Cars transformed modern life—but automobiles alone were not enough. Cars would have been useless without a second invention: driving. Behind the daily commute is a vast, intricate system of customs, laws, and innovations that make driving possible. This system evolved over decades and its development wasn’t easy or fast. Ride along with Virginia Postrel and Charles C. Mann as they explore the hidden history of traffic, road design, and the strange creation of modern driving.

Podcast website: http://abundance.institute/EverydayAbundance

Picture the main street in a classic Western movie like Shane or High Noon. There are no lines down the middle. No stop signs, no speed limits, no left-turn lanes—in fact, no lanes at all. People ride their horses or drive their carriages wherever they want, however they want, no matter how crowded the street. They can do this because horses are intelligent beasts that won’t run into each other.

Then came the automobile.

People are now in charge—suddenly, totally, in ways they have not been before. The result: a tsunami of fatal car crashes. In 1913, more than 33 people died for every 10,000 vehicles on the road—more than 20 times today’s vehicular death rate.

One year later, Detroit police sergeant Harold “Harry” Jackson introduced the first stop sign, placing it at a particularly hazardous intersection. The idea caught on. It was the beginning of a thorough reworking of the landscape, one that changed daily lives so thoroughly that its very existence has been forgotten.

Subjects discussed include:

• Maple Syrup Fortunes
• Private Colonial Turnpikes
• Herbert Hoover’s Mighty Role
• Curious Explanations for Driving on the Right
• Stop Signs as Infringements on Pedestrian Rights
• Pennies from Inuit Children
• The Lincoln Highway
• Emily Post’s Cross-Country Drive
• Gasoline in the Pharmacy
• How Big Government Began

Social technologies: Richard Nelson, “Physical and social technologies, and their evolution,” 2003.

Stop signs: Clay McShane, “The Origins and Globalization of Traffic Control Signals, Journal of Urban History, 1999.

Early turnpikes and right-hand driving: Albert C. Rose, Public Roads of the Past. 1952-53 (2 vols.) From the preface: “Future generations will place Mr. Rose’s name among the very few that may be called major highway historians.”

Blue Book: Automobile Blue Book. 1901-1917 (vol. 1 of 3). The first Blue Book was in 1901, but it just covered the Northeast. The first edition that covered almost the entire country was 1907.

Lincoln Highway: Earl Swift, The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways.

Emily Post’s 1916 cross-country voyage: Emily Post, By Motor to the Golden Gate.

Los Angeles home-made crosswalks: Crosswalk Collective.

“Route 66” song:

• (00:01:47) - Why Trucks Couldn't Cross America
• (00:04:33) - The Social Technologies We Never Notice
• (00:08:18) - The Invention of the Stop Sign
• (00:12:03) - When Roads Had No Rules
• (00:17:56) - Google Maps Before Google
• (00:20:11) - The Lincoln Highway Dream
• (00:30:20) - Route 66 and the Interstate Revolution
• (00:36:08) - How Gas Stations Conquered America
• (00:39:09) - Standardizing Road Rules

Nineteenth-century cities were crowded, polluted, and brim-full of tuberculosis. The combination of disease and dirty air led to enormous nasal issues—and the rise of the surprisingly large and influential handkerchief trade. Then came Kleenex and the rise of disposable hygiene. Join Virginia Postrel and Charles C. Mann as they explore the strange history of nose-blowing, tissues, and the modern culture of throwaway consumer products.

Podcast website: http://abundance.institute/EverydayAbundance

People have been blowing their noses as long as there have been people, but phlegm control did not become an industry until after the industrial revolution in the late 18th century.

Rising affluence, industrialization, and urbanization led to a global increase in polluted city air. Exacerbated by ubiquitous coal smoke, a host of respiratory diseases became constant presences in those cities, tuberculosis most prominent among them. Constant coughing, sneezing, and nasal discharge became ordinary features of city life.

Enter the handkerchief.

A remarkably sophisticated physical object, it became a cultural focus, a vital part of the middle- and upper-class wardrobe, and an icon of approved male behavior. Like so many other aspects of 19th-century society, the handkerchief-industrial complex died in the trenches of the First World War.

But technology developed for that same war gave rise to the complex web of creped, plied, and folded wood-pulp fibers known as tissue paper. Kleenex, introduced by Kimberly-Clark in 1924, was more than just a new method of cleaning your nose, it was a harbinger of a new age of disposability—for good and bad, the age we live in now.

Subjects discussed include:

• Charles’s Memorable Shaanxi Snot Shower
• The Handkerchief-Industrial Complex
• Dying Attractively from Tuberculosis
• Advertising Unmentionable Products (A Digression)
• Reliability of Ancient Disease Estimates
• Teddy Roosevelt’s Swag
• East Asian Social Norms, Nasal Division

Erasmus on nose-blowing: Desiderius, Erasmus. De Civilitate Morum Puerilium, 1530. (English translation)

Indigenous disgust with European handkerchiefs: Charles’s book, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, 2005 (online excerpt with quote).

