Hard Fork's 100 Most Iconic Technologies

Summary

Hard Fork Podcast Episode Summary: "Hard Fork's 100 Most Iconic Technologies"

Podcast Information:

• Title: Hard Fork
• Host/Author: The New York Times
• Description: "Hard Fork" explores the latest advancements in technology each week, demystifying the rapidly evolving tech landscape.
• Episode: Hard Fork's 100 Most Iconic Technologies
• Release Date: November 29, 2024

---

Introduction

In this special Thanksgiving episode, hosts Kevin Roose and Casey Newton decide to pivot from their usual critical discussions about technology's challenges to a celebratory countdown of the 100 most iconic technologies of all time. Inspired by Casey's experience with the podcast "Las Culturistas," they embarked on creating a similar list to honor technological advancements that have fundamentally shaped human civilization.

Casey Newton explains the genesis of the list:

"[...] there's been so much incredible technology since the dawn of mankind, and frankly, Kevin, we've talked about very little of it on our show."
([03:14])

Kevin Roose humorously adds to the list-making process:

"We made a Google Doc and we just started putting things in it, and that's how we got the hard fork 100."
([04:20])

---

Countdown Highlights

100 to 91: Foundations and Everyday Innovations

• 100. Boats ([05:14]): Highlighted as one of the earliest means of water transportation, allowing humans to navigate and explore waterways safely.

• 99. Calculators ([05:50]): Essential for education and business, transforming how mathematical computations are performed.

  "The best thing I've ever done on a calculator is play the game snake on my TI 83 in trigonometry."
  (Casey Newton, [06:12])

• 98. NFTs ([06:23]): A controversial yet groundbreaking technology that introduced digital scarcity and ownership on the internet.

  "They did open up a new way of seeing the Internet, of creating scarcity on the Internet where none existed before."
  (Casey Newton, [06:29])

• 97. Oregon Trail ([07:11]): A classic educational video game that made learning about history engaging and interactive.

• 96. The Spinning Jenny ([07:35]): Played a pivotal role in the Industrial Revolution by increasing textile production efficiency.

90 to 81: Digital Age Catalysts

• 90. Nintendo DS ([10:06]): Revolutionized handheld gaming and left a lasting legacy with franchises like Pokémon.

• 89. Zoom ([11:09]): Became indispensable during the pandemic, transforming remote communication and work.

• 86. Linux ([13:02]): An open-source operating system that underpins billions of devices and the majority of the world's supercomputers.

  "Everything runs on Linux. It also powers Android, so billions of devices that way."
  (Kevin Roose, [14:03])

• 85. Podcasts ([14:20]): Changed how people consume audio content, fostering diverse and niche communities.

• 84. Fracking ([16:21]): Revolutionized energy production, making the U.S. a net energy exporter and altering global politics.

80 to 71: Transformative Technologies

• 80. Juul ([16:56]): While controversial due to health implications, it significantly impacted the vaping industry and smoking trends.

• 78. Netflix ([17:58]): Transformed media consumption from physical rentals to streaming, popularizing "Netflix and chill."

• 75. Disposable Diapers ([18:59]): Enhanced convenience for parents, though raised environmental concerns.

• 73. Microsoft Excel ([20:33]): A staple in business and education, enabling complex data management and analysis.

• 70. Insulin ([22:23]): Revolutionized diabetes treatment, saving countless lives and improving quality of life for sufferers.

70 to 61: Integrative and Essential Tools

• 67. Doom ([24:21]): Pioneered first-person shooters and multiplayer online gaming, influencing modern gaming and GPU development.

• 64. AOL Instant Messenger ([26:11]): Served as a precursor to modern instant messaging and social networks, fostering early online communication.

• 60. GPS ([26:52]): Integral for navigation, transforming transportation, logistics, and daily commutes.

  "We would have missed out on a great episode of the Office, which is where Michael and Dwight are driving in a car with GPS and they follow the GPS and end up driving into a lake."
  (Kevin Roose, [27:12])

---

Notable Discussions and Insights

Technological Duality

Hosts frequently discuss the dual nature of technology, acknowledging both its benefits and unintended consequences. For instance:

• Haber Bosch Process ([12:50]): While enabling mass fertilizer production and sustaining global population growth, it also caused significant environmental damage through fertilizer runoffs.

• CRISPR ([53:21]): Celebrated for its potential to cure genetic diseases but also raising ethical questions about gene editing.

Humorous Banter and Personal Anecdotes

Interspersed with technical discussions are moments of humor and personal stories that humanize the conversation:

• Turkey Deep Frying ([00:51]):

  "I never have. And for this reason, I'm confident that's how I would die."
  (Casey Newton, [00:51])

• Vine Nostalgia ([08:56]):

  "The first vine ever shared was on January 23, 2013. [...]"
  (Casey Newton, [09:20])

• Penicillin's Accidental Discovery ([75:25]):

  "Which is such a genius idea, because if I had come back and I had seen that mold had killed the bacteria, I'd be like, oh my God, we have to kill the mold."
  (Kevin Roose, [75:26])

Historical Context and Modern Impact

The hosts provide historical backgrounds for each technology, linking past innovations to present-day applications:

• The Spinning Jenny ([07:46]):

  "It was one of the first pieces of equipment that is credited with sparking the industrial revolution."
  (Kevin Roose, [07:44])

• Electricity ([81:28]):

  "Modern life as we know it today would not be possible without electricity."
  (Kevin Roos, [81:42])

Ethical and Societal Implications

Discussions often venture into the ethical territories of technological advancements:

• Atomic Bomb ([69:36]):

  "It could kill us all. It could save the world. The jury's still out, but I think it's fair to say, already iconic."
  (Kevin Roose, [69:37])

• Vaccines ([33:53]):

  "Vaccines are an amazing, amazing technology."
  (Casey Newton, [47:32])

---

Conclusion

As the countdown nears its end, Kevin Roose and Casey Newton reflect on the vast landscape of human ingenuity. They acknowledge that while some technologies have had overwhelmingly positive impacts, others bring complex challenges that society continues to navigate.

Casey Newton emphasizes the importance of recognizing both the triumphs and pitfalls of technological advancements:

"[...] celebrate them a little bit, and frankly, try to point the way forward for other inventors out there who want to have a positive impact on the world."
(Casey Newton, [87:10])

The episode concludes with an invitation for listeners to suggest additional technologies for future lists, ensuring an ongoing dialogue about what shapes our world.

---

Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Boat Discovery:

  "It's believed to be called the Pech canoe, and it was discovered in 1955 in the Netherlands. It's believed to be about 10,000 years old."
  (Casey Newton, [05:41])

• NFT's Impact:

  "I actually sold it in a few. Remember that?"
  (Kevin Roose, [06:47])

• Linux Ubiquity:

  "Everything runs on Linux. It also powers Android, so billions of devices that way."
  (Kevin Roose, [14:03])

• Compound Interest Significance:

  "Compound interest drives the world today, and without it, we would be a much different society."
  (Kevin Roose, [27:26])

• Penicillin's Accidental Discovery:

  "Which is such a genius idea, because if I had come back and I had seen that mold had killed the bacteria, I'd be like, oh my God, we have to kill the mold."
  (Kevin Roose, [75:26])

---

Final Thoughts

The "Hard Fork" episode offers an engaging and informative journey through the annals of technological innovation. By blending historical insights with modern-day implications and a touch of humor, Kevin Roose and Casey Newton craft a compelling narrative that celebrates human progress while prompting listeners to reflect on the complex legacy of technology.

For those interested in the intersection of technology, society, and culture, this episode serves as both an educational and entertaining exploration of the tools and inventions that have defined our civilization.

Transcript

[Casey Newton]

Whether you're starting or scaling your company's security program, demonstrating top notch security practices and establishing trust is more important than ever. Vanta automates compliance for SoC2, ISO 27001 and more. With Vanta, you can streamline security reviews by automating questionnaires and demonstrating your security posture with a customer facing Trust Center. Over 7,000 global companies use Vanta to manage risk and prove security in real time. Get $1,000 off vanta when you go to vanta.comhardfork that's vanta.com hardfork for $1,000 off. I love Thanksgiving. I love the chance to actually, you know, prepare things a couple days in advance. You know, it's very exciting. I don't know if you've ever, you know, brined a turkey over like one or two days. Yeah, that's like a. To me, that's thrilling putting that much effort into dinner.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah. Have you ever done the, like, deep fried turkey?

[Casey Newton]

I never have. And for this reason, I'm confident that's how I would die.

[Kevin Roos]

It's true. You can find all kinds of videos. People like, almost burning down their houses because of their attempts to deep fry turkeys.

[Casey Newton]

But don't you kind of feel like.

[Kevin Roos]

That'D be a little fun, Like a little, a little extreme?

[Casey Newton]

Of course.

[Kevin Roos]

Little frisson of danger?

[Casey Newton]

Well, it's like, it's like, you know, on 4th of July when people carry their fireworks out into the street and they have the sparklers and everything, it looks very cool. I will not touch them because all I can think about is the emergency room statistics that I read on July 5 every year. But I'm happy to watch it. And that's how I feel about somebody frying a turkey.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm gonna fry a turkey this year.

[Casey Newton]

All right, well, let us know how it goes and if you need emergency medical attention.

[Kevin Roos]

I'm Kevin Roos, a tech columnist at the New York Times.

[Casey Newton]

I'm Casey Newton from Platformer, and this is Hard Fork. This week, it's a Thanksgiving special. We're counting down the 100 most iconic technologies of all time. There's lots to be grateful for. What will be number one?

[Kevin Roos]

It's gotta be the scrub daddy.

[Casey Newton]

We'll find out.

[Kevin Roos]

Well, Casey, we have something a little different today.

[Casey Newton]

We do, Kevin. We have a celebration.

[Kevin Roos]

A celebration of technology.

[Casey Newton]

Yes. You know, so often on the show, we, we come to you week after week and we tell you about the challenges that technology is creating, the things that we're worried about. But when it Came time for our Thanksgiving episode. Kevin, you and I said to each other, maybe we could just celebrate today.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes. So we are going to do something today that we've never done before. We are going to do a list of the hundred most iconic technologies.

[Casey Newton]

We are. And if I could say a word about how this came about. The other day, I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, Las Culturistas, and they counted down the 400 most iconic people in pop culture. And it was so much fun. And I laughed and I smiled and I learned so many facts. And I thought, I am going to rip this off for Hard Fork. It was such a good idea, and it was so fun. And I thought, there's been so much incredible technology, you know, since the dawn of mankind. And frankly, Kevin, we've talked about very little of it on our show.

[Kevin Roos]

It's true. Yeah, it's true. Very few episodes devoted to things like the Fulcrum, but today, the Fulcrum gets its due.

[Casey Newton]

It gets its due.

[Kevin Roos]

And 99 other iconic technologies. So, Kasey, what do we mean when we say iconic technology?

[Casey Newton]

That is a great question. You know, because just because something is on this list doesn't mean that it is 100% good. It doesn't mean that no bad things have ever happened as a result of this technology. But it means that it has earned a place in the landscape as something where. If you were putting together a list, as we did, of the technologies that really sum up the past few thousand years on Earth, this belongs on that list.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes. I would say it is technologies that changed the world.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah.

[Kevin Roos]

Our lives or both. Yeah.

[Casey Newton]

And we have a few facts that we can share with you about these technologies, so maybe you can learn a little something. And we also imagine that you're probably going to disagree with us on some of these, Kevin.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah. And when that happens, just know that you are wrong. That's right, because this is the authoritative list.

[Casey Newton]

Now, Kevin, tell our listeners about the authoritative process that we went through to accurately rank all 100 technologies on this list.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah. We consulted a panel of dozens of Experts, historians, engineers, CEOs, government officials. We commissioned a survey, and we sent it to hundreds of thousands of people. No, we made a Google Doc and we just started putting things in it, and that's how we got the hard fork 100.

