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Shmoop! Health and household. Ancient Egyptians used makeup, the Greeks

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invented door locks, Romans wore underwear. Well sometimes we don't member

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toga parties. All right, well these inventions don't get the credit they[makeup, lock and underwear]

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deserve but they definitely influence the way we live today. Don't believe us?

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Just visualize all underwear and door locks, disappearing. Plus buttons,

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eyeglasses and toilets, yep a toilet less world that's what we'd be in folks. We

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hope nose plugs exist in that world, yikes.

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All right well in previous units we've talked about the big guys the atom bomb,

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the steam engine, the airplane, electricity, all those colossal

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inventions. That change the courses of wars, connected distant parts of the

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globe and remade the nature of human energy use. [solar panels] Well they deserve their stars

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on the Walk of Fame, but this unit isn't about the headliners. It's more about the

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small indie band that never made it to the big time even though they totally

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influenced music. We're talking about the little everyday technologies that

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individuals rely on ovens, eyeglasses, soap, vaccines, vacuums and all the stuff [technologies playing instruments]

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in between. In other words it's about how humans have lived, how they built their

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homes, cooked, cleaned, dressed, and generally stayed healthy. It's about how

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technology has changed the way we think about everything from hygiene to

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nutrition to comfort. Well let's do a quick review of all the major topics

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will be getting cozy with, like domestic technologies. These are the kinds of

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technologies that everybody forgets about but have actually made big[man in kitchen cooking]

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differences in our lives. They affect how we prepare our food, improve our health,

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make our clothes and live our lives. You know the little stuff. And how about food

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preservation? Well it's one of the earliest technologies that made human

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life way more awesome and yeah that's the technical term we're going with way

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more awesome W.M.A. All right well techniques like

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fermentation, smoking, salting and just plain old cooking, helped humans save their [caveman couple cooking]

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food and probably made it taste better. Sorry raw diet folks but it's true.

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Industrialization dramatically changed the way we keep and prepare food.

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Pasteurization preserved dairy products and chemical preservatives and factories

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canning have made it possible for a can of peaches to survive the apocalypse.

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Which is why we've built our bomb shelter inside a can of peaches,

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brilliant right? Well cloth and clothing are pretty essential to human cultures[runway model]

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as well. Early clothing was animal-based as in leather, wool and silk. But cotton

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eventually came to dominate the world's cloth production. Let's show our t-shirts

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some respect and be grateful we're not wearing a bearskin. Whoo! Once we got

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industrialized, though, new synthetic materials got popular. Well most of them

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were petroleum products, plastic, nylon, polyester anyone? None of these things

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grow naturally in the wild folks. Human health has also been at the heart of

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some of the most important technological developments. From early sewers and

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plumbing to the microscope and vaccinations. But more recently we're[lab engineering]

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heading into the exciting and slightly scary territory of bioengineering and

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cloning. And eventually a massive clone army will create an interstellar Empire.[star wars soldiers, Yoda, and George Lucas]

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Exactly as George Lucas hath foretold. All right well housing and building

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materials have come a long way too. We started in caves and now hang out and

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structures of concrete, bricks, plaster and glass. Turns out living in fancy

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homes has also changed humans culturally. Instead of just making it a little

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warmer in the winter. As a side note this unit is also about how much we do not[mother and son]

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want to live in the Middle Ages, no matter how much we like Lord of the

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Rings and Game of Thrones. Two words, chamber pots. Yeah, now a few more words,

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unclean water supplies, rampant infectious disease and a belief that

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taking a shower might kill us nasty[dirty man and dog in crumbling castle]

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