Author: Shaunacy Ferro

Not every inventor is recognized as a genius in their time. And not every invention is recognized as a game-changer when it first comes out. Plenty of inventions and technologies throughout history have seemed considered newfangled, superfluous, or even flat-out dangerous at first glance. Here are eight now-ubiquitous technologies that were unappreciated, underestimated, and feared at their debut.

1. THE PRINTING PRESS

In 1492, the monk Johannes Trithemius, a leading scholar in his time, predicted that the printing press would never last. In his essay “In Praise of Scribes” [PDF], he argued that handwriting was the moral superior to mechanical printing—an opinion surely influenced by the fact that monks working as scribes worried that the printing press would put them out of work.

“The word written on parchment will last a thousand years,” Thrithemius boasted. “The printed word is on paper … The most you can expect a book of paper to survive is two hundred years.” Parchment, the material monks used for their books, is made of animal skin, while paper is made from cellulose derived from plant fibers. Modern paper does degrade because it’s made from wood pulp, but in Trithemius’s time, paper was made from old rags, a material that remains stable over hundreds of years, as the surviving copies of the Gutenberg Bible show. Trithemius went on to write that “Printed books will never be the equivalent of handwritten codices, especially since printed books are often deficient in spelling and appearance.” Ironically, his screed was disseminated by printing press, not hand-copied by monks.

2. ICE CUBES

People in cold climates have always had access to ice in the winter, but it was only in the early 19th century that the ice market became global, and it took a considerable marketing campaign to get there. New England’s Frederic Tudor spent decades trying to drum up widespread interest in the ice he harvested from frozen ponds.

When it came out that he was preparing to ship many tons of ice to the sweltering West Indies, he “was laughed at by all his neighbors” back home in Massachusetts—as a local history from 1888 recounts—who thought loading up a ship with ice and setting sail for the Caribbean was an insane undertaking. As the Boston Gazette wrote of his voyage, “We hope this will not prove to be a slippery speculation.” The paper had to preface news of his ice endeavor with “No joke.”

When he did ship a 130-ton load of ice to the Caribbean island of Martinique, in 1806, no one wanted it. People were intrigued by the novelty, but had no idea what to use it for. As his valuable cargo began melting, Tudor was forced to turn as much as he could into ice cream. He lost thousands of dollars on the venture, but eventually, he was traveling the world bringing ice to hot places from New Orleans to Calcutta, plying people with chilled drinks and convincing doctors to use ice on their feverish patients. He’s now known as “The Ice King.”

3. THE TELEPHONE

In advance of Philadelphia’s Centennial Exposition of 1876, where Alexander Graham Bell would later debut his telephone, The New York Times published an editorial accusing an early phone inventor, German scientist Johann Philipp Reis (who had died in 1874), of conspiring to empty concert halls. The Times, writing of the telephone as a method of broadcasting classical music, warned that “a patriotic regard for the success of our approaching Centennial celebration renders it necessary to warn the managers of the Philadelphia Exhibition that the telephone may really be a device of the enemies of the Republic.” What if every town in America got a phone, and never had to show up to celebrations like the Centennial in person again? the author wondered. He continued:

“There is so far nothing to indicate that this is Prof. Reuss’ dark design, but as all foreign despots, from the Queen, in the Tower of London, to the Prince of Monaco, in the backroom of his gambling palace, are notoriously and constantly tearing their hair as they … note the progress and prosperity of our nation, it is not impossible that they have suggested the infamous scheme of attacking the Centennial Celebration with telephones.”

After Bell introduced his telephone to the world, his father-in-law and business partner, Gardiner Hubbard, famously offered to sell it to Western Union, the company that held a virtual monopoly on U.S. telegraph enterprises. Western Union President William Orton (who had a contentious relationship with Hubbard), turned him down—a decision he surely came to regret when Western Union’s own efforts to develop a telephone were shut down by a patent lawsuit from the Bell Company. Though the exact nature and price of the offer is contentious [PDF], it is now considered one of the worst decisions in business history, since the phone would go on to make Western Union’s telegraph business obsolete.

