Everyday Abundance: The hidden stories behind everyday technologies

Cars transformed modern life—but automobiles alone were not enough. Cars would have been useless without a second invention: driving. Behind the daily commute is a vast, intricate system of customs, laws, and innovations that make driving possible. This system evolved over decades and its development wasn’t easy or fast. Ride along with Virginia Postrel and Charles C. Mann as they explore the hidden history of traffic, road design, and the strange creation of modern driving. Podcast website: http://abundance.institute/EverydayAbundance Picture the main street in a classic Western movie like Shane or High Noon. There are no lines down the middle. No stop signs, no speed limits, no left-turn lanes—in fact, no lanes at all. People ride their horses or drive their carriages wherever they want, however they want, no matter how crowded the street. They can do this because horses are intelligent beasts that won’t run into each other.  Then came the automobile. People are now in charge—suddenly, totally, in ways they have not been before. The result: a tsunami of fatal car crashes. In 1913, more than 33 people died for every 10,000 vehicles on the road—more than 20 times today’s vehicular death rate.  One year later, Detroit police sergeant Harold “Harry” Jackson introduced the first stop sign, placing it at a particularly hazardous intersection. The idea caught on. It was the beginning of a thorough reworking of the landscape, one that changed daily lives so thoroughly that its very existence has been forgotten.  Subjects discussed include:  Maple Syrup Fortunes Private Colonial Turnpikes Herbert Hoover’s Mighty Role Curious Explanations for Driving on the Right Stop Signs as Infringements on Pedestrian Rights Pennies from Inuit Children The Lincoln Highway Emily Post’s Cross-Country Drive Gasoline in the Pharmacy How Big Government Began References, further reading, and credits: Social technologies: Richard Nelson, “Physical and social technologies, and their evolution,” 2003. Stop signs: Clay McShane, “The Origins and Globalization of Traffic Control Signals, Journal of Urban History, 1999.  Early turnpikes and right-hand driving: Albert C. Rose, Public Roads of the Past. 1952-53 (2 vols.) From the preface: “Future generations will place Mr. Rose’s name among the very few that may be called major highway historians.” Blue Book: Automobile Blue Book. 1901-1917 (vol. 1 of 3). The first Blue Book was in 1901, but it just covered the Northeast. The first edition that covered almost the entire country was 1907.  Lincoln Highway: Earl Swift, The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways. Emily Post’s 1916 cross-country voyage: Emily Post, By Motor to the Golden Gate.  Los Angeles home-made crosswalks: Crosswalk Collective.  “Route 66” song: Chapters (00:01:47) - Why Trucks Couldn't Cross America(00:04:33) - The Social Technologies We Never Notice(00:08:18) - The Invention of the Stop Sign(00:12:03) - When Roads Had No Rules(00:17:56) - Google Maps Before Google(00:20:11) - The Lincoln Highway Dream(00:30:20) - Route 66 and the Interstate Revolution(00:36:08) - How Gas Stations Conquered America(00:39:09) - Standardizing Road Rules

Nineteenth-century cities were crowded, polluted, and brim-full of tuberculosis. The combination of disease and dirty air led to enormous nasal issues—and the rise of the surprisingly large and influential handkerchief trade. Then came Kleenex and the rise of disposable hygiene. Join Virginia Postrel and Charles C. Mann as they explore the strange history of nose-blowing, tissues, and the modern culture of throwaway consumer products. Podcast website: http://abundance.institute/EverydayAbundance People have been blowing their noses as long as there have been people, but phlegm control did not become an industry until after the industrial revolution in the late 18th century. Rising affluence, industrialization, and urbanization led to a global increase in polluted city air. Exacerbated by ubiquitous coal smoke, a host of respiratory diseases became constant presences in those cities, tuberculosis most prominent among them. Constant coughing, sneezing, and nasal discharge became ordinary features of city life. Enter the handkerchief. A remarkably sophisticated physical object, it became a cultural focus, a vital part of the middle- and upper-class wardrobe, and an icon of approved male behavior. Like so many other aspects of 19th-century society, the handkerchief-industrial complex died in the trenches of the First World War.  But technology developed for that same war gave rise to the complex web of creped, plied, and folded wood-pulp fibers known as tissue paper. Kleenex, introduced by Kimberly-Clark in 1924, was more than just a new method of cleaning your nose, it was a harbinger of a new age of disposability—for good and bad, the age we live in now. Subjects discussed include: Charles’s Memorable Shaanxi Snot Shower The Handkerchief-Industrial Complex Dying Attractively from Tuberculosis Advertising Unmentionable Products (A Digression) Reliability of Ancient Disease Estimates Teddy Roosevelt’s Swag East Asian Social Norms, Nasal Division References, further reading, and credits: Erasmus on nose-blowing: Desiderius, Erasmus. De Civilitate Morum Puerilium, 1530. (English translation) Indigenous disgust with European handkerchiefs: Charles’s book, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, 2005 (online excerpt with quote). History and prevalence of tuberculosis: John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection, 2025.  Scholarly study of the same subject: Ilaria Barberis, et al., The history of tuberculosis: from the first historical records to the isolation of Koch's bacillus. Journal of Preventive Medical Hygiene, 2017. Fashionability of 19th-century TB: Imogen Clarke, Tuberculosis: A Fashionable Disease. Sciencemuseum.org, 2019. The plague of female shoplifters: Elaine S. Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store, 1992. Rheta Childe Doer at the handkerchief counter: Rheta Childe Doer, Chapters (00:00:33) - The Problem of Blowing Your Nose(00:03:35) - Coal Smoke and the Mucus Crisis(00:06:10) - Tuberculosis and Victorian Handkerchief Culture(00:09:04) - The Industrial Revolution Creates Handkerchief Abundance(00:13:11) - Handkerchiefs, Fashion, and Theft(00:17:56) - Christmas Chaos at the Handkerchief Counter(00:23:22) - Teddy Roosevelt and the Political Bandana(00:26:54) - World War I and the Birth of Cellucotton(00:29:34) - From Kotex to Kleenex

