Victorian gas lamps that sold cups of hot coffee (2012) | Hacker News Reader

Victorian gas lamps that sold cups of hot coffee (2012)

ianvisits.co.uk

71 pointssnee84 comments

Having lived in Korea and visited Japan, ubiquitous vending machines is an absolute game-changer. Especially with a choice of hot or cold drinks, vending machines really make life super convenient.

Pretty cool to see the Victorians had this idea over a century ago.

Completely agree; I'd love to see it in the US, but it's really a shame that Americans are completely incapable of not destroying a vending machine that isn't under 24/7 surveillance...

Vending machines for everything seems pretty unsustainable. Is everything made of paper or something?

Cans have an extremely high recycling rate because (unlike plastic) it costs a lot more energy to get the stuff out of the ground than to melt it down and reuse. Cans are also fairly easy to get back clean (unlike plastic), and they don't degrade as much as plastic does.

In the US, which is not very good at recycling at all, the EPA estimates that 70% of cans are recycled: https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-...

In Japan, recycling rates for cans are about 94%. https://recycling.world-aluminium.org/regional-reports/japan...

Is aluminum used for both hot and cold items? I haven't been to Japan so just curious. I was just imagining little disposable thermoses and thinking that maybe that isn't the move - but yeah it's an interesting subject. I try to avoid plastic cups a la $SBUX when I want to just grab a coffee so go to a place with little ceramic espresso demitasses instead of some plastic shell that will become a waste product.

I just moved down to Miami and it is pretty crazy how bad communities are about recycling down here. I rarely see specific recycle bins in almost any establishments, and my apartment specifically didn't have dedicated recycling dumpsters. Not sure if maybe they hide it or something, but definitely something to think about.

I've only visited; when I've had one, I would call it "warm" rather than "hot", mostly because when I think of hot coffee in the US I think of things that are too hot to drink like that McDonald's lawsuit. Google says there are a few ways around the "hot metal can" problem, like an insulated label.

Interestingly enough, Japan has some public trash cans, but not a whole lot in general; the cultural expectation is to bring it home and sort it there. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-23/where-are...

Japan used to have quite a few public trash cans, but they were widely removed particularly from public transport as a security theater overreaction to the Tokyo sarin subway attacks in 1995. But drink vending machines do nearly universally have a trash can next to them, which is (supposed to be) used only for recycling cans.

> like an insulated label.

I've had beer cans in the US that used these. They feel really, really weird. Can's been in the fridge for three hours, but feels barely under room temp (because you're touching the insulated label, not the metal)

Also collection rates for PET bottles is above > 90% in Japan. Some are recycled, other are "thermal recycled" that means just burn as a fuel. (IMO just burn is better because it works as a fuel instead of brand new fuels)

https://ccet.jp/events/growth-pet-bottle-recycling-japan

The vending machine in my local shop has a stack of paper cups you pull from, I don't see why you couldn't bring your own cup.

I have never understood that compulsion, why do people here constantly vandalize anything unsupervised. What is the motivation of these people they don't get anything out of it. Why break something when it wont benefit you to do so. Why do people rub feces all over public restrooms, break vending machines or graffiti hate filled messages on others property. why make to world a worse place for everyone including yourself for no gain.

The people who are doing that are generally not thinking rationally in the first place.

Mental healthcare in the US is absolutely awful, and so is the safety net.

Because you are angry and unhappy and want to make other people angry and unhappy. schadenfreude is a very human and common emotion.

If you are looking for a serious answer, vandalism is generally explained as a response to a social hierachy. When you feel you are at the bottom of the pile in relation to others around you, it has a variety of psychological effects. One of the most notable is that it increases your impulsivity and irrationality, and also causes you to feel "judged" by other people simply being near you, even inanimate objects feel like a judgement (a nice car you can never afford, a building made to a high standard with so much visible cost it's insulting to your very existence).