4. THE CAR RADIO

In 1922, Outlook magazine, a New York-based weekly, breathlessly reported that “This equipment, with which you can listen to the radio concerts while driving in your car is said to be the very latest development of inventive genius for the amusement of the radio fan.”

But not everyone was excited. In 1930, The New York Times quoted an unnamed traffic authority in Washington, D.C. expounding on the potential pitfalls of the technology for drivers. “Music in the car might make him miss hearing the horn of an approaching automobile or fire or ambulance siren,” he told the Times. “Imagine fifty automobiles in a city street broadcasting a football game! Such a thing as this, I am sure, would not be tolerated by city traffic authorities.”

A 1934 poll of Automobile Club of New York members found that 56 percent found car radios to be distracting to the user, fellow drivers, and just “more noise added to the present din” of the road. Several states moved to ban the controversial devices, which opponents argued could lull drivers to sleep. However, a 1939 study found that radios didn’t have any effect on taxicab accident rates, and the bans never became widespread.

5. THE SKATEBOARD

In the 1960s, the relatively new sport of skateboarding had sparked plenty of interest among young people, but not so much among their parents. Many decried skateboarding as a fleeting but potentially lethal craze. In 1965, Pennsylvania’s traffic safety commissioner, Harry H. Brainerd, thought that skateboarding was “extremely hazardous fad,” according to The Pittsburgh Press, and argued that parents “would be well advised not to permit the children to use skateboards until they have been instructed in and understand basic, common sense rules of safety for their use.” He wasn’t the only one that thought kids couldn’t be trusted to ride early skateboards without killing themselves. The liberal political organization Americans for Democratic Action petitioned the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission in 1979 to ban skateboards outright, saying that “The design of the skateboard itself cannot be improved in any way to make it safe.” Needless to say, kids kept skating.

6. THE WALKMAN

Sony’s first Walkman portable cassette player came onto the scene in 1979, changing how people listened to music. But not everyone bought into the pet project of Sony CEO Akio Morita at first. In his book Made in Japan, he recounts that in the beginning, “It seemed as though nobody liked the idea. At one of our product planning meetings, one of the engineers said, ‘It sounds like a good idea, but will people buy it if it doesn’t have a recording capability? I don’t think so.’” Even once the product was developed, Morita says, “our marketing people were unenthusiastic. They said it wouldn’t sell.”

It did sell—in 1982, the Daily News of Bowling Green, Kentucky declared that it was “now clear that the Walkman and its successors not only sell and sell from Anchorage to Ankara, but also appear to have become a semi-permanent appendage to most of the world’s ears.” It had attracted a different kind of criticism by then, though. Municipalities started trying to ban people from wearing headphones while walking across the street, arguing that it was a safety hazard. A law fining people $50 (or 15 days in jail) for wearing a headset while crossing the street—even if the music is off—is still on the books in Woodbridge, New Jersey today.

7. THE CELL PHONE

In 1981, telecommunications consultant Jan David Jubon was skeptical of how popular the rumored new devices known as cell phones could be. “But who, today, will say I’m going to ditch the wires in my house and carry the phone around?” he said in The Christian Science Monitor.

Even Marty Cooper, known as the “father of the cell phone,” didn’t predict how ubiquitous mobile phones could be at that point. “Cellular phones will absolutely not replace local wire systems,” Cooper told the paper. “Even if you project it beyond our lifetimes, it won’t be cheap enough.”

8. THE iPHONE

On the cusp of the debut of the first iPhone in 2007, several tech writers made bold predictions about how hard it would fail. “That virtual keyboard will be about as useful for tapping out emails and text messages as a rotary phone,” TechCrunch’s Seth Porges wrote in a piece titled “We Predict the iPhone Will Bomb.”

Bloomberg writer Matthew Lynn argued that “The iPhone is nothing more than a luxury bauble that will appeal to a few gadget freaks. In terms of its impact on the industry, the iPhone is less relevant.”

