The most disruptive technology of the last century was home appliances | Hacker News Reader

The most disruptive technology of the last century was home appliances

washingtonpost.com

112 pointsdavidiach112 comments

Hans Rosling presented a similar topic at TED (2010):

http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing_...

On the other hand, we may overestimate the disruption of home appliances because of how history played out. Today, many poor villagers choose to spend what little money they have on a cellphone instead of a washing machine. They continue to wash clothes by hand and hang them to dry but they absolutely need the cellphone to tell them what price their crops will sell for at the market.

The article is about last century. Smartphones are this century's invention. However, both appliances and mobile tech only show how significant and underestimated the effect of technology on society is. We like to think that technology is just some weird addition or convenience, but it seems to me that it is technological advancements that fundamentally transform society.

> Smartphones are this century's invention.

If you notice, I had deliberately used the word "cellphone" instead of "smartphone". Cellphones (1980s) were 20th century technology. Many poor villagers don't have smartphones but they do have cellphones.

Right. My misread, I apologize.

The reason I read 'smartphone' instead of 'cellphone' is that they're related to an observation I find important - that smartphones are actually essential tools for the poor. Internet access gives significant quality of life improvements.

Cellphones only took off in the late 90s. They are not really 80s technology, at least for poor peasans.

You could use the internet on a web on a phone in late 90's. The post 2000 smartphone was more an evolution than a specific capability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_browser

EX: BlackBerry 850 (1999) was very email centric.

You could, but the Internet in mid-to-late 90's was nothing like it looks today. I still remember WAP browsers and this was not something useful for general population in a way smartphones and the Internet of today are. Western corporate businessmen did AFAIK had some use for it though.

I was in india till 2001 and very few people in urban areas has cellular phone. Even in US during studies, very few students had cell phones (2001-2002).

The advent of cellphone is definitely from 2000 (not before). atleast my experience.

a found a link to support my observation: http://www.cartesian.com/the-rise-of-mobile-phones-20-years-...

Yes but you couldn't convince a 1989 Indian villager to use Zack Morris's brickphone. They only became practical from a price and "carry on your person" standpoint in the very late 90s or so.

It's incidental (for me) that this article should be posted today. Only two days ago, in a philosophy class on environmental ethics, I was told by the professor that my answer to a discussion prompt on "ecofeminism," which cited the development of the washing machine as facilitating the women's rights movement, would be disagreed with by feminists and that it reflected my worldview that it was women's "essential role in life to do laundry." The counterargument was that World War 2 had been responsible for women entering the workforce and not household electrical appliances. My rebuttal that this may not explain global demographic data from developing countries has thus far gone unanswered.

Apologies for the personal anecdote, but needless to say I'm still a bit offended at having been called a bigot. Particularly when Ana Swanson, a "reporter for Wonkblog specializing in business, economics, data visualization and China" would probably not have been similarly told that by writing this article she believes housework is women's essential role in life. It seems some would require extensive quantitative evidence for this claim to avoid stepping on any toes, though, and I wonder if Hans Rosling, Ha-Joon Chang, Max Roser and the others making it have quantified to what extent appliances were an influence compared to other factors.

Personally I'm starting to believe in a limited form of something I heard called 'technological determinism' - that it's the technology that shapes society. Your washing machine would be an example. Another would be seeing civil rights movement as enabled by the printing press.

That is not technological determinism. Technological determinism would suggest that this happens WITHOUT OUR SOCIAL WORLDS BEING ABLE TO INTERVENE. I don't subscribe to this.

Read this by Sally Wyatt - https://prezi.com/x06bsuq4an_o/technological-determinism-is-...

Have you read Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media? Written in the 60s, explaining world phenomena from the perspective of "media" (which he uses to mean something very similar to "technology" - roads and the printing press both qualify) and accurately predicts the effect of the internet on society. Dense, but very worth reading if you're interested in macro societal change.

I haven't. Thanks for the reference, I'll definitely read it!

Civilization is formed by technology that provides great access to energy.

