi-family housing, and entertainment became the horrors of slums, poor public transportation, racially charged violence, and other crime. As freeways connected outlying areas to business districts in the 40s and 50s, suburbs sprung up backed by zoning regulations that gave them some autonomy and provided for smaller business centers, such as mini-malls, with the promise of privacy, quality schools, large lots, and racially segregated, white neighbors.

SUBWAYS

Distinct from steam-powered railways or tunneled roads that existed in Istanbul and Paris, a subway refers to a primarily underground rapid transit system with electric or cable cars that run frequently throughout a metropolitan area.  Even under this definition, there is some disagreement as to which city can lay claim to building the first subway, as the Thames Tunnel opened in 1843 (but was only one line), London Underground in 1863 (with railway cars), and Manhattan had a pneumatic subway in 1870, soon adding a cable car into Brooklyn over the Brooklyn Bridge.  Not until the prescient Frank Sprague invented a multiple-unit train control that could replace individual drivers with a central control base in 1897, and electrical cars replaced cable cars throughout the 20s and 30s, could large cities like Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Buenos Aires, London, Paris, and Tokyo develop both elevated and underground systems.

SUGAR

Although sugar occurs naturally in fruits and honeycomb, sugar as a granulated sweetener and preservative originated in India where people smashed sugar cane and evaporated the water to make a “sweet salt” that traveled through the Middle East to Europe via Moor traders.  During the early Colonial Era, Europe valued sugar so highly that the Dutch, Portuguese, and British established vast sugar mills across the Caribbean, North America, and Central and South America on plantations populated by African slaves to fulfill the demand for luxurious chocolate, jam, and sweetened tea.  An explosion in the availability of sugar made it affordable even for the working classes and the new sweet tooth motivated Edward Charles Howard to refine sugar in 1813, so for the first time potent sugar could be easily added to all foods, not just desserts.

SURGERY

Early practitioners of ancient times resorted to surgery as a last resort to remove a growth, set a broken bone, or amputate a limb, because it came with the risk of the patient bleeding to death or developing a fatal infection in the incision. While surgery became less popular in the Dark Ages and early Medieval period in favor of more holistic, even supernatural, treatments such as bloodletting and balancing the humors, barbers reintroduced surgery because they were adept at quickly removing rotten or abscessing teeth, and painted red and white stripes down their barber pole to represent blood and bandages. Although pain and death initially demanded the surgeon’s attention, discoveries and developments such as bacterial infection, blood type, blood transfusions, x-ray machines, and breathing apparatus all contributed to the ease with which modern surgeons accomplish routine procedures and complex organ replacements.

TEA

Tea leaves growing in the mountains of China were harvested and turned into consolidated powder “cakes” before steeping loose tea leaves came into fashion during the Ming Dynasty, around the 15th century, that allowed cultured connoisseurs to appreciate the delicate flavors of different teas (oolong, red, black, white) during ritualized tasting.  Portuguese explorers brought tea back to England, and thus began a long love affair the British had for drinking pots of tea that was partially responsible for the Opium War and the colonization of India (to reduce their dependence on Chinese export of tea). This brings us to the colonies, which were even more dependent on the strictly taxed import from Britain via The John Company that almost acted as a government until outraged colonists staged the Boston Tea Party, in 1773, began rumbling for a revolution, and switched to coffee.

TELEPHONE

After the initial excitement when Alexander Graham Bell successfully transmitted his voice over electrical lines in 1876, telephones enjoyed a hectic history that turns almost entirely on patents, company disagreements, lawsuits, charges of monopoly, new subsidiaries, and personal rivalries. For example, Elisha Gray filed an “intention” to file a patent just days after Bell’s patent, and often the altruistic ideal of connecting people at a distance ran contrary to competitors (Bell Telephone, Western Union, AT&T) fighting to establish a controlling presence in local markets with police departments, public payphones, and cross-country lines. In fits and starts, the telephone acquired a ringer, better amplifiers, overseas connection, the switchboard system of connection replaced by dialing, integrated telephone lines, the handset, and finally portable cellular phones, despite occasionally strict federal regulation. 

