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If you see a film with a pay phone in a booth, you know it’s not 2025:
To signal the era without actually telling us the year, movie makers can go to History for Hire. In a 33,000 square foot warehouse, the company preserves cereal boxes and cans from the 1940s, movie projectors from the 1950s, hair dryers from the 1960s.
Although we are told that History for Hire might have to close its doors, its message is timeless. Populating tales of destruction and creation, their inventory documents the everyday products that reflect and fuel economic growth.
Product History
These TV, coffee, and computer images are from the History for Hire catalogue.
Media and 1950s television
Now we stream.
Food and 1980s Coffee
From Starbucks to monthly beans delivery, coffee has gone global.
Information and Apple Macintosh
Laptops and Smart phones are descendants of the original Apple computers.
At this point, looking for a common denominator, we can conclude with the cargo container.
Globalization and the Cargo Container
Imagine 82,880 T-shirts in this box:
Before that container, t-shirts, TVs, and coffee were packed in barrels or bags or crates. Transported by truckers to waterfront docks, it could have taken weeks to load them onto ships.
But then, Malcom Mclean invented the container and created the globalization that brought us a vast affordable menu of media, food, and information products.
Creative Destruction
As economist Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950) explained, entrepreneurs’ new products and processes are the source of “creative destruction.” Rendering others obsolete, new products and processes create jobs, progress, and productivity. They change consumer habits, develop new means of production and new forms of economic organization.
They fuel the massive economic growth that has characterized the global economy:
My sources and more: Thanks to the NY Times for inspiring today’s post on product history. It reminds us that products can be signposts along a sometimes bumpy road to economic growth. For more about that road, I recommend Our World In Data.
Please note that several of today’s sentences were in a past econlife post.