As James Burk described in the final episode of Connections:

    This was the first great trigger of change: the plow. It appeared
    maybe 7000 years ago, and when it did it gave people the chance to
    grow enough grain not just to survive, but to provide a surplus to
    support craftsmen. That triggered the beginnings of civilization.

    With enough food, the population expanded every year. Small viliges
    sprang up, and they too grew larger with the population. In the 
    spreading fields around the villages, the technique grew of irrigating
    the land from the nearby river. As the grain supply increased, it had
    to be stored. The potter's wheel solved that problem. Who it belong t
    demanded the development of writing, and building these irrigation
    ditches taught people the skills of engineering and mathematics, that
    gave them in turn architecture.

    The need to predict floods for irrigation brought realization that
    the flood was annual. That gave them a calendar their government could
    use to enforce law through a police force and an army who needed
    weapon makers to protect the wealth of the country from invasion.

    A country that was now an empire... all because of the plow.

The various aristocracies of the past built their standard of living by exploiting the work of others, usually shaped by the available technology. To build a pyramid required a very large number of slaves. To wage war against the neighboring feudal lord required a large number of serfs providing food and practicing the longbow.

In the west, we like to think that we grew out of feudalism into a modern representative democracy for various reasons usually relating to ideology or politics. In reality, we prospered because we quickly took advantage of the energy provided by technology and salve labor. Learning how to take advantage of the greater energy density of coal and oil was much more efficient at providing energy than slave labor.

Every time society learns a better way to exploit energy, society quickly reshapes itself to take advantage of the energy. Modern society now depends on a large amount of energy, and we had better learn some way of sustaining those levels or we will learn the hard way that this ability of society to reshape itself works both ways. Without modern levels of energy that technology provides us, we will lose our freedom to specialize on topics not directly linked to survival.

> To build a pyramid required a very large number of slaves.

Minor nitpick - I think this was finally confirmed by historians that pyramids weren't built by slaves, but by paid contractors. But then again, the lives of slaves in the past were closer to the lives of employees today; American slavery was a historical abberation. Also I personally believe that if you have to work to earn for bread and home, you are a slave. What will break this slavery is - you've guessed it - more cheap energy!

I agree with you and with Burk here; this is the pattern I'm increasingly begin to notice. Social issues are indeed secondary to technological and are enabled by them. This also means that energy issues are the most important topic the public refuses to talk about - most of the things that usually take up the slots on TV will sort themselves out. I hear people in my country discussing the issues of immigration, in between bickering about schooling and taxes, and I can't stop thinking that we could do so much more for those problems if we just shut up for a moment about them and finally ACKed the construction of that goddamned nuclear power plant.

Welcome to modern universities, where anything that could possibly be misconstrued is and title 9 inquisitions are a thing. Even mentioning a gender could trigger someone, so you best be careful!

That's not true, we hear about the misconstruals but when someone listens charitably that never makes the news. This otherwise innocuous property of news reporting has led you to believe that a rare thing is common.

Give me a break. Insane people are in positions of tented authority at universities and colleges and are allowed to run amok.

In a supposedly open discussion about a book that we were reading (the autobiography of a former gang member and rapist gone good) I said something that perturbed the professor.

That resulted in a big tirade of screaming at me, where I was assigned responsibility for the slaughter of her family in a war and rape of her ancestor by the US Cavalry. I responded that my ancestors were peasants on the other side of the world and had nothing to do with treatment of the Plains Indians, and I was kicked out of the class and given an F.

Ultimately it was overturned by an appeals process, but similar incidents happened in mandatory classes like that in my school, and the administration was unwilling to take any action behind the individual cases.

The fact that the misconstruals are institutionally backed means they are not one-off events. Title 9 is an entire punishment system designed around eliminating due process and fairness to punish anyone who offends someone. It's a systematic disease.

It actually seemed like the rare example where a professor and a student could actually debate a point.

