Posts Tagged ‘commerce’
“The metric system did not really catch on in the States, unless you count the increasing popularity of the nine-millimeter bullet”*…
Nearly everywhere in the world, folks use the metric system to measure things; here in the U.S. we use the Imperial system. (Note that Britain should really be a dark shade of green– i.e. a little yellow, mixed with a lot of blue. Brits may regularly use inches, ounces, miles, and pounds in everyday life, but have officially been Metric since 1965.)
Mike Sowden (amusingly and informatively) recounts the history of the metric system, then muses on why Imperial measures– the mile, the inch, the cubit, the ell– have staying power…
… Yes, all of these lack precision, so they’re useless for modern science, and would be incredibly dangerous if used for engineering purposes. But they also tell a story of people’s relationship with the space they moved through.
A lexis of movement – perhaps in a similar fashion to the language of landscape that writer Robert MacFarlane has done so much to retrieve.
This is why I’m on the fence about Imperial now. There’s no question that Metric is necessary as a standardised, exact form used to make cars that don’t shake themselves to bits, planes that don’t fall out the sky and spacecraft that can launch themselves to interplanetary targets with mind-blowing accuracy.
But the versions of Imperial still being used by people in everyday life deserve their place in the world too.
Anyone brought up thinking and feeling temperature in Fahrenheit can tell us Celsius-reared folk something different about how we can experience the world. Anyone cooking in pounds will be thinking about food a little differently (“well, it’s just 2 cups, isn’t it?”). All these things are tiny windows into new ways of seeing what we think we already know…
In defense of an old way of measuring: “Why Go Imperial in a World Gone Metric?” from @Mikeachim.
See also: “The real reasons the US refuses to go metric,” and explainer from Verge Science on the last big attempt to turn the US towards Metric, why it failed, and the ways scientists and manufacturers have snuck it in anyway.
* Dave Barry
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As we muse on measurement, we might pause, on Pi Day, for a piece of pi(e)…
… in celebration of Albert Einstein’s birthday; he was born on this date in 1879.
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
“We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.”*
Through the second half of the 20th century, the mall became more than a fixture of American life; it became a hub. And, as Matthew Christopher explains, while malls remain, the bloom has come off of the “rows”…
I’ve visited hundreds of abandoned places in my life—factories to asylums, schools to churches—but suburban malls might be the most surreal and striking. They captivate the imagination in a way few other types of environments can: with an almost imperceptible layer of fog that forms between the first and second floors of an atrium, endless reflections of vacant storefronts, or a chance encounter with a groundhog in the remains of a food court. Stripped of signage and wares, they are nearly perfectly liminal spaces. Malls have become a part of the modern collective unconscious, through both the haze of half-buried memories of any American over the age of 20 and their ubiquity in popular media. They reflect the American consumer’s identity, and to see a suburban mall in ruins warps nostalgia into something nightmarish and forlorn in a way that abandoned factories, hospitals, or even churches don’t quite do.
We are all, to some extent, intimately familiar with the mall experience. Many of us in America had an indoor shopping center that was “our mall” at some point in our lives. Those memories are shared, because even though we weren’t all going to the same mall, we were: franchise stores—Auntie Anne’s, Sbarro, The Gap—share the same layout and inoffensive color palette and logo lettering across the country. To know one of these malls is to know them all. It’s a powerful magic I’m not sure I can fully explain, even after wandering the deserted storefronts of many vacant shopping hubs.
Much has been written on the phenomenon of the collapse of the American mall and the reasons for it. The most obvious—the rise of online retail—is undeniably a significant factor, but it also masks a rot that had been spreading before Amazon gutted brick-and-mortar. It’s hard to think of any comparable social institution that cost so much and covered so much physical space and then imploded so quickly. As always, the story is far more complex than any tidy summary can encompass…
The indoor suburban shopping center is a special kind of abandoned place; read on for more of the story and more photos: “The Life and Death of the American Mall,” @AbandonedAmerica@mastodon.social in @atlasobscura.
* Bill Bryson
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As we fool around in the food court, we might note that today is Teddy Day, a celebration of Teddy Bears…
The Teddy Bear appeared in a shop window in Brooklyn, New York, on February 15, 1903, but the story of the cuddly toy began a few months before that.
