Hi, I’m John Green. Welcome to my salon. This is Mental Floss on YouTube, and did you
know that before dating apps and social media helped usher a romance along, people used
all kinds of terrible techniques to alert their crushes. Like in 19th century Austria,
women would put an apple slice under their arms during a town dance, and if they fancied
a boy, they’d hand the apple to him. If he liked her back, he’d eat it.
I prefer swiping right, all things being equal.
But at least the apple action was straightforward: Victorian men had to memorize a whole slew
of signals to know whether or not to approach a woman. If a woman put her fan on her left
cheek, it meant she wasn’t interested. If she fanned herself slowly, she was spoken
for. Fanning quickly meant she’s on the market. And fan on the right cheek? She just
might like you. Or she’s blocking the sun from her face. One or the other.
Thankfully, today we have air conditioning. And also Tinder.
And those are just two of the many ways technology has made our lives ridiculously better that
I’m going to share with you today in this video, sponsored by out friends at Intel.
So these days getting the time is as simple as looking at your cell phone, but of course
that wasn't always the case. Back in the 19th century, merchants in London would literally
buy the time from a woman named Ruth Belville. Belville would visit the Greenwich Observatory
every morning to set a chronometer to the exact time, accurate to within one-tenth of
a second. And then she’d hop on a train and sell the correct time to clockmakers,
who could check their time against hers for a price. And then when the Standard Time Company
tried to run a smear campaign against Belville, it only increased her sales! Sounds like they
had a little bit too much TIME on their hands.
So of course now we can all brew coffee at home -- although we choose not to, going to
cafes instead. But back in the early 20th century, the beverage was often dusgusting
because people had no good way to filter out the grounds. In fact, before a German woman
invented coffee filters in 1908, people had ridiculous methods for getting rid of the
grounds. Like some people added pieces of salted cod to the coffee. In theory, the gelatin
would help coagulate the grounds so they would sink to the bottom of the cup. But in practice,
adding a piece of salted flesh to your drink results in like disgusting, fish-flavored
coffee. It was just like this.
Back in the 19th century, there was quite a large business for art forgers who wanted
to hawk fake masterpieces. And art critics used to authenticate paintings by looking
at how the ears, or the eyes, or the fingernails were shaped because those are the things that
are difficult for artists, the tiny details and stylistic habits. But these days, we can
use algorithms to analyze paintings for authenticity or imaging to analyze the cracks in a painting
that create a topographic map of the paintings’ surfaces and show whether the paint would
have cracked that way over 50 years, or 500. Curators and conservationists can even use
spectroscopy to ID a paint’s chemical fingerprint and determine whether it was actually from
the same time as the artist who supposedly painted it.
Alright, now let's talk about directions. There used to be these crazy things that we
would print on thinly sliced trees called maps. THey were basically like a physical
representation of Google Maps, except, in fact, that's WHY Good Maps are CALLED Google
Maps. But they were huge, even bigger than the iPhone 6 Plus!
Right, so this is the world that Alice Ramsay lived in in 1909, when she and her 3 friends
decided to cross the country to prove that women were perfectly capable of driving. They
didn’t have the benefit of an atlas, but instead just had a bunch of like, local maps
-- none of which had standardized measures and many of which had inaccuracies. But they
made it! From Manhattan to San Francisco driving 3800 miles, only 152 of which were paved,
in just 59 days! It was a remarkable feat at the time. You might say that it PAVED the
way for future road trips. Meredith! What did I tell you about puns?
Even opening cans used to be extremely complicated. Like the technology for canning food has existed
since Napoleon’s time, when he ran a contest to help store foods for his army. But OPENING
a can, that's a while different ball of wax. Actually, it's a whole different can of soup.
It took nearly 50 years before Ezra Warner of Connecticut came up with a can opener.
And even then, they were inconvenient things that never left the grocery store. So instead
of using your hammer to crack open your food at home, you’d simply open your cans at
the store before leaving.
Now that the weather's nicer, you may have forgotten that you spent 6 months of the last
year shoveling snow. At least if you were me. Many cities have embedded their sidewalks
with coils that use electricity and hot water, or geothermal heat to stay snow-free. And
the systems offer a green alternative to salting and they efficiently keep walks and driveways
clear. I need one of those desperately. Meanwhile, here in Indianapolis, we have exactly one
snow plow, which was built in 1907 and then Alice Ramsey drove it from New York to Indianapolis.
Speaking of weather, you know what's pretty recent?Knowing what the weather will be in
24 hours. The first report, with somewhat scientific predictions of the weather, was
made in 1861 by a British naval officer named Robert FitzRoy after a clipper carrying 450
people got wrecked in a storm. So FitzRoy cleverly asked fellow officers to telegraph
the weather where they were to him, and he created a little map to forecast the weather.
Of course, the predictions weren’t nearly as sophisticated as anything on your iPhone.
The first report included lines like: “North-- moderate westerly wind; fine. South-- fresh
westerly, fine.” What's FitzRoy, of course, couldn't predict was North West -- who I forecast
to have fresh and fine fashion sense for a baby.
Back in the 1820s, if a restaurant wanted ice, they’d have to import it from a New
England ice farm -- where laborers would saw giant 300 lb cubes of ice from frozen ponds,
and then use horses to drag the blocks to ships that delivered the ice around the country.
I know this is going to come as a terrible surprise to the people of Maine, but while
you guys are still up there working at your ice farms we have like, ice in our fridges now!
Burnt popcorn used to ruin the whole bag. But thanks to a popcorn app that listens to
the popping sounds coming from your microwave, and then reveals the perfect time to pull
the bag out, home movie snacking has effectively been saved forever.
But of course there are many inventions currently trying to solve problems of the palette. MIT’s
intelligent spoon, for instance, will “taste” your cooking and offer up suggestions for
improving it as you cook -- whether it’s by adding a little more salt to brine your
pickles perfectly, or adjusting the butter in your cookie dough.
While autocorrect has the occasional effect of changing your text’s meaning, at least
your spelling is always ducking accurate. I never mean ducking, iPhone. I have NEVER
meant ducking. But anyway, back in the days of typewriters, getting rid of a little text
error was no easy task. Because White-Out and correction tape didn’t work well on
onion skin -- the thin paper regularly used for making carbon copies -- typists and writers
had to put their elbows to work using a typewriter eraser, this really abrasive stick with bristles
on the end that helped brush away the inky debris made from cleaning away a mistake.
And finally, I return to my salon to tell you that a good night’s sleep has gotten
a little easier thanks to things like white noise machines and sleep number mattresses.
Just consider how beds have changed over they years. Like a plush mattress in 19th century
England? It was stuffed with like straw, and hair, and corn husks, and disease. The Ancient
Chinese used wood and metal pillows. And the Egyptians kept their heads elevated on stones,
so insects couldn’t crawl up their nostrils. What do we use now to keep insects from crawling
up our nostrils? Maybe that's what those sleep numbers are for.
Anyway, thanks for watching this episode of Mental Floss on YouTube, which was made with
the help of all of these nice people. And also thanks to our friends at Intel, whose
innovative technology is bringing a smarter future into your world right now! To find
out What's Next from Intel, check out their innovation hub. We've put some links below.
Thanks to them, thanks to you for watching, and thanks to those ridiculous people who
made that popcorn app.