If you post your complete submission and their response I would be happy to help you decide whether you were being a bigot, but without that it's really hard to tell if you were mis-labeled, or if you just didn't understand the point they were making.

> worldview that it was women's "essential role in life to do laundry.

Of course that view would be wrong. But that doesn't negate the fact that laundray was usually done by women, was an important job to do, and was hugely time consuming. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with spending your life doing house work, it is just bad that women were denied other oppurunities.

Modern tech means that you can live alone and have a clean house, clean clothes, and regular meals without needing a servant.

The fact that you are calling common house appliances "modern tech" made me smile, but essentially you are right, anything that came about in the last 100 years can be called modern.

As for whether it caused more women to work, I can imagine that it really did facilitate the transition. It would take much longer if women had to negotiate housework with their husbands first. Instead, it happened the other way around, women came out to work first, while doing household chores at the same time, and in time men transitioned to helpful spouses later.

>and in time men transitioned to helpful spouses later.

And that was only possible because of the development of the 40 hour work week. Most men weren't home enough to be very helpful around the house until then.

Not sure about that. I would say it became more common for men to help with the housework from the 70's onward, and we had 40 hour weeks way before that. Do you think that the men who worked for Ford in the 1920s and 1930s, started helping with the housework after they implemented 40 hour work week? No, it think it's more likely that women had to prove themselves capable money earners first.

No, I'm not saying that the 40 hour work week was sufficient to bring out that change, just necessary. I'm just pointing out that a confluence of many things led to the result of women working/not dong all the housework, not just 1.

I'm not really sure there's a lot of evidence that either you or your professor are correct.

I don't believe there's much evidence that there was a permanent jump in the female labour force due to WWII. Equally, I'm not sure that there is much correlation between workforce increase and the ownership of washing machines (and yes, I know that correlation != causation but not much correlation != causation either).

The hypothesis I've seen that seems to follow the evidence is for the number of women attending higher education but, my guess, is that there were a lot of competing factors rather than one outlier.

And no, it doesn't make you a bigot for proposing that any more than it makes your prof a warmonger for proposing that WWII was a good thing for women.

This highlights the importance of using data when arguing, even in seemingly "soft" social sciences.

On every day of the 20th century, a definite number of people washed clothes, and the gender of each person was (for the most part) definitely determinable. Likewise for people doing work for a paycheck.

Now, it might be difficult (or impossible) to get that exact data. So you'll have to make do with what you can get. But this is what occupies quite a lot of the time of professional historians and social scientists: getting the best data they can. In some cases it might mean personally combing through the paper archives in dozens of museums, corporate archives, or libraries. Or following chains of relationships, like a detective, to find the one retiree who might have held on to some of those records that everyone thought got tossed out 40 years ago.

I offer this not to imply that you, as an undergrad, should do all these things. My point is to illustrate the hard work and tenacity that's necessary to actually know things.

Quite often here on HN (in fact, even in this thread), I see sentiments to the effect of "well anyone can just make up what they want" when it comes to these sorts of gender/society issues. While it's true that anyone can hold an opinion, it's also true that there are often ways to better inform our own opinions.

Your professor certainly has a good point. As a normative principle, there is something not quite right about the idea that the women's rights movement had to wait for technology to reduce the burden of the role they were unfairly relegated to in the first place.

Besides that, at least in the U.S. the actual demand of housework did not go down with technology. For a long time, the standards for homemaking just went up instead: http://www.amazon.com/More-Work-For-Mother-Technology/dp/046....

>As a normative principle, there is something not quite right about the idea that the women's rights movement had to wait for technology to reduce the burden of the role they were unfairly relegated to in the first place.

There is a major difference between explaining what happened and saying that is what should have happened.

Slavery should not have ever happened, but any discussion of why slavery has become far less popular among people should not be shot down by someone yelling "But slavery shouldn't have happened to begin with!"

Sure, but your explanation for what happened might be predicated on an assumption about "how things should be."

