5 Simple Things You Won't Believe Are Recent Inventions

We're certainly not going to try to claim that, say, Abe Lincoln lived and died having never seen one. Right?

Doorknobs Weren't Actually Around Until ...

1878. Check this out:

187-freakin'-8 is when the doorknob was patented. That is, a knob that actually turned and made a little metal thing retract and allow the door to open, the way they do now.

Before knobs, doors were opened and closed through latches like this. It wasn't until 1878 that inventor Osbourn Dorsey filed a patent for the doorknob mechanism we know and love, and along with it the first internal door-latching mechanism.

But then it took a long time for the doorknob to become a common fixture around the world -- we can only guess because it took a few generations to master that difficult simultaneous turning and pulling motion you have to make to get it to work. Watch a dog try to do it -- it's hilarious.

If tomorrow all of the time keeping devices on the planet vanished, things would devolve into absolute chaos by sundown. We'd all be able to agree that it's "morning" or "afternoon" or "evening," but figuring out exactly when your plane leaves, or exactly when you have to be at work? Sheeeeit. There'd be riots in the streets.

Yet, for most people, this is exactly the way it worked until very recently.

Standardized Time Wasn't Actually Around Until ...

1880.

For centuries, checking the time meant checking the sun. Or, to save your eyeballs from frying, checking the neighborhood sundial (assuming the day wasn't overcast and it actually cast a shadow). Even after mechanical clocks became all the rage, those clocks were still set to solar time, which meant that your clock would still be different from the clock of your friend a few towns away. You could get away with it because there was no real-time communication via phones or whatever. Everybody was hours apart, so what difference did it make?

But the trains changed everything. By the time the trains were up and running, every damn town in the country was keeping on its own sweet time. So the people in charge of the trains didn't just need to concern themselves with the local time; they also had to worry about what time it was at the terminus, plus each railroad junction. Which was why the main station in Philadelphia once had six clocks up showing six different times.

And for a while, it just seemed like this was the way it had to be. Solar time was as natural as the sun rising and setting. It's not like after thousands and thousands of years you could make people forget that noon was exactly when the sun was highest overhead. No train schedule was going to change that.

OR WOULD IT? On Dec. 1, 1847, the British tested fate by using Greenwich Mean Time to institute time zones to keep their trains running on schedule. But it wasn't until 1880 that standardized time zones were made the law in Great Britain, and in 1883, zones based on GMT became the law in the U.S. By 1929, most other countries around the world had also adopted the hourly time zone system. So there are probably still people alive today who didn't have to abide by "the man's time."

That's the part that was new. A hundred years ago, a person hoping to make a pig lard pie would write everything she needed down on a list, then hand that list over to a store clerk, and wait. And then the clerk would shuffle around the back, filling the order as he felt like it. You didn't get to pick through the bananas to get the ones that weren't already black. You took what they damned well gave you.

If the shopper was lucky, there were a lot of clerks on staff and a short line ahead of her. If she was unlucky, it was Pig Lard Pie Day and she had something embarrassing like Lysol Douche on her list.

This new setup had all kinds of advantages. The store could lower prices because grocery shopping wasn't as labor-intensive (it was making the customer do all the work, after all -- something we don't even think about today while we're shoving around a cart for an hour). It could also accommodate more customers at one time, since they weren't waiting on a clerk to free up.

And shoppers loved it. Within 10 years, the grocery store chain was a fixture across North America, and the American love affair with cheap food and obesity was born.

Teddy Bears Weren't Actually Around Until ...

1902. So no matter how raggedy your teddy bear looks, it can't possibly be more than 108 years old. To put that in perspective, this iconic emblem of Americana is more modern than the light bulb, the discovery of X-rays and toilet paper on a roll.

In 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt was invited on a hunting trip by the governor of Mississippi. Everyone in the hunting party bagged some sort of game for the wife, but at the end of the day poor Teddy was dead animal-less. Not wanting to offend their honored guest, the Mississippi hunting party did what any self-respecting 20th-century hunting party would do: They clubbed a baby bear and tethered it to a tree for the President of the United States to shoot.

And Teddy Roosevelt, the perfect gentlemen that he was, refused to shoot because it was unsportsmanlike (but ordered his entourage to shoot the bear to put it out of its misery).

The story of Roosevelt's act of pity spread like wildfire, especially after a cartoonist illustrated the episode in a political cartoon that was published in The Washington Post, then reprinted across the country.

The cutesy cartoon inspired Brooklyn stationery store owner Morris Michtom to create "Teddy's Bear," which he displayed in his store window. And that was when things really went nuts for the stuffed bear industry. Teddy bears became the Cabbage Patch Dolls of the early 20th century. By 1906, people were singing songs about teddy bear picnics, and Roosevelt himself used the bear as his mascot in his successful re-election bid.

But haven't those guys -- the equivalent of the "American flag painted onto a pickup truck" tribe we have now -- been around since ... well, forever?

Nationalism Wasn't Really Around Until ...

Try the late 18th century.

Up until that point, the zealous types were all about loyalty to their ethnic group, or a leader, or their religion, their city-state or their clan/tribe. Not their country, because countries as we understand them today didn't exist.

It's hard to grasp how different the world was then. Most nations of the time were really just a collection of ethnic enclaves, usually speaking multiple languages within the country, sometimes united under one leader, often not. But thinking of themselves as "Russian" or "French" just wasn't a big part of their personality.

Let's pick on another example besides America. How about France? After all, they're famous for being fiercely French -- the snobby, tourist-hating Frenchman is still a stereotype in the USA, and we fully expect them to hate us if we don't speak perfect French when we travel there. Now consider this: In 1789 only 50 percent of the people in France actually spoke French, and only 12 to 13 percent of those folks spoke it "fairly well."

And the same was true in other countries across Europe; people just didn't see themselves as citizens of a particular nation. Which is why the national anthem of the UK, for example, is "God Save the Queen." Not "God Save Our Kick-ass Country."

It wasn't until the Enlightenment-inspired Founding Fathers of the U.S. and their French cousins got it into their heads that states should be governed by the people, that the people actually got boners for the state. Which is probably the best description of nationalism anyone's ever going to come up with: state boners.

You can find more from Eric Yosomono over at GaijinAss.

Now make sure you learn about "modern" ideas that were here before us, in 11 Modern Technologies That Are Way Older Than You Think and 6 Depraved Sexual Fetishes That Are Older Than You Think.

And stop by Linkstorm to find out when POGs were actually invented.

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