From Tom, a good pick and a good point:
Prolly you’ve all seen it … the most underrated invention — The Pallet. More underrated even than the shipping container, but just about as needed. http://www.slate.com/articles/business/transport/2012/08/pallets_the_single_most_important_object_in_the_global_economy_.html
Right up there with pallets I would put adoption of the UPC bar code (and newer generations such as DataMatrix and RFID chips). These made it possible to computerize inventories without manual data entry as well as real time tracking of shipping (so when you wonder where your Amazon package is as I did several years ago you can find out; mine sat on a delivery truck for three days and Amazon refunded the shipping fee). I wonder how many of the readers of this blog remember grocery stores without bar code enabled checkout.
They’re still around.
A palatable choice.
Cratered the delivery.
There is a distributor in Indianapolis named “Buckingham Pallets”.
dont forget wheels.
wtf are you talking about ?
The modern pallet would be limited in use without the forklift.
Before I jump over to Wiki to look it up, I’m guessing that a platform pallet has probably existed for thousands if years, hoisted by ropes or chains, but the modern pallet was invented in conjunction with the forklift.
The novelty of the shipping container is it’s standard size which makes it suitable for transloading between ship, barge, train, truck and airplane.
The barge, invented thousands of years ago, still carries most of the coal and grain down the Mississippi River for export markets.
The shipping container was more than a standard size. It changed the way that freight was handled in port. A number of years ago there was a bitter strike at the Port of Vancouver, when the work rules where all the freight was to be removed by hand was changed. The union lost, the Port authority wasn’t going to back down. Shipping became far less prone to damage and theft, and much cheaper.
I still can’t figure out how the union could justify it’s existence in these situations.
“Shipping became far less prone to damage and theft,” …..there’s your answer; loss of income stream to union members.
“The novelty of the shipping container is it’s standard size which makes it suitable for transloading between ship, barge, train, truck and airplane.”
Or galley: amphorae (those big jars shaped like a vase from the days of ancient Rome and Greece) were an important example of exactly that standardization. They look wildly impractical as shipping containers to modern eyes, with their pointy ends which make them incapable of standing on solid ground. But their points were embedded into sand in the bottom of ancient cargo ships, and then they could be packed tightly amongst each other (thanks to their pointed, graduated ends).
I imagine that after barrels were invented they were a superior cargo container, but amphorae were both effective for their time, and must have been non-trivial to invent. (Who would think of creating a container that can’t stand upright?)
You can say this for plenty of mundane things
Yes. Frankly, the fact this is even debated is indicative of the great stagnation. A society that continued to progress from the same rate as the early-mid 20th century until today would have far more impressive underrated inventions to muse about.
To be blunt, every age of human civilization has had its pivotal inventions. A man in Dark Ages Europe could point to the stirrup and heavy plough. If in 2012 we’re pointing to an invention little more sophisticated than these, then we’re doing something wrong.
I believe the topic was “under rated” inventions. Things that are life changing but we take for granted and hardly recognize their contributions until they are brought to our attention and we really have to think hard about it. Someone suggested the UPC. Yeah, it’s overlooked but bring it up and people quickly say, yeah I see what you are saying. The most under rated invention is one that leaves you wanting to say no but grudgingly admitting it is amazingly useful. Pallets? Clothes hangers? Cardboard? Karaoke?
We certainly have had recent inventions that had a transformative effect on modern society: the PC, the smart phone, the internet, anti-virals and other pharmaceuticals. I think we are at a fairly comfortable stage of development and innovation is happening mostly in electronics, energy, and medicine. We have everything else we need.
I think we should fight over chopsticks vs. forks some more.
You think we’re at a comfortable stage of development? With middle-aged women checking frantically for breast tumors, their husbands losing sleep over their prostates, and older people stressing over Alzheimer’s? Humanity cannot be said to be comfortable so long as we retain the maximum life expectancy our forebears in Mesopotamia had. Saying we have everything we need aside from electronics, energy, and medicine (the latter the means to forestalling pain, injury, and death) is tantamount to admitting we’re still very much in a primitive age of scarcity.
The sooner we recognize this fact, the better. Because in the meantime, we seem to becoming complacent about decreasing economic growth rates and concomitant technological rates of advancement.
Dude, what are you talking about? The life expectancy stunk in Mesopotamia in antiquity. Plus we have segways now.
A humble proposal. The way to analyze the importance of these types of things is to subtract them from existence and see if there are substitutes.
I suppose, but that obviates unique solutions such as the wheel, rope, and hammer.
The pallet is a pallet and by any other name it is a platform that lifts many smaller items at once. A tray is a form of pallet, or a pallet is a form of tray.