[Casey Newton]

And it raises the question, is Google Docs on the iconic 100? And. Well, you're just going to have to listen to find out.

[Kevin Roos]

All right, so we're going to count down from 100 to 1 we're going to try to do all of these entries in 30 seconds or less.

[Casey Newton]

That's right. We are going to try to get through these quickly. You know, we know you have places to be on Thanksgiving weekend, so we're going to do this very judiciously and expeditiously. All of a sudden, I sound like Don King.

[Kevin Roos]

I'm going to say we're going to try to do it deliciously.

[Casey Newton]

Oh, perfect. Even better. Even better.

[Kevin Roos]

All right, let's go. 100 iconic technologies.

[Casey Newton]

It is time to start the countdown. And we will begin with number 100, boats. Boats are an incredible way to get across the water. Before the advent of boats, if you came to a wide river and you needed to get across, you were out of luck. Y.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes. And, you know, many people died trying to swim across large bodies of water. And then they figured out, wait a minute, we could make a craft to carry us across the water. And Casey, do you know what the oldest boat in the world is?

[Casey Newton]

What's the oldest boat?

[Kevin Roos]

Well, it's believed to be called the Pech canoe, and it was discovered in 1955 in the Netherlands. It's believed to be about 10,000 years old.

[Casey Newton]

Amazing. Amazing. Well, that brings us to number 99, calculators. Oh, boy. I would not have made it out of math class without one of these. Kevin.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes. So electronic calculators have been around since the early 1960s. Texas Instruments made the first ever handheld calculator in 1967. And Casey, what would you say the best thing you've ever done on a calculator is?

[Casey Newton]

The best thing I've ever done on a calculator is play the game snake on my TI 83 in trigonometry.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah. I use it to factor some quadratic equations. So that's the on label use.

[Casey Newton]

Very good.

[Kevin Roos]

Okay. Number 98, NFT. Casey, why did NFTs make the list?

[Casey Newton]

Non fungible tokens. Look, they're incredibly controversial. Many people hate them. And yet they did open up a new way of seeing the Internet, of creating scarcity on the Internet where none existed before. And some people think that they might be primed for a comeback in the coming years.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah, I actually sold it in a few. Remember that?

[Casey Newton]

I do. You made a lot of money for this company?

[Kevin Roos]

Well, I made a lot of money for the charity of the New York Times, which I gave the money to. It sold for something like $560,000. That's 350 ETH. Back when I did this as a stunt. I looked that up yesterday and it turns out that would be more than a million dollars today.

[Casey Newton]

That's great. You told me you would never donate to charity. I can't believe you actually went through with that.

[Kevin Roos]

Okay, number 97, Oregon Trail.

[Casey Newton]

Wow. Was this a video game? Classic video game when there were hardly any video games. Somehow they brought a video game into school and it taught us all what dysentery was.

[Kevin Roos]

It's true. My favorite fun fact about Oregon Trail, it was created by three student teachers in Minnesota who are trying to spice up a history class.

[Casey Newton]

Oh, my gosh. Well, and they're all icon cons, every single one. I mean, you want to talk about making history come alive using the power of technology? No one ever did it better than Oregon Trail.

[Kevin Roos]

It's true. I loved Oregon Trail as a game. I mostly loved the part where you could shoot the buffalo.

[Casey Newton]

Number 96, the spinning jenny.

[Kevin Roos]

Casey, what is the spinning jenny?

[Casey Newton]

I honestly have no idea. You're going to have to tell me.

[Kevin Roos]

Okay, well, the spin. I'm glad you asked. The spinning jenny was one of the first pieces of equipment that is credited with sparking the industrial revolution. It allowed people to spin and weave textiles much, much faster. And it may have also contributed to the American Revolution war because the spinning jenny caused the price of British cloth to fall, which flooded the US Market with cheap imports and made American merchants very mad.

[Casey Newton]

You have my head spinning. I'm a spinning Casey. Number 95, radio. Oh, my gosh. Imagine your morning commute in the 1990s and early 2000s without the radio.

[Kevin Roos]

You just have to talk to the other person in your stagecoach.

[Casey Newton]

You'd have to. You'd have to yell at people and the stage coach over radio. I mean, it was one of the first major shifts in the media. Right. Because before then, everything was written down. All of a sudden with radio, you could broadcast, you could broadcast music, you could broadcast talk radio, you could spread vicious lies. It's amazing. Number 94, Vine. Wow. Six second looping clips that set the stage for the short form video era that we still live in to this very day.

[Kevin Roos]

Ken, I miss vine so much.

[Casey Newton]

Oh. I mean, think about all of the iconic vine quotes that are just probably in your head right now. For me, it's back at it again at the Krispy Kreme.

[Kevin Roos]

What about you? I love the one with the rubber ducks. You know which one I'm talking about?

[Casey Newton]

Yes. That all make the noise.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes. So go look up rubber duck vine if you have not seen that. The first vine ever shared was on January 23, 2013. When Dick Costello, then the CEO of Twitter, tweeted a six second video of someone preparing steak tartare at LaSalle, a French restaurant in New York City.

[Casey Newton]

Number 93, the KitchenAid stand mixer.

[Kevin Roos]

Casey, you put this one on the list. Why?

[Casey Newton]

Well, here's why, Kevin. Because this thing has me rolling in dough. And not the money kind. It's the kind that I'm using to bake cookies, cakes, pies. And let me tell you something. If you're a single single person and you're 20, there's a chance that you're thinking, I have to wait until I get married to get a KitchenAid stand mixer. And when I was much younger and in this world I'll never forget, a friend said to me, you know what, Casey? You can just go buy a KitchenAid stand mixer today. And I went and I did it. And Kevin, I would say that, you know, during the pandemic, when I was baking chocolate chip cookies every week, that thing, I was using that as often as I was using my laptop. That's good technology.

[Kevin Roos]

And one fun fact about the KitchenAid stand mixer is that the now iconic design was created in the 1930s by Egmont Arends, a former editor who also designed the ice cube dispenser.

[Casey Newton]

No wonder I love them so much. Number 92, barcodes. Oh, boy. Have you been to a restaurant lately? Maybe you've seen. No, that's a QR code.

[Kevin Roos]

But barcodes were the precursor to the QR code, and they made checkout and inventory much, much faster. You had to. Previously, you had to write down every. Everything had to have a number associated with it. But barcodes were this invention that allowed for much faster processing of goods at stores. The first item scanned with a universal product code barcode was a pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit chewing gum on June 26, 1974, in a supermarket in Troy, Ohio. Thank you.

[Casey Newton]

Barcodes number 91, drones. Wow. This is a way you can. You can take a little object and it can fly around and it can take pictures. And with some of the more advanced ones, they can actually even kill a person.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes. We included this on the list because I'm pretty sure that drones are what's going to end our lives.

[Casey Newton]

Yes. But in the meantime, I would still say they have mostly positive applications. And when I watch tv, I'm constantly seeing very cool shots by drones. And I have friends who have drones and take them out and, you know, they'll record themselves, you know, skiing down the side of a mountain.

[Kevin Roos]

Wow. Amazing.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah. Number 90. The Nintendo DS.

[Kevin Roos]

Casey, why'd you put this on?

[Casey Newton]

Look, there are so many amazing game consoles, and I kind of wanted to put all of them on this list, but when I thought about what is a console that really took the world forward? It was the Nintendo ds. It was sort of the evolution of the game. Boy, this was one of the first major mass market handheld consoles. And if you talk to any sort of millennial, they will tell you that some of the happiest memories of their lives are playing Pokemon on their Nintendo DS.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah.

[Casey Newton]

And that's an iconic technology to me. Number 89. Zoom. Wow. Imagine the pandemic without Zoom. You can't.

[Kevin Roos]

It's true. There were other web video conferencing pieces of software, but they were all terrible.

[Casey Newton]

Yes.

[Kevin Roos]

And Zoom came along and really changed the game. And do you know what the original name of Zoom was?

[Casey Newton]

What was it?

[Kevin Roos]

SAS B. Sas B.

[Casey Newton]

Okay. Why is that so much better than Zoom? Catch me on SAS B. Damn. Now, I want to say that. But seriously, though, Zoom was a social lifeline for me for about two years. And while I never want to use it ever again, I do respect the time I spent with it in 2020 and 2021. Number 88.

[Kevin Roos]

The sun dial.

[Casey Newton]

Oh, my gosh, Kevin, believe it or not, there was a time before watches. There was a time before clocks. And you know what we had? Sundials.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah. Do you, like, ever think about who the first person ever was who was like, you know, what would be interesting and good a way to tell what time it was?

[Casey Newton]

I mean, imagine being the first person to have that idea and just be like, wait a minute. We could just put a stick in the ground. Was that the first sundial? A stick in the ground?

[Kevin Roos]

No, that would be the sun stick in the ground. It was a dial that let you know what time it was. That's why it's called a sundial.

[Casey Newton]

Number 87.

[Kevin Roos]

The Haber Bosch process.

[Casey Newton]

Oh, go off, King.

[Kevin Roos]

I love this one.

[Casey Newton]

Go off.

[Kevin Roos]

Did you know that fertilizer is one of the most important things in the world because it allows for mass agriculture?

[Casey Newton]

Absolutely.

[Kevin Roos]

And before humans learned to synthesize ammonia using the Haber Bosch process, nitrogen was a major constraint on the proliferation of life on this planet. You need fertilizer to grow crops. To make fertilizer, you need ammonia. The Haber Bosch process was an invention that allowed us to mass produce fertilizer. And a 2008 study estimated that without the Haber Bosch process, about half the world's population wouldn't have enough food. The mass production of fertilizer has also been linked to serious environmental damage. And runoffs from fertilizer are one of the leading things damaging the earth. So in conclusion, the Haber Bosch process. It's a land of contrasts.

[Casey Newton]

Number 86. Linux open source software is a huge. You know, before Linux really entered its heyday, so much software it just, it came in a box, it was packaged, you were paying 100 bucks for it. And this created a lot of problems. And then along came Linus Torvalds Kevin, and he built this open source operating system and he actually gave it away for free. And this enabled so much innovation that we continue to see people build onto this very day.

[Kevin Roos]

Everything runs on Linux. It also powers Android, so billions of devices that way, and the top 500 fastest supercomputers in the world all run on Linux.

[Casey Newton]

Number 85, podcasts. Put it this way, if it were for podcasts, you'd have to be talking to your family right now.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes, this may have been a little selfish to include this on the list, but I do think they're an important technology. And do you know that Ben Hammersley, the journalist who is credited with coining the term podcasting, also suggested two other names for this emerging form of audio broadcast.

[Casey Newton]

Let me guess, number one. SAS B.

[Kevin Roos]

No, the two other names he suggested were audio blogging and guerilla media. So if those had taken off, you could be guerillain this podcast right now.

[Casey Newton]

I think we found our way to the right one. Number 84, fracking. RuPaul's favorite technology. I'll say that it's so important. Tell us about fracking.

[Kevin Roos]

Well, fracking is a method of extracting natural gas from shale deposits found deep underground. And while it does have many environmental side effects and is rightly controversial, it has also allowed the US to become a net energy exporter and has totally changed global politics. We used to fight wars over oil, Kasey, but we don't fight as many of them because we now have this plentiful deposit of natural gas.

[Casey Newton]

Why does it sound like this item was placed by the national fracking council? Number 83. Thoughts? Oh, my gosh. Can you imagine? There was a time when you would be just typing on your typewriter and all the letters just looked one way. Along came fonts, Kevin. And with the rise of desktop publishing, all of a sudden, kids like me could design our own newsletters, our own zines, our own websites, and use different fonts to convey different aspects of our personalities. It's so important, it's like a little bit of art. And in fact, Wingdings, which was one of those early 90s popular fonts, was one of the first ways that we were able to bring art into publishing.

