Time inevitably marches on and there’s not much we can do about it. The world progresses, things change, and theoretically, everything improves. That may not always be the case, or at least not in everyone’s eyes, but you can’t deny that things definitely are different today than they were 100 years ago. Some things that used to be everywhere have been rendered obsolete and other things that used to be commonplace just seem to have vanished for inexplicable reasons.
10. Before Time Zones Two Nearby Cities Might Run a Few Minutes Apart
What better topic to discuss when focusing on things from the past than time itself. These days we’re all used to time zones separating the world into little segments like an orange. For the most part, everyone follows the breakdown of time zones with a few notable exceptions including China where everything is the same time, all the time. Before the acceptance of time zones, things were quite different and very disorganized.
When it was left up to everyone to determine time for themselves you could travel from one town to the next and find yourself four minutes in the future or four minutes in the past. This was thanks to people telling time by the sun and a single degree of latitude could tweak your clock just a tad.
You might even be in a town that was two minutes off of where you started. When it was noon in Washington, DC, it was 12:02 in Baltimore. In Albany, New York it was 12:14. In Boston it was 12:24. These times were how railroads calculated when trains would arrive and depart, all locally, meaning confusion was inevitable. Comparative timetables had to be published to allow travelers some slight chance of guessing the correct times as they went from city to city.
9. White Dog Poo Disappeared Thanks to Ingredient Changes in Dog Food
Sarah Silverman once sang a song about white dog poop disappearing and as weird a way to start a sentence as that is, that’s what we’re talking about here. If you are old enough, you remember a time when dog poop turned white. All of it did, everywhere. You’d see it wherever owners refused to clean up after their dogs. But now you don’t see it and there’s a reason.
Back in the 80s and earlier, dog food was bulked up with a lot of fillers that weren’t really nutritious. Bone meal was one of these fillers, which is basically just calcium. After a dog eats and digests their food, most of that bone meal goes straight through and out the other side. As the end result dried out on the sidewalk, it would turn powdery white, like a little ghost turd in the sun.
Starting in the ’90s, dog food companies cut back on the bone meal and added more fiber and actual nutrients to dog food to make it better for your four-legged friend. That meant fewer white leftovers and now dog poop tends to stay the same color if people leave it lying around.
8. Before Fountains and Disposable Cups We All Used Unhygienic Common Cups
Schools around the world have water fountains from which students can drink and have had them for years. In more adult settings you get water coolers with their little disposable cups from which you can refresh yourself. So what did we do before either of those things were invented? You know people would have been thirsty back in the day, how did they manage when they were out in public?
If you guessed “They shared a gross public cup,” you’re absolutely right. Before we devised ways to enjoy water in a sanitary way, the world had water buckets, water coolers, and whatever other sources that were manned by scoops or cups everyone had to share. Every strange, thirsty person put their mouth on the same cup and left it there for the next person, all covered in their bacteria-laden slobber.
The disposable cup has actually been credited with saving countless lives. They were invented near the beginning of the 1900s and when the influenza epidemic of 1918 hit; they exploded in popularity. Imagine trying to get through another contagious disease outbreak in which we all had to share a cup with strangers when we were thirsty. That’s just how things used to be and thankfully we don’t have to endure that anymore thanks to fountains and Dixie cups.
7. Before Parks Were Big People Used to Picnic in Graveyards
In the UK, people picnic about three times a year. During the Covid lockdown when restaurants were scarce, Americans took up picnicking as a pastime and that habit has lasted even as Covid fears died down and restaurants opened again. People like to head to the park and have some lunch.
The thing about picnicking in a park is that you need a park and public parks are a relatively new invention. England’s green spaces were mostly private until the mid-1800s. In America, Boston Common was the first public park back in the 1600s but up until 1800, there were only 16 parks in the entire country. In other words, there weren’t a lot of places to picnic. At least, not the ones you’d think.
Before parks, the best green space you could access as a regular person was a cemetery, and that’s where people went to picnic. They were green; they were peaceful, and they had a lot of unused space where you could toss down a blanket and have some sandwiches.
Various epidemics might have kept people heading to cemeteries regularly, but the move away from morbid and dark cemeteries to landscaped, beautiful ones made them an ideal meeting place for an afternoon.
6. Computers Used to Come With a Lock and Key
There’s a good chance you’re using your phone to check this out. You may also be using a laptop. Far less likely is an actual desktop computer but, if you are, hello! Does your computer have a keyhole in it?
Once upon a time, computers came with a lock and key right there on the case that held the hard drive. IBM pioneered these, and they existed in a time before password protection was the norm. If you used your little key and locked your computer, it prevented someone else from coming along and typing anything and potentially ruining whatever you had been working on.