To make a more extreme version of OP's point: "the women's rights movement couldn't happen until household technology evolved to reduce the burden of housework." That's only true if you assume that women can't reduce the burden of housework simply by refusing to do it.

You also can't say it had to wait for technology because it is possible that aliens could've come along in the early 1800s and enlightened us all. Granted, that seems unreasonable, but is it that much more unreasonable that a nation (if not world) wide same time rejection of a common social norm back when most people were not interconnected?

> to say I'm still a bit offended at having been called a bigot.

Why? Why would you be offended by this, and what will it take for you to learn to not be offended by it? Do you understand this part of your own psychology?

It's not hard to understand.

People believing you are a bigot is bad, because bigotry is correlated with stupidity and ignorance, which are correlated with low status.

He was called a bigot and he believes he is not a bigot.

That's enough to cause a bit of offence.

What is strange to me is how the invention of home appliances seems to have stopped. The refrigerator, washing machine, vacuum and dishwasher all made huge changes to everyday life. But since the microwave oven, there has been nothing major. We are still spending many hours on household work. Are the remaining chores just to difficult to automate?

It's funny that on the one hand we'll soon have something as advanced as self-driving cars, and on the other we still need to iron our clothes, wipe off the dust and take garbage manually :)

It's not because of technology. We just tend to solve problems in order of how easy is to create a business model out of them.

Trust me, there is a HUGE business model to be made out of washing and ironing clothes. Many who can afford it have maids to do this. If it was possible to automate these tasks it would be hugely valuable for the provider and the recipient.

Of course. The problem isn't the size, but the difficulty level of designing a successful business model.

Then build a traditional pickup and delivery laundry service with enough scale to offer competitive prices to in-home laundry services.

Now you can have revenue to fund your R&D departments "automation" goals, increasing your margins...

Or go the Tesla way - build a super-expensive automaton for some rich customers and use that money to bankroll R&D for a cheaper solution...

My take on it is that next level of disruption in the home requires a high degree of AI or robots to work.

Ironing clothes has to cope with intricate clothing types and shapes. Wiping dust has to navigate a space around obstacles (like a self driving car?). Taking the bins out has to work with a hugely varying terrain - steps, doors, gates, etc - unless you install something custom to the building.

That said, these solutions are the obvious way to automate the tasks we do today. May be the disruption comes form clothes that don't need ironing, spaces that don't collect dust.

Right, if you look at washers, dryers, and dish washers, it's not like they automated the exact procedure that people performed to do the task. They used a different method that was possible to automate.

Similarly, early AI research tried to mimic how humans learn, and now we have machine learning, which doesn't learn in the same way as humans do but is still quite successful.

And with clothes, for example, that's arguably pretty much what has happened. Clothes do tend to wrinkle less in general with modern materials and social norms have also evolved so that, for many situations, wearing perfectly ironed clothes isn't a requirement.

Dust can be reduced by using air filtration systems, sealing dwellings better, and using low-lint fabrics for clothes, furniture, and carpets.

I think you severly underestimate the complexity of ironing and cleaning -- I would say wiping dust in a room full of objects (many of them fragile and of complex shape) is a significantly harder task for a robot than steering/parking/stopping a car. And ironing has been solved, though the machines dry cleaners use take too much room for most households to be practical,

I understand how difficult these tasks are to automate - I just wanted to point out how uneven technological progress is. We imagine a not-so-distant future where we have self-driving cars, advanced AI, trips to Mars etc. and yet tasks that bothered people for hundreds of years aren't even close to being automated .

I haven't ironed anything for at least 10 years.

http://www.moss.co.uk/non-iron-shirts

The most labor-intensive and time consuming activities in the past were, in no particular order:

- Farming, raising animals, gathering food

- Food preparation and cooking (including e.g. grinding grain)

- Taking raw plant/animal fibers and turning them into cloth

- Sewing new clothing and mending old clothing

- Chopping firewood and tending fires

- Making pottery (or similar containers from other materials)

- Carrying water home from a well / river / spring

- Raising (typically many) children

- Cleaning / tidying

- Washing clothes

- Building homes, fences, furniture, etc.