One reaction people can have to this is they can try to "dominate" their environment in the way it makes them feel dominated. Instead of facing the near impossible task of climbing the hierachy, they simply look to impulsively destroy it where possible.

Makes a lot of sense, although in the end it only affects others on the same level in the hierarchy rather than those higher.

> vandalism is generally explained as a response to a social hierachy

Japan is even more hierarchical than the US. Their vending machines are fine.

I think the answer might be that the lowest large portion of their society—aside from some marginalized groups and outliers, talking the broad base of their social pyramid—is their working class, not something else even lower. There's enough affinity or in-group feeling among the working class that it's not divided into a whole bunch of categories, with some very low ones indeed that are very clearly and visibly way under the top of that stratum, but into a smaller set that still consider each other fairly similar and "one of us", for where-am-I-on-the-social-hierarchy purposes.

(pure speculation)

It could be that the relevant thing is the absolute position of the lowest rung of the hierarchy.

In that case, the lowest rung of Japanese hierarchy could still be much higher than that in the US.

I’m not convinced social heirarchy/inequality causes vandalism as much as bored teenage deliquents do. I can’t picture a bunch of tired fast food workers who can’t wait to get off their shift and smash a coke machine or tag walls.

Having lived in Japan my theory is that there is a much tighter social fabric and there is always someone watching. Japan has plenty of delinquents but there is always a slightly higher more responsible delinquent to go “hey idiot vandalism isn’t cool” (or a nosy neighbor to call the local cops who will find the perps family. And the ostracism can be instant and brutal in a way that isn’t really even possible in middle class America because we do not rely on the social fabric or reputation anymore since we are a fairly low trust society.

Japan unemployment rate is 2.97%. They are basically gifting jobs to people who would be left behind in the USA. It's easier to have a peaceful society when nobody feels excluded from it.

You would thinks so! But one time in the middle of Shinsekai in Osaka I've seen a trash can for drink cans full of regular trash - oh, the horror! ;-)

On related note, Shinsekai is nice - it remainded as a bit of back home & the hostels there are super cheap. :-)

This is a canny observation, but not entirely complete. Japan has incredibly low unemployment, even lower rates of juvenile delinquency, homelessness and drug abuse. "Being more hierarchical" isn't really meaningful if you look at the core differences. The West is far more severe in its application of competitive consumerism, where inequality is supposed to act as a motivator.

How does stomping on sandcastles fit into this? How does griefing in minecraft fit in? I think some people just intrinsically love destroying things. This impulse is then more or less moderated by social norms in various groups.

Is the instinct for rebellion irrational, or the instinct for tyranny?

If you can't make, you break.

In my (post-Soviet) country the only vandalism is people putting stickers on drain pipes, and the occasional grafiti - but usually it's art, not just random drawing on stuff. Once I saw a plastic bin burned to the ground, but that could have been from someone who had put a cigarette in it accidentally.

My city feels very safe and there is little vandalism, but nobody is really well off. Everyone complains they have no money, rent is too expensive, salaries are too low, fuel is too expensive, etc. I guess it's because nearly everyone feels like that here, there isn't a 'poor' vs 'middle class'. On the other hand you do get 'new money' driving their G-wagens and Porsche Taycans, so it's not that there isn't a social heirarchy.

It’s the mixture of resentment from material disadvantage and sense of entitlement from cultural dominance.

It’s a side effect of how the Bohemian and associated cultural movements have dominated the west for the last century or so. They claim to still be the counter culture, but really they are the cultural elite and have been for a long time.

Of course it gets lost on people that you need to actually be a great artist and not just a deadbeat with a spray can. You feel you know better than everyone else what good urban aesthetics are supposed to look like, but you lack the means to create anything other than nonsensical scribbles on the walls.

