131–140 of 583 posts
Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis on discovering the effects of washing your hands before operating on patients. Simple, yet highly effective.
The idea of human rights is simple, fairly modern, and very important -- one of the most important today.
It's just that it's only in the 1800s and 1900s that general strikes forced the idea to actually be implemented. Before industrial work, if you stopped working the land you could be replaced (Strikes did still happen, but they were easier to deal with). The introduction of industrial work makes strikes harder to deal with, because instead of having to come up with 10 or 20 men for the fields, or exerting your force over them, you have to come up with a couple of hundred or a couple of thousand men to work the factory, or find a way to exert force over them. And while the labour is 'unskilled', you still need a certain level of understanding about, say, making steel, to avoid killing yourself and to properly manufacture the materials.
And then in the 20th century, globalisation -- or more accurately -- the resulting specialisation of facilities, made striking even more effective. To quote Tony Cliff:
When 3,000 General Motors brake parts workers went on strike in
Dayton, Ohio, in 1996, they shut down General Motors operations across
the United States, Canada and Mexico. Over 125,000 General Motors
workers were laid off within days. The strike cost the company around
$45 million a day, and the Clinton government screamed at both sides
to settle.
When an almost general strike took place in Denmark, Saab was forced
to stop car production in Sweden because it ran out of essential
components from Danish suppliers. The assembly of Saab’s convertible
motors in Finland was also forced to stop. Volvo also announced that
its production lines in Sweden and the Netherlands had been very badly
affected.
In 1988, when Ford workers in Britain struck, they brought the whole
of Ford Europe to a halt within three or four days.
As I mentioned in another comment, the things that we take for granted: the ability for working men to vote (Something won by the Chartists in the 1800s), the ability for women to vote, human rights laws, worker's rights laws, the NHS, etc. were all given to us by strikes.
Maybe not "most important", but a few dollars worth of post-it notes can turn any wall into a "business application" that can potentially cost thousands to turn into code.
I don't know if you were being sarcastic, but the post it note meetings only provide illusion of getting things done and they can often be destructive if not conducted well or relied on too heavily. Your mileage will vary of course.
Common soap bars, they weren't really a thing until the mid 1850's and you had to make your own soap unless you were wealthy prior to that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap#19th_century Similarly, liquid soap which came to be around the same time.
Liquid soaps are a poor choice from an environmental/cost standpoint. Most of the soap goes down the drain and is wasted. Bar soap stays on your hands and last many times longer.
Also, washing machines didn't really start to catch on until the mid 1940's, prior to that it was still pretty much scrub boards. Scrub boards are bad enough with liquid soap.
Bicycles are pretty amazing, although there's no way you could 'build one yourself'.
Well, you can certainly assemble a bike from a pile of components, a pair of wheels, and a frame (try and do that with a sedan...) And it's not beyond most people to learn how to weld or braze a frame together from tubing (or even glue up carbon fiber or bamboo into a frame, at room temp). But smelting the steel and aluminum at home to make the parts is admittedly not practical.
It's no surprise the first mass producers of bicycles were weapons manufacturers -- they were the ones with the high quality steel supplies and equipment that allowed for tight tolerances.
Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis on discovering the effects of washing your hands before operating on patients. Simple, yet highly effective.
His story is so sad though. He was ostracized by the other doctors and medical community who didn't believe him and indeed openly mocked him. He remained outspoken about his findings until a colleague forced him into an asylum where he was beaten by the guards and died.
The process for making ammonia from air (nitrogen) and hydrogen. Allowed a huge increase in agricultural output that saved a few billion people from starvation. Haber-Bosch process.