- Transportation by walking/horse/carriage

(The reason peasant societies are poor is that these tasks take up more time than anyone can possibly stay on top of. There’s just always an unlimited amount of extra work to do, and the only folks with leisure time are those with plentiful servants to handle all the basic chores.)

Of those, we started with the low-hanging fruit, things that could be done at industrial scale in factories, and then added on-site appliances to handle the parts that couldn’t be centralized, steadily ticking items off until the overall amount of labor required to keep a basic household running is a tiny fraction of the labor required in an unindustrialized agrarian society.

At this point, there aren’t similar opportunities for new home appliances the way there were in 1850–1950. Sure we have 3D printers and floor cleaning robots and all kinds of computerized gizmos, but as for mass-market labor-savers, we just don’t spend nearly as much time on the kinds of machine-tractable labor-intense tasks that we used to.

Self-driving cars and trucks are one big one coming up.

This is a serious question: Why does my washing machine not dump the clothes into the dryer for me? Why do I have to come back and manually move them? Can't we put the washing machine on top of the dryer and build a gravity fed vibrating teflon hopper or something like that?

This bothers me every time I go down to the laundry room.

In a lot of places, no movement is necessary. Many European homes don't have the space for both, and I think losing some drying efficiency is worth it for the space reduction.

See: http://www.amazon.com/LG-WM3997HWA-White-Electric-Washer/dp/...

Space reduction, plus work reduction - you don't have to manually move clothes from the washer to the dryer. On the other hand, when you're in a hurry, you can't start another load in the washer while the first load is drying...

I have a combined washer/dryer. I put dirty clothes in, and get clean, dry clothes out. It was more expensive than buying two machines separately, and I loose the ability to run a washing job and drying job in parallel. For communal laundries, the additional expense and reduced throughput might be the deciding factors.

The necessary innovation to reduce time spent on household work is likely to be a cultural shift away from owning physical things and towards digital media. Arguably it's already here - CDs, DVDs, games and books are all available digitally now, so we don't have to keep shelves of media clean and tidy. Once people move away from owning art, pictures, plants, etc and replace them with digital versions instead then cleaning will become a trivial 5 minute job.

I have plenty of books and CD's in my house, but I don't think they are my main household work bottleneck at all... I spend much more time hanging and unhanging clothes, ironing clothes and cleaning the bathroom than what I spend dusting the books and CD's, which is only needed maybe once or twice a month... perhaps I'm not the cleanest person on the planet though.

I think that the main issue is that the major problems are solved by the listed tools.

There is still some innovation going on. For example there is a window cleaning tool from Kärscher (probably also others) and gutter cleaning tool from iRobot.

A wishlist.

All-in-one robotic kitchen:

1. Automatically orders product from the supermarket to ensure it can prepare a set of food dishes you configure at any time

2. Stores the products once they are delivered

3. Automatically prepares the food that you select

All-in-one robotic wardrobe:

1. Washes the clothes (done)

2. Dries the clothes (done)

3. Checks clothes for stains, sends to dry cleaner if present

4. Irons the clothes

5. Folds the clothes

6. Automatically stores the clothes, presents them to you on request

All-in-one robotic bathroom:

1. Showers and washes you automatically

2. Cuts your hair, shaves your beard

3. Styles your hair

4. Applies makeup and perfume if desired

5. Cuts your nails

6. Varnishes your nails if desired

7. Removes body hair if desired

The only fundamental obstacles to doing all this seem to be having good enough computer vision, and getting to a scale where the products become affordable.

If you look at those appliances, they all basically take one relatively narrow and labor-intensive household task and either automate it or reduce the amount of labor involved.

I'd argue that one area of invention that has continued is essentially outsourcing home tasks in areas like food prep rather than creating new appliances to do them in the house.

More broadly though, if you think about where time is now spent on housework, it's a lot of generalized cleaning, straightening up, and putting things away that don't lend themselves well to the types of simple, repeated tasks that machines are good at handling.