[Kevin Roos]

Because what's the best font?

[Casey Newton]

The best font is to me, Futura. How about for you?

[Kevin Roos]

I'm an Arial guy, but do you know what the most used font in the world is?

[Casey Newton]

What's that?

[Kevin Roos]

It's probably Roboto. You know what Roboto is?

[Casey Newton]

Domo arigato. Mr. Roboto.

[Kevin Roos]

Default font on Android devices.

[Casey Newton]

Number 82, Patreon. Patreon is so great because it's just an indictment of YouTube. Patreon is just a group of features that YouTube should have had but didn't. And one day Jack Conte and his friends said, hey, what if you really liked a YouTuber and you could just pay them directly to make the thing that you want to see more of? And frankly, it kicked off the creator revolution in a big way.

[Kevin Roos]

I agree with all that. I have nothing to add, period.

[Casey Newton]

Number 81, concrete. Now, Kevin, give us some concrete examples.

[Kevin Roos]

Well, concrete is a mixture of cement with aggregates like sand and gravel, plus water. And did you know that it is the second most used substance in the world after water?

[Casey Newton]

I would never have guessed that.

[Kevin Roos]

Twice as much concrete as used in construction as all other building materials combined. Without concrete, no skyscrapers, no buildings, no.

[Casey Newton]

Cities, no life, no icons.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah.

[Casey Newton]

Number 80, Juul, one of my favorite singers.

[Kevin Roos]

No, no, we're talking about the vaping technology. Not the singer Juul or the item, the gemstone Juul. But Juul was it kicked off the e cigarette sort of vaping revolution, which has had many unintended consequences and has hooked an entire generation on nicotine, but has also probably saved some people from smoking tobacco. And tobacco use has been falling. So I think we can say the legacy of Juul is mixed at best. But it is an important technology and.

[Casey Newton]

It is an icon. Number 79, anesthesia. Oh, boy. I would not want to have major surgery without it.

[Kevin Roos]

And yet for thousands of years, people had surgery without anesthesia.

[Casey Newton]

Can you imagine the screams that must have been coming out of the world when we didn't have anesthesia?

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah, thank God for anesthesia. Do you know what the first local anesthetic was?

[Casey Newton]

What was that?

[Kevin Roos]

Cocaine.

[Casey Newton]

Interesting.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah.

[Casey Newton]

You know, I went on a date with an anesthesiologist once. Really put me to sleep. Number 78, Netflix. Oh, my goodness. Remember before Netflix you had to go to the video store often. It was called Blockbuster. And you'd have to bring back the cassette tape within five or seven days or they would find you, Kevin.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah, and you had to rewind it or you wouldn't be kind.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah. And then Netflix came along and said, hey, keep the dang DVD for as long as you want, and you can maybe invite a hookup over and have a little bit of what came to be known as a Netflix and chill.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah, thanks, Netflix.

[Casey Newton]

Number 77, screws.

[Kevin Roos]

Screws are so important, Casey. Do you know?

[Casey Newton]

You're telling me.

[Kevin Roos]

But screws seriously are important because once they became standardized, all of a sudden you could have interchangeable parts. Oh. And you never think about that, but it was so important that we landed on a standard screw where you could put one screw from one thing into another thing. And that made a lot of stuff possible.

[Casey Newton]

Beautiful. Number 76, seatbelts. Oh, my gosh. You do not want to be in a car without a seatbelt. Imagine there's a crash. You could go flying out the window.

[Kevin Roos]

Seatbelts are probably the best thing that Ralph Nader ever did for this world.

[Casey Newton]

Better even than running for president 11 times.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes, yes. His campaign to install seatbelts in cars was a major part of why they installed them, and that has greatly reduced traffic deaths.

[Casey Newton]

Number 75, disposable diapers.

[Kevin Roos]

Casey, as a parent whose child wears diapers, I cannot imagine the world before disposable diapers. And yet, for thousands of years, children were raised with cloth diapers or no diapers at all, or rubber pants.

[Casey Newton]

Wasn't that better for the environment, Kevin?

[Kevin Roos]

Well, it may have been better for the environment, but it was also much worse for babies. They would get skin rashes. The parents would also have to spend many hours a day cleaning their diapers. But in the 1940s, a woman named Marianne Donovan came up with the idea of a disposable diaper that would be better for babies and parents. And she made the first forerunner to the disposable diaper out of a shower curtain.

[Casey Newton]

You know, I heard when she came up with this idea, she was so excited, she pissed herself. Number 74, Amazon Prime. Before Amazon prime, you would often have to leave the house if you wanted goods to come into your home.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes.

[Casey Newton]

And now anymore, every day, package after package, I think for many of us. And did the pandemic illustrate this in a big way? Amazon prime just makes life easier for people.

[Kevin Roos]

It totally revolutionized the world of E commerce. It created a flywheel of loyal customers for Amazon. And I think it helped turn Amazon into the world striding behemoth that it is today.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah. And then at some point they decided we're going to make a TV show called Fleabag. And nobody really quite understood how that fit into the delivery thing, but it was a very good show.

[Kevin Roos]

Do you know what the original code name for Amazon prime Was?

[Casey Newton]

Was it SAS B?

[Kevin Roos]

No, no, it was Futurama. Hmm.

[Casey Newton]

73. Microsoft Excel. You know, some people are going to get mad at us for putting this low on the list, because for some people, Microsoft Excels their entire world. And I get that and I respect it.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah. When I used to cover Wal, I learned just how much of the world runs on Microsoft Excel. It is truly the most important technology in the world of work. And it was actually a huge part of what convinced people to buy the Apple ii, which was one of the first popular personal computers. Steve Jobs has said that actually the key to the Apple II was that it had VisiCalc, which was a spreadsheet program that was a precursor to Microsoft Excel.

[Casey Newton]

When people say killer app, they're talking about Microsoft Excel. Number 72, roads. Oh, my God. Before roads, you would just sort of have to look for a wide spot in the jungle. Let's do this again. Roads are such an important way of getting from one place to another, Kevin.

[Kevin Roos]

That's true. And, Casey, do you know what the longest road in the world is?

[Casey Newton]

What is it, Kevin?

[Kevin Roos]

Well, it's the Pan American highway, which covers nearly 19,000 miles from Alaska to Argentina.

[Casey Newton]

God, that makes me want to go drive it with you right now.

[Kevin Roos]

Let's do it.

[Casey Newton]

Road Trip.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah.

[Casey Newton]

There were no road trips without roads.

[Kevin Roos]

That's true. That's true. And you wouldn't have had the iconic movie Road Trip Trip that starred Tom.

[Casey Newton]

Green or Thelma and Louise, another Road Trip movie that didn't have Road Trip in the title.

[Kevin Roos]

That's true.

[Casey Newton]

Number 71, databases.

[Kevin Roos]

I would put this in the category of Microsoft Excel of, like, extremely boring technology, I.e. that without which the world would cease to function.

[Casey Newton]

Yes. This is the underpinning of so much of modern life. Anytime you do anything, it's being stored in a database, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for bad reasons. But it is making the world go round.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah. And specifically, I would say relational databases, which were invented around 1970, are the key technology that basically the entire world is built on. Now, they are different from other databases, since you're asking, because they organize data into interconnected tables with defined relationships, using primary keys, foreign keys, and SQL to ensure data integrity.

[Casey Newton]

I've been wondering about that. Number 70. Insulin. If you have diabetes, the invention of insulin changed your life and may have saved your life.

[Kevin Roos]

No, it definitely saved your life. Yeah, diabetes, type 1 diabetes used to be basically a death sentence. If you got it, you would probably die.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah.

[Kevin Roos]

And there was not much you could do about it. But in 1889, two German researchers made a discovery because they found out that when you removed the pancreas gland from dogs, the dogs got diabetes and died. And later, in 1921, a young surgeon named Frederick Banting and his assistant Charles Best figured out how to remove insulin from a dog's pancreas. The first human was injected with insulin in 1922. It was a 13 year old boy and it saved his life.

[Casey Newton]

Just goes to show you, never be afraid to remove a dog's gland. You never know what you'll invent. Number 69, only fans. So only fans was invented in 2016, and I think it came out of the movement that Patreon started. But Only Fans is really, I think, the most successful company in the entire creator economy. It is obviously a lot of not safe for work and adult content. But guess what? Adults deserve to have an Internet too. And I think OnlyFans has been a huge positive, not just for the creators there, who are many of whom are making tons of money, but also just for the Internet at large to have a place for adults on the Internet to like, explore their.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah. And if listeners would like to find your OnlyFans page, where can they go?

[Casey Newton]

It's at platformer news. Number 68, Dolby surround sound.

[Kevin Roos]

So why'd you put this on the list?

[Casey Newton]

Here's why. Because before Dolby surround sound, movies didn't sound as cool. You know, like the whole experience of going to a movie is you sit in the seat and then you see the big Dolby thing and they play like the really loud noise and it sounds cool. And like, you know that Star wars is gonna sound much better here than it's gonna sound at your house.

[Kevin Roos]

Okay, well, I don't really use Dolby surround sound much.

[Casey Newton]

No. What do you just want the straight stereo, left, right channels?

[Kevin Roos]

I mean, I guess I'm not an audiophile like you are.

[Casey Newton]

No, you want to have the subwoofer. You want to have those rear speakers. And when it all comes together, I'm telling you, that is the best way to watch anything.

[Kevin Roos]

Will you come to my house and install a Dolby surround sound system?

[Casey Newton]

Absolutely not. Okay. Number 67, doom.

[Kevin Roos]

We're not talking about the concept of Doom. This is the video game Doom, which I would argue changed the course of modern computing. Why is that? Because Doom was one of the first, first person shooter games. It was also one of the first multiplayer Internet games. And it had this thing called texture mapping, which basically started an arms race among the people who built video games, trying to make more and more realistic environments in those video games, which led to the creation of something called the gpu, which was a special processor that we now know was the key to unlocking everything that we now see in AI today, as well as things like cryptocurrency mining.

[Casey Newton]

There is no AI without doom. Number 66, ibuprofen. This really is the main technology that we have to deal with headaches.

[Kevin Roos]

It's true. Do you take a lot of ibuprofen?

[Casey Newton]

I actually prefer Naproxen. It works a little bit better for me. But guess what, Kevin? If there's no naproxen around, I'm going straight to ibuprofen.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah, ibuprofen really, really does a lot for you.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah.

[Kevin Roos]

In the pain department.

[Casey Newton]

And speaking of pain, we have 65 more of these. Number 65, the compass.

[Kevin Roos]

Well, compasses are a great way of figuring out where you're going, which I would say is an important technology if you are lost or if you are trying to navigate over land or sea.

[Casey Newton]

I've never had a sense of direction, but you know what I have had at various points in my life, Kevin? A compass. And from time to time, it has gotten me where I was trying to get.

[Kevin Roos]

When was the last time you used a compass?

[Casey Newton]

I would say when I was trying to get out of the New York City subway and I had Google Maps open on my phone, and I'm sort of spinning around in a circle. That's the last time I used a compass.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah, well, compass is the person who made that really snapped off, because without it, we'd all be lost.

[Casey Newton]

And I believe it was the Han dynasty, was it not?

[Kevin Roos]

No, I think it was Mr. Compass.

[Casey Newton]

Oh, okay. Number 64, AOL Instant Messenger.

[Kevin Roos]

I would say that few technologies have changed my life more than AOL Instant messenger, which came on the scene when I was a child and quickly took over my social life. It was the main way that my friends and I communicated, and it really introduced this concept of instant messaging, which we now see everywhere.

[Casey Newton]

It's ubiquitous. And I would also argue it was essentially the proto social network. Right. Like when I was in college, you would set up your little away message. People would be able to check in on you, see what you were up to the key was to put, like.