Grocery shopping in a supermarket is such a commonplace part of everyday existence that it is routinely mocked as a ritual of narcotized consumerism. In fact, the modern supermarket is a radical break with the past—and a nexus of innovations central to contemporary life. Markets have existed for millennia, of course. But they were nothing like the modern grocery store, with its shopping carts, self-service selection, shelves of branded, packaged goods, and lineup of cash registers. Walk the store aisles with Virginia Postrel and Charles C. Mann as they explore the now-invisible network of technologies that arose to create the supermarket. Podcast website: http://abundance.institute/EverydayAbundance Nowadays a Cracker Barrel is a restaurant where you eat down-home food amid rustic décor. But crackers and other provisions used to actually come in big wooden barrels from which store proprietors scooped out and weighed goods for customers. They represented a whole lost world of grocery shopping. Service was personal, choices were limited, prices were high, and quality was inconsistent. This is where “bottom of the barrel” originates. You didn’t want crackers—or flour or anything else—from down there. The cracker-barrel model fell under attack in the mid-19th century, with the arrival of the first packaged goods—items made in factories, stuffed into branded boxes, and transported to stores. But the real beginning of the end was February 1898, when 114 different bakeries making a host of different products merged into a cookie colossus: the National Biscuit Company (today known as Nabisco). Its head, Adolphus Green, dreamed of making a single baked good that could be sold across the nation—an identical product, identically fresh, identically packaged, sold everywhere from Boston to Bakersfield. Green’s dream would become a landmark in the history of consumption. Subjects discussed include: Fig Newtons, Origin of Actors in the Aisles Inflation, Effect on Price Stickers Fame of Tristam Shandy, Lack of Uneeda Biscuits Architecture of Shopping Frank Peters, Package Prodigy Self-Service as Means of Fighting Segregation and Sexism Bar-Code Brilliance References, further reading, and credits: The Nabisco story,from the invaluable American Business History Center Fun short account of Adolphus Green and Frank Peters: David Traxel, 1898: The Birth of the American Century, 1998, pp. 287-295. Out of the Cracker Barrel;: The Nabisco Story, From Animal Crackers to Zuzus by William Kahn General origins of packaged food: Anne Murcott, The (Not So) Secret Lives of Food Packaging, 2024. Clarence Saunders, Piggly Wiggly, and effects of self-service shopping: Lisa C. Tolbert, Beyond Piggly Wiggly: Inventing the American Self-Service Store, 2023. Slightly exaggerated but fun short video on the same thing. Parallel story about African-American customers and Sears catalogue. The Cart That Changed the World: The Career of Sylvan N. Goldman by Terry P. Williams Origin of the bar code: The History of the Bar Code, Smithsonian, 2015. Earliest bar-code scan... Chapters (00:00:52) - From Hunting & Gathering to the Cracker Barrel(00:04:04) - Biscuit Abundance(00:19:52) - Why Clerks Used to Do Your Shopping(00:22:55) - How Self-Service Changed America(00:28:46) - The Surprising Equalizing of Supermarkets(00:33:44) - The Shopping Cart Nobody Wanted(00:38:56) - Fake Shoppers Save the Shopping Cart(00:45:09) - The Barcode Revolution(01:00:28) - From Mr. Jones to Grocery Apps