Arguably automated vacuuming is the closest thing which is handled to some degree--depending on the environment--with Roomba's etc. But it's hard to imagine the automation that takes clothes from a basket, washes and dries them, and then folds and hangs them even if one assumes that the workflow can be adjusted to better fit with automation.

>> I'd argue that one area of invention that has continued is essentially outsourcing home tasks in areas like food prep rather than creating new appliances to do them in the house.

Actually if you do it right, it can take around 2-2.5 hours each week to freeze meals for the whole week

https://www.reddit.com/r/MealPrepSunday

https://mealprepsunday.wordpress.com/2015/03/09/hello-world/

On the other hand, while there are some tasty ,high quality frozen foods(like the french chain Picard) , they're more expensive , so people still make their own.

I'm no particular fan of frozen and other supermarket-prepared food for the most part and I do make meals with the intent of having leftovers even if I don't do it systematically. I agree that a lot of people who say they don't have time to cook could do so with a little planning.

However, frozen food, ubiquitous takeout, etc. is certainly widely used and probably makes faster and less labor-intensive meal prep at home a less pressing concern for many.

Thank you for that link, I really needed it (I do cook on Sundays but not enough for a whole week).

Sous vide and combi ovens will/are revolutionizing cooking. We are just couple of years away.

Count me skeptical. I have a sous vide setup circulator and like it a lot. They're even pretty reasonably priced ($100-$200) these days. They're a great way to cook meat in particular and let you throw in a steak from the freezer in the morning and it'll be ready (perfectly cooked) in the evening with only a couple of minute sear. Of course, you can also do interesting things by long-cooking tough cuts of meat.

But, even as a fan, I'd be hard put to call it revolutionary for the home cook given that it's relatively special purpose.

I also mentioned combi oven. Throw in Watson that is walking flavor bible, and you have very potent mix.

Sous vide removes any kind of skill out of the cooking process.

I have also had policy later - everything that is not sous vide goes into the pressure cooker (which could be seen as 120 degreee sous vide bath). Makes food prep extremely easy.

I know combi ovens have their fans and there are some fairly reasonably-priced options these days. I don't have a personal opinion which is why I didn't mention them. I do have a pressure cooker which I also use although not as regularly as you apparently do.

I should play with Watson more. I have the link on my Bookmark bar but I haven't really explored it much.

Robotic vacuums save a lot of time for those with hard floors and children/pets. Soylent and other meal replacements save about an hour per day.

If you cook for an hour a day, you're not doing it right.

>Soylent and other meal replacements save about an hour per day.

This sounds utterly horrible although it did lead me to this gem of a quote: "When Soylent debuted last year, the New York Times' tech columnist Farhad Manjoo described it as "the most joyless new technology to hit the world since we first laid eyes on MS-DOS."" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/soylent-2-0-review_561d6...

As someone else said, cooking really doesn't need to take a lot of time. I doubt I spend an hour a day on average even though I generally like cooking and spend more time on it than strictly necessary. There's a lot you can do with stir frying and making meals like chili in bulk.

But shudder. If that's what efficiency looks like, I'll just stay inefficient.

If you're spending an hour a day cooking, I'm guessing your standards are way to high to be dealing with Soylent.

I disagree that the invention of home appliances has stopped.

The appliances you list are "labor-saving" devices. But there is only so much labor to be saved. In the last quarter of the 20th century, and into today, new home appliances tend to be for communications or entertainment. Examples:

- TV, then flat panel, digital

- Computer, then laptop

- Modem - telephone/Cable/DSL

- WiFi router

- Cable box/DVR

- Video game system

In addition, an entirely new category of appliances was created: the personal appliance:

- PDA

- Cell phone, then smart phone

- Tablet

- Fitness sensor, then smart watch

I think the next round of home appliances is likely to be energy-related:

- Solar panels

- Home battery

- Smart monitoring & reporting system

I think it's so weird that cooking robots don't exist. Most tasks that you perform to cook are repetitive and mostly foolproof, and I say this as someone who trained as a cook. Certain things maybe can't be automated, like seasoning to taste. But I mean...It's weird that you can't throw a bunch of raw vegetables into some sort of box and soup pops out an hour or two later. Wash, peel, chop, heat, simmer, bam. Slow cookers are cool, but the actual cooking part is easy regardless, it's the prep which takes up most time and seems automatable. They obviously automate it at an industrial level.