[Kevin Roos]

Coded messages to your crush in your away message.

[Casey Newton]

Using song lyrics. Yes.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah, Exactly. The first AOL instant message was sent by Ted Leontis, the AOL executive, to his wife in 1993. And it read, don't be scared. It is me. Love you and miss you.

[Casey Newton]

Oh, that's beautiful.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah.

[Casey Newton]

Number 63, GPS. The global positioning System. This is how your phone and your car know where you are in the world.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes. I would put this in the same category as the compass, but it was sort of like the next big thing in navigation after the compass. And it's part of the modern world. No one would have any idea where they were if it weren't for gps.

[Casey Newton]

We would all be lost simultaneously if it weren't for gps.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes. And we would have missed out on a great episode of the Office, which is where Michael and Dwight are driving in a car with GPS and they follow the GPS and end up driving into a lake.

[Casey Newton]

Number 62, compound interest.

[Kevin Roos]

It's maybe apocryphal, but Albert Einstein is often credited with saying the compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. And that's because it is the force. That means that when. When you loan somebody something, they can pay it back with interest, and that interest can compound over time. Compound interest, I would argue, made things like agriculture and banking possible. It made the concept of governments issuing currency and lending out money through bonds possible. Compound interest drives the world today, and without it, we would be a much different society. And it was also very controversial over time because usury or the practice of charging excessive interest on loans has been outlawed by a bunch of major religions and societies over time and just generally been a pretty bad thing in the world.

[Casey Newton]

For more on that, you can read the Bible. Number 61, Facebook newsfeed. So look, before the Facebook newsfeed, there was no way of sort of having an ambient sense of which ones of your friends were getting in and out of relationships and why.

[Kevin Roos]

It's true. The Facebook newsfeed, I would argue, was one of the most important innovations in early social networking. It changed Facebook from a place where you would have to go to someone's profile to see what was up with them to a place where you could have a personalized, algorithmically ranked feed of everything happening on the network. Network, which, depending on who you asked, was either a major step forward in making social media feel more personalized and engaging, or it created surveillance capitalism.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah, we live in the world that the newsfeed created. Number 60, Dolly the Sheep. Dolly, of course, was the first mammal ever to be cloned from an adult cell. This happened in 1996. It absolutely captured the public's imagination. It led to a lot of dystopian sci fi. You know, Kevin, Dolly herself only lived six years. Years. But I'm told that after she died, she really did turn out to be delicious.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah, she died in 2003. But four clones made using the same genetic material were created in 2007, nicknamed the Nottingham Dollies. And they lived healthy lives into old age.

[Casey Newton]

And if I ever met their creator, I'd say, thanks for mutton.

[Kevin Roos]

I'd say, hello, dolly number 59.

[Casey Newton]

Tesla, you want to take this one?

[Kevin Roos]

Well, Casey, as the world's biggest Elon Musk fan, I think you should make the case that Tesla is an iconic technology.

[Casey Newton]

I mean, a lot of our listeners are probably driving around in Teslas right now. Teslas are very cool car, and they do deserve credit for kind of catalyzing the electric car revolution in this country.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah, I think before Teslas there were electric cars, but they were sort of coded as, like, things for crunchy hippies to drive around the streets of Berkeley, California. But I think Tesla really brought them to the mass market. And whatever you think of Elon Musk, I think it's a pretty important thing that he did with Tesla number 58.

[Casey Newton]

Tumblr. Tumblr really, I think, was the first successful microblog. There was, of course, Twitter, but Twitter was all text based. But Tumblr sort of took this basic idea of blogging and said, what if you made it much shorter? What if you made it more mixed media? And to this day, Tumblr remains a favorite social network for millions of people because it is just weirder, funkier, funnier than almost anything else. So I truly believe that Tumblr is an icon of technology.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah, I never use Tumblr. That's a fun fact about me, But I trust you on this one. It's very good.

[Casey Newton]

You should check it out.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah.

[Casey Newton]

Number 57. The lever, Casey.

[Kevin Roos]

The lever is so important. Do you say lever or lever?

[Casey Newton]

I say both, and I don't explain why.

[Kevin Roos]

It's interesting, though, that it's leverage, but people say lever. It should be leverage.

[Casey Newton]

That's another mystery of language. Language, of course, being one of the other iconic adventures. But right now, let's focus on the lever or the lever. It's your call, Kevin.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes. So however you choose to pronounce it, it is obviously an iconic technology. Archimedes was often credited with saying, give me a place to Stand and with a lever, I will move the whole world. World.

[Casey Newton]

And then he did. And you know, if anybody ever tried to get rid of it, Kevin, I'd say leave her alone. Number 56, Bitcoin.

[Kevin Roos]

Bitcoin. Whatever you think of it, whether it's a speculative bubble or an enduring piece of technology, it did change the way that people thought about money on the Internet. And it was created in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor, and it gave rise to basically the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem, which is currently valued at something like $3 trillion.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah. And it's about to take over the entire United government. So if you're not familiar with bitcoin, great time to read up on it. Number 55, Motorola Razor. So before the iPhone, we were really struggling for cool phones. Kevin. Right. A lot of them had this so called candy bar shape. They were very ugly. They were very industrial. They looked like, you know, something that you would see, like somebody working at a used car dealership. I don't know why I'm criticizing people who work at used car dealerships. The Motorola Razor was beautiful, sleek lines, very satisfying. Snap when it closed and it became one of the first icons in mobile phone technology. Everyone wanted one of these things.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah, it was a real status gadget when that category was sort of new.

[Casey Newton]

Number 54, gunpowder. Kevin, tell us about gunpowder.

[Kevin Roos]

I would put gunpowder into the category of iconic, but pretty harmful. It was invented in 9th century China and it's led to a lot of warfare.

[Casey Newton]

It has, and I'll say it, it's led to too much warfare. And if we could go back in time and get rid of the gunpowder and transition to a more swords based combat universe, I'd be in favor of it.

[Kevin Roos]

Me too.

[Casey Newton]

Number 53, Snapchat. Snapchat invented so much of the web that we use today, of course, disappearing messages. That was huge. Also stories. The idea of an ephemeral post on a social network, something that could only be viewed for 24 hours. They also were the first major tech company to release kind of fun little augmented reality glasses. So very few companies have had as many good ideas as Snapchat. And so it is surprising that this company remains as unprofitable as it is.

[Kevin Roos]

Well, very few companies have had as many good ideas that were immediately stolen by Mark Zuckerberg and Snapchat.

[Casey Newton]

Number that's good. Number 52, condoms. You know, Austin Powers once said that condoms are only for sailors, but I think other people should wear them as well.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes, I put contraceptives in general into a category of iconic technologies because they allowed for things like family planning.

[Casey Newton]

They gave people more control over their own lives and were an incredible bulwark against the spread of infectious disease.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah.

[Casey Newton]

And to give you just one example of how important condoms are, Kevin didn't wear one one time, and now he has a human child. Number 51, eBay.

[Kevin Roos]

I put this on the list because ebay really did shape the early Internet. It was the first major platform where people could buy and sell things from other people over the Internet. What an amazing thing.

[Casey Newton]

And it was one of the companies that first made people comfortable storing their credit cards with an Internet company. Like many people did not want to put their credit card number online before ebay came along and someone decided, you know what? I really do need that shipment of beanie Babies.

[Kevin Roos]

Do you know what the first item sold on ebay was?

[Casey Newton]

What was that?

[Kevin Roos]

Well, back then, it was called auction web, but it was a broken laser pointer, and it sold for $14.83 in 1995.

[Casey Newton]

Well, I hope someone fixed it just like that. Kevin, we're through the top half of the list.

[Kevin Roos]

We're halfway through.

[Casey Newton]

We're halfway through.

[Kevin Roos]

I need a sip of coffee, Casey. This is exhausting.

[Casey Newton]

I'm in coffee. By the the way, another iconic convention that I guess we'd have to say was an honorable mention on this list.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah.

[Casey Newton]

When we come back, Kevin, the remainder of the iconic 100 technologies.

[Kevin Roos]

Let's do it.

[Casey Newton]

They're not writers, but they help their clients shape their businesses financial stories. They're not an airline, but their network connects global businesses in nearly 180 local markets. They're not detectives, but they work across businesses to uncover new financial opportunities for their clients. They're not just any bank. They are Citi. Learn [e-mail] we are City Holidays got you stressed. Take a meditative moment and bake cookies anytime with Instacart. Feel your shoulders drop and your breath deepen as you realize you won't have to go out for groceries. Whisk yourself away on smooth waves of batter. Allow the familiar fragrance to waft through your home and your mind. Dissolve your anxieties with cookie recipes from New York Times. Cook. Get ingredients delivered in as fast as 30 minutes through Instacart. Find a [e-mail] Instacart all right, Casey.

[Kevin Roos]

We are back, and we are ready to count down the top 50 iconic technologies.

[Casey Newton]

If you thought the first 50 were iconic, well, let me just say you've Heard nothing yet.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah. All right. Number 50, corrective lenses. Casey, I think about this all the time.

[Casey Newton]

Both you and I are wearing them right now.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah.

[Kevin Roos]

What's your prescription?

[Casey Newton]

Well, before I had corrective lenses literally implanted into my eyes, I was like negative 12 or something like that. I'm very near sighted.

[Kevin Roos]

You would have died a very short.

[Casey Newton]

Probably of dysentery on the Oregon Trail.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes, yes. Corrective lens is so important. Billions of people have them. They are essential to life if you are a person with bad vision. And. And they also inspired the song I Can See clearly now the Rain Is.

[Casey Newton]

Gone, and they also inspired jocks calling nerds four eyes in the 80s.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes.

[Casey Newton]

It used to be considered a vicious Insult.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes.

[Casey Newton]

Number 49, Slack. Slack promised that it would replace email and make our lives better, and instead it just gave us something in addition to do to email. And it was worse.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes, but I would say iconic because it has totally transformed the culture and the politics of the modern white collar workplace. Many companies now, I think, regret having implemented Slack, but it has also saved me and other workers a lot of time and energy trying to figure out who's doing what inside your organization. Yeah. And did you know that Slack is.

[Casey Newton]

An acronym for a searchable log of all conversation and knowledge?

[Kevin Roos]

Yes.

[Casey Newton]

Number 48, IVF.

[Kevin Roos]

Speaking of acronyms, in vitro fertilization is an iconic technology because it allowed for babies to be born to people who could not naturally conceive them, such as.

[Casey Newton]

Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, who famously had an IVF baby that he talked about on the campaign trail.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah, but that was actually a misnomer because he conceived through iui, which is.

[Casey Newton]

Another method of fertilization, and it's less iconic than ivf.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes, yes, but ivf, which was once derided as being the test tube babies, is now a major part of fertility treatment for millions of people.

[Casey Newton]

It's brought so much happiness to so many people. Number 47, shipping containers.

[Kevin Roos]

So before shipping containers were invented, you had to sort of manually take stuff off of ships and load them onto trucks and trains. And that caused a lot of, you know, friction and took a lot of time and energy. But Malcolm McLean got the idea to create a standardized container that you could transport by truck, train and ship without needing to take any goods out of the container. And that reduced the cost of carrying cargo and led to the world of interconnected shipping that we have today.

[Casey Newton]

And I bet things are probably cheaper as a result.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes, they are.

[Casey Newton]

Number 46, TikTok. TikTok. The world's most popular short form video app. Kevin. This one really kicked off a revolution, I would say, in social networks when it dropped.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes. And I would say it's also become a cultural force and has led to many popular musicians and memes and just, I was say, has become sort of iconic because of how widely used it is, especially among young people.