The electric washing machine may be the single most liberating household technology ever invented. Before it arrived, millions of people—mostly women—spent enormous portions of their lives bent over washtubs and washboards. Join Virginia Postrel and Charles C. Mann as they explore how laundry technology transformed work, family life, public health, and modern society itself. Podcast website: http://abundance.institute/EverydayAbundance Except for fire and stone tools, clothing may be our species’ oldest technology—it was invented 170,000 years ago or more. The first humans to don clothing soon made a discovery: worn too often, their garments would become infested with lice. Soon followed another invention: laundry. That laundry was presumably done by banging animal skins on rocks, more or less as people do with rugs today. Soap did not become part of the process for tens of thousands of years. Indeed, the first recipe for soap in the historical record dates only to ancient Babylonia, where big commercial laundries served all the main cities.  Over the centuries, clothing became the province of an extraordinary industry of toil—one that was blown apart in 1907, when the first electric washing machine appeared. In a few decades, it upended the domestic life of half the human species. A way of life that had endured for centuries was so thoroughly and rapidly ended that most of us today have no idea it existed.  Forget the flying car. We’re going to the laundromat! Subjects discussed include: Charles’s Mumbai Laundry Epiphany Vermin Evolution No More Open Pores! Undercover Laundry Reporter Elizabeth Banks Not-so-trad Tradwives Rural Electrification 1900 U.S. Census Categories Charles’s Attempt to Use a Washboard References, further reading, and credits: Lice, human hairlessness, and the origin of clothing: Ian Gilligan, Climate, Clothing, and Agriculture in Prehistory, 2018. (Gilligan bases his fine account on, among other things, these two scholarly articles.) Prize-winning student essay on Lenin’s battle against vermin: Prisca Allio, The Louse Manifesto,2018.  Soap: Ferris Jabr, Why Soap Works, Yale School of Medicine, 2020. Research article on Babylonian laundry: Nathan, Wasserman. Treating Garments in the Old Babylonian Period: “At the Cleaners” in a Comparative View, Iraq, 2013. Elizabeth Banks’ laundry career: Elizabeth L. Banks, Campaigns of Curiosity: Journalistic Adventures of an American Girl in London, 1894, pp 153-208.  Correction: In discussing journalists like Banks, Virginia says 18th and early 19th century when she means 19th and early 20th century. Famous economics paper evaluating the washing machine as liberatory technology: Jeremy Greenwood, Ananth Seshadri, and Mehmet Yorukoglu, Engines of Liberation, The Review of Economic Studies, 2005. Cleaning in general: Virginia Smith, Clean: A History of Personal Hygien... Chapters (00:01:23) - The Laundry Mountain of Mumbai(00:04:08) - What Lice Reveal About the Origins of Clothing(00:08:55) - The Science of Soap(00:12:35) - Babylon's 4,000-Year-Old Dry Cleaners(00:16:33) - My Washboard Disaster(00:20:00) - Laundry as a Profession(00:33:12) - Bleach, White Clothes, and Respectability(00:40:12) - The Washing Machine That Sold Electricity(00:45:49) - The Technology That Freed Half of Humanity

For nearly all of history, hearing music required someone physically making it nearby and the only music humans ever heard was whistling or singing. Even when instruments became widespread, music was rare. The idea that people could hear any music they wanted at the push of a button was undreamed of. Listen along with Virginia, Charles, and special guest musician/historian/engineer John Hardin as they play the chords of the great transformation of music from dearth to digital, from scarcity to Spotify. Podcast website: http://abundance.institute/EverydayAbundance One of the most popular books published in the 19th century was Looking Backward (1888), Edward Bellamy’s science-fiction novel about the fantastic, faraway world of A.D. 2000. Characters listen to music in their homes through cable “telephones.” Bellamy correctly predicted that future listeners would have near-instant access to music from anywhere. But he missed the crucial breakthrough: recording. Instead, Looking Backward portrayed live musicians playing over the wires. And that made all the difference. The ability to capture, reproduce, duplicate, store, transmit, remix, and stream sound transformed music from a fleeting experience into a permanent and infinitely reproducible one. Entire industries emerged. Old business models collapsed. New art forms appeared. The very meaning of listening changed. Subjects discussed include:  Player Pianos Music, Strangeness of AI Music Copyright, Endless Complexities of LPs to CDs Invention of Radio Home Studios Technological Backlash Mixtape and Sampling Culture Digital Divas References, further reading, and credits:  Traces of ancient music: Graeme Lawson, Sound Tracks: An Archaeological Journey through our Musical Past, 2025. John Hardin’s Substack, “Creative Frontiers” “Dynamism, Stasis, and Popular Culture,” Virginia’s 2000 talk referring to Bellamy and CDs at Best Buy Looking Backward on Project Gutenberg Duke Ellington, “Mood Indigo” on YouTube (1962 version) Charles’s somewhat outdated but still useful Atlantic article on music copyright (from 2000). History of sampling and mixtape culture: Nate Petrin, Bring That Beat Back: How Sampling Built Hip-Hop, 2020. Overview of format changes in music from two industry experts: Howie Singer and Bill Rosenblatt, Key Changes: The Ten Times Technology Transformed the Music Industry, 2023. Metronome video courtesy of The Museum of Music History, https://momh.org.uk/ Chapters (00:02:26) - Music Before Recordings(00:04:48) - Every New Music Technology Was 'Cheating'(00:06:05) - Bellamy's Dream of Unlimited Music(00:11:26) - The Phonograph and the Birth of the Recording Industry(00:20:32) - Radio Changes Everything(00:27:10) - Microphones, Tape, and the Modern Studio(00:37:02) - Hip-Hop, Sampling, and the Digital Revolution(00:41:10) - Streaming, AI, and the Future of Music