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

The electric washing machine may be the single most liberating household technology ever invented. Before it arrived, millions of people—mostly women—spent enormous portions of their lives bent over washtubs and washboards. Join Virginia Postrel and Charles C. Mann as they explore how laundry technology transformed work, family life, public health, and modern society itself.

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

Except for fire and stone tools, clothing may be our species’ oldest technology—it was invented 170,000 years ago or more. The first humans to don clothing soon made a discovery: worn too often, their garments would become infested with lice. Soon followed another invention: laundry.

That laundry was presumably done by banging animal skins on rocks, more or less as people do with rugs today. Soap did not become part of the process for tens of thousands of years. Indeed, the first recipe for soap in the historical record dates only to ancient Babylonia, where big commercial laundries served all the main cities.

Over the centuries, clothing became the province of an extraordinary industry of toil—one that was blown apart in 1907, when the first electric washing machine appeared. In a few decades, it upended the domestic life of half the human species. A way of life that had endured for centuries was so thoroughly and rapidly ended that most of us today have no idea it existed.

Forget the flying car. We’re going to the laundromat!

Subjects discussed include:

• Charles’s Mumbai Laundry Epiphany
• Vermin Evolution
• No More Open Pores!
• Undercover Laundry Reporter Elizabeth Banks
• Not-so-trad Tradwives
• Rural Electrification
• 1900 U.S. Census Categories
• Charles’s Attempt to Use a Washboard

Lice, human hairlessness, and the origin of clothing: Ian Gilligan, Climate, Clothing, and Agriculture in Prehistory, 2018. (Gilligan bases his fine account on, among other things, these two scholarly articles.)

Prize-winning student essay on Lenin’s battle against vermin: Prisca Allio, The Louse Manifesto,2018.

Soap: Ferris Jabr, Why Soap Works, Yale School of Medicine, 2020.

Research article on Babylonian laundry: Nathan, Wasserman. Treating Garments in the Old Babylonian Period: “At the Cleaners” in a Comparative View, Iraq, 2013.

Elizabeth Banks’ laundry career: Elizabeth L. Banks, Campaigns of Curiosity: Journalistic Adventures of an American Girl in London, 1894, pp 153-208.

Correction: In discussing journalists like Banks, Virginia says 18th and early 19th century when she means 19th and early 20th century.

Famous economics paper evaluating the washing machine as liberatory technology: Jeremy Greenwood, Ananth Seshadri, and Mehmet Yorukoglu, Engines of Liberation, The Review of Economic Studies, 2005.

Cleaning in general: Virginia Smith, Clean: A History of Personal Hygien...

• (00:01:23) - The Laundry Mountain of Mumbai
• (00:04:08) - What Lice Reveal About the Origins of Clothing
• (00:08:55) - The Science of Soap
• (00:12:35) - Babylon's 4,000-Year-Old Dry Cleaners
• (00:16:33) - My Washboard Disaster
• (00:20:00) - Laundry as a Profession
• (00:33:12) - Bleach, White Clothes, and Respectability
• (00:40:12) - The Washing Machine That Sold Electricity
• (00:45:49) - The Technology That Freed Half of Humanity