THREE MEALS A DAY

As soon as humans developed methods of storing excess food, customs developed around when and how to serve this food during special “meals” that depended upon the workday schedule, religious observances, weather or daylight, and cultural differences, until eventually we have the current American custom of a small breakfast, medium lunch (midday meal), and large, rather late dinner.  For example, Greeks ate three meals a day with deipnon (dinner) being the largest, yet the British started their heaviest meal of the day, also called dinner, early in the day, at around 11 o’clock in 1500 to 3 o’clock in 1750, perhaps because they took a light breakfast before dawn. However, the idea and timing of three square meals a day owes the most to the schedule of the monks, since they strictly observed devotions, such that they broke their fast at dawn, ate their midday meal nine hours after nones, recited at daybreak, and the evening meal after vespers, which were recited at sunset. Since our work schedules no longer demand such timing, it is probably healthier to eat five or six smaller meals spread throughout the day, as this keeps your metabolism level and aids digestion.

TOBACCO

The tobacco plant originated in the Americas, so Mayas primarily smoked it, and then the Aztecs invaded around 600 CE, and continued to use the leaf during social gatherings and religious ceremonies.  When Columbus and other explorers observed the value placed on dried, brown leaves, they investigated the smoking and chewing of tobacco, eventually bring harvested tobacco and then tobacco plants back to Europe where it became an entertaining pastime that fueled a slave-driven economy in colonial Chesapeake Bay.  Almost as long as there were snuff users, there were reports issued on the dangers and risks associated with excessive tobacco use, like Dr. John Hill’s study in 1761, that eventually established detrimental health effects of nicotine addiction, including lung cancer.

TOILET

When populations became concentrated in metropolitan centers, such as London and Paris, and the contents of chamber pots created open sewage trenches that contaminated water and spread disease, the need for toilets and plumbing became evident.  As early as 1596, a devoted relative of Queen Elizabeth built an indoor toilet that emptied when one poured water through it, yet toilet evolution froze until close to the turn of the 19th century when several inventors contributed pieces of technology that would eventually form a modern toilet. Alexander Cummings developed a valve that slid open the pipe connecting the bowl and trap to let water through, Joseph Bramah improved the S-valve by connecting it to a hinged mechanism, and Thomas Twyford cast his toilets in ceramic, with an elevated tank and low bowls.

UTENSILS

It didn’t take long for prehistoric man to fashion primitive tools resembling knives that could skewer, cut, shave, and chop meat, wood, or bone, while spoons of hollowed shell emerged soon after because miniature cups on the end of poles were convenient to stir hot liquids or bring broth to the mouth.  However, the shape of a fork (long associated with the trident of Poseidon and pitchfork of the Devil) remained anathema to much of Christian Europe until Victorian England infused an unnecessarily barbarous violence to wielding sharp knives at the dinner table and sterling silver forks were allowed. The fork’s history is traced in an exhibit opening at the National Design Museum, “Feeding Desire,” (May, 2006) as it became a popular alternative that blended the cupping ability of the spoon with the skewering of a knife. The ubiquitous triad entered all households of the last century in affordable, stainless steel flatware sets that wouldn’t rust or tarnish.

WATCHES

Since common clocks of the time used water and pendulums to tell the hour, portable timepieces had to wait until the 1600s before gears and springs could get small enough to be carried around in a case, known as a pocket watch. Pascal, the mathematician, preferred easily glancing at his pocket watch, so he tied it to his wrist, and other would-be watch wearers had to wait hundreds of years before technology improved enough to create watches that used a quartz crystal or self-winding gears to tell accurate time with an hour, minute, and second hand.  The fashionable wristwatches became bejeweled accessories in the hands of Cartier, yet the ubiquity of wearing watches with the “official” time can be traced to World War I, when both common soldiers and officers were provided watches to synchronize their strategic movements, and continued to wear them after the war ended. Electronic technology improved, with batteries small enough to fit inside a watch introduced in 1957, and plastic, digital watches with LED displays in the 60s.