It really started when President Theodore Roosevelt took up an invitation to go bear hunting, in Mississippi with the Governor of the state, Andrew Longino, in November 1902. I can tell you two things about President Teddy Roosevelt – 1. He hated being called Teddy, and 2. he was an avid hunter – he had trophies and hunted for both meat and sport. That first day of his hunting trip, he was really disappointed because he and the governor didn’t find any Bears, but the governor DID NOT want to disappoint the President, so he had the hunting guide go out and find a bear, which he did. He found an old bear and tied it to a tree; they brought the president, but he didn’t want to hunt a trapped bear – it was unsportsmanlike.
Whenever any President does anything, it’s kind of newsworthy, and Clifford Berryman, a cartoonist heard the story, made the old bear a cub, and made a cartoon of Teddy freeing a Bear Cub from a tree. The cartoon made the rounds and inspired Morris Michtom and his wife Rose, to make a little toy bear cub, just to decorate the window of their hand-made toy shop. Most toys were handmade still in the early 1900s. A bunch of people offered to buy it, but he didn’t sell it right away. He actually sent it to the President and asked permission to sell what he called The Teddy Bear. Teddy Roosevelt approved, with no strings attached, so the Mitchums started making them, and put them on sale.
The Teddy Bear really represented the start of more than just the first stuffed non-human toy with arms and legs, it changed the whole toy industry. The earliest toys were usually something with wheels, a ball, a human baby doll, or sports-oriented. In 1892, there was a cat toy, basically the outline of a cat with stuffing, called Ithaca Cat (US patent 483727A). It was more like a shaped pillow, they still make reproductions today. That caused a mini-craze for other stuffed pillow toys like bunnies, kittens, puppies, and the Teddy Bear came out at just about the right time.
The stuffed Bear was the biggest toy of the last century. Change a few things, and give the bear a personality, and the toy becomes Winnie The Pooh, or Paddington Bear, Teddy Ruxpin, The Care Bears, or Corduroy. Teddy Bears introduced the whole idea of anthropomorphic toys- animals having human features and personalities.
The Mitchums went on to found the IDEAL Toy Company, which up until Barbie & GI Joe, was the largest Toy Company in the World. IDEAL is also the company that gave us The Rubik’s Cube in the 1980s. If the Miitchums didn’t start by giving us the Teddy Bear, we’d probably still be rolling hoops (hooping) with a stick like people did for most of the past 2000 years…
“The Teddy Bear“
We might further note that a recent incarnation of the Teddy was an avatar of late Mall culture: Build-a-Bear Workshop… which, from its founding in 1997) grew to over 500 (largely mall-based) locations around the U.S… but that has now moved aggressively on-line.
“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”*…
… a circular journey of discovery that can be accomplished much more quickly today than 110 years ago…
In 1914 John G. Bartholomew, the scion of an Edinburgh mapmaking family and cartographer royal to King George V, published “An Atlas of Economic Geography”. It was a book intended for schoolboys and contained everything a thrusting young entrepreneur, imperialist, trader or traveler could need. As well as the predictable charts of rainfall, temperature and topography, it had maps showing where you could find rubber, cotton or rice; maps showing the distribution of commercial languages, so that if you wanted to do business in Indonesia you knew to do so in Dutch; and maps showing the spread of climatic diseases, so that if you did find yourself in Indonesia you knew to look out for tropical dysentery. It also contained the map you see here, which told you how long it would take to get there from London: between 20 and 30 days.
This is an isochronic map – isochrones being lines joining points accessible in the same amount of time – and it tells a story about how travel was changing. You can get anywhere in the dark-pink section in the middle within five days – to the Azores in the west and the Russian city of Perm in the east. No surprises there: you’re just not going very far. Beyond that, things get a little more interesting. Within five to ten days, you can get as far as Winnipeg or the Blue Pearl of Siberia, Lake Baikal. It takes as much as 20 days to get to Tashkent, which is closer than either, or Honolulu, which is much farther away. In some places, a colour sweeps across a landmass, as pink sweeps across the eastern United States or orange across India. In others, you reach a barrier of blue not far inland, as in Africa and South America. What explains the difference? Railways.
