Today, a consumer report. The University of
Houston's College of Engineering presents this
series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
created them.
In 1986, the Consumers
Union, which publishes Consumer
Reports, celebrated its fiftieth anniversary
with a book entitled I'll Buy That. It's
arranged in an odd way. It lists fifty technologies
that've radically changed the lives of American
consumers, and it illustrates each with several
examples.
Much of what we see is expected, of course. The
Transistor, commercial Air Travel,
Hi-Fi, and TV are all obvious
major consumer items. But then we realize that the
people who put this book together have no interest
in prettying up American consumerism. They're
interested in seeing which items radically altered
the social landscape -- pretty or not.
Once you go down that road, you find much that you
might want to forget. Take, for example, the
section entitled Standardized Dining. The
American fast-food industry is presently under
attack for afflicting the young with a high-fat
diet. However, the early White
Castle chain, then McDonalds and Howard
Johnson, provided a vast improvement over the sale
of sometimes-lethal cheap food in the old
uncontrolled greasy-spoon diners.
And we find a section on Antibiotics. In
the section called Suburbia, we see the
vast tracts of prefab homes that sprang up after
WW-II to house a nation of returning veterans and
their new families. Wrinkle your nose at such
ticky-tacky if you will, but, like fast foods, this
was an affordable answer to a nation's need.
A section on Supermarkets shows how we
finally cut the overhead costs, slow service, and
waste that went with the corner groceries of the
1930s. The shopping cart,
checkout lines, and large refrigerated inventories
vastly improved the delivery of food to low-income
families. The same case may be built around the
sudden explosion of Synthetic Fabrics or
Frozen Foods.
There are sections on Tampons and the
Birth-Control Pill. The impact of those
items on American life is too obvious to dwell on,
and they might easily have been overlooked in such
an accounting.
Three sections tell how we dealt with the problem
of paying for the most expensive consumer items:
housing, education, and medical care. By spreading
the cost, VA and FHA Mortgages,
the GI Bill, and
Health Insurance plans radically improved
American life.
Other sections deal with certain automobiles,
Latex Paint, Smoke Detectors, and
Refrigerator/Freezers. We see no
concession to style and taste here -- only the raw
process of clawing our way out of the cave. Museums
of American design go back, after the fact, to
celebrate some of the cream that rose to the top:
beautiful Eames chairs,
Tifanny lamps, and Art Deco radiator ornaments.
But that's after the improvement of the human
condition has taken place! What we see here is the
crude struggle to extend human life and to improve
its quality. There's time enough, once that job is
done, to look back and find all the ways we
might've done it better.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
I'll Buy That! 50 Small Wonders and Big Deals
that Revolutionized the Lives of Consumers: a 50-Year
Restrospective by the Editors of Consumer
Reports. Mount Vernon: New York: Consumers
Union, 1986.
American getting down to serious consumerism in
1900
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-2002 by John H.
Lienhard.