YOGA

The westernized, commercialized practice of yoga as an exercise regimen and stress-reducer can be traced to several gurus, writers, and speakers that traveled and taught in the United States in the 60s and 70s and developed almost a cultish, counter-culture following during a time when young people craved an Eastern spirituality.  The founder of the Self-Realization Center, Swami Paramshansa Yogananda, who published Autobiography of a Yogi in 1947, and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, associated with the school of Transcendental Meditation, were joined by Swami Sivananda during the 60s to bridge the gap from the path toward enlightenment to the physically demanding asanas, or yoga positions. Now, a consumer-friendly version of yoga has purged the more esoteric, intellectual, and Hindu aspects of yoga, leaving behind an innocuous practice that fosters harmonious living and a multi-billion dollar industry in videos, mats, clothing, and books.

 

           I trust it is clear from reading the above that many of the concepts, devices, foods, and luxuries as well as the language that consume much of our daily mental lives are esoteric to our culture and historically contingent, meaning that they are relatively recent inventions and may cease to exist or be altered dramatically when some better technology or way is created or discovered.  In fact, looking at a culture or society is akin to trying to watch the earth rotate; cats and dogs know when night is arriving but they don’t know that night falls because the earth is rotating and the sun only lights up one part of our planet at a time – correct?  It is a similar phenomenon with humans and culture: our culture is constantly changing and evolving just like the earth is rotating; however, while it is happening it is almost imperceptible to us.  We adamantly believe what we believe and do not wish to imagine that those beliefs as well as the language they are housed in may someday evolve out of existence.  I am quite sure very few citizens in ancient Athens or Rome said, “One day there will be a country called America, discovered by a Spaniard but (mis)named after an Italian and colonized by the English.  By that time all that will be left of our great empire will be some statues and a coliseum.”  We really only notice the extremely grand changes retrospectively – don’t we?  If you look back on America 150 years ago – slavery, dirt roads, outhouses, surgery performed in barber shops with whiskey as anesthesia, no telephones, no radios, no televisions, no contraceptives – we can already see vast changes.  Just consider how much of our lives have backgrounds of recorded music, or how much information we can easily access on our computers, or how convenient it is to travel by car or plane or find a toilet.  Did our great-grandparents enjoy any of these luxuries in the same way that we do? 

           Now let’s consider all of the people living in 2nd and 3rd world countries today.  Did you know that 2 billion people living on our planet today – that’s 2,000,000,000 human beings, a population roughly equivalent to six times the population of the United States of America – have never seen a telephone?  That these fellow Homo sapiens live on less than $2 per day?  That they will go to bed hungry tonight and may die from a curable disease such as diarrhea before you wake up tomorrow morning?  14% of Americans have passports and the number of Americans who have traveled to such third world countries I imagine to be quite lower than Americans who have gone to Cancun for Spring Break; if you have traveled to such a country and met people who live on $2 per day then you know how different our concerns are from people who are merely trying to survive.

But even if you haven’t traveled extensively, it should be clear now that we live in a particular culture at a particular point in its evolution (or devolution).  This culture – America in the 21st century – functions on a particular paradigm that dictates acceptable thoughts, emotions, beliefs, actions, customs and mores.  That paradigm rests on a matrix of hidden assumptions that is taken to be “true” or “best” or “most interesting” or “most fruitful or propitious” for us to exist together as a civilized society.  However, it is easily observable from all of our individual problems such as depression and anxiety and all of our societal problems such as war, crime, poverty, and disease that our current paradigm may not be the most propitious and efficacious and - if the past is any indicator of the future - that a shift to the next paradigm may facilitate fulfillment, peace, health, wellness, love, and happiness for a greater number of people.  I ask you for the rest of this book to grant the assumption that humanity has not reached its highest peak in the form of Western Culture in the 21st century.  If humanity ends up blowing itself off of the planet in a nuclear tsunami then history will in fact just how brilliant human beings in the 21st century were.  However, for the purposes of this book let us assume that there will be intelligent life on this planet for at least another thousand years and that human beings who look back on us from the year 3000 will probably consider our beliefs, mores, customs, laws and ways of being and interacting to be relatively remedial, unsophisticated, ignorant, absurd, misguided, and often times barbaric.

 

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