That’s also why we see it in the west and not so much in Japan as another user pointed out.

as someone who has been the vandal

vandalism is the most accessible way to literally change the world. it's direct, visceral cause and effect before your very eyes, and it remains visible in daily life and to everyone around.

i didn't have anything to lose, and it was more fun than sitting on a curb. in that position it did make the world a better place for me.

if you want people to quit breaking shit give them a reason not to. no, legal penalties are not a reason, that just makes them hate you more

> legal penalties are not a reason

Don't be ridiculous. If we throw enough vandals in prison for long enough, then yes, vandalism will drop. It's not fashionable to say it, but it's true: the way to get criminals out of society is to get criminals out of society.

you can't jail alienation.

> you can't jail alienation.

Want to bet?

The US has the largest prison population in the world (if I recall correctly both in absolute number and as a proportion of the population), it really doesn't seem to be working out for them. So no, it's not that simple...

The US has the most prisoners, by far, of any country in the world. How's that working out for eliminating crime?

We basically did that for several decades, and we now have more people in prison than the rest of the world combined, as well as a much larger population of second class citizens (try to get a job with a criminal record!). Many of them did not commit any crime at all. And all of the second-order effects that come from this carceral worldview: missing parents, broken families, generational poverty, and for those directly involved, tremendous suffering.

And you can look for yourself: our crime rates are comparable to, in many cases worse than, any other place that superficially resembles ours.

The way your comment is written makes it seem like you are sympathetic to this idea.

There is no "out of society." They're still here, we still have to deal with them. Not only with them, but also with the machine that we built to coerce them into living the way they live. In exactly the same way you have to deal with me, and I have to deal with you, and we both need to deal with seeing a vending machine vandalized. The question is, how do we deal with that?

> We basically did that for several decades, and we now have more people in prison than the rest of the world combined,

And? Is your solution to legalize crime? That hasn't worked well in the big west coast cities, has it?

> The question is, how do we deal with that?

By arresting people who vandalize vending machines. As long as vending machines continue to be vandalized, we haven't arrested enough people for that crime.

> There is no "out of society." They're still here, we still have to deal with them.

Sure there is, it's called execution. It's a tool that's sadly underutilized, IMO.

>i didn't have anything to lose

Clearly the problem is with incorrect penalties. Singapore canes vandals and it works.

It may work, but at what cost?

You trade living in a country that has vandalism for living in a country that has torture.

I am sure execution will work even better than caning if a nation wants to put "stopping vandalism" above all else.

Sounds to me like the "cost" is some bad people getting whacked by canes, which seems like a pretty low price to pay overall.

I worked with a young urban type for a while, and one morning while walking to the office together I expressed my dismay at the sad state of our office block.

He countered that it was actually an improvement over the otherwise dull corporate architecture. That it was dull I could certainly agree with, but not that scribbling illegible nonsense with spray paint on every surface is an improvement.

So I think there actually are a lot of people with a sincerely held belief that they are actually improving their environment when they do these things.

What’s an urban type?

Someone who lives in the city. It comes from the Latin word for city “urbs”.

I on the other hand would be considered a rural type.

That’s easy. America is a very individualistic society. A lot compared to Asia and a reasonable difference to Europe. It works well with our “rebel” mentality and the almost pathological requirement to stand out. It works really well when it comes to innovations and fostering a productive society but there are downsides and things like this are some of those side effects.

Beverage (e.g. fancy dispensers that dropped a cup and filled it with your choice of juice, coffee, etc) and food vending machines (sandwiches, microwavable meals, etc) used to be much more common. I'm old enough to remember them from the 1980s and 1990s, albeit as a kid, and they seemed very common, though in the 1990s they began to look antiquated--very 1970s'ish. At some point I stopped seeing them altogether. One of the last beverage machines of that sort I remember seeing was in a university break room circa 1997.

Japan: Ubiquitous vending machines. UK: Vending machines widely defrauded with scrap metal in place of coins. US: Unsupervised vending machines immediately destroyed.

Over 10 years ago as a poor student I made a trip to Japan. I spent three weeks in Saitama, which is near-ish to Tokyo, to see if it would be worth it teaching English for a year (spoiler: no).