[Casey Newton]

Very important for its recommendation algorithm, which some people think might be the best in the world. It also created this idea of a network where you don't even have to follow anyone. We'll just use AI to pick out what you think you might like. Which everyone has copied since.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes. And sort of moved us away from the era of social networks based on who your friends were and what they were sharing into this sort of universal for you feed where everything is just picked out for you by an algorithm.

[Casey Newton]

Also lets the Chinese government spy on you whenever they want. Number four, 45, the light bulb. Kevin. When I saw this on the list, it was a real light bulb moment for me.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah, Light bulbs, obviously iconic. And my favorite fact about the light bulb is that they were one of the first examples of planned obsolescence. This is this theory that people that companies sort of maliciously make their products not last as long because they want you to keep buying more of them. There was an actual example of planned obsolescence called the Phoebus Cartel, which was a group of major light bulb manufacturers that formed in 1924. And their goal was to shorten the lifespan of light bulbs so that people would buy more of them.

[Casey Newton]

My grandfather was murdered by the Phoebus Cartel. He knew too much. Number 44, microscopes. Good luck seeing the human cell without one of these.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes. If you are a biologist or just someone who takes any kind of medicine, you are grateful for the advent of the microscope, which allowed us to see things that could not be observed with the naked eye.

[Casey Newton]

It's kind of its own kind of corrective lens, if you really think about it. But what it corrects for is not being able to see the mitochondria, which is the powerhouse of the cell.

[Kevin Roos]

I loved using microscopes in science class.

[Casey Newton]

43, washing machines.

[Kevin Roos]

This is the thing that I think about most when it comes to, like, the things that my great grandparents did not have that I have that have radically made my life easier than them. I run the washing machine every day or every other day.

[Casey Newton]

Wow.

[Kevin Roos]

I mean, if you have a young child someday, you will too, because they're always throwing up. Yes. Very dirty, Very dirty beings. And the washing machine really freed up people Especially women who were doing the majority of laundry before the advent of the washing machine, to do other things around the house and to. To actually participate in the workforce. So I think there's an argument that the washing machine sort of changed not only the way we did our laundry, but also changed the dynamics of the modern household.

[Casey Newton]

Beautiful. Number 42 elevators. Look, before an elevator came along, if you lived on the eighth floor, you were walking up and down every single time and your legs were hurting.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah. And they basically created the conditions that made the skyscraper possible and tall buildings that were much larger than anyone would want to walk up or down the stairs to. And my favorite fact about elevators was that Elisha Otis, who was the sort of popularizer of the elevator, was the ultimate salesman. He did this sort of Steve Jobsian demo at the 1854 World's Fair where he suspended himself on a platform and then had the rope that was holding him up cut and demonstrated the safety break that he had invented that kept the elevator from plunging to everyone inside's death. And that was a very dramatic reveal.

[Casey Newton]

Icon behavior from Elisha showed us number 41, Twitter. RIP Twitter, founded in 2006. While it was never a particularly well run company, it also was, I think, the most important news product in the world during its heyday.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah. Really created this era of sharing status updates. Also catalyzed the Arab Spring and has had lots of other knock on effects throughout the world. So despite what Twitter has become today, I think it's fair to say it is an iconic technology because it did really usher in this whole era that we're still living in.

[Casey Newton]

Also super important to the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Trump was the Twitter candidate.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes.

[Casey Newton]

Number 40 refrigerators.

[Kevin Roos]

This is another one of those things where I'm like, I would not switch lives with my great grandparents because they had to have ice blocks delivered by the iceman. But with the refrigerator, finally there was a reliable way for people to have cold things in their house and keep them cold without the iceman. It also allowed for the cold transportation of produce around the country, which is why we can have sort of out of season produce today.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah. Now, at the same time, all the iceman did lose their jobs.

[Kevin Roos]

That's true.

[Casey Newton]

So that was kind of sad. That's true. But I'll say it. I would prefer having a refrigerator than having an iceman.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes.

[Casey Newton]

Number 39, the iMac. This was such an important technology in bringing Apple back from the brink. Right after Steve Jobs left the first time, Apple was in dire straits. He comes Back to the company. They limit the product line to just a few things. And one of the first things that they release under him after he returns is these imacs that are in these beautiful candy colors.

[Kevin Roos]

I love those. The blue one?

[Casey Newton]

Yeah. I, I worked in a newsroom at the Daily Northwestern and we had every single color of the imac. And it was like the most beautiful looking newsroom that I've ever worked in since, because that's how beautiful the imacs were. They were also just really great computers. They connected to the Internet. They had a disc drive so you could, you know, put a CD ROM in them. IMACs were everything.

[Kevin Roos]

They had the circle mouse. Loved the circle mouse. Yes.

[Casey Newton]

Incredible. Number 38, Napster.

[Kevin Roos]

Napster revolutionized my life as a teenager. It was the first popular peer to peer file sharing system. You could download any song ever. It got sued out of existence by the recording industry. And I think it's fair to say it ushered in the sort of modern streaming music era as we know it. Because people all of a sudden realized, hey, you can, you don't have to go out and buy whole albums anymore. You can just download individual songs.

[Casey Newton]

It completely changed the music industry. And certainly from the standpoint of consumers, I think we live in a much better world. You know, before Napster came along, you wanted to listen to a new CD. You were paying $18. Now we pay, you know, what, 10, 11 bucks a month and we can hear every piece of recorded music in the world. Pretty amazing.

[Kevin Roos]

Do you know that Best Buy Napster for three years.

[Casey Newton]

Really? What do they do with it?

[Kevin Roos]

Well, they owned it from 2008 to 2011 and then they merged it with Rhapsody, another music streaming service, and it still exists today.

[Casey Newton]

Amazing.

[Kevin Roos]

It's not free anymore.

[Casey Newton]

Number 37, money.

[Kevin Roos]

Before money, you had to barter.

[Casey Newton]

You had to say, hey, I want a cow. About how many goats will that run me? Yes.

[Kevin Roos]

So thank you to the leadership of Lydia, modern day Turkey, who around 600 BC, invented the first metal coins. These coins created the sort of modern crypt currency system that we know today, where you don't have to barter with beads and wampum and cows and goats anymore. You can just give someone a dollar bill.

[Casey Newton]

It's such a relief to be paid in money and not in livestock the way our ancestors were.

[Kevin Roos]

It's true.

[Casey Newton]

Number 36, the cotton gin.

[Kevin Roos]

Casey. I would put this on the list of iconic technologies because not only did it allow for the quick and easy separation of cotton fibers from their seeds, fueling the industrial revolution. It also indirectly caused the Civil War because the cotton gins invention intensified the demand for slavery in the American south because all of a sudden you could produce way more cotton and people wanted way more cotton. And that expanded slavery in the south and led to the sort of civil war. That didn't lead to the sort of civil war, it led to the actual.

[Casey Newton]

The actual civil war. It just goes to show you, you know, so there's a real, you know, chaos theory thing here where you sort of don't know what's going to happen when you unloose when you un a new technology into the world.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah.

[Casey Newton]

Or when you unloose it. Number 35, Uber. So look, the taxi industry had been not great for a long time. I remember before Uber you would call it for a cab in San Francisco and then you would just pray that it would actually show up at your house. And often it would not. And then along comes Uber and you can summon a car to wherever you are in the city with the tap of a button. And it truly did change my life.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah, it changed my life too. And I think it changed the course of the technology industry. Obviously we remember that period in the 2010s where there were like all these Uber for X startups. Many of those failed. But Uber has continued on and I think has reshaped. Transportation around the world has also increased congestion, led to a lot of other things that we maybe don't think are so great. But I would say Uber is an iconic technology.

[Casey Newton]

Number 34, the Fulcrum.

[Kevin Roos]

You know, we already talked about the lever and you can't have levers without fulcrums. It would just be a plank.

[Casey Newton]

Tell us about what you would even say a fulcrum is.

[Kevin Roos]

Fulcrum is the point that gives levers their leverage. It allows humans to amplify force and perform tasks more efficiently. The fulcrum is essential to technologies like seesaws, scissors and crowbars.

[Casey Newton]

I feel like the physical fulcrum is sort of a metaphorical fulcrum for the leverage that technology has over our lives.

[Kevin Roos]

It's true. I would not want to live in a world without fulcrums.

[Casey Newton]

Number 33, vaccines. I would say get one before RFK Jr takes over the Department of Health and Human Services.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes, there's a reason that we no longer die of polio and that is because of vaccines, which I think were a great invention and we should probably keep them around.

[Casey Newton]

The reason I did not get childhood measles. Also vaccines. Also the day in 2021 when I got My COVID vaccine, truly one of the happiest days of my entire life. Vaccines are an amazing, amazing technology.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes.

[Casey Newton]

Number 32, MySpace. So it was not the first social network that was arguably friendster. But, man, when MySpace came along, it truly defined a generation on the Internet. Having to pick your top eight friends and then watching them all jockey for position in your life so that they could be on your profile page. All of the fights that that started. Some of the first influencers and creators became popular on MySpace. Musical artists took off because they were able to promote their music on MySpace. So it had a very brief heyday, but it got a lot done. And also we were able to all become friends with Tom from MySpace during that time, and he's one of the great Internet characters of all time.

[Kevin Roos]

Yep.

[Casey Newton]

Icon number 31, AlphaFold.

[Kevin Roos]

This was the Google DeepMind product that allowed us to use AI to come up with the 3D structures of proteins, solving a major problem in molecular biology and paving the way for potentially lots of different discoveries in science and medicine. It won the Nobel Prize this year in chemistry. And I would say this is an iconic technology, not because of what it has already done, which is very impressive, but because what I think it will do in the future, which is allow scientists to discover new kinds of vaccines and treatments for different kinds of diseases, potentially saving a lot of lives.

[Casey Newton]

Yes. And to me, AlphaFold is the thing that I go to when people say AI is all hype. I say that you need to reckon with AlphaFold, the things that it has already done, the things that it is about to do, because I think that it's incredible.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah. I think the only thing that can make it better was if it could alpha fold my laundry, that would be good.

[Casey Newton]

Number 30, Ozempic. Ozempic is relatively new on the scene, Kevin, but I think when all is said and done, people are absolutely going to say this is an iconic technology.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes. This class of drugs that Ozempic is a part of, GLP1 agonists, are displaying radically transformative effects in people with obesity, people with diabetes. It's also got all these other effects that are now being studied about how it helps people kick addictions and things like that. So I just think this is already a very important drug. I think it will be basically ubiquitous in the coming years. And my favorite fun fact, it was inspired by Gila monster venom.

[Casey Newton]

Hmm. I got nothing. Number 29, agriculture.

[Kevin Roos]

Casey, what do we want to say about agriculture?

[Casey Newton]

Agriculture was what took us away from being hunter gatherers in small tribes and sort of modern life began. And without agriculture, if you wanted a peach or a berry or a pineapple, you just had to hope that you live near one. KEVIN Agriculture came along, it enabled their mass production, and now you can actually get pretty good strawberries for most of the year in California.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah. Agriculture was so important to the development of modern society because it meant that you could distribute labor, you could have people who grew the food and people who ate the food, and those could be different people. You didn't have to have your own family farm.

[Casey Newton]

Number 28, the Walkman. Talk about an icon. You know, when the Walkman came along, all of a sudden you didn't have to be listening to the radio to listen to your favorite music. You could put it on a cassette tape, later, a cd, Walkman around town, and the world was your oyster. It was really the start of the sort of personal technology revolution, I would say.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah. And I think one of the biggest things that sticks out if you look at photos of, like, you know, groups of people 50 years ago, was that none of them are wearing headphones. Right. And the Walkman really ushered in this era where you could be constantly walking around listening to your own personal music. And today we often see people with headphones in AirPods or otherwise. And I would say that's just like a big change in the way that people went about their daily lives. Did you know that Sony initially considered naming, Naming the Walkman the sound about.

