American History: Public Transport and the Automobile

This keeps coming up, so I'm writing it up here so I can link to it.

Public transport in America is significantly less pervasive than in Europe and many other parts of the world. People often imagine that this is because America is less advanced. But the history is almost the opposite: America adopted a new technology (specifically, the automobile) earlier and faster and more enthusiastically than other countries.

Many Americans believe that the automobile was invented here. It wasn't; but the automobile assembly line, and with it mass production of motor vehicles, was. During both world wars, American industry, which already had quite a bit of experience mass-producing vehicles, supplied the allies with large quantities of military vehicles. Everyone knows about the planes and ships and tanks, but the factories also cranked out large numbers of military trucks and jeeps, because transporting troops and supplies is essential to any war effort.

Americans are often shocked to learn that during WWII, Germany, widely regarded as having been an industrial powerhouse at the time, was heavily reliant on horses for military transport. That feels like an anachronism to Americans; we associate military use of horses, with medieval cavalry, or with our mid-nineteenth-century Civil War, in which most of the soldiers had single-shot muzzle-loading rifles. We don't think of military horses and machine guns as belonging to the same era. (There were both horses and gatling guns in the Spanish American war, but our history classes tend to gloss over that one in a rush to get to WWI and WWII, which are considered more important.) It's quite weird to us that an industrialized country with the ability to make things like airplanes, would use horses in the military.

After WWII, we had a major economic boom. Most of Europe largely missed out on this, because a lot of their infrastructure had been bombed into oblivion, and they were still recovering, rebuilding. America didn't have to rebuild, and with all the soldiers back in the country to work regular jobs, production and income both rose. Many women continued to work outside the home, for the first time (on any kind of large scale) in our history during peacetime, and as a result, families now had two incomes and could afford more stuff than before. The factories turned their production to civilian purposes, and most American families purchased a number of things for the first time in this era: cars, major appliances, cameras, radios, etc. (Many families' earliest family photos are taken in front of the family car, because both were new.)

With so many American households owning cars, public support for building better roads skyrocketed, resulting in, among other things, the Interstate highway system. People often blame the interstates for causing America's love affair with the car, but it's really the other way around. Yes, there were politicians who had other reasons for wanting to build them, but they were able to get popular support because all the new car owners wanted better roads to drive on. Meanwhile, passenger railroads started losing customers left and right, until after a few years they started going out of business like it was going out of style. Yes, America *used* to have fairly pervasive passenger rail service. I live in a city of ten thousand people (called Galion) in central Ohio, that *used* to have passenger rail service, but it was discontinued in the late sixties or early seventies, because people weren't using it any more. Other cities in our area, exactly the same thing happened. Now, the nearest passenger rail station is an hour and a half away by car.

America didn't fail to build a public transport network. We *had* one, and we abandoned it because we didn't need it any more. You talk to Americans about passenger trains, and we think the nineteenth century called and they want their technology back.

Does this mean that widespread use of cars is inherently better than widespread use of passenger rail? Not necessarily. But cars are what America collectively chose, and there were and are reasons for that choice. It doesn't mean we don't know how to build a passenger rail network. We had one, and we stopped using it, mostly on purpose.

Why English Breakfast Tea Hasn't Caught On in America

If you pay attention to the portions of the internet that deal a lot with international travel and cultural differences, and if you watch for patterns, certain questions emerge. This is one of the lesser ones, but it's persistent: British people come to America, and they go to the grocery store and find the tea aisle, and they look for the specific teas that they are used to buying at home. This usually includes something called English Breakfast, and they don't always find it. Why, they want to know, is such an important staple tea so uncommon here?

There's some history that's worth knowing here, and I'll talk about that, but first I want to focus on the present situation. First of all, English Breakfast tea is available here, but it's one of several hundred named teas. It has to compete not only with such old standby teas as Constant Comment, but also with the explosion of flavors we've seen in the tea aisle in recent decades. If you go to any large grocery store (say, Meijer) and find the tea aisle, you're going to see hundreds of shelf-feet of different teas, ranging from the mundane (three or four different orange teas, three or four different lemon teas, three or four mint teas, chamomile, ...) to the peculiar.

Some of the most peculiar teas that you will find on the American grocery store shelf belong to a category that I am going to call gift teas. As far as I know, no one else calls them that, but the only time I have ever seen these sorts of tea, other than on the store shelf, was when they were purchased by one person and given to another. Rather than trying to formally define the category, I'm just going to give a couple of examples, and hopefully the idea will become clear.

I was once given a box of tea for Christmas, the exact name of which I no longer recall, but it had Christmas in it. It might have been something like Christmas Brunch or Country Christmas, or some similarly vague holiday-themed name. It was a flavored black tea, meaning that someone took ordinary black tea and added flavors to it. (This in itself is not odd. The aforementioned Constant Comment is a flavored black tea, and it's perfectly normal and reasonable and good.) Unfortunately, I don't remember the exact list of flavors it had in it: there were at least six, and I'm certain that almond and cherry were among them. If it had just been an almond and cherry flavored black tea, that might have been good, but there were several other flavors as well, and it just came out as a muddle. I only ever made one cup of it, which I didn't finish.

