You've probably heard an older person begin a sentence with the words "back in my day." The world was different back then, and we all know it. But what's sometimes lost is just how different things were in the everyday world. We also don't need to look at the world of life-changing inventions like cars or antibiotics to appreciate how strange things were back then.
10. Before the introduction of insulin, diabetics had to live on dangerous low-carb diets.
Frederick Banting discovered insulin at the University of Toronto in 1921, changing the world for millions of diabetics. Before insulin, the life expectancy of diabetics was three or four years, and those weren't exactly the most pleasant years.
Before insulin, the only treatment for diabetes was dietary changes. If you have type 2 diabetes, this can actually work in some cases. Type 2 diabetics have an impaired ability to produce or use insulin, and often weight loss and dietary changes can help lower blood glucose levels and improve health. On the other hand, type 1 diabetics don't produce insulin. Diet can't really help them at all because their pancreas doesn't function, so the stereotype of eating less or trying to be healthier isn't helpful at all.
To squeeze a few extra years of life out of people, doctors put diabetics on diets so strict they would be considered criminals today. Carbohydrates, which turn into sugar in the blood, had to be completely eliminated. Some diabetics ate as few as 450 calories a day, at least until the diet literally starved them to death.
9. Stimulating ovulation in rats was a way to test for pregnancy before home pregnancy tests.
In 1977, you could finally head to the pharmacy and buy a home pregnancy test for the first time. But what were women supposed to do before then? There was a method developed 50 years before this convenient home test that could also tell you if you were pregnant, but instead of urinating on a stick that could measure your hormone levels, you needed access to a female rat and someone capable of dissecting it. You can see why the home test proved more popular.
In 1927, doctors Selmar Aschheim and Bernhard Zondek developed the so-called AZ test. The urine of a woman who suspected she might be pregnant was injected into an immature female rat or mouse. If the woman was pregnant, her hormones would trigger estrus and trigger the rodent to go into estrus. To determine this, the animal had to be dissected.
Over the years, other methods existed, including mixing urine with wine, which could sometimes yield accurate results, and urinating on barley or wheat seeds to see if they would grow. Modern tests have shown that this testing method was accurate in 70% cases.
8. Before the advent of small carrots, the big ones were thrown in the trash.
In the carrot world, there are regular carrots and then there are baby carrots. Yes, there are colorful carrots, but they're still full-sized, mostly regular ones. And at some point, you may have heard the devastating news that there's no such thing as a baby carrot; they're just regular carrots with the whole thing cut off. Media sources often repeat this story every few years, humorously portraying it as scandalous.
What most sources don't understand is why baby carrots exist and what the world was like before they appeared. It turns out that baby carrots aren't just a wasteful way to make root vegetables more palatable. In fact, the opposite is true.
In the early 1980s, carrot production was incredibly wasteful. More carrots were thrown away than sold. This is because people love beautiful food, and carrots are often ugly. This, coupled with the fact that carrots can be good with a rotten end, means all carrots are now useless.
Carrot farmer Mike Yurosek, tired of losing money, started peeling his ugly carrots by hand. It was labor-intensive, so he bought a green bean chopper, which cut the carrots into tiny 2-inch pieces. The carrot was born.
Within one year of the Yurosek innovation's introduction, carrot consumption in the US increased by 301 tp3t. Over the next 10 years, it increased by another 1171 tp3t. The waste is used as animal feed, and consumers now enjoy better nutrition overall.
7. Before elevators, the rich lived on the ground floor and the poor lived on the upper floors.
When you look at a high-rise apartment building today, you'll notice that the upper floors often look a little different thanks to large, luxurious penthouses. The top floors of buildings are reserved for the wealthiest residents, who can afford the best views. In midtown Manhattan, there's a $90 million penthouse. In Monaco, there's a $335 million penthouse.
Do you know why a penthouse is so expensive? It's one thing and one thing only—the elevator. Before elevators were invented, the wealthiest residents lived closer to the ground. The poorer you were, the higher you went. The top floor of many buildings was considered servants' quarters. And this makes sense when you consider that people on the top floor were planning to carry all their furniture up the stairs to move in. They could collide with people on the upper floors.
6. Before barbed wire, the meat industry was much smaller and more expensive.
Before barbed wire, the world had far fewer cliché tattoos, but that's not the only contribution this method of secure fencing is responsible for. In the pre-barbed wire world, beef was a much rarer commodity, and we owe much of the modern meat industry to barbed wire. Without it, perhaps the hamburger-based fast food industry wouldn't exist.
