Parts of Everyday Life That Are Newer Than You Think
If you take stock of all the objects you can see from wherever you’re posted in your home, you probably have a pretty good idea of when they were invented. Microwave? Mid-20th century. Bicycle? Victorian era. American flag thong underwear? Definitely ‘80s.
But a lot of staples of modern living are much newer than you think…
The Word ‘Hello’
It’s hard to get through a day without it, but we’ve only had the word “hello” for about 150 years. Before that, we greeted people with “hail,” as in “Caesar,” which we should immediately bring back. “Hello” was popularized as a greeting by none other than Thomas Edison, who preferred it over clunkier greetings like, “Are you there?” Which, again, would be hilarious to bring back.
Paramedics
You would think emergency medical technicians go back as far as ambulances, which have existed since the 1400s, but they’ve only been staffed by personnel trained to keep people alive in transit since the ‘60s. Before that, they were driven by whatever first responders they could get, who weren’t very well-trained in emergency medicine, and sometimes undertakers from the local funeral home — never a good sign.
Credit Scores
Your FICO score affects everything from where you can live to how busted your phone has to be, but that wasn’t the case before 1989, when the credit scoring system as we know it in the U.S. today was born. That doesn’t mean your financial options were wide open. It just meant creditors used their own system, which often consisted of evaluating how white you were. Believe it or not, one youthful misunderstanding of compound interest ruining your life for seven years was supposed to be a step forward.
Matches
Modern matches — you know, the kind with the little nub you have to strike — weren’t invented until 1826. That means the distance from the match to The Little Match Girl is less than 20 years. No wonder nobody was buying — they were suspicious of this newfangled innovation. How did people light fires before that? Lighters. No, seriously. The first modern lighter was invented only a few years earlier, but since the 16th century, people had been using pistols converted to shoot fire. It’s unclear why they thought they needed to improve this technology.
Teenagers
People have always been between the ages of 13 and 19, but the concept of adolescence wasn’t particularly meaningful in Western society until the end of World War II, when the post-war economic boom freed young people from the necessity of working and more jurisdictions began requiring high school attendance. Before that, you were either a child or an adult, and it was pretty easy to tell which just by looking at you. That’s because they didn’t have concepts like “age of consent laws” and “ephebophilia,” either.