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Scary Thoughts
Brian Gongol

These are called "scary thoughts" not because they're intended to frighten, but because they document some of the easily-overlooked changes that have shaped modern life.

• A digital camera that takes photos good enough for a magazine cover costs less than dinner for two at a good restaurant.

• The processor inside a plain-vanilla smartphone is faster than any desktop computer sold in 1999.

• A basic color television cost $400 in 1965. Adjusted for inflation, that would be $2,800 today.

• The Cosby Show was on television a full two years longer than YouTube has even existed

• Nobody had an automatic washing machine until just before World War II

• Nobody ever got allergy relief from an antihistamine tablet before 1937

• The Federal debt is equal to $1,800 for every second that has passed since the US declared independence in 1776.

• The Constitution was written more than 70 years before anyone ever rode a bicycle.

• A first-time voter in November's elections was born the same year the text message was invented.

• Japan was producing nuclear energy for civilian use just 21 years after the bombing of Hiroshima

• Web video is about as old today as movies with sound were when "Snow White" and "The Wizard of Oz" were first released

• The youngest Baby Boomer was born five years before the invention of the laser printer

• Modern radial tires have only been widely used on American cars since the 1970s, saving millions of gallons of gas a year

• Forced-air central heating was only introduced as recently as 1935
• Someday, the Burj Khalifa will outlive its usefulness and have to be dismantled.

• Only 50% of American adults used the Internet in Y2K.
• Today's micro-SD card stores as much data as a full computer hard disk stored ten years ago.

• It took almost 40 years after its invention for the microwave to reach widespread adoption.
• Even if you only know how to plug in a floor lamp, you know more about alternating current than Thomas Jefferson ever did.

• No one had ever seen dedicated pay-TV programming on cable before the Nixon Administration.
• In 1995, the average US household still paid $21 a month in long-distance phone charges. Then the cell phone arrived.

• If Saturn really does close, it will have lasted less than half as long as Packer or Studebaker as an automaker
• Automobiles, airplanes, and television were all invented before anyone figured out how to make antihistamines.
• GPS has only been available for public use since 1993.
• Nobody ever heard the true sound of their own voice before 1877. Today, we get annoyed by voicemail.

• America's first oil well was built 150 years ago, which in turn was 150 years after the start of the Industrial Revolution.
• The porta-potty was invented around the same time as the nuclear bomb
• The first Moon landing is almost as distant in the past today as Lindbergh's crossing of the Atlantic was in 1969.

• Apple sold more iPhones in 2008 than the total number of refrigerators sold in all of the 1920s.
• The majority of American households didn't have air conditioning until the 1970s.
• American highways were rarely paved in concrete before World War II.
• In 1909, the leading cause of death in the United States was tuberculosis. Today, it kills fewer than 700 a year.

• Nobody knew CPR before 1960.
• If allergy medications recover just two weeks of lost productivity for 40 million Americans, that's 1.5 million person-years saved annually.
• Nobody thought to develop a measuring scale for tornado intensity until 1971. Average warning lead time today is 13 minutes.
• Too bad Leonardo da Vinci was born 550 years early for custom manufacturing. With CAD, he could've built most of his designs.

• Open-heart surgery is younger than many Baby Boomers, some of whom will live to have bio-engineered heart replacements.
• More people on the planet today would recognize a cell phone than a corded phone.
• Five years after WWII ended, Toyota was a major supplier to the US Army in the Korean War. What will we soon import from Iraq?
• The widespread use of weather radar started after President Obama was born. Now it's used to identify tornadoes before they happen.
• Some day, schoolkids will look for WhiteHouse.gov archives from the Reagan Administration and won't know why they don't exist.
• Scheduled transatlantic passenger flights have only been around for 70 years. No wonder we're baffled by pandemics.

• Henry Ford set the land speed record in 1904: 91 mph. Do you know anyone who drives a car that couldn't pass him today?
• We've only been disinfecting drinking water in the United States for about a century
• Gandhi's campaign for India's independence predated commercial TV west of the Mississippi. Would he have used Twitter, Facebook?
• Legend says Abe Lincoln went to great lengths to borrow and return books. Imagine if he'd lived to see Amazon.com and Netflix.

• In the last 65 years, we've gone from never having seen Earth from space to real-time satellite views of much of the planet.
• Anything my grandmother learned in college in 1925 is most likely accessible in under 60 seconds using Google on my PDA.
• Akira Kurosawa and Stanley Kubrick were born at least a generation too early to take advantage of digital video cameras.
• My new cell phone contained 5 pre-recorded songs, which exceeds the world's entire library of recorded music in Mozart's time.
• Thanks to freeways and automobiles, you can cover the entire Oregon Trail today in under 24 hours.
• I know more about nuclear physics than Benjamin Franklin ever did. You do, too.

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Gongol.com -- posted 2009.0504 -- last updated 2011.1117