Unsurprisingly, the CEO of Microsoft wasn’t a big fan of the new phone either. “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share,” then-CEO Steve Ballmer told USA Today in 2007. “No chance.” In December 2014, the iPhone had captured almost 48 percent of the smartphone market in the U.S.—though those numbers have dropped since then—compared to the Windows phone’s less than 4 percent.

Unlike humans, birds don’t have voice boxes or vocal cords. The organ that allows them to produce songs and sounds is called a syrinx. There’s a big gap in what scientists know about the origins of this organ, because while birds are closely related to dinosaurs, syrinx fossils are fairly rare. Now, scientists have discovered the oldest fossil evidence of the syrinx in Antarctica, and it dates back between 66 and 68 million years, according to a recent study in the journal Nature [PDF].

The preserved syrinx was found in the partial skeleton of a bird from the Late Cretaceous period on Vega Island, located just off the Antarctic Peninsula. It belonged to Vegavis iaai, an extinct bird related (but likely not ancestral) to modern ducks and geese. The fossil was discovered way back in 1992, according to The New York Times, but the lead author of the present study, paleontology Julia Clarke, only thought to examine its vocal structures and look for the syrinx in 2013. 

 
As you can see in the image above, the syrinx is located deep within birds’ chests, branching into both the right and left lungs. Clarke and her team used CT tomography scans to compare the fossilized syrinx to those of 12 other modern birds and the next-oldest fossil syrinx ever discovered in an attempt to reconstruct the evolution of the organ.

The researchers hypothesize that few other fossilized syrinx examples have been found because it’s a relatively newer feature in bird evolution, and is much younger than some of birds’ other respiratory developments or the ability to fly, which came about during the dinosaur age. Non-avian dinosaurs probably didn’t have these vocal organs, this study suggests, although the evidence isn’t entirely conclusive.

It’s hard to imagine what the dinosaur world sounded like, but this suggests that while avian dinosaurs might have honked in a similar way to geese, using a syrinx, non-avian dinosaurs didn’t make those noises. Clarke’s research has previously pointed to dinosaurs making cooing or bellowing sounds similar to crocodiles. Either way, they probably weren’t roaring.

The Nobel Prize’s literature committee went with a far left field candidate this year: musician Bob Dylan. The singer-songwriter is receiving world literature’s highest prize for “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition,” according to this morning’s announcement, as reported by The New York Times.

Dylan has been floated as a potential candidate for the prize for years, but his chances have been seen as quite low, considering that it typically goes to more traditional members of the literary world, like novelists or poets, with the occasional nonfiction writer thrown in. The prize going to Dylan seemed so unlikely that in 2015, The New Republic’s Alex Shephard declared: “If Bob Dylan wins, I will eat my copy of Blood on the Tracks.” Some of this year’s more favored candidates included writers Don DeLillo and Haruki Murakami.

Widely considered the greatest songwriter in the English language, Dylan, who is still touring at 75, is the first American to win the literature prize since Toni Morrison in 1993. He’s only the 14th American to win since the prize’s inception. The prodigious artist published a book of prose poetry, Tarantula, in 1971, in addition to several books of drawings and paintings. Dylan received a special citation from the Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for his contributions to music.

The Nobel Prize in Literature is the last of the Nobels to be awarded; the scientific awards were announced last week, as was the Nobel Peace Prize. The economics prize was announced earlier this week. The awards ceremony takes place annually on December 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death in 1896.

[h/t The New York Times]

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A new study will help justify your seltzer addiction, according to Co.Exist. The sensations of cold bubbles are just more refreshing than warmer, still beverages. Cold, carbonated water is the most effective way to quench thirst, researchers from the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia found in a new study published in PLOS One.

To see what mouth sensations might contribute to people’s perceptions of thirst, the researchers had almost 100 people abstain from both food and drink for 12 hours (most of which was overnight), then drink 13.5 ounces of an “experimental beverage” that was designed to elicit specific sensations. There was still water, carbonated water, water sweetened with sugar, water made astringent (like a cup of tea would be) with grape extract, and water acidified with citric acid; some were cold, and some were room temperature.