Anyways towards the end of the trip I was running out of money so my meals for that final week consisted of a 100yen (basically $1) chicken breast from their Lawsons (basically their 7-11) and a 100 yen can of warm corn soup from one of the many vending machines to be found on the street. It was cheap, tasty, and did the job of filling me up.

Fun factoid: Japan is the world's largest market for 7-11, and Japan's 7-11 (officially Seven & I Holdings) bought the US operations back in 2005.

I found your description of Lawsons kind of funny since Japan also has their fair share of 7-11s.

Konbini are totally there when you need them. Also yeah, associated with tragic poverty as well, e.g. in Japanese cinema.

I got a bit nostalgic reading your comment. I lived off of some weird stuff when I was poor in Japan. Bags of donuts or bread found behind bakeries, basically in the trash. Unwanted produce that our Brazilian friends would bring over. They always had some other amusing garbage find too, like a G-Shock still in its original packaging. "SHIN-PIN, ne," they'd shout, laughing together.

You couldn't talk about this to regular Japanese friends, some understood but most seemed to look away embarrassed.

My favorite at any kombini was tuna onigiri and a meiji bar.

> Having lived in Korea and visited Japan, ubiquitous vending machines is an absolute game-changer

Having lived in Japan, I found the ubiquitous vending machines to be neat (and very photogenic), but I didn't use them more than once or twice a year. If I wanted canned coffee as a (wretched) backup if I slept in, I had a few bought from the super for 39Y a can rather than the machine at 100Y. When skiing, I opted for the (much tastier) 550Y soba from the shop rather than the 150Y corn potage from the vending machine.

Cold drinks when checking out tourist stuff in the hot summer was the key use I got from them. And they weren't as absurdly overpriced as north american vending machines (excluding the ones outside walmart and equivalent)

The link entitled "Pluto Lamps" goes to a site which is gone and which changed the content of that linked page frequently. The intended story is in this Wayback Machine capture: https://web.archive.org/web/20130622053706/http://www.reasou...

Coffee lamps, electric trucks, the Titanic, gigantic starship-like airships - what a time to be alive...!

The future was then.

Hand held terminals giving you access to humanity whole knowledge, the ability to instantly pinpoint your location on a map and get directions to anywhere, logistic chains so perfectioned you can buy from the other side of the world and get your product in the week, vaccines engineered by direct manipulation of RNA chains, planes which can stay in the air for days using electricity, machines approaching a human level of speach, meat grown in a lab without hurting animals.

The future is now.

Hand held terminals giving you an addiction on par with heroin, the ability to instantly pinpoint your location on a map and get directions to anywhere your gig economy job makes you go, logistic chains so perfectioned you can't buy graphic cards cheaply because people from the other side of the world who mine bitcoin out bid you, dependence on biochemistry to difficult to grasp for the majority, planes that are to complex to be checked by third parties so one needs to just trust the manufaturer, machines approaching a human level of deception, meat grown in a lab without hurting animals is not possible/affordable at scale.

You almost (maybe) had a point. Wait til you find out what happened to the titanic

Wait til you google Hindenburg.

On par with heroin!

I don’t vomit when i forget to charge my phone.

I find it very strange you can talk about smartphones giving you an addiction, while complaining about expensive graphics cards

Those logistic chains are struggling.

Are they? I think our supply chains are showing how resilient we are. In the middle of a pandemic, I have safe food to eat. I have heat and lights. I have medicine. Everything else is just icing on the cake.

It's the best handled plague ever.

titanic and airships had some issues tho

The reason the airships look like starships is because our (fictional) starships were modeled on those (real) airships.

This is your argument that then wasn't futuristic?

Fictional technological futures are virtually always projections of their presents.

Shelley's Frankenstein's Monster, Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues, Wells's Time Machine, Kubrick and Clarke's 2001, Star Wars, Battlestar Gallactica (both the original and the remake).

It's the principle function of the genre.

@dang , did something on the HN side of things break or is this a feature I'm unaware of?