History and prevalence of tuberculosis: John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection, 2025.

Scholarly study of the same subject: Ilaria Barberis, et al., The history of tuberculosis: from the first historical records to the isolation of Koch's bacillus. Journal of Preventive Medical Hygiene, 2017.

Fashionability of 19th-century TB: Imogen Clarke, Tuberculosis: A Fashionable Disease. Sciencemuseum.org, 2019.

The plague of female shoplifters: Elaine S. Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store, 1992.

Rheta Childe Doer at the handkerchief counter: Rheta Childe Doer,

• (00:00:33) - The Problem of Blowing Your Nose
• (00:03:35) - Coal Smoke and the Mucus Crisis
• (00:06:10) - Tuberculosis and Victorian Handkerchief Culture
• (00:09:04) - The Industrial Revolution Creates Handkerchief Abundance
• (00:13:11) - Handkerchiefs, Fashion, and Theft
• (00:17:56) - Christmas Chaos at the Handkerchief Counter
• (00:23:22) - Teddy Roosevelt and the Political Bandana
• (00:26:54) - World War I and the Birth of Cellucotton
• (00:29:34) - From Kotex to Kleenex

Grocery shopping in a supermarket is such a commonplace part of everyday existence that it is routinely mocked as a ritual of narcotized consumerism. In fact, the modern supermarket is a radical break with the past—and a nexus of innovations central to contemporary life. Markets have existed for millennia, of course. But they were nothing like the modern grocery store, with its shopping carts, self-service selection, shelves of branded, packaged goods, and lineup of cash registers. Walk the store aisles with Virginia Postrel and Charles C. Mann as they explore the now-invisible network of technologies that arose to create the supermarket.

Podcast website: http://abundance.institute/EverydayAbundance

Nowadays a Cracker Barrel is a restaurant where you eat down-home food amid rustic décor. But crackers and other provisions used to actually come in big wooden barrels from which store proprietors scooped out and weighed goods for customers. They represented a whole lost world of grocery shopping. Service was personal, choices were limited, prices were high, and quality was inconsistent. This is where “bottom of the barrel” originates. You didn’t want crackers—or flour or anything else—from down there.

The cracker-barrel model fell under attack in the mid-19th century, with the arrival of the first packaged goods—items made in factories, stuffed into branded boxes, and transported to stores.

But the real beginning of the end was February 1898, when 114 different bakeries making a host of different products merged into a cookie colossus: the National Biscuit Company (today known as Nabisco). Its head, Adolphus Green, dreamed of making a single baked good that could be sold across the nation—an identical product, identically fresh, identically packaged, sold everywhere from Boston to Bakersfield. Green’s dream would become a landmark in the history of consumption.

Subjects discussed include:

• Fig Newtons, Origin of
• Actors in the Aisles
• Inflation, Effect on Price Stickers
• Fame of Tristam Shandy, Lack of
• Uneeda Biscuits
• Architecture of Shopping
• Frank Peters, Package Prodigy
• Self-Service as Means of Fighting Segregation and Sexism
• Bar-Code Brilliance

The Nabisco story,from the invaluable American Business History Center

Fun short account of Adolphus Green and Frank Peters: David Traxel, 1898: The Birth of the American Century, 1998, pp. 287-295.

Out of the Cracker Barrel;: The Nabisco Story, From Animal Crackers to Zuzus by William Kahn

General origins of packaged food: Anne Murcott, The (Not So) Secret Lives of Food Packaging, 2024.

Clarence Saunders, Piggly Wiggly, and effects of self-service shopping: Lisa C. Tolbert, Beyond Piggly Wiggly: Inventing the American Self-Service Store, 2023. Slightly exaggerated but fun short video on the same thing. Parallel story about African-American customers and Sears catalogue.

The Cart That Changed the World: The Career of Sylvan N. Goldman by Terry P. Williams

Origin of the bar code: The History of the Bar Code, Smithsonian, 2015. Earliest bar-code scan...

• (00:00:52) - From Hunting & Gathering to the Cracker Barrel
• (00:04:04) - Biscuit Abundance
• (00:19:52) - Why Clerks Used to Do Your Shopping
• (00:22:55) - How Self-Service Changed America
• (00:28:46) - The Surprising Equalizing of Supermarkets
• (00:33:44) - The Shopping Cart Nobody Wanted
• (00:38:56) - Fake Shoppers Save the Shopping Cart
• (00:45:09) - The Barcode Revolution
• (01:00:28) - From Mr. Jones to Grocery Apps