Presumably this was meant for work or school where there was a chance some other person might try to use your machine when you were grabbing a snack or taking a bathroom break. On the downside, not every manufacturer actually connected that lock to anything so sometimes if you tried to use it, nothing happened.
5. Airplane Windows Used to Be Square Until People Started Dying
Most of the windows we encounter in life are square or rectangular. It’s easy to work with frames that have 90-degree angles, after all. But on an airplane the windows are round and that’s not just a fun quirk of aviation. They used to have square windows, but they had to get rid of them for a terrifying reason. Square windows get sucked out of airplanes at high altitudes.
Modern airplanes fly at high altitudes like 30,000 feet. This creates less drag on an airplane and allows it to fly faster and more smoothly. But, because of the air pressure up there, cabins require pressurization.
If you have a cylinder-shaped fuselage under pressure with square windows in it, the air pressure really focuses on those sharp corners. The pressure is two to three times what it is anywhere else on the fuselage when you have window corners. That, in turn, forces the windows to fly right out of the plane and depressurize the cabin as the plane tears itself apart. If you’re sitting next to that window, maybe you go out with it. Or the whole plane crashes and kills everyone on board, like what happened twice with the de Havilland Comet and its square windows.
Round windows prevent pressure from focusing anywhere so the planes don’t tear apart. It’s a good choice.
4. Before Cutlery Almost No One Had an Overbite
About 8% of people have a severe overbite and about 20% of people have some kind of overbite. They’re pretty common then, but they didn’t used to be. You can blame the invention of forks for a lot of it.
According to anthropologists, 250 years ago just about no one had an overbite. You can look through old skeletons if you’re into that sort of thing and see for yourself. Folks had some very nicely aligned jaws back in the day.
When researching the history of overbites, research showed that China developed them about 900 years before Europeans, which seems bizarre if the overbite was just an evolutionary change as had been previously thought. Why did the Chinese develop them 900 years earlier than Europeans? The Chinese began using chopsticks 900 years before Europeans started using cutlery.
Without utensils, humans used their hands. You picked up food and tore a chunk off. You had to use your jaw muscles to bite and tear and chew more. But forks and knives allowed you to do half of that work with your hands. Cutting and eating small pieces puts less strain on your jaw. Jaws weaken and overbites form.
3. Before Alarm Clocks, Knocker Uppers Woke People Up
Do you use an alarm clock to wake up? Maybe an alarm on your phone? That’s standard for many of us but the alarm clock wasn’t really a thing until the mid-1800s and it took a while to gain widespread acceptance. So what happened before that? Knocker Uppers happened.
People who needed to wake up back in the day had to hire someone to wake them and that person was a Knocker Upper. Despite the weird pregnancy vibe the name implies, the job of the Knocker Upper is to use a long, thin stick and knock on your window to let you know it’s time to work.
Especially helpful in towns where shift work was the norm, the Knocker Upper would go house to house where people had paid them and tap a few times then move on, making sure everyone was up. In some towns, these people were still working as late as the 1970s.
2. Prior to Toilet Paper, People Used Sears Catalogs
In Western culture, toilet paper is pretty ubiquitous. If you went into a bathroom anywhere in America and there was no toilet paper, you’d probably panic a little. But toilet paper as we know it didn’t exist until 1857 and research shows pooping was invented quite a few years earlier. That means, before TP became the norm, something else was common. That something was, for a time, the Sears catalog.
If you’re too young, you may not know that Sears used to be a big deal department store. Every year they produced massive catalogs to show off what they had for sale and sent them to people’s homes. Usually a couple of catalogs per year, in fact, just hundreds of pages of stuff you could buy. Crazy, right? So every home had these huge books of paper sitting around, often for no reason.
Before the advent of glossy paper, Sears catalogs were printed on flat, soft newsprint paper and the rest of the story writes itself here. People kept the catalogs in their bathrooms or the outhouse. It wasn’t just a thing some people did; it was so commonplace that the Farmer’s Almanac, another choice toilet paper publication, used to send out copies with a hole pre-drilled in the corner so you could hang it up in the outhouse and tear off sheets as needed.
1. Before Trees The Earth Had Giant Mushrooms
There are currently an estimated three trillion trees on Earth. That seems like a lot but we are also cutting down 15 billion per year and it takes these things a few years to grow back. The idea of a world without trees is absolutely foreign to everyone alive today. But there was once a time when that was the norm. Like everything else, trees had to start somewhere. And before them? Mushrooms.
Around 400 million years ago, trees were not dominating the landscape. The forests of the world were made up of Prototaxites, towering fungi that grew to 24 feet in height with trunks three feet in diameter. Now that’s a magic mushroom.
While the massive mushrooms were the kings of the forest back in their heyday, they went extinct about 350 million years ago. But when they did exist, they competed against plants that were barely more than shrubs. There was nothing larger in the world and they would have dominated the skyline wherever they grew.