Maybe there's just no demand for it.

I recall hearing that the first Betty Crocker cake mix didn't sell well. It was very convenient - just add water, stick it in a pan, and bake. People didn't like it.

After running some focus groups, Betty Crocker found out that it was too convenient - people didn't feel like they had done any "cooking". So Betty Crocker reformulated it so that you had to add eggs, not just water, and then it became a huge success.

People want cooking convenient, but many people still want to feel like they cooked.

Yes! I've heard this story. The supposed black-box of consumer buying-behaviour is weird indeed.

This reminds me of a film from 1960, "The Home Of The Future: Year 1999 A.D." [1], where even more household chores are automated (for example, meals are delivered and stored frozen, and take only seconds to heat up).

However, for some reason, the wife still stays at home (and goes shopping) while the husband works and pays the bills. This made me think that the only development which is harder to predict than technological progress, is sociocultural progress.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RRxqg4G-G4

Agh I wish people would either read some of Christensen's work, or even the basic Wikipedia article, or else stop using the word 'disruptive' in this context. It's diluting a concept which used to have a very specific meaning, and has rapidly changed to mean nothing, through misuse.

This article starts off by almost calling people out, saying that people use 'disruptive' in the wrong way, but then it proceeds to make the same basic errors.

There are a few key characteristics of a disruptive innovation. One is that incumbents don't notice the changes due to market myopia. Were competitors to the vacuum unaware of the technical leaps possible due to technology? I will bet not. Another key characteristic is that it causes competitor value-networks to change. What value network changed by vacuums being adopted? The hitting-rug-with-stick value network? How much value flows through this network? Did the sweeping brush value network change? No, everyone still has a sweeping brush even now. All that happened was that consumer demands changed and a new product was adopted. But wasn't it still an amazing leap in technology? Yes! It was a 'radical innovation'!

"Disruptive" does not mean "big change". It doesn't mean "impressive". It doesn't mean "unexpected competition". In this case, it doesn't mean "society changed over the course of a century as a new industry was created due to ancillary technological improvements".

It certainly doesn't mean "normal dynamics of industry and competition", which is how most people seem to inexplicably use it.

I'd love to see a study of these tech adoption trends and their effect in an even shorter timescale like in post-Soviet countries.

In Russia even a few years ago, all my friends' parents would obsessively pickle the hell out of whatever they could grow. My impression is now that that tradition has almost disappeared among the younger generations.

I'm from an East European country and can confirm that the pickle obsession seems to be a lot less relevant for the newer generations. But I think the cause for this is better access to western style supermarket chains and not technological.

Supermarkets are enabled both by refrigeration and by trucking. How is that not technological?

There's a beautiful chapter ("The Sad Irons") in Robert Caro's first volume of his Lyndon Johnson biography which describes life in rural Texas in the 1930s before they got electricity. Because all the electric appliances existed already, their world was transformed literally overnight when the switch was flipped and the juice started flowing.

Looking back it's amazing how little change there was through the twentieth century in fundamental consumer tech. Radio, TV, record players, fridges, washing machines & vacuum cleaners were all available in the 1930s. Sure, they became cheaper and more widely available, but IMHO, not much changed in home tech until the 1980s.

They may have existed in some form but that doesn't mean they were good, widespread, or useful. It's like saying that since the first semiconductor was invented, nothing has really changed in computing tech.

With the exception of the '80 most of these items lasted longer, were easily repairable, or made to be repaired.