My mom currently has in her cupboard a box of Sugar Cookie Sleigh Ride, which was, of course, also a gift. It's an herbal blend containing, again, at least half a dozen different flavors. Among them are, I swear on Dave Barry's soul that I am not making this up, thistle and barley. It's been in the cupboard for at least a year. It was a gift, and you can't throw away a gift. Realistically, nobody's ever going to drink it.

Given the existence of these sorts of teas, with vague, non-flavor-related names, can you begin to get a picture of why Americans see English Breakfast tea and don't immediately think that sounds good, we should try that. Frankly, most Americans are more likely to buy this product for someone they know who is planning a trip to England, than for themselves. Oh, you're interested in England? Well, here you go, here's a gift tea that has England in its name, so even if it's no bloody good, you'll know that I was thinking about you and what your interests are. It's the thought that counts, right? And no, to preempt an obvious question, I don't think most Americans are aware that English Breakfast tea is a thing in England. We get lots of things here that purport to be of various national origins and in fact are not. Why should this English tea we've never heard of before be different? The only way people are going to know otherwise, is if they see British people talking about it on the internet. Which, admittedly, is now possible.

I've glossed over something, though: how is it that Americans have not previously heard of English Breakfast tea?

The really weird thing is, if you look up the history of English Breakfast tea, it is believed to be of American origin. Well, the name, English Breakfast is believed to be of American origin, though it's hard to be quite certain of the particulars. As odd as it may seem, this is a clue. It is worth noting that the blend that went by that name in nineteenth-century America, is not the same blend that goes by that name in England now. In fact, it appears to have been composed of teas imported from China. (The British English Breakfast tea is, according to Wikipedia, made of teas from India, Sri Lanka, and Africa.) Why is this relevant? The thing is, pretty much all American teas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, were made of local American products (sassafras, mint, etc.), black tea (mostly pekoe grade) imported in bulk from China, or some combination thereof. Going across the Pacific, China is just plain closer than India. Also, prior to the advent of containerized shipping, it was cheaper and more practical to get all the tea from one port of origin, because you had to fill an entire bulk hauler with nothing but tea if you wanted the shipping to be at all affordable. Today, an importer can fill a single shipping container with palettes of various goods; but that is a relatively recent development.

We didn't start to see imported named teas in our stores until the nineties, by which time we already had several major competing tea companies (Bigelow, Celestial Seasonings, Arizona, Nestea, Snapple, and of course the old and much maligned standby Lipton, which ironically enough was originally British), each pushing their own line of teas (some more bottled-and-served-cold than others). We already had a pretty well stocked tea aisle. All of the real, tea-containing teas on the aisle had certain things in common, but this was not obvious from their names alone, and of course there were always the herbal teas. Into this mix we now add green tea (which we started to see in stores in the nineties), oolang tea (some time around the turn of the century), white tea (subsequently), and any number of imported blends and specialty teas. But they don't have a long history here, and they have to compete with everything that's already on the shelf. Earl Grey got free publicity from Star Trek, but that doesn't help English Breakfast.

Of course, it's early days yet. If we've only been getting imported named tea blends here for less than a generation, it follows that some that haven't yet caught on, still may do so in the future.

What were "pocket protectors" anyway, and why are really old people always talking about them?

We've all been in this situation: you're talking with an old person, and through one circumstance or another the fact comes up that you know something about computers, or at least use them, or that you have studied a little math, or science, or accounting, or business, or pretty much any other subject that the old person doesn't know anything about.

Anyway, as soon as they find out that you know something about anything, they immediately make some kind of remark about "pocket protectors".

Huh? What does that mean? What's a pocket protector, and what does it have to do with the differential equations class I'm taking?

Having heard these "pocket protector" remarks all my life, a couple of years ago I did some research and found out what it's all about, so now I can share that knowledge with you. The short version is that what these remarks really mean is that the old person hasn't really caught on to the fact that they're old and the world has changed since they were in school. Okay, so you probably already knew that part. The details, however, are interesting...

As you are probably aware, technology is constantly improving. If the laptop that was so awesome you couldn't afford it last year is now selling used on ebay for approximately the same price as a discount ringtone, imagine how primitive computers must have been way back in the twentieth century! In fact, you probably can't imagine it, because any degree of primitiveness you can think up would still be a good deal more advanced than what they had back then. But that's okay, because you don't have to imagine: I'm going to actually tell you.

In your great-great grandfather's day, microchips and even transistors simply hadn't been invented yet. Instead they used something much more primitive (and larger) called a "vacuum tube". A single computer filled up an entire room. Several scientists were required to make it work, and it would take weeks or even months to complete a computation that your phone can do in under a second.

