Disruptive Decades: Technologies that revolutionised the 1920s

In 1928 Otto Frederick Rohwedder gave the world the invention that all future inventions would be cheekily compared to: sliced bread. His revolutionary bread-slicing machine made such an impact that it inspired the popular idiom “the best thing since sliced bread” which we still use today. Despite the idiom we are not quite as impressed these days by sliced bread. It remains an apt example of the many inventions that defined one of the 20th century’s most dynamic decades and revolutionised the world.

The 1920s were a time of change and prosperity. Jazz ruled, hemlines rose and Western countries like the United States experienced an economic boom of epic proportions. In all aspects of life things were changing and they were changing fast.

It was an exciting time. Society was shifting and innovation was booming with advancements in technology, science and entertainment rolling out one after another. Post-WWI prosperity allowed many people to live comfortably with cash to burn on consumer goods. The retail market blossomed with gadgets. Scientific discoveries saved more lives than ever and technological breakthroughs turned science fiction into reality. The Twenties were Roaring.

Antibiotics

Antibiotics have saved countless lives by curing infections that would have been deadly only a century ago. We have Alexander Fleming’s messiness to thank for it. On September 3 1928 the Scottish professor returned to his laboratory after a family vacation. Fleming was not known for being especially tidy and had left stacks of staphylococci-drenched glass plates sitting on a bench. While sorting them he noticed that a fungus had contaminated one of the cultures forming a staph-free area. Reacting with a simple “That’s funny” Fleming showed his assistant and got to work studying the mystery mould. He discovered that this “mould juice” as he called it was able to destroy a variety of bacteria. He soon renamed the mould juice dubbing it penicillin which today is well-known as the first true antibiotic. Surprisingly scientists in Fleming’s time were not interested in his discovery. Research on the mould juice did not take off until the 1940s after he had more or less given up on it. Fleming’s work was eventually recognised and he was granted a Nobel Prize in 1945.

Radio broadcast

The history of radio goes back to the 19th century with a variety of innovations contributing to its development. Radio was used for wartime communication and amateur broadcasts in the early 1900s but the radio as a commercial medium did not take off until the 1920s when radio receivers became common. The first licensed commercial radio station KDKA was developed by Henry P. Davis on November 2 1920. The first commercial broadcast was Davis reading the results of the US Presidential election. Over the next decade radio stations began popping up all over the world. The new medium made immediate mass communication available for the first time. Newspapers feared the decline of the printed page and bought their own stations. Advertisers immediately jumped on board and society fell in love with entertainment programs that provided news, drama and music.

Frozen food

Walk into any grocery store today and you will find aisles of frozen food ready to be popped into the oven. Whether that is a great thing for modern society is debatable but it was a major deal in the 20s and had a significant effect on future Western eating habits. Frozen foods were developed by Clarence Birdseye. He was an American who travelled to northern Canada in the 1910s for business and observed the process of freezing food by natives. After some experimentation he founded a company and patented his process of flash-freezing fish packed into cartons. In 1929 he sold his company and patents for $22 million and large-scale production began in 1930. It was a hit with consumers for its efficiency and for making out-of-season foods available year round.

Pop-up toaster

The pop-up toaster is not the most prolific invention of all time but it is a perfect example of the many time-saving household items that hit the market in the 20s. Before the first electric toaster was developed in the 1890s toast was not a quick snack. A toast-lover had to hold bread over an open flame using tongs or a wire toasting frame. Even when using an electric toaster the bread still had to be manually flipped and it was a fire hazard. The pop-up toaster solved these problems by letting people set a timer and toast both sides of the bread without worrying about kitchen fires. Invented in 1919 by Charles Strite the first commercially available electric pop-up toaster, the Model 1-A-1 Toastmaster, hit kitchens in 1925. This was three years before sliced bread.

Insulin

Before the development of insulin diabetes was a death sentence. Doctors knew the disease was related to sugar and would prescribe strict diets but there was not much else they could do. In 1920 Frederick Banting had a moment of clarity and jotted a note regarding the ligation of pancreatic ducts to isolate internal secretions. This was the final breakthrough in a series of research milestones in the study of diabetes. Banting took his hypothesis to J.J.R. Macleod at the University of Toronto who gave him lab space, ten dogs and two assistants. Banting experimented with his idea and refined the drug until it was ready for clinical tests. On January 11 1922 14-year-old Leonard Thompson became the first patient treated with insulin. The boy had a severe allergic reaction and Banting worked for the next 12 days to perfect the injection. He gave it another go on January 23 and it was a complete success. Banting and his team then made the rounds in a hospital injecting children who were dying from diabetes. The children awoke from their comas. Banting and Macleod won the 1923 Nobel Prize for medicine.

For more on how technology has shaped culture, see these must-read quotes about television from history’s most creative minds.