In the early 1840s an American dry-goods merchant called Asa Whitney, who lived near New York, travelled to China on business. It took 153 days, which he thought a waste of time. When he got back he began lobbying for a transcontinental railroad connecting Lake Michigan with Oregon, which had a trade deal with China. The railroad, he thought, would cut the journey time to China to about 30 days and open up the market. Similarly, the British invested so heavily in the Indian railway that between 1860 and 1880 it extended from 838 miles to 15,842 miles. If you compare this isochronic map to one from the 1870s, by Francis Galton, you see the difference. Bombay is quickly accessible by sea; the rest of India less so. Likewise, there is no spit of pink reaching across the Russian Empire on Galton’s map, because there was no Trans-Siberian Railway. As the geographer L.W. Lyde says in his introduction to Bartholomew’s atlas, “isochronic distances…change with every additional mile of railway brought into use.” What was the one thing a young entrepreneur needed most? A train ticket…
“Time Travel,” by Simon Willis in Intelligent Life/1843 Magazine
That was then. Now entrepreneurs and other travelers are reaching for a different kind of ticket– now we have aviation…
In late 2015 the Rome2Rio team spotted a beautiful travel map on Intelligent Life. The map, which was published by venerable mapmaker John G. Bartholomew in 1914, illustrated how long it would take to travel from London to destinations across the globe.
We were excited to see such a fantastic visualisation of travel times and we were curious to see what had changed in the 100-odd years since; especially at such a world-changing juncture in travel technology. The first commercial flight took place on January 1st, 1914, so travel times started changing drastically soon after this date.
We created a new map using Rome2Rio’s routing engine and unique repository of transport data… It is clear that travel times have improved immensely. Modern air, rail and road infrastructure has led to a ten-fold increase in travel times across the dark pink parts of the map.
Globalisation is also readily apparent. Journeys that would have taken 10 to 20 days by boat and train have been replaced by the speed of air travel, with most of the world now accessible within ½ to 1 day. This change is most apparent in Asia. In 1914 reaching Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Tokyo would take up to 40 days. Now, these powerhouses are a day’s travel from London.
Island destinations have benefited from the advances in technology as well. Locations such as the Bahamas, Bermuda, Seychelles, Mauritius and Madagascar are all with ½ a day’s travel, suggesting demand for direct flights by holiday makers. For those who prefer colder locales, visiting the world’s coldest city, Yakutsk, is a breeze in comparison to the area surrounding it; from London, it takes ¾ of a day…
“Time flies? According to these maps it does,” from Rome2Rio
What a difference a century– and a new technology– can make…
* T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” The Four Quartets
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As we fasten our seatbelts, we might recall that it was on this date in 1935 that was Amelia Earhart became the first person successfully to fly from Honolulu, Hawaii to Oakland, California. It had been attempted numerous times before by other pilots who’d been foiled by mechanical trouble; Earhart had none. Indeed, it is said that during the final hours of her flight, she relaxed to the broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera from New York.
Sadly it was just two year later that she went missing while attempting to fly from Lae Airfield in Papua New Guinea to Howland Island (about 1,700 nautical miles southwest of Honolulu). She was never seen again.
“The way we eat has changed more in the last 50 years than in the previous 10,000″*…
And that change is coming for China… Even as trade tension tighten between China and the U.S., foreign investment in China drops, and talk of decoupling grows (see, e.g., here and here), one sector of American business is doubling down on the Chinese market…
There’s been no shortage of tough news for China’s economy as some of the world’s biggest brands consider or take action to shift manufacturing to friendlier shores at a time of unease about security controls, protectionism and wobbly relations between Beijing and Washington.
Count Adidas, Apple and Samsung among those looking elsewhere.
But as a tumultuous 2023 for the Chinese economy comes to a close, there has been at least one bright spot for Beijing when it comes to foreign investment: American fast-food chains have decided a market of 1.4 billion people is simply too delicious to pass up.
KFC China’s parent company opened its 10,000th restaurant in China this month and aims to have stores within reach of half of China’s population by 2026. McDonald’s is planning to open 3,500 new stores in China over the next four years. And Starbucks invested $220 million in a manufacturing and distribution facility in eastern China, its biggest project outside the U.S.
This is surely not what Chinese President Xi Jinping had in mind as he made the case to American CEOs about the upside of China’s “super-large market” last month while he was in San Francisco for a summit of world leaders. The investments in fast food and other consumer goods, while Washington is curbing exports of computer chips and other advanced technology, don’t fit into China’s own blueprint for modernizing its economy…
Unlike manufacturing plants, fast-food franchises are relatively easy to set up and break down and don’t have to worry about IP security/theft. So, even as trade policy hardens and manufacturing/tech companies lean away, “American fast-food companies find China’s 1.4 billion population too delicious to resist,” from @BusinessInsider.
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As we supersize that, we might spare a thought for Fred Turner; he died on this date in 2013. One of the first employees hired by McDonald’s entrepreneur Ray Kroc, Turner rose quickly through the ranks, and succeeded Kroc as CEO in 1977.
Turner founded Hamburger University in 1961 and was a co-founder of Ronald McDonald House Charities.
“Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.”*…
On the defining characteristic of civilization: Peter Frankopan, Marie-Louise Nosch, and Feng Zhao on the history of textiles, with special emphasis on silk…
Some say that history begins with writing; we say that history begins with clothing. In the beginning, there was clothing made from skins that early humans removed from animals, processed, and then tailored to fit the human body; this technique is still used in the Arctic. Next came textiles. The first weavers would weave textiles in the shape of animal hides or raise the nap of the fabric’s surface to mimic the appearance of fur, making the fabric warmer and more comfortable.
The shift from skin clothing to textiles is recorded in our earliest literature, such as in the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, where Enkidu, a wild man living on the Mesopotamian steppe, is transformed into a civilised being by the priestess Shamhat through sex, food and clothing. Judaism, Christianity and Islam all begin their accounts of their origins with a dressing scene. A naked Adam and Eve, eating from the forbidden tree, must flee the Garden of Eden. They clothe themselves and undertake a new way of life based on agriculture and animal husbandry. The earliest textile imprints in clay are some 30,000 years old, much older than agriculture, pottery or metallurgy…
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… The technology behind silk had long been a historical puzzle. The recent archaeological discovery of a 2nd-century BCE Han dynasty burial chamber of a woman in Chengdu has now solved it. Her grave contained a miniature weaving workshop with wooden models of doll-sized weavers operating pattern looms with an integrated multi-shaft mechanism and a treadle and pedal to power the loom [see illustration above]. Europeans wouldn’t devise the treadle loom, which enhances power, precision and efficiency, for another millennium.
This technology, known as weft-faced compound tabby, also emerged in the border city of Dura-Europos in Syria and in Masada in Israel, dating to the 70s CE. We can, however, be confident that the technique known as taqueté was first woven with wool fibre in the Levant. From there, it spread east, and the Persians and others turned it into a weft-faced compound twill called samite. Samites became the most expensive and prestigious commodity on the western Silk Roads right up until the Arab conquests. They were highly valued international commodities, traded all the way to Scandinavia….
…
… The word ‘text’ comes from Latin texere (‘to weave’), and a text – morphologically and etymologically – indicates a woven entity. We can therefore say that history starts not with writing but with clothing. Before history, there was nudity, at least in the Abrahamic tradition; clothing thus marks the beginning of history and society. The representation of nudity as part of a wild and pre-civilised life mirrors the European colonial perspective of the naked human as ‘wild.’
Across the world today, there are two main ways to dress: gendered into male and female, and stylistically into clothing tailored to fit the body, or draped/wrapped around it like the Roman toga or the Indian sari. Fitted clothing dominates globally, especially after the Second World War, with blue jeans and T-shirts now ubiquitous across all continents.
Today, a T-shirt on sale in any shop around the world is the result of a finely meshed web of global collaboration, trade and politics. From cotton fields in Texas or Turkmenistan, to spinning mills in China, garment factories in Southeast Asia, printers in the West, and second-hand clothing markets in Africa, a T-shirt travels thousands of kilometres around the world in its lifetime. On average, a Swede purchases nine T-shirts annually, and even if they are made to last 25 to 30 washes, consumers tend to discard them before. Greenpeace found that Europeans and North Americans, on average, hold on to their clothes for only three years. Some garments last only for one season, either because they fall out of fashion, or because the quality of the fabric, tailoring and stitching is so poor that the clothes simply fall apart.
This is the impact of fast fashion that has taken hold since the beginning of the 21st century: for millennia, clothing had always been expensive, worth repairing and maintaining, and made to last. Along with the acceleration of consumption came falling prices and an ever-narrowing margin for profit. The fast-fashion business model requires seamless global trade, inexpensive long-distance transportation, cheap flexible labour and plentiful natural resources. That equation is changing in a world that is warming and where trade barriers are coming up. The future of fabrics, textiles and clothing is bound up in the great themes of the present – and the future…
Eminently worth reading in full: “A silken web,” from @peterfrankopan and @NoschMarie in @aeonmag.
For more, see the full UNESCO report from a chapter in which (“The World Wide Web”) this was adapted: Textiles and Clothing Along the Silk Roads (2022)
* Mark Twain
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As we dress, we might recall that it was on this date that American audiences in America first encountered a heroine whose costumes went from regal to humble then back to regal: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered. An animated musical fantasy film produced by Walt Disney Productions and released by RKO Radio Pictures, it was based on the 1812 German fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm (here and here), it is the first full-length cel animated feature film and the first Disney feature film.
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