Incidentally, one unheralded benefit of LED and CFL bulbs is that I suspect it is making a distinct improvement in the safety of older homes with older wiring.
Valuethinker wrote:Watching a technological revolution is such fun. I struggle to explain to my nieces and nephews life without email and mobile phones. But something as prosaic as a lightbulb. I look forward to the (distant no doubt) day when I have to explain what a gas station was.
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It's the little things that slip by you without much heralding. You tend not to notice them until the change is complete. As long as gas stations still change oil, you don't notice how few of them do; as long as Niblets still come in "tin" cans, you don't notice how few cans there are in the supermarket.
There are still gas stations, but people don't come out and clean the windshield and check the oil. It's quite a change from services bay to convenience stores. I believe the period of rapid changeover occurred circa 1990.
Have you noticed how few things still come packaged in glass containers, for example? "Tin" cans are still so common that one doesn't yet think of the possibility of life without them, yet we are seeing more and more "drink boxes," pouches, things that look like cans with metal tops but cardboard or plastic sides.
This kind of milk carton
was introduced in the late 1950s, and was interesting at the time.
Does it have a name? Does anyone know a name for it? People discussed the technique for opening one and getting the "spout" to pop out without using an unsanitary finger to pull it out. Before that, they were made of waxed paper, the top was flat, with a hinged, round paper stopper. And little bits of wax--it was wax, not some plastic laminate--detached from the paper and there would usually be some specks of wax floating in your milk:
These co-existed with glass milk bottles, and I envied our neighbors because we got ours from a dairy that used ordinary milk bottles, while theirs used a
wonderful mysterious milk bottle with a bulge near the top. The cream rose into the bulge so it was easy to pour off just the cream. "Homogenized" milk was a modern miracle.
"Cream" of course what is now called heavy cream, if not "whipping cream." You could just shake a half-full bottle of "cream" have it progressively turn into whipped cream and then separate out into butter.
Speaking of saturated fat--nobody worried about saturated fat, it was "starches" that were villainous--I guess there was a sort of orgy of meat-eating in reaction to the shortages of World War II, and of course there was always half an inch of fat around the edge of the steak. I was the good little boy because I always ate everything, fat and all. My finicky brother thought it was gross and cut it off and left it behind on his plate, and while my parents allowed him to do that, they expressed silent disapproval of the waste.
Am I off-topic yet?
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness; Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.