The experimenters also had some people drink a menthol solution, creating an artificial sense of coolness. After the test subjects drank all of their assigned beverage, they were given still, room-temperature water to drink freely. The researchers measured how well an experimental beverage quenched thirst by measuring how much water the person wanted to drink afterward.

Acidity, sweetness, and astringency didn’t seem to have an effect on thirst, but temperature and carbonation did. People wanted to drink more after chugging 13.5 ounces of warm water compared to cold water, indicating that the cold sensation quenched thirst better. They also felt less thirsty after drinking room-temperature carbonated water than drinking still water at the same temperature. But cold, carbonated water seemed to be perceived as the best thirst-quencher. People drank less after having cold carbonated water than cold still water.

In a second study, 10 people were asked to estimate the amount of cold, room-temperature, or carbonated water they drank while they couldn’t see or feel the amount of liquid in the cup (or see through the straw). The subjects overestimated the amount of water they drank if the beverage was cold or carbonated. Compared to their estimates for room-temperature water, they estimated that they drank 22 percent more of the cold, carbonated water.

These findings echo a “surprising” takeaway from another recent study, which found that colder beverages quench thirst faster.

This may make you feel justified in reaching for a beer or seltzer when you’re thirsty, but on the flip side, it may mean that you think you’re more hydrated than you are. If you are in real danger of dehydration, it may be better to drink something warm and flat, because while you may feel thirsty for longer, at least your body won’t be misguided into ceasing to drink before it’s ready.

[h/t Co.Exist]

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Just about any barista will tell you that you should be grinding your own coffee beans—with a decent burr grinder, no less. But let’s face it, for some of us, that $100 grinder and the extra few minutes of prep time is a bit too much of an investment for our morning coffee routine. Besides, different coffee-brewing methods require different types of grind, and for the uninitiated, it’s hard to eyeball what exactly constitutes an appropriately coarse or fine grind.

Luckily, there are a couple of new ground coffee options that promise to make your home-brewed coffee just a little bit better, even if true coffee snobs will be able to taste that your beans were ground more than five minutes ago.

Perhaps the most highbrow pre-ground coffee you can buy right now comes from Blue Bottle, the Oakland-based coffee company that has a legion of cultish Silicon Valley devotees. The company is so dedicated to the quality of its coffees that its baristas refuse to grind the beans you buy in-store for you, but Blue Bottle recently debuted Perfectly Ground, a line of single-serving ground coffee packets that purport to taste just as good as if the beans were ground seconds before you began brewing. Right after the beans come out of the grinder, the coffee is sealed up in a packet in the proprietary, zero-oxygen environment of a California warehouse Blue Bottle calls “the dome.” The lack of oxygen keeps the coffee from going stale.

According to Co.Design, the company eventually wants to sell two- and four-serving Perfectly Ground packages, but for now, it’s all single-serve. Each packet costs $3.50, or $17.50 for a five-pack, meaning that making your coffee at home might be more expensive than getting a cup from your local coffee shop. But if you’re camping or live in a place where you can’t get a third-wave coffee pour-over easily (and that’s the taste you’re after), it might be worth it.

Meanwhile, if you’re a little less neurotic (or a little more stingy) about your at-home coffee routine, Gevalia’s new special reserve coffees are a step up from the rest of the ground coffee you’ll find on grocery store shelves.

The pre-ground, single-origin coffees come in two different grinds to provide a slightly more precise brewing process. The Guatemalan coffee, for instance, is a coarse grind designed for a French press (finely ground coffee can pass through the filter and clog your press). The Kenyan coffee is finely ground for a pour-over or a drip coffee maker. It’s idiot-proof, too—if you see a picture of a French press on the bag, that’s what you should use to make the coffee inside.