[Casey Newton]

Hmm, Honestly, pretty good. Yep. Number 27, cuneiform. Oh, the foundation of the written word. Kevin.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes, it's so important. Among the earliest known examples of cuneiform was a list of receipts for beer, which just so just shows you how important writing is.

[Casey Newton]

Also, one of my most recent uses for writing was getting a receipt for beer. And I'm not even kidding. It just goes to show you the enduring power of cuneiform. And let me just say this. If you read the written word today, thank cuneiform.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes.

[Casey Newton]

That's where it all started.

[Kevin Roos]

We used to be an oral society, and now we're a written society. Well, I think we're going away from that because now we've got TikTok. But cuneiform was very important for a long time.

[Casey Newton]

Number 26, spaceships. Spaceships. At the end of the day, there's a lot to say about spaceships, but I think it all starts here. They're very cool.

[Kevin Roos]

They're very cool, and they catalyze an entire generation of people's interest in science and in exploration. The moon landing was the sort of pivotal turning point of the 20th century in a lot of people's eyes. And I would say that being able to explore space has led led us to some very cool and important discoveries.

[Casey Newton]

And Kevin, if we ever become a multiplanetary species, spaceships will be the reason that we did it. Also, most great sci fi, I would argue, owes its life to the existence of spaceships.

[Kevin Roos]

True.

[Casey Newton]

Number 25, CRISPR. And we're not talking about the drawer in your refrigerator.

[Kevin Roos]

No, this is the gene editing technology that was pioneered by Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier and other researchers. And while CRISPR has not been in wide use in humans yet, it has already sort of transformed the way that scientists are thinking about the editability of genes and a way that we might be able to cure diseases and engineer new products in the future.

[Casey Newton]

Number 24, combustion engines.

[Kevin Roos]

Wow. Combustion engines were so important. Imagine having to travel by a stagecoach and horse drawn carriages as we often.

[Casey Newton]

Did earlier in our careers.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah. And the combustion engine changed all that by making it possible to get around in a new thing called an automobile.

[Casey Newton]

And of course it had a lot of, you know, deleterious effects on the environment. And we got to a place where we realized, hey, we need to transition away from these. But much of modern society was invented by the combustion engine.

[Kevin Roos]

True.

[Casey Newton]

Number 23, aqueducts.

[Kevin Roos]

I'm obsessed with aqueducts, Casey, tell me. I listened to a podcast about them once, a multi part. It was very cool. Essentially, you know, aqueducts exist because you need fresh water to run a society. And if you do not live in a place with fresh water deposits, you need to get that water from somewhere else. And so aqueducts were popularized in ancient Rome. And you know, without aqueducts, there's no cities in deserts, no Phoenix, no Los Angeles, no. Aqueducts are so important to modern society.

[Casey Newton]

Moving water around since way back in the day. And they're still doing it and they're doing a great job.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah.

[Casey Newton]

Number 22, Grindr.

[Kevin Roos]

I think you put this one on the list.

[Casey Newton]

I did. Listen, Grindr, I truly believe, changed the way that people meet in the world. Obviously it started with gay men hooking up, also dating. But Grindr was really the first location based dating and hookup network. Grindr is how we get to Tinder and it's how we get to online dating being the way that so many couples now meet. I would argue, obviously it is not the only online dating product, but there was something about just as a gay man knowing, hey, there's a really hot guy 600ft away. Maybe we could hang out right now. That changed the world.

[Kevin Roos]

It kind of brought instant gratification and, you know, sort of instant fulfillment to dating in a way that has now spread to straight people with apps like Tinder and has led to many, many successful marriages and relationships, and also a lot of unsuccessful ones.

[Casey Newton]

That's right. And I hope you'll try GRINDR Someday. Number 21, the telephone. Oh, telephones. When these came along, they changed the way that we communicate. And I think they actually brought us closer together. And particularly for those of us who live far apart from our friends and loved ones, the telephone became the best way to stay in touch.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah, Alexander Graham Bell really popped off with telephones. They became sort of the foundation of modern communication, replacing the telegraph. And I would say they had a long and successful life until they were murdered by text messages. No one calls anymore. It's really a shame.

[Casey Newton]

If you're listening to this, let me just say, call your mother. If she's around, call her. She wants to hear from you. Number 20, semiconductors.

[Kevin Roos]

Casey, what would you say a semiconductor is?

[Casey Newton]

I would say a semiconductor is how we get computers, Kevin. They power.

[Kevin Roos]

You absolutely do not notice. They're.

[Casey Newton]

They're manufactured in Taiwan, and they have a huge geopolitical importance.

[Kevin Roos]

You have no idea what you're talking about. A semiconductor, Casey. Thank you for asking. Is a material such as silicon that has electrical conductivity that is essential for controlling electronic signals in devices like transistors, microchips, and integrated circuits that power almost everything we use today.

[Casey Newton]

And that's an icon, if I've ever heard one. Number 19, the wheel. You don't have to reinvent it because it was perfect the first time.

[Kevin Roos]

And actually, one of my favorite facts about wheels is. So they were created to serve as potter's wheels to make pottery around 3500 BC in Mesopotamia, people think. But it was another 300 years after that until someone had the idea of using them for transportation. 300 years went by before someone said, wait a minute, we could take the potter's wheel, turn it on its side, and put it on a chariot. And then you could go.

[Casey Newton]

It just goes to show you, if you think America in 2024 is the dumbest society that's ever existed, you have to have to go back to the people that were using the potter's wheel and didn't realize you could put it on a carriage.

[Kevin Roos]

That's offensive to Mesopotamians.

[Casey Newton]

Number number 18.

[Kevin Roos]

Way mo.

[Casey Newton]

Look, this might be a little controversial. It's pretty high on the list. But I am telling you, when you get into a car and the car drives itself, it blows my mind every single time.

[Kevin Roos]

It blows everyone's mind who tries this. This is the experience that I. Of showing people. Waymo, when they come to San Francisco is. It's the. It's sort of. You can see a childlike wonder in their eyes the first time the car starts driving itself.

[Casey Newton]

Yes. Waymo is a reminder to me that it is possible for technology to do things that are cool and useful and are. It is probably going to save a lot of lives at the end of the day.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes.

[Casey Newton]

Number 17, indoor plumbing.

[Kevin Roos]

It's so important, Casey.

[Casey Newton]

It's so important. You know, before indoor plumbing, let's just say life was incredibly disgusting.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes. It was very smelly. People would have to take their sewage and dump it out the window into the street.

[Casey Newton]

The disease that bred, as a result, the rats that it attracted. And, you know, I think probably everyone involved wishes that they had invented indoor plumbing even sooner than they did.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah.

[Casey Newton]

But thank God they did.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah.

[Casey Newton]

Number 16, Wi Fi Wireless Fidelity.

[Kevin Roos]

Kevin, is that what it stands for?

[Casey Newton]

Absolutely. And we're using it right now to stay connected to the Internet, to our production team. And I don't think there's been a day, probably in the past decade where I haven't either been on wifi or been complaining that I couldn't get wifi.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes, I would say it has crossed the chasm into things that most people today could not live without. I do remember a time before wifi, you had to plug in your computer to the wall using Ethernet. But wifi sort of opened up, you know, an entirely new world.

[Casey Newton]

When I got my laptop for college, they told me it had wifi, and they had to explain to me what that was. And I was like, what do you mean? I don't have to plug it into the Internet. Truly, my mind was blown at the age of 18. God bless Wi Fi. Number 15, LSD.

[Kevin Roos]

LSD was first synthesized in 1938 by Albert Hoffman, a Swiss chemist, although the psychedelic properties were not discovered until 1943, when he accidentally ingested a minuscule amount of it and ended up on the world's first acid trip. And then three days later, he took it on purpose. He then rode his bicycle home from his laboratory while tripping on acid, which is why on April 19th every year, LSD fans celebrate Bicycle Day. LSD was also a major inspiration for Steve Jobs, who then went on to invent the iPhone and lots of other things.

[Casey Newton]

It really kicked off global interest in psychedelics more broadly, which are still being researched, but I think we believe have some really positive applications, deserve a lot further study. Are very powerful and particularly in Silicon Valley, quite iconic.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah. And you're on LSD right now?

[Casey Newton]

I am. And by the way, when did you turn into a giant Purple Dragon? Number 14.

[Kevin Roos]

The World Wide Web.

[Casey Newton]

Oh boy. You know, this is something that I just have such great nostalgia for, Kevin. The first moments that I was able to connect to the Internet, visit websites, leave comments on posts, embed videos. So much of my life, in fact the life I live today, it is enabled by and made more beautiful by the World Wide Web.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah. Did you know that the first ever world wide website is still up?

[Casey Newton]

And what is it?

[Kevin Roos]

Here, I'll show you. It's called.

[Casey Newton]

Kevin, that's porn.

[Kevin Roos]

It's called World Wide Web and it says it's a wide area hyper media information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents.

[Casey Newton]

Sounds like a great idea. And long may the web live. Even though it's under many challenges right now. Number 13, batteries.

[Kevin Roos]

What's your favorite kind of battery?

[Casey Newton]

My favorite kind of battery is the battery that powers my phone because it keeps getting better and better, which means I have to charge my phone less, which means that I can use it more. How about you?

[Kevin Roos]

Double A's very useful, but for your.

[Casey Newton]

Like remote control at your house.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah, they're in everything.

[Casey Newton]

Battery, battery technology. It's like, it's like very difficult to get it much better than it is. But every time it gets better, I feel like the world gets better because we just became able to do more things.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah. I mean batteries are the way that we were able to do things like light things during the night. That was, that was, it was a way of storing energy.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah.

[Kevin Roos]

Storing energy is a.

[Casey Newton]

Do you like a flashlight? Thank. A battery.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah.

[Casey Newton]

Number 12, the pill. Kevin. Birth control. This is truly one of the most powerful pieces of technology we've ever seen.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah. Economists have been talking for years about how the advent of the birth control pill basically paved the way for the modern economy where women can, you know, can sort of plan their families, can participate in the workforce. It was hugely powerful and controversial as.

[Casey Newton]

A technology approved in 1960 and it is still doing incredible things for, for everyone all over the world. Congratulations to the pill. Number 11.

[Kevin Roos]

It's a shame it's going to be illegal soon, but let's just say stock up.

[Casey Newton]

Great time to stock up on the pill. Number 11. Email. Look, not everybody loves it and we all feel like we get too much of it. But you cannot deny an open protocol that lets you message anyone in the world does have a lot of really positive and powerful uses.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah. I remember seeing my mom and dad email people back when I was a kid and just being amazed that you could just send messages through your computer.

[Casey Newton]

I remember my first Hotmail account which did not automatically update when you got a new email. And so I would just reflexively go to that tab like every six minutes and just reload the browser to see if I had a new email. Because believe it or not, there was a time in your life when it was exciting to get a new email.

[Kevin Roos]

What was your email address?

[Casey Newton]

It was my, my last name and my parents [e-mail].

[Kevin Roos]

Wow. So thank you to Ray Tomlinson who invented email in 1971. Casey, do you know how many emails are sent and received every day?

[Casey Newton]

I'm going to guess more than 100.

[Kevin Roos]

As of 2024, there are approximately 361.6 billion emails sent and received globally every day. And only half of those are from J. Crew.

[Casey Newton]

All right. And just like that, Kevin, we are at the top 10.

[Kevin Roos]

Wow. We're really getting to the important stuff now.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah, I mean we have had so many great pieces of technology on this list, but I dare say what is about to come is even more iconic than what has come before.

[Kevin Roos]

I just love imagining all of the angry emails we're going to get from people who are like, why did you put the Fulcrum on this list? Like, like people have arguments about this stuff all the time.