Unless I'm losing my mind, which is definitely a possibility, I'm certain I was reading this thread (via front page) last night, as in 20 or so hours ago.

When I search to find this in the HN search bar, I do in fact find this singular thread, timestamped 1 day ago.

As I'm viewing it now, and I presume across all of HN, it is stamped 5 hours ago, back to the front page, and the vast majority of the comments seem to be stamped 2 hours ago.

Hope I'm being clear enough - something just seems strange. Is it possible somebody re-posted the article link today, it got a decent amount of upvotes, and then automatically merged with last nights thread and something on the timestamp side of things broke?

Ooh. There is definitely something going on. Checked top comment - timestamped 3 hours ago in the thread, but when I go to the posters account and look at the comment, it's from over 24 hours ago (says one day, reply to it is 23 hours)

Going to be really awkward if it's just on my side of things... but I'm curious to know at this point

This post was selected for the second-chance pool. I believe that has the side effect of altering timestamps.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

https://news.ycombinator.com/pool

These days it's next to impossible to find a vendor of beef tea essence.

According to the "foods of England" website (http://www.foodsofengland.co.uk/beeftea.htm), beef tea is

"The clear liquid from beef which has been boiled until fallen, strained and skimmed of all fat. "

You can find a recipe online.

And "beef essence" is just meat extract

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebig%27s_Extract_of_Meat_Com...

"Liebig's Extract of Meat Company, established in the United Kingdom, was the producer of LEMCO brand Liebig's Extract of Meat and the originator of Oxo meat extracts and Oxo beef stock cubes. It was named after Baron Justus von Liebig, the 19th-century German organic chemist who developed and promoted a method for industrial production of beef extract.

In 1847, Justus von Liebig developed a concentrated beef extract in hopes of providing a cheap and nutritious meat substitute, Extractum carnis Liebig, for those unable to afford the real thing.[2] His method was to trim the fat from the meat, break the meat into small particles, boil it with water to form a liquid of 6-8% solids, and then stir it over low heat, until it was reduced to a paste of 80% solids."

https://store.belgianshop.com/syrups/1414-oxo-beef-meat-extr...

My grandmother would occasionally offer me "Bovox" out of habit:

"Tea, coffee, or Bovox?"

"What's Bovox?"

"It's a beef drink."

"Do you have any?"

"No."

wouldn't that just be beef soup? Tea basically takes something and soaks it in hot water for a long time. If you are using meat products i assume it automatically become soup (since thats basically what soup is)

More like a stock. Soup implies more complexity than a base of stock.

I was thinking it was beef stock.

Oddly, meat essences, particularly chicken essence, have found a new life in Asia, where they've been adopted into the pantheon of Chinese traditional medicine and are now considered essential (bad bum tssh) for hard-studying students. The market leader, Brands, was originally British.

https://www.brandsworld.com.sg/en/about-us/history-and-herit...

Bouillion.

Neat. When I look at old pictures like the one in the article, I wonder, is it foggy, smokey, or just an artifact of the photograph?

In this case possibly all three. in Victorian England you probably had lots of coal smoke produced by everything form home heating & cooking wide spread rail travel, to powering every industry, being England fog is very likely, and the photography technology was fairly primitive. so all of the above

Now this is steampunk.

Given that the supposed inventor was one H. Robinson isn’t this likely a joke?

Where would all the water come from?

Does "H. Robinson" have some hidden meaning? I don't see how the name implies a joke.

W. Heath Robinson was essentially an English Rube Goldberg.

There's long been talk to provide electric car charging from lamp posts. Ie to future the large amount of people parking their electric cars in the street.

In Norway, the percentage of electric cars is high already but couldn't find info online on how the street parkers charge...

The one thing I've noticed that kind of sucks from everything getting super power efficient is that, everything becomes "single purpose" since there is very little energy that is wasted.

Can't have fun little things like this tacked on using waste energy.

I’ll have a triple soy skinny mocha vanilla latte please lamp … oh ok …

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