Just how much does the technique you choose matter? In a taste test in the mental_floss offices, we made the Gevalia Guatemala coffee using two different processes—the recommended French press way, and using a pour-over. Though both cups were drinkable as a morning pick-me-up, the coffee was obviously better when it came out of the French press. The resulting brew was brighter and clearer, while the pour-over process left the coffee tasting a little bit muddled. It was fine, but it needed milk, while the French press version was delicious on its own.

If you’re a true coffee snob, pre-ground coffee will never live up to the taste of a bean that you just crushed in your burr grinder. But if you can’t stomach the idea of paying more than $50 for a piece of coffee equipment, a slightly elevated version of pre-ground coffee is a solid option.

Sitting down on your couch could be as contemplative as staring into the depths of the ocean with this coffee table created by the UK studio Duffy London. Called the Abyss Horizon, the table—spotted by Design Milk—mimics a topographical cross-section of the ocean, with islands and underwater canyons.

It’s not a map of any specific place on the seafloor, but the relief-based design evokes the varied topology of the world at the bottom of the ocean. Don’t worry; there’s a glass top, so your coffee mug won’t fall to the bottom of the ocean.

The Abyss Horizon took a year to develop, and is made of hand-crafted wood. It has a limited run of just 12 pieces, each made to order, and will be on display at various design shows this fall in London, New York, and Miami.

[h/t Design Milk]

All images courtesy Duffy London

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It’s expensive to be a woman. Several studies have shown that choosing the shampoo bottle marketed to women (with its pastel colors and floral motif) will cost you more than reaching for the gray bottle of “men’s” shampoo, even when both items are essentially the same product. It’s referred to as the “pink tax,” and Boxed, a bulk shipping retailer, just announced a discount to combat it, Entrepreneur magazine reports. If the women’s product you’re buying costs more than the men’s equivalent, Boxed will cut the price on the ladies’ version.

A 2015 study from the New York Department of Consumer Affairs found that in 42 percent of the 800 products they surveyed, women were paying more for the exact same purchases as men. If you can’t picture that, Buzzfeed rounded up a collection of examples of “pink tax” products in 2014, finding that body washes, razors, shampoos, deodorants, and perfumes all charge different prices for the same products depending on whether they’re marketed to men or women. And in some states, tampons and other feminine hygiene products are legally considered “luxury” items subject to sales tax, though there has been a recent movement to roll back those duties. While some of the higher prices may be due to different ingredients or import tariffs, the fact is, female consumers are racking up higher bills.

“Based on our research, on average, per ounce or per unit, women are paying 108 percent more for razors; 10 percent more for body wash; 8 percent more for deodorant and 5 percent more for shaving gel,” Boxed’s Nitasha Mehta said in a statement.

The Boxed discount applies if the personal care item in question has a price difference of more than 9 percent between the men’s and women’s versions. Those products will be marked with the hashtag #rethinkpink.

[h/t Entrepreneur]

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TAP, Portugal’s national airline, really, really wants you to visit the Iberian country. It’s launching a new program giving tourists free airline stopovers in Lisbon, Condé Nast Traveler reports. And for a limited time, TAP will even give you a free flight to Porto, one of the country’s largest cities, about 200 miles north of Lisbon. The free flight deal lasts until October 18, but the Lisbon stopover is a permanent program.

Iceland created a similar stopover program all the way back in the 1960s, and it’s given the country’s tourism industry a major boost, enough so that Icelandair has almost two dozen of its own branded hotels across the country. Earlier this year, the airline even launched a “buddy” program to connect stopover tourists up with locals willing to show them the sights.

Portugal is clearly hoping to replicate the success of the Nordic program, though the country’s tourism industry is already doing pretty well on its own—it hosted a record number of foreign visitors in 2015. More information and deals are at TAP’s Portugal Stopover page.

[h/t Condé Nast Traveler]

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A 3D-printed microscope attachment can turn scientific observation into a video game. LudusScope, a smartphone microscope designed by Stanford University researchers, could be a low-cost way to get kids invested in biology, its creators write in a paper in PLOS One. As reported by Gizmodo, the microscope can be connected to a phone to allow you to play games with microbes, particularly Euglena, a single-cell microorganism that’s attracted to light and often used in science labs.