[Casey Newton]

Well, look, we. Let's just say we have some honorable mentions. For example, the dirigible. We tried to find a place on it on, on the iconic 100 and we couldn't find one. Yeah, yeah, you might have, you might have your own entry that you think we should have added. And I say send it in. Yeah, email us.

[Kevin Roos]

And we're not going to do anything with it, but you can send it in.

[Casey Newton]

Maybe we'll do it next year on the, on the hard fork. Iconic 200.

[Kevin Roos]

We should do a least iconic technologies list.

[Casey Newton]

It's like the Juicero. Yeah.

[Kevin Roos]

The Zune.

[Casey Newton]

I don't know. There's a case of the Zune. It's pretty iconic.

[Kevin Roos]

That's true.

[Casey Newton]

It's sort of like the funniest technology, you know.

[Kevin Roos]

It's true.

[Casey Newton]

Anyways, when we come back, the top 10 most iconic technologies.

[Kevin Roos]

Everyone deserves access to clean, affordable energy. Everyone. Millions of Americans rely on propane for dependable energy that is independent from the electric grid. Propane is reliable, versatile energy produced in the United States that powers school buses, hospitals, and our homes with lower carbon emissions than conventional fuels. The path to a low carbon future includes cleaner energy like propane. And the production of renewable propane, which is made from used cooking oils and plant oils, is growing rapidly. Propane is the energy for everyone. Learn [e-mail] this podcast is supported by Made in Cookware.

[Casey Newton]

As a chef and a restaurant owner, I'm as meticulous about my cookware as I am about my ingredients. That's why I love made in cookware. Each pan they make isn't just designed to perform. It's crafted to last. As a mom, I love that I can trust Made in. It's made from the world's finest materials so I can feel good about what I'm feeding my family. I'm chef Brooklyn Williamson, and I use made in Cookware.

[Kevin Roos]

For full details, visit madeincookware.com that's M A D E I N cookware.com wow, Kasey. We have done 90 iconic technologies.

[Casey Newton]

We have, and it's felt really good to sort of highlight both the really obvious things and maybe some of the more obscure technologies that people take for granted. Kevin.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes. So before we get into the top 10, Kasey, we should just say there are some technologies that almost made the cut of the top 100, but did not. So, Casey, what are some honorable mention technologies that barely missed the list?

[Casey Newton]

Sure. So some of those would include forks, the BlackBerry. Escalators.

[Kevin Roos]

Escalators, yes. Yes. Which also inspired one of my favorite Mitch Hedberg jokes of all time, which was that, you know, escalators can't break. They just become stairs.

[Casey Newton]

I would also give a shout out to the Nintendo Entertainment Entertainment System, the Sega Genesis, and PlayStations 1 through 5.

[Kevin Roos]

We should also just say that none of these are sponsored. Like, I think that's very important because, like, you know, we have mentioned some brand names, things like Uber and Waymo. Yeah. And those companies are not paying us in any way.

[Casey Newton]

They have no idea we're doing this. We would never tell them that we were doing this because we. We don't want them to know.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes. Also, we are not shilling for the fulcrum industry just because these citizens of ancient Mesopotamia wanted us to.

[Casey Newton]

That's true. But I am open to being spons by the lever if they want to get in touch with us over there. I'm open to it. All right, Kevin, let's jump into the top 10. Starting with number 10. The transformer. And we're not talking about Optimus Prime.

[Kevin Roos]

Exactly. This is the Transformer neural network architecture that was popularized in 2017 after researchers at Google published the now iconic paper, attention is all you need. In that paper, they described something called a Transformer, which became the foundation for everything that we see in AI today. It is the T in ChatGPT stands for transformer. And everything that has been built in AI of any importance since 2017 has been built on top of the Transformer architecture.

[Casey Newton]

That's right. And while there are questions about whether Transformers really are all you need, there is some thought even to this day that we might be able to create a super intelligence based solely on this technology. And even if we don't get all the way there through Transformers alone, they seem like they will be at least a huge pillar of the foundation of whatever is about to come next.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah, and I could talk for an hour about Transformers and why they are so important, but I think it's important to say that they were inspired by the alien language in the film Arrival, which had just recently come out. And a group of researchers at Google, one researcher in particular who was part of that original team, was inspired by watching Arrival and seeing that the alien aliens in the movie had this language which represented entire sentences with a single symbol. And they thought, hey, what if we did that inside of a neural network? So rather than processing all of the inputs that you would give to one of these systems one word at a time, you could have this thing called an attention mechanism, which paid attention to all of it simultaneously. That would allow you to process much more information much faster. And that insight sparked the creation of the Transformer, which led to all this stuff we see in AI today.

[Casey Newton]

I love that story for a lot of reasons, but just the feedback loop between, like, nerds watching sci fi and sort of seeing things that don't exist and getting expired to make things that are real, which then inspires more sci fi. Super cool. Very fun. God help us all. The Transformer, an iconic piece of technology.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes. It could kill us all. It could save the world. The jury's still out, but I think it's fair to say, already iconic.

[Casey Newton]

And speaking of things that could kill us all or save the world, number nine, the atomic atomic bomb. Kevin. Without the atomic bomb, there simply is no Barbenheimer Summer in 2023.

[Kevin Roos]

That's true. I think it's done a few more things than that. But look, the iconic nature of the atomic bomb is because of how important it has been not only to Arguably ending World War II, but through sort of creating the global nuclear reality that we live in today, where nation states are basically defined on the world stage by whether or not they have access to the atomic bo. Nuclear powers have been sort of keeping each other in check through mutually assured destruction. And the entire geopolitical order that we now have today basically rests on the atomic bomb.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah. And we should also say atomic bombs have done horrible things. They've killed hundreds of thousands of people, and I hope we never use them again.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes, me too. One interesting fun fact about atomic bombs is that during the Manhattan Project and the testing of the first atomic bombs, scientists placed beer and soda cans near the first atomic bomb test sites and then drank what was inside afterwards.

[Casey Newton]

And they all have superpowers now.

[Kevin Roos]

And that's how we got Surge Cola. No. Some of the cans reportedly tasted a little off, but most were fine and they didn't harm anyone.

[Casey Newton]

Wow. And that, and that really raises the question, what is in Coca Cola number 8?

[Kevin Roos]

YouTube.

[Casey Newton]

I will never forget the first time I saw a YouTube video embedded on a friend's blog. It was like, before then you sort of had to go to a dedicated website where there was some sort of horrib player. But YouTube said, hey, we're going to take video. And of course you can upload it here, you can watch it here, but we can also just sort of spread it all across the web through embedding. And over time, it became truly one of the most important media innovations of all time, I think.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah, I would say on a pure hour spent basis, YouTube probably consumes more of the world's attention than basically any other website or technology. It has totally reshaped the entertainment industry. But also just things that I do around the house every day. I mean, yesterday I was watching, I was trying to make some sushi at home for dinner. And so what did I do? I watched a YouTube video. And that is how many, many people discover how to do many, many things.

[Casey Newton]

Every time I have to carve a chicken, I go back to YouTube and watch the same video. But of course, it's not just the how to stuff. There is so much entertainment that happens there. It's about live streaming. It's also about maybe watching really extremist content, or at least it was for a certain period of time before they, they cracked down on that and led people down some pretty dark rabbit holes. And if you're interested in that, we have a podcast to recommend to you. It's called Rabbit Hole. Kevin hosts it. It's great but YouTube is truly one of the great icons of all time.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah. And my favorite fact about YouTube and its history was that it was originally supposed to be a dating app. Did you know this?

[Casey Newton]

I did not know this.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah. So the co founders of YouTube basically had this idea for a site where people could upload videos of themselves, and then you could find other people's videos and sort of try to date them. And they even had a slogan to tune in hookup. But then no one wanted to upload their videos, so they pivoted to letting anyone upload any videos they wanted.

[Casey Newton]

They said, we'll tune in, but we don't really feel like hooking up right now. And that's, you know, that just happens sometimes when you're making products.

[Kevin Roos]

Yep.

[Casey Newton]

Number seven, airplanes. Oh, the Wright Brothers. In 1903, Kevin figured out how to get an airplane off the ground and completed the first flight at Kitty Hawk and kicked off a revolution in the way that we get around this world.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah. And if you've never read the biography of the Wright Brothers by David McCulloch, it is one of my favorite biographies of all time. It's a really interesting story of these two brothers who were inventors, also heroes of my native state of Ohio. But they really did something that people thought was impossible, and they proved that it wasn't. And I think that led to many, many changes that we now, now take for granted today.

[Casey Newton]

You know what's interesting, given how important they are, how few people name their children Orville or Wilbur these days.

[Kevin Roos]

That's true.

[Casey Newton]

You think those would be due for a comeback? They're icons of flight.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah. So they were brothers. They were bicycle mechanics, and Wilbur was the older brother, and he was often sort of seen as the more strategic thinker of the two, whereas Orville was known as the sort of ingenious mechanical thinker.

[Casey Newton]

All right, well, there you have it. Number six, television. As powerful as YouTube, Kevin, is, I really do think that the world that we live in today was created by television.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes. And obviously television has had a rough past decade or so. The idea of the sort of linear television broadcast is in decline and may never be as popular as it once was because streaming entertainment has popped up to replace it. But TV really reshaped the mind modern world.

[Casey Newton]

It changed our politics, it changed our culture, the way we entertain ourselves, the way we relax. It went from something that almost no one had in their homes to something that people were watching multiple hours a day. So very hard to come up with. Many more technologies more iconic than tv yeah.

[Kevin Roos]

And among its effects, it killed the radio star, according to a song that I heard once.

[Casey Newton]

It did. It was also without tv, there is no TV Guide.

[Kevin Roos]

That's true. Do you know what the first ad shown on TV was for?

[Casey Newton]

What was it?

[Kevin Roos]

A Bulova watch?

[Casey Newton]

I was going to guess cigarettes.

[Kevin Roos]

Actually, that's a pretty good guess.

[Casey Newton]

Number five, penicillin. Oh, thank you, Alexander Fleming.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah, I love penicillin mostly because I love accidental inventions. And penicillin was among the world's great accidental inventions.

[Casey Newton]

Tell us about that.

[Kevin Roos]

So in 1928, Alexander Fleming was a scientist and he was about to go on vacation. And before he went on vacation, he piled up a bunch of used petri dishes in his lab. When he came back, he found mold growing in one of these petri dishes. And most notably, the mold appeared to have killed some bacteria in the petri dish while he was on vacation. And he thought to himself, wait a minute, maybe I could harness this mold into something that could be used to kill bacteria.

[Casey Newton]

Which is such a genius idea, because if I had come back and I had seen that mold had killed the bacteria, I'd be like, oh my God, we have to kill the mold. We got to kill our mold here. Yes.

[Kevin Roos]

And that's why you did not invent penicillin.

[Casey Newton]

Literally.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah.

[Casey Newton]

I mean, also it had already been invented, but that's true.

[Kevin Roos]

But I think this is also an iconic technology because in addition to its many life saving effects, it proved the importance of going on vacation without vacation. No penicillin.

[Casey Newton]

That's beautiful. So thank you, penicillin and all the antibiotics that it paved the way for, for keeping us healthy. Number four, the printing press. The printing press. You know, before this, if you wanted to read a book, you were going to have to find a monk to illuminate a manuscript for you.

[Kevin Roos]

It's true.

[Casey Newton]

And they did not just want to do that for just about anybody, particularly if you didn't want them to just write the Bible for you. Yes, that was kind of the main book they would write back then was just the Bible over and over again.

[Kevin Roos]

That's true. They did a lot of that. And many people devoted their lives to transcribing the Bible by hand. But the Gutenberg printing press, invented by Johannes Gutenberg, really changed the game and ushered in not only the Protestant Reformation, but some also argue the Enlightenment was a result of the printing press, where all of a sudden you didn't have to go town to town sort reading your manuscript out loud or having a monk transcribe it for You. You could print a bunch of copies of something and distribute them all over the place.

