4 Everyday Technologies That Never Seem To Improve

4

The Headphone Jack Has Stayed Unchanged For 150 Years

Phones today are trying to ditch the headphone jack, and customers are rioting. "Clearly," we tell each other, "this is a conspiracy by the corporations to make us shell out money for some proprietary BS other cable." And maybe that's true (it is), but phone developers are utterly baffled as to why we're so set on using tech that's left over from another century. I don't mean the 20th century -- that exact connector (officially known as the "phone jack") was invented in 1877 or 1878, and has not changed since. Or to be strictly accurate, it has undergone one change since -- 75 years ago, it shrank from from 0.25 in to 3.5 mm. And the quarter-inch variant is still in use today too, as you'll know if you've used a guitar amp or a keyboard.

The phone jack was originally invented for telephone switchboards, with human operators jacking in and jacking off all your call connections. If you're picturing women with bouffant hairdos and swing dresses, you're still thinking of the wrong century. Alexander Graham Bell first built these switchboards right after he invented the telephone, with phone jacks operated by teenage boys -- expert jackers -- in 12-hour shifts. He fired them decades later and shifted to women because the boys kept prank-calling people.

3

Locks Have Remained The Same For 150 Years (And Largely The Same For Thousands Of Years)

Your basic lock, where you stick in a key with bunch of teeth and then turn it to open the mechanism, is spectacularly old. That makes some sense. When you see one pop up in Lord Of The Rings or The Witcher, it doesn't look out of place. But the lock goes back even further than you think, all the way to Egypt 4,000 years ago. Early locks weren't so great, though. They needed a key with teeth, but they weren't super particular about a key having the right teeth. Stealing was easy, which is why the wilderness in RPGs is populated with 90% bandits.

It took until the 1700s for this general type of lock (called the pin tumbler lock) to be tweaked into the double-acting pin tumbler lock, which rejected most random keys one could collect from lootable corpses. Then in 1865, Linus Yale tweaked the design further, turning the keyhole into a cylinder filled with a plug which took a flat and serrated key. And ... that was it. That was the lock they had then, and that is the lock we have now. Your standard lock today can be jimmied using a pick and a torsion wrench exactly as easily and exactly the same way as a lock from the 1800s, to the delight of vampires everywhere.

2

We Had The Last Good Idea For Improving Toothpaste In The 19th Century

We've been trying to clean our teeth for longer than we've known what cavities are. For a few millennia, the process consisted of rubbing our chompers with whatever gritty stuff we could find. Then, in the 1890s, scientists came up with the one thing that actually fights tooth decay: fluoride. And though it took another half century for the FDA to approve it, they first started adding it to toothpaste all the way back in the 19th century. And we haven't advanced the formula since then.

1

Planes Simply Aren't Getting Any Faster

Flying has improved in many ways. Air was said to be the safest way to travel even back in the '50s, when the chance of an accident was 1 in 50,000. Today a passenger's chance of dying in a plane crash is 1 in 50 million. Plus, pilots now have all kinds of computers and navigation equipment that didn't exist decades ago. Tech is clearly advancing. So what about speed, always the big selling point for traveling by air? Well ...