The innovation comes from pallet plus crane or pallet plus forklift. I’m not an engineer, but would a pallet be considered a form of a lever?
The amazing thing about rope is how strands of short length are woven together without knots to form a longer and stronger strand that does not unravel. The innovation is the weaving technique. There probably isn’t one person in 10,000 in the US who knows how to make rope. Is the innovation so obvious? Even knowing of its existence and general design I’m not sure I could figure it out and be willing to risk my life with the end product.
I’m sure it’s rare, but it seems like it must be higher than 1/10,000–we did it in boy scouts. Read Caveman Chemistry if you want a lovely primer on this stuff, and don’t forget the important difference between spinning string and winding rope; they’re very different techniques, discovered at different times, and obviously jointly necessary.
I think it is clear that universal Parcel Post in the US is the most significant innovation in the past century.
(Parcel Post existed for three decades previously for international mail, by treaty agreement.)
The pallet serves the few who already had access to cheap transportation, merely making cheap transportation cheaper.
Parcel Post served the exploited individuals who were constantly struggling with transportation problems and costs.
It is claimed that in Africa farmers are greatly aided by cell phone texting apps that let them learn the price of their commodities before beginning the costly in time and money trip to sell their production.
American farmers had the same problem, but worse. They traveled to a town, which had one of the 300,000 Post Offices plus rail depot, or other freight terminal, and the store with the deal with the freight office for lowest fares. They had fought to get RFD, so the news did come daily by the contract mail carrier. But with the beginning of Parcel Post, farmers could send and receive goods daily. They got chicks by mail and shipped out eggs.
I was just listening to a story on coffee and its taste being a trait of soils and altitude and climate. Imagine an Ethiopian farmer with some coffee harvest shipping his coffee directly to you, or more likely indirectly through an agent handling the ag product pest inspection and customs. With universal parcel post, any farmer producing even small amounts of coffee beans could ship to any of multiple agents in the nation which would then ship by parcel post
Imagine if the things you needed to deliver or fetch required an hour of travel at a minimum to accomplish? How much would you pay per item/pound to have someone come to you?
Before RFD began, private carriers could deliver the mail from the post office to addresses, and carry news papers and parcels, and they did, but they charged the rural customers, so it wasn’t universal so it didn’t have the required network effect to drive its use.
For people in cities, options, competition, were easily accessible, but they too weren’t universal. FedEx was started in 1973 because of the unfilled need for a way to ship easily universally. Even then, anything that couldn’t be shipped by Parcel Post, were a hassle to ship, often requiring a freight forwarding agent that figured out how to route your shipment to its destination, with it arriving at a freight office with an extra charge to deliver it to the addressee. Starting from that premise, it ended up FedEx carries mostly things that can be shipped Parcel Post.
And US Post Office universal Parcel Post will celebrate its centenary January 1, 2013.
Which, by mere coincidence, is the day it will declare insolvency and shut down.
It’s ironic that just a few years ago (2006) they transported the most mail ever in history. Takes skill to kill a goose like that!
Like GM they were strangled by their own unions.
Although, the in the case of the Post, congress really hamstrung them.
Pallets are a great invention.
Shipping containers are a great invention.
But what I never understood ist, why aren’t they compatible?
Standard size pallets (euro-pool) are 80cm x 120cm
Standard size containers (TEU) are (on the inside) 235 cm x 571 cm.
This means you can’t stack pallets efficiently in a container.
The container ist just a few cm to narrow for either 2×120 or 3×80.
When you put the pallets with the narrow side front (which would be the easiest way to fill al container) you would get 2×4 pallets in one container.
That means that 43% of the container’s floorspace remains unused.
That strikes me as strange in an industry that’s so much geared towards efficiency.
Yes, there’s some funny history here, and I wouldn’t be too shocked if it were sorted out someday, but there’s not as much pressure as you think because most shippers aren’t willing to waste the vertical cube space of the container on pallets, so the loss of floor space is entirely theoretical.
There are a few comments nosing around the idea, but to put it plainly, rather than quibble about the shipping container, the pallet, or the lightbulb, I would say let’s praise the common thread underneath them all; the rise of international standards!
Just the very idea of getting the whole world to agree on a single standard for an object like a pallet or shipping container was a very large task in the 19th century, one that really needed an empire to pull off. Nowadays we have strong international standards bodies that can organize the world around a common way to do things and make life much more efficient in many different areas of commerce. Everything from internet standards to nuts and bolts to international banking protocols.
The AP is reporting that CO2 emissions are at twenty year lows due to cheap natural gas: http://news.yahoo.com/ap-impact-co2-emissions-us-drop-20-low-174616030–finance.html
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