[Casey Newton]

It also wreaked havoc. Kevin, recently on the show, we had Yuval Noah Harari, who was telling us that when the printing press came along, essentially misinformation was born and people were spreading terrifying tracts about witches in various towns doing horrible things. And a lot of people think that the printing press is a major reason why we had so many wars in the immediate aftermath of its invention, because all of a sudden many more people had speech rights and it led to. To tons of conflict. So sometimes when people today look at the Internet and all of the strife that we see online and the real world effects that have, they compare it to the invention of the printing press and say, we are now living through a shift on the order of the printing press. But the printing press did it first.

[Kevin Roos]

I have a sad fact about the printing press.

[Casey Newton]

What's that?

[Kevin Roos]

Which was that Gutenberg actually never got rich off of his invention because his business partner, Johann Fust, sued him just as he was finishing the Gutenberg Bible.

[Casey Newton]

And.

[Kevin Roos]

And he won the case and seized his printing press and basically drove him to financial ruin, kicked him out of his own business.

[Casey Newton]

That is horrible. But the good news is not one person remembers the name of Fust. And I would say many or even most of us know Gutenberg.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes. He was vindicated.

[Casey Newton]

Gutenberg, we salute you. Yeah, King.

[Kevin Roos]

Thanks, Gutenberg.

[Casey Newton]

Number three, the iPhone. The iPhone is a magical.

[Kevin Roos]

Wait, wait, you have to say iPhone. Because, you know, Apple, that's. They have this thing in particular. What are those called? Definite articles. Yeah, they're not big fans of definite articles.

[Casey Newton]

So.

[Kevin Roos]

So you'll never hear an Apple executive say the iPhone. They only say iPhone.

[Casey Newton]

Okay, number three, iPhone. The thing about iPhone is that it is a piece of glass and machinery that is a rectangle that fits in your pocket, and you can use it to summon all of the world's information, to talk to anyone, to see their face via a video call, to play a game, to entertain yourself. There has rarely been a technology that does so many things, and certainly not one that is that small and that affordable for that many people.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah. And the iPhone, I would say, gets its due like it is almost universally makes the lists of, like, the, you know, the best inventions of all time. Because it was just so powerful in taking cell phones from this thing that was sort of ugly and clunky, where you could only sort of make call and maybe send, you know, text messages, you know, in a very clunky way to this thing that is now ubiquitous and the touchscreen display. The other things that were popular on the iPhone, like the idea of infinite scroll or of the kind of rubber band. What do they call that?

[Casey Newton]

The effect that. The sort of.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah, the snapback effect. So the iPhone. There are many books that have been written about the development of the iPhone. I think people 100 years from now will still look back on it as an iconic technology, but I think it's really easy to forget how different the world was before the iPhone.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah, it was worse, at least for me.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes. And the original code name for the iPhone, Casey, do you know what this is?

[Casey Newton]

Sasby.

[Kevin Roos]

No. It was purple.

[Casey Newton]

Hmm. Well, I think they came up with a better name for that one in the end.

[Kevin Roos]

Do you remember when the iPhone came out? Like, do you remember where you were and what your thoughts were?

[Casey Newton]

I was sitting at my desk in a newspaper in Arizona, and at the time, there was no live stream of the Apple event, so I was having to follow tech blog and getting these very incremental updates. But I remember calling a friend afterwards and just saying, like, do you hear about this thing? This thing seems legitimately amazing because obviously it had been rumored for months and months, but then when people saw it, they were like, this seems really cool. And while I would say that the very first iPhone wasn't that great, by the time you get to iPhone3G or my favorite iPhone, iPhone4, that is when it seemed like everything had started to come together and they had really kicked off a revolution.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah. And that's when basically every cell phone became an iPhone. It was very hard to find, like, the flip phone because the iPhone's touchscreen was just so much, obviously better than the ones where you had to use a keyboard. Yeah. Okay. All right, we've reached the top two.

[Casey Newton]

Top two.

[Kevin Roos]

We are in the pantheon of the greatest technologies of all time. Kasey. Number two.

[Casey Newton]

Electricity. Electricity. It's powering all of the lights in this studio. It is providing power to our laptops, and it is the feeling that Kevin and I have between each other every time we step into the podcast studio. And that's electricity.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes. Modern life as we know it today would not be possible without electricity.

[Casey Newton]

And who invented it?

[Kevin Roos]

Well, it's.

[Casey Newton]

It wasn't Ben Franklin.

[Kevin Roos]

Technically, it wasn't invented. It's a natural phenomenon that has always existed, but it was harnessed by many people over a period of centuries. Obviously, Benjamin Franklin and his famous kite experiment in 1752 demonstrated that lightning was a form of electricity, but it also. We needed Things like the electrical battery, which was invented in 1800 by Alessandro Volta. Michael Faraday, who discovered electromagnetic induction in 1831. And then we got things like alternating current from Nikola Tesla and the light bulb from Thomas Edison. All of these are implementations of electricity.

[Casey Newton]

I mean, it's not only is it a technology, but it's like a force of nature. Right. And we have been able to harness it in so many ways. And every time I turn my lights on, I say, thank you, electricity.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes. One of my favorite books of all time is by a historian named David Nye, who wrote this book called Electrifying America. And it's just sort of about the period where electricity was really seeping into American life and culture and how it redefined basically everything. Like, you would be in some sort of an agricultural village or something where people were doing subsistence farming, and all of a sudden, electricity would come to town, and it totally changed everything about your life.

[Casey Newton]

You could.

[Kevin Roos]

You could do things at night. You could extend the work day. Like, it became possible to have just all kinds of new technologies in your life that would basically take you out of the subsistence farming era and into modernity.

[Casey Newton]

And that's what we want to see more of, out of our technology, change our lives in positive ways.

[Kevin Roos]

Please.

[Casey Newton]

Well, Kevin can't believe it, but we've arrived at number one God. And this took a lot of thought, a lot of. A lot of debate, a lot of fractious, contentious debate. But when we really thought long and hard about it, there was only one possible candidate for the most iconic technology of all time. And we'll say it now, the number one most iconic technology of all time.

[Kevin Roos]

Fire.

[Casey Newton]

First of all, only technology on this list that was stolen from the gods. Thank you, Prometheus. Second of all, once we became able to control fire, sometime within the past million years, we were able to cook food, which was one of the biggest revolutions of all time. We were also able to create campfires and sit around and tell stories, which became the foundation that podcasting is built upon.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes.

[Casey Newton]

And a third thing I would say, once we began to be able to control fire, we were able to adopt a scorched earth technique to our military campaigns. So if it really seemed like we were gonna lose a war, we could just burn down our whole country. I think they did that in Russia once or twice.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah. I would say the most important application of fire has been to keeping us warm, Right?

[Casey Newton]

Yeah.

[Kevin Roos]

People would just die of being cold.

[Casey Newton]

Fire is the most iconic source of heat that exists. It's true.

[Kevin Roos]

And it's sort of a cliche now among people in our world, the tech industry, to compare AI to fire in some way to say it's the most important invention since fire. Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, has said that. But I think implicit in that is that no one is arguing that fire is the most important technology of all time. We just sort of take that one for granted.

[Casey Newton]

We do. And so today we really wanted to celebrate it because I think fire is. It perfectly encapsulates so much of what we talk about when we talk about tech, which is it is incredibly powerful, it has many wonderful uses, and also, if it is not controlled, it can absolutely kill you.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes. It is a dual use technology that can cause both extreme harm, as in a wildfire or a house fire, or it can cook food and keep you warm and help you survive. Fire also allowed humans to migrate, to leave warm regions and settle in colder areas. It helped humans navigate the dark with things like lamps and lanterns, and it was essential for making things like metal.

[Casey Newton]

Well, anything else we should say about fire?

[Kevin Roos]

What would you say is your favorite kind of fire?

[Casey Newton]

My favorite kind of fire is when the roof is on fire, but you don't need any water. And so you just let the mother effer burn like so of in a dance club setting. You know what I mean? Do you remember. Do you remember the old song that said, you know, somebody called 911 because there's a shorty fire burning on the dance floor? To me, that. That's the kind of fire I want to be a part of. How about you?

[Kevin Roos]

I'm a big fan of the bonfire.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah.

[Kevin Roos]

Still a great place to have a conversation, to maybe roast some marshmallows, to sing some folk music. Bonfires, they also, you know, I love this. I love the way they smell.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah. I mean, it feels like you shouldn't want your clothes to smell like a bonfire after, but it always makes me happy when it does.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah.

[Casey Newton]

Love a bonfire. Well, Kevin, any final reflections on this list of 100 iconic technologies?

[Kevin Roos]

Yes. I would say this was an exercise that seemed a little bit stunty to me when you first proposed doing it. And I should say it is stunty. We are doing this in part because we're taking a week off making a podcast about the news. But I would also say that it has. Doing all of the research about all these iconic technologies has really made me appreciate just the process of invention. And the people who go out into the world and they say, there's a problem, I want to fix it.

[Casey Newton]

Exactly. You know, look, I love the aspect of my job that lets me to think critically about technologies and point out potential problem areas and urge people to fix them. But I wouldn't have started writing about these issues at all if I didn't fundamentally love trying new things and sampling the fruits of human ingenuity. And so having a chance today to run through all of them with you, celebrate them a little bit, and frankly, try to point the way forward for other inventors out there who want to have a positive impact on the world. I had a lot of fun.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes, me too. Kasey. That is the hundred most iconic technologies of all time.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah. And if we look, we may have missed something. You should feel free to email it. If we miss something really obvious, I actually do want to hear about it because we may take another run at this sometime. You know, things are going to move up and down on this list. By next year there are going to be more technologies in the world that could be worthy of our consideration. So if you have an iconic technology out there that we didn't consider and you don't work for the company that makes it or their PR agency, we are hardforkytimes.com thanks for listening.

[Kevin Roos]

This podcast is supported by Made in Cookware.

[Casey Newton]

As a chef and a restaurant owner, I'm as meticulous about my cookware as I am about my ingredients. That's why I love Made in Cookware. Each pan they make isn't just designed to perform, it's crafted to last. As a mom, I love that I can trust Made In. It's made from the world's finest materials so I can feel good about what I'm feeding my family. I I'm Chef Brooke Williamson and I use Made in Cookware.

[Kevin Roos]

For full details, visit madeincookware.com that's M A D E I N cookware.com this podcast is supported by Carvana. With Carvana Value Tracker, you can track your car's value anytime, anywhere. If you want to know what your car's worth, Carvana Value Tracker analyzes your car's make, model, condition, market and more to give you the value for your vehicle. Carvana will even let you know when your car's value changes with update emails so you're always up to date. However you value your car, know it's worth with Carvana Value Tracker. Hard fork is produced by Whitney Jones and Rachel Cohn. We're edited by Jen Poyant. We're fact checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show is engineered by Chris Wood Original music by Marion Lozano, Rowan Nemisto, and Dan Powell. Our audience editor is Nell Galogli. Video production by Ryan Manning and Chris Schop. You can watch this full episode on [e-mail] hardfork Special thanks to Paula Schuman, Puy Wing Tam, Dalia Haddad, and Jeffrey Miranda. As always, you can email [e-mail].

[Casey Newton]

This.

[Kevin Roos]

Podcast is supported by Made in Cookware.

[Casey Newton]

As a chef and a restaurant owner, I'm as meticulous about my cookware as I am about my ingredients. That's why I love Made in Cookware. Each pan they make isn't just designed to perform, it's crafted to last. As a mom, I love that I can trust Made in Made from the world's finest materials so I can feel good about what I'm feeding my family. I'm Chef Brooke Williamson and I use Made in Cookware.

[Kevin Roos]

For full details, visit madeincookware.com that's M A D E I N cookware dot com.