Smart phone cameras have simplified sharing snapshots.
Before: Buy film, load film in camera, take pics (auto or not), rewind and remove film, develop film, print photos from that film, physically take pics to friends to show them. Adjust the steps as you see fit.
Now: Turn on camera app, take pic, smart phone automatically uploads them to Facebook even notifying all your friends to take a looksie.
Essential? Important? Nah… Actual real world use of advanced tech to speed up a task? Seems legit.
Notice I didn’t include anything like Photoshop in the above post. Snapshots are often just snapshots. Add in image manipulation, and it is no longer merely a snapshot.
I was going to say the washing machine. But on reflection, I’m going to say trucks.
Yeah, the engine was a nice invention and a car is a pretty labour reducing thing, but trucks, they really make the world go round, all around the world, when you think about it.
Tons and tons of labour saved by the truck, I think!
Do people actually use microwave ovens that much? I don’t know about anyone else but I use my microwave maybe about 10% as much as I use my conventional oven. I mainly use it to heat up drinks, occasionally to steam vegetables, a bit of defrosting now and then and very rarely, if I’m being particularly lazy, to heat up a ready meal.
Everyday cooking is still almost entirely done on the hob or in the electric oven.
I’m still going with laundry devices - washing machines, particularly, although dryers are nice too. Laundry used to be a HUGE part of a woman’s weekly work - it was one of the most strenuous things a housewife had to do, and it was never-ending.
Sharing pictures doesn’t at all qualify. Sure, it was harder to do before–so folks just didn’t do very much of it. I am absolutely certain that I spend more time sharing pictures today than I would have twenty years ago, just by virtue of how easy it is to do. IOW< it’s increased the amount of time I’ve spent in the activity, not decreased it.
Cotton gins fail on another respect. Yes, it’s drastically reduced the amount of time spent in the activity, but as a percentage of a person’s total time, the reduction is very small, because before the cotton gin, the average person already spent a very small percentage of time picking out cotton seeds. If the reduction is from 0.05% of time to 0.001% of time, that’s not actually a big reduction in the total percent of time.
Compare to indoor plumbing. If that’s reduced the amount of time the average person spends carrying water from 5% of their waking hours to 0.05%, that’s a pretty significant reduction.
This depends a lot on what you count. Take the printing press for example. If every copy of everything printed today was hand copied, it would likely take every waking hour of every person on earth. So the printing press has saved countless hours. Of course, without the printing press there would be a tiny fraction of the material now available.
So do you count the hours saved to produce all we have now, or do you count the hours saved to produce at the level we did before? In the former case, it might well be the printing press, or it could be travel, as someone else mentioned. In the latter case, it likely is something agricultural, as there is obviously a certain minimum of food that needs production.
Snapshots should count. If it takes you more time now, you’re doing it wrong.
Seriously, people took pics all the time. Maybe not everyone, but a significant number. For all the steps needed to share just one snapshot in film days, today is SUPER FAST.
Which is why I didn’t include image manipulation for professionals or advanced hobbyists. I spend much more time now on a photo I’m selling or hanging on the wall.
No, work is force dot distance. In general, something that reduces force needed can require the same amount of work due to increasing the distance by a proportional amount. The inclined plane, for example, requires the same amount of mechanical work as simply lifting the mass vertically, discounting friction.
I’m not sure that the technical definition of the jargon term “work” in physics is to be preferred in this thread over the ordinary language word “work” which was around first for physics to steal from…
The ability to communicate over long distances in a negligible amount of time would be my most important invention. The telegraph was a major leap forward. The Pony Express, which carried information from St. Louis to Sacramento in 10 days, was shut down two days after the completion of the telegraph which could do the same thing in just a few minutes.
Right, but that’s a different question. I’m not asking what’s enabled us to do more, I’m asking what’s enabled us to spend less time. Let’s say that 1000 years ago, an average person (including both monks and the illiterate) spent an average of 10 hours of their life creating text. The printing press would only qualify if today the average person spent LESS than ten hours of their life creating text. Do you really think today people spend less time creating text than people did prior to the printing press?
Naw–you’re interpreting it wrong :). I might spend five hours a year sharing snapshots. Twenty years ago, I spent less than ten minutes a year doing it. It was such a pain in the butt to do that I just didn’t do it. Now it’s so easy to do that I do it a lot.
Possibly. Which ONE human activity does the average person do that much less of, due to smelting?
:rolleyes:
Do you think we spend less time communicating over long distances than we used to? I mean, I’ve probably spent at least thirty minutes today communicating with folks all over the world. Prior to the Internet, that would’ve been maybe thirty minutes a year.
Farming I can see, although that’s not a specific technology. Fighting? What?
I honestly didn’t know that. I assumed ginning was a process.
