I think its the vapor compression and expansion cooling system in all the air conditioners and refridgerators in the world, really cool physics and totally taken for granted. Its also cool because it was something known about for awhile before it was finally perfected.
Oh and you would not believe how many people insist a fridge makes coldness, instead of removing heat. My mom insisted she could run a window AC unit inside the house with no outside ventilation to vent the heat removed.:rolleyes:
Dry cell batteries. Flashlights, the Walkman, mobile phones, wristwatches, all of these nifty things running on magic candy. It’s great. And they’re remarkably safe, too. All that energy, and it almost never goes amok.
(Every so often, someone puts a battery in their pocket with their key-ring, and a circuit is closed, leading to a minor burn. But, dang, it’s rare!)
I’ll have to think more on this one, but off hand - those seat belt things that tighten up in a crash (are the the pretighteners?). Not as cool as AC - unless you crash I guess.
Not sure if public key encryption counts as mundane…
I never cease to be amazed at the drainage systems in built-up areas, although I’m even more impressed at nature’s version in non-built-up areas. And clean, piped, running water.
I was without a kitchen sink for three weeks and now have one again. Boy did I ever take that thing for granted! What an elegant accomplishment! (I mean, it doesn’t look elegant under the hood, but it is.)
So you have clean, pure drinking water pumped in from somewhere (ours comes from Lake Murray, I think) - they make it safe to drink, they run a pipe from the lake to the purification facility to my house, then some of it goes through a tank with a gas burner under it that makes it hot when I ask it to be hot, and all of this is at my fingertips at the touch of a tap! My god! I bitch when the hot part doesn’t come on for a whole minute!
And THEN it goes down a drain and I never see it again! It’s whisked away! All that work for just the water I need at any given moment, and I waste a lot of it! And this costs me under 50 bucks a month to do it all over my house! (And that includes trash pickup!)
ETA - I am also amazed by the internal combustion engine. So you mean, it explodes? It explodes constantly? And moves a billion moving parts, most of which never break? And I take this miracle and use it to toodle around town never even thinking about it?
Probably not what the OP had in mind for technology but I vote for the alphabet/writing. The world would be extremely different without it. It would be a good premise for a SciFi story. What if the entire planet suddenly lost the ability to read and write?
That kind of internal combustion engine is called an “explosion engine” in Spanish (motor de explosión); not every internal combustion engine works by explosion. Sounds kind’a scary, doesn’t it? Talk about taking “taming fire” to new heights, tho!
The amount of… compresion, miniaturization, call it X we’ve achieved in the last 200 years. Plastics, multi-layer technologies and so forth make possible an enormous array of items we take for granted, from hygiene products to thumb drives to those vegetable-packing bags which aren’t “plastic” but actually several layers of different plastics.
Internal combustion literally means explosions inside your engine. I don’t know of any internal combustion engine that doesn’t work by explosion. Every car you’ve ever driven (unless it was a volt) has an internal combustion engine. And yes, a 4 cylinder engine running at 3,000 RPM is containing 200 explosions every second and transferring that energy to forward motion. It is pretty cool.
Microprocessors. It’s tiny little logic gates, flipping around due to electrical charge or lack thereof. EVERYTHING you ever do on a computer boils down to an unimaginably long Morse code looking string of electrical impulses. And it runs so fast, and with such precision, that we can build it out into human-usable interfaces and watch movies and even pretend at making something that thinks. I’m impressed that computers work at all, really.