Cattle ranching ceased in the 1870s because it couldn't be contained. Cattle would destroy other crops, and they couldn't be contained if herds were limited to that size. All existing fencing methods proved ineffective, but the invention of barbed wire in 1874 changed everything.
Cattle could be kept on pasture, allowing them to grow larger, stronger, and healthier. Driven herding was no longer necessary, allowing the animals to grow much larger and produce more meat. New breeds, such as Angus, could also be developed because they no longer had to endure these long drives, which, in turn, improved the meat industry as a whole.
5. Before the invention of the heart-lung machine, cross-circulation connected two living patients together
A heart-lung bypass is the procedure you'll undergo if a surgeon ever needs to open you up for heart surgery. A machine, often called a heart-lung machine, takes over the functions of your heart and lungs when they're occupied, but your blood and oxygen must still flow. These machines were developed in the 1950s, and testing resulted in several deaths. From 1951 to 1955, 18 operations were performed. Only one patient survived.
However, before machines, there were successful methods. In 1954, an 11-year-old boy underwent heart surgery and survived thanks to a technique called controlled cross-circulation. For this procedure, his father was anesthetized, and the boy's veins and lungs were connected to his own. His father became a secondary living circulatory system for his own son, allowing blood and oxygen to flow between them while doctors repaired the boy's heart.
4. Before the creation of crash test dummies, live volunteers were used.
Some time after the invention of the automobile, people began to realize that car accidents were very dangerous. But how can you determine the most dangerous moments of a crash without injuring people? Enter the crash test dummy. They were developed throughout the 1950s and 1960s as a means of testing not only cars but also airplanes and anything else that could travel at dangerous speeds.
However, the adoption of the crash test dummy wasn't immediate. There were many car manufacturers, and numerous safety tests were conducted over decades before it became an industry standard. That's why, from 1960 to 1975, people like Lawrence Patrick volunteered for crash tests.
Patrick's contribution to impact testing was invaluable. While a crash test dummy can show how severe an accident might be, it can't tell you how much force a human can withstand. That was Patrick's job.
Living subjects like Patrick weren't the only ones. Some studies even used pregnant baboons, strapped to cars, for testing.
3. Marathon runners used to drink during races.
The first marathon dates back to 490 BC, so it's an ancient custom. A modern marathon can involve a lot of planning and fanfare, and you'll often see people on the sidelines providing runners with water and sports drinks to keep them hydrated. But there was a time when we weren't entirely sure what a person should drink while running, and this led to many drunken marathons.
On the one hand, if you're running and tired, you feel thirsty, so drinking something seems like a good idea. On the other hand, the fact that runners were once advised to drink champagne seems confusing at best, since drinking and gassing can't help your running game.
A century ago, runners at the Boston Marathon had runners who kept pace on bicycles or cars and handed out whiskey or brandy when runners needed a pick-me-up. Cognac and wine were also available at various races.
The reason for this seems to have been that, although thirst was generally recognized as a bad habit, water was generally considered weak and not very manly.
2. Before the advent of radar, combat tubes helped detect enemy aircraft.
Radar has been an invaluable tool for many years, and its importance in warfare is difficult to overstate. If enemy planes are coming to destroy you, knowing where they are is crucial. But radar wasn't invented until 1935, and the dangers from above existed long before that.
Before the advent of radar, the Japanese, in particular, developed a method for tracking enemy aircraft that involved the use of the so-called "battle tube." And the name is remarkably apt. Battle tubes were gigantic horns pointed skyward. A person stood on the narrow end of these enormous horns, with the wide-open end of the mouth pointed skyward. The intention was for the open end to detect the sound of an approaching aircraft before anyone even saw them coming.
There is no evidence that this method was successful in detecting and helping to destroy any aircraft, but Britain and the US attributed their successes with radar to acoustic location methods such as combat tubes before anyone knew that radar was a thing, as a method of keeping it secret.
1. Before modern erasers, people used breadcrumbs.
Everyone makes mistakes, so pencils have erasers, as the saying goes. But what about the time when pencils didn't have erasers? It wasn't an error-free world back then; it was simply one that relied on breadcrumbs.
Since pencil erasers stick to the graphite marks on paper and then rub off when you rub them, the same principle applies to many other substances. Interestingly, before "real" erasers, people simply used bread crumbs.
Rubber erasers were invented in 1858. From about 1612 to 1770, breadcrumbs were the most popular means of fixation simply because they worked, were cheap, and were really easy to get.