As a child, when my parents bought an appliance it was a big deal, and that appliance lasted. It was partially due to practical engineering, an emphasis on longevity, and my father who refused to spend his hard earned money on a new washing machine every two years. My father believed in 15 years durable goods. And so due I. (Yes--that's a fragment Mr. Taylor.)

So appliances, I don't want your bells and whistles. I want an appliance that lasts. I want a service manual attached to the gizmo, along with the warranty information. I want an assurance of a few years of the availability of repair parts.

I don't need, nor want to buy a new appliance every two years, but I know you have built it into your business cycle by now. Some of us see through the scam, and just aren't buying.

Everything I said here, goes for any new automobile(gas, alt fuel, electric), but that might be a loosing fight? I can't believe how people buy automobiles. They buy them like they will never break down?

Are you willing to pay significantly more for your home appliances?

Some people are, and this is why companies like Miele exist (as an example)

If I can get one with a 15-20 expected life then yes I'll pay 3-4x more for it. I expect however an ~10 year guarantee and a firm promise that parts will be available for a further 10 years (or if possible the full spec for parts is published and new ones can be made from the spec.)

Just because there're new iterations of well known tech coming each year doesn't mean they're SO much better than the old one and worth the price - that's only what companies want you to believe. It's not in their business to sell you a simple refrigerator that will last 20 years - it's better to either make it last 5 years or make you believe that you're living like a caveman with refrigerator that doesn't have a touch screen and isn't connected to the Internet.

I think the most disruptive technology invented recently is effective birth control.

Effective birth control isn't recent - it was a reasonably flourishing industry and concept by the 1850s (including rubber and skin condoms). American birth rates plummeted from 1800 to the mid 1800s because of this.

Modern innovations have certainly made birth control more convenient, but I think the biggest changes have been social.

Also relevant: This[1] Nautilus article about how we have a tendency to over-estimate the significance of new technology in the future, simply because it is new.

[1] http://nautil.us/issue/28/2050/why-futurism-has-a-cultural-b...

What am I missing? The graph suggests only 1/3 of Americans had a water heater as of 1985?

Note that you don't need a discrete water heater to have hot water. I didn't have one in my current house until I got a new furnace a few years back.

Multi-unit buildings may also have shared hot water heaters which may factor into the numbers as well.

So many technological improvements, and we are still working 40+ hours per week...

That's because we are being pushed back into the working conditions of a peasant.

They worked because there wasn't enough time to do everything. And we're being worked because we cannot get enough money for the basics, like rent and food. Its another way of control.

We're working 40+ hours a week. That's at a job. But when we come home, we're working less at home. That's still progress.

Well usually, one person was going to work, and the other person usually worked at home (doing laundry, etc.) Nowadays, two people have to work to pay the mortgage. Not really progress if you ask me.

One big non-appliance thing here is the proliferation of mobile phones. Am pretty sure months of my productive life have been saved simply by excluding waiting around on people and not making unnecessary trips.

Chapter 4 of "23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism" echoed this point titled, "The Washing Machine has Changed the World More than the Internet Has". In addition to talking about how revolutionary household appliances have been, he also mentioned how economists have consistently failed to measure much economic value in the Internet.

This thesis seems rather incomplete in light of:

https://www.nber.org/digest/oct08/w13985.html

http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1975-07262-001

Where is the vibrator, the fifth home electrical appliance, on these graphs? :-)

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/04/27/hysteria-an...

As an owner of an older home I find the evolution of central heating to be fascinating. I highly recommend this book:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Lost-Art-Steam-Heating/dp/09743960...

Why is the 'Civilian Labor Force Participation Rate' for women going down again?

It could be lower US employment in general since the 2008 downturn.

Whant happens if you try to plot the relative improvement instead of absolute reduction of working hours? Because it's much more difficult to kill the remaining ones than the ones gained by the washing machine!

You know what has been one of the sickest revolutions ever?

Ballpoint pens.

Just let that sink in.

AKA robots that replaced human labor.

sssshh. we're not supposed to talk about that.

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