LudusScope consists of a 3D-printed microscope with four LED lights controlled by a joystick. A smartphone holder keeps your phone camera positioned over the microscope eyepiece so you can see what’s going on in the microscope slide. Android software (the code is freely available on GitHub) allows you to play games by superimposing images over the view of the slide, so that, for instance, it looks like the bacteria are roaming around a soccer field.

 
Because the microbes respond to light, you can guide their movements with the LEDs. One game allows user to turn one of the microorganisms into Pac-Man, while another turns one into a soccer ball ready to be lured between the goalposts by the LED flashes. The software also tracks the real-time speed of the Euglena’s movements. Other programs included are purely educational, allowing you to collect data on the microorganisms’ behavior.

The PLOS One study showed that 12-year-olds could successfully assemble the LudusScope by themselves using basic instructions provided, and a second demo with 10 high school students found that all 10 were able to operate the microscope and accurately make observations of and draw the Euglena they saw. According to the researchers, building the full set-up on your own would cost about $100, but if you already have access to a 3D printer—as some schools do—it would only be $60, and even less if you just build the attachment to use on a standard microscope. They estimate that mass-producing the microscope (rather than 3D printing it) would lower the cost to about $30 per microscope.

Ingmar Riedel-Kruse, the Stanford bioengineer whose lab developed the technology, is currently working with an educational game company to develop science kits that would be available within the next year.

If you’re interested in building the kit for yourself, there are instructions in the paper’s supplementary materials.

[h/t Gizmodo]
 

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Brewing beer is one of the world’s oldest culinary pastimes. It dates back 5000 years in China, and probably longer in Mesopotamia, where the ancient Sumerians had a goddess of brewing.

As old as it is, scientists and historians don’t entirely know how beer brewing evolved across the world. Now, a new study published in Current Biology finds that compared to other alcohols like wine, the genetics of beer yeasts are incredibly diverse, possibly highlighting how inventive early beer-makers were. Most strains of yeast used to brew beer come from a different genetic line than the yeasts used to make other alcohols, the study found.

Different yeasts yield different beer varieties. Ales are made with Saccharomyces cerevisiae (commonly known as baker’s yeast), as are wine and bread, while lagers are fermented with S. pastorianus. The S. cerevisiae yeasts ferment at the top of the liquid, while the S. pastorianus ferment at the bottom.

The study found that genetically, beer yeasts are very different from each other. “Whereas wine yeasts from any place in the world, say France and New Zealand, cluster in the same group and are genetically very similar, quite the opposite is true for beer yeasts,” said a press statement by the study’s lead author José Paulo Sampaio, who researches yeast ecology at Nova University of Lisbon. He and his colleagues looked at genetic data from more than two dozen yeast strains.

They found that top-fermenting beer yeasts like S. cerevisiae mostly belong to one clade (or group with a common ancestor) that’s split up into three subgroups: mostly German and Belgian beers; mostly British, Australian, and American ales; and a subgroup of other strains used for kölsch beers and a California ale. Of the 30 top-fermenting yeasts in the study, 23 belonged to this main beer clade, which showed genetic diversity that was more than twice that found in wine yeasts.

Meanwhile, some other beer yeast strains were closely linked to the yeasts used to make sake, wine, and bread. This indicates that the main genetic group of beer yeasts—the top-fermenting ones—was likely domesticated in a completely separate event than the strains related to wine and sake yeasts.

“Our results revealed that the most important wheat beer strains are in the sake clade and seem to have a completely different ancestry as compared with the other wheat beer yeasts,” Sampaio and his co-authors write. Those wheat beer strains include the type of yeast used in 90 percent of Bavarian wheat beer production, they note.

Some of the other strains used in beer-brewing were related to sake and wine yeasts. “The search for new beer types might have [led brewers to] co-opt wine, bread, and sake strains for beer brewing, as evidenced by our results,” they hypothesize.

Love beer history? Go enjoy a brew at one of the multiple European breweries that have been operating continuously for almost a thousand years.

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