Speaking of phones, they had to be wired to the wall in order to work, and they didn't have screens, and you couldn't use them to send text messages or do anything else. All they could do was make phone calls, and that was *it*. Even for that you had to dial them, and I mean actually dial, not select a name from a list. If you wanted to send a text message back then, you had to write it on paper.

Cars in that era were made out of metal, and they didn't have cupholders or power windows, and to pay for your gas (petrol for British readers) you had to actually go INTO the gas station.

They didn't have "pay at the pump", because credit cards hadn't been invented yet. Back then, if you wanted to borrow money to buy something, you had to make an appointment and speak to a person at the bank called a "loan officer", and he would expect you to be able to show that you could afford the payments, or you wouldn't get to borrow the money.

You may already know (perhaps from watching something old with your grandparents) that movies were in black and white back then, and the special effects were really cheesy. What you may not realize is that people couldn't just watch movies whenever or wherever they wanted. If your great grandparents wanted to watch a movie, they had to go to a place called a "theatre", which was basically a dedicated building just for watching movies. (Well, sometimes a building; other times the theatre was outdoors in a sort of parking lot, and you'd watch the movie through the windshield of your parked car. Really.) Even small towns had a theatre (larger towns often had more than one), and people would come from all over town to sit in the theatre and watch a movie. There was only one screen for everybody, so they had to all watch the same thing. At the time, this didn't seem strange or restrictive to anyone, because movies were new and they just thought it was cool to get to watch one.

But it wasn't just the big-ticket technologies like phones and computers and cars and money and entertainment that were primitive. The little things were primitive too. Clothes, shoes, soft drinks, Jell-O (it didn't even come in blue), lunch boxes, and even such basic things as pencils and pens. That's right, pencils and pens were primitive, and that's why they had "pocket protectors". No fooling.

Today, with modern technology, we take for granted that we can just put a pen or a pencil in our shirt pocket and carry it there, and we don't expect anything bad to happen. However, this is only possible because we have modern pens. This is the really interesting part of the story.

You see, back in the dark ages, before a company called Walkman introduced the first rudimentary portable music players, the pens that they had were horrible barbaric medieval things called "fountain pens". Compared to modern ballpoint pens they were much harder to use. (Among other things, it actually mattered which direction the pen was rotated compared to the tilt of your hand against the paper.) Fountain pens were expensive, notoriously unreliable, and a hassle to use. The only reason people used them at all was because they were portable: you could carry them around anywhere. This was a new feature.

The pens people used before fountain pens wouldn't work if you took them away from the writing desk, because they relied on something called an "inkwell", which was built into the desk, to supply them with ink every few letters. The obvious solution to this was to put a supply of ink in the pen so you could carry it around, and that's what fountain pens were: pens that could carry a supply of ink around in them, so you could use them away from the writing desk and its inkwell.

You could use a fountain pen almost anywhere. This was such a useful feature that people wanted to carry the pens around everywhere, just like we do today. (It was even more important back then, because they didn't have portable computers or phones, so everything had to be written on paper.) The only problem was, the companies that made the pens hadn't really figured out how to do it right yet. The pens were unreliable, but the worse problem was that they leaked. Frequently. People wanted to carry them in their pockets, but they knew that if they did, they'd get pockets full of ink.

And that's why they needed pocket protectors. Anybody who wanted to carry a pen around in their pocket needed to protect the pocket from leaking ink. Scientists had recently developed a totally new kind of material called "plastic", and although it wasn't nearly as good as the plastic we have now, it was good enough to solve the problem. Somebody made little plastic pocket-shaped bags that wouldn't leak from the bottom and called them "pocket protectors".

People who wanted to carry a pen would put a pocket protector in their pocket and then carry the pen in the pocket protector. When the pen leaked, the ink would collect in the bottom of the pocket protector, and they could just pour it back into the inkwell built into the pen, and the shirt wouldn't be ruined.

That's a lot of trouble. If the pens leaked, why didn't they just use pencils? Well you see, back then pencils were made out of wood, and the point could not be retracted. If the tip broke off, you couldn't just click the eraser end a couple of times and extend the "lead". You had to actually sharpen the pencil using a device that cut away some of the wood to reveal more of the graphite "lead". Every time you did this, the pencil got shorter. Also, because the tip could not be retracted, and because the graphite "lead" was much thicker than on modern pencils, carrying a pencil in your pocket would often result in unsightly graphite stains, especially if you were wearing a thin or light-colored shirt. Then there's the possibility of poking yourself if the pencil was at all sharp. In short, the pencils were just as much of a pain as the pens.

So anybody who used pens and pencils on a regular basis (mathematicians, scientists, businessmen, teachers, students, doctors, nurses, ...) would wear a pocket protector all the time. People who didn't know how to write, or didn't have a job that required them to write, didn't need one.

So when old people ask you about your "pocket protector", all they're really implying is that you're not too dumb to write.