Fifty Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy

by Tim Harford

The data are clear that the washing machine didn’t save a lot of time, because before the washing machine we didn’t wash clothes very often. When

The pill gave women control in other ways, too. Using a condom meant negotiating with a partner. The diaphragm and sponge were messy. The

their fertility, the pill allowed them to invest in their careers. Before the pill was available, taking five years or more to qualify as a doctor or a lawyer did not look like a good use of time and money. To reap the benefits of those courses, a woman would need to be able to reliably delay becoming a mother until she was thirty at least—having a baby would derail her studies

It wasn’t an obvious career move for a thirty-nine-year-old high school principal from Wisconsin. But then, being the world’s first market researcher

The nature of advertising was changing: no longer just providing information, but trying to manufacture desire.10 Sigmund

Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays pioneered the fields of public relations and propaganda. Among his most famous stunts

for corporate clients, Bernays helped the American Tobacco Company in 1929 persuade women that smoking in public was an act of female liberation. Cigarettes, he said, were “torches of fre...

Thorstein Veblen. Veblen developed the concept of conspicuous consumption back in 1899. Charles Coolidge

Air-conditioning as we know it began in 1902, and it had nothing to do with human comfort. The workers at Sackett

Willis Carrier was earning $10 a week—below minimum wage in today’s money. But he figured out a solution: circulating air over coils that were chilled by compressed ammonia maintained the humidity at a constant 55 percent. Modern air conditioners use different chemicals as coolants, but

These early industrial clients didn’t much care about making temperatures more comfortable for their workers; that was an incidental benefit to controlling the humidity. But Carrier saw an opportunity. By 1906 he was already talking up the potential for “comfort” applications in theaters and other public buildings.5 It was an astute

The burgeoning movie theaters of the 1920s were where the

general public first experienced air-conditioning, and it quickly became as much of a selling

With air-conditioning, old workarounds become irrelevant and

new building designs become possible. Air-conditioning has changed

demographic...

The proportion of air-conditioned homes in Chinese cities jumped from under one-tenth to more than two-thirds in just ten years.11 In countries such as India, Brazil, and

that human productivity peaks when the temperature is between 65 and 72 degrees Fahrenheit.19 But there’s an

But global demand for air-conditioning is growing so quickly, even

there will still be an eightfold increase in energy consumption by 2050.22 That’s worrying news for climate change.

Harry Gordon Selfridge was introducing Londoners to a whole new shopping experience, one honed in the department

for granted, where you can touch a product, pick it up, and inspect it from all angles, without a salesperson hovering by your side. In the full-page newspaper advertisements he

Management consultants today talk about the fortune to be found at the “bottom of the pyramid”; Selfridge was way ahead of them. In his Chicago store, he appealed to the

Another trailblazer was an Irish immigrant named Alexander Turney Stewart. It was Stewart who introduced to New

practice the now ubiquitous “clearance sale,” periodically moving on the last bits of old stock at knockdown prices

Another insight Stewart applied at his store was that not everybody likes to haggle; some of us welcome the simplicity of being quoted a fair price and told we can take

it or leave it. Stewart made possible this “one-price” approach by accepting

This idea wasn’t totally unprecedented, but at the time it was considered radical. The first salesman Stewart hired was appalled

But the experience of going to the shops has changed remarkably little since pioneers such as Stewart and Selfridge turned it on its head. And it may be no coincidence that they did it at a time when women were gaining in social and economic power. There are,

One of his quietly revolutionary moves: Selfridge’s featured a ladies’ lavatory. Strange as it may sound to modern

And in due course, the conference reached an agreement: the establishment of the International Organization for Standardization, or ISO. The ISO, of course, sets standards. Standards for nuts and bolts, for pipes, for ball bearings, for shipping containers, and for solar panels.

In the 1980s, when Robert Solow was writing, it was growing at the slowest rate for decades—slower even than during the Great Depression. Technology seemed to be booming, but productivity was almost stagnant. Economists called it the “productivity paradox.”2 What might explain it? For a hint, rewind a hundred years. Another remarkable new technology was proving disappointing: electricity. Some corporations were investing in electric dynamos and motors and installing them in workplaces. Yet the surge in productivity would not

come. The potential for electricity

Factories could be cleaner and safer. They could be more efficient, because machines needed to run only when they were being used. But you couldn’t get these results simply by ripping out the steam engine and replacing it with an electric motor. You needed to change everything: the architecture,

efficient, because machines needed to run only when they were being used. But you couldn’t get these results simply by ripping out the steam engine and replacing it with an electric motor. You needed to change everything: the architecture, the production process, how the workers were used. And because workers had more autonomy and flexibility, you had to change the way they were recruited, trained, and paid. Factory owners hesitated, for understandable reasons. Of course

the production process, how the workers were u...

Factory owners hesitated, for understandable reasons. Of course they didn’t want to scrap their existing capital. But maybe, too, they simply struggled to think through the implications of a world where everything needed to adapt to the new technology. In the

Partly, of course, it was simply that electricity from the grid was becoming

cheaper and more reliable. But American manufacturin...

1910s and the 1920s of an invention we’ve already encountered: the passport. Thanks to a series of new laws that limited immigration from a war-torn Europe, labor was in short supp...

Trained workers could use the autonomy that electricity gave them. The passport helped kick-start the dyn...

figured out how to make the most of electric motors, new ideas about manufacturin...

productivity in American manufacturing soared in...

Paul David, an economic historian, gives much of the credit to the fact that manufacturers finally figured out how to use

technology that was nearly half a century old.4 They had to change

Brynjolfsson and Hitt revealed their solution: What mattered, they argued, was whether the companies had also been willing to reorganize as they installed the new computers, taking advantage of their potential. That often meant decentralizing

decisions, streamlining supply chains, and offering more

choice to cus...

The Web is much younger even than the computer, of course. It was barely a decade old when the dot-com bubble

Revolutionary technology changes everything—that’s why we call it revolutionary. And changing everything takes time, and imagination, and courage—and a lot of hard work.