this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2024
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Did they not have plastic in the 1920s?
My brother or sister, they didn't have antibiotics. Electricity, hot water and cars were a little bit inconsistently available depending on where you lived. Airplanes and highways were a rare and exceptional thing to see to almost everybody. The first vaccine was twenty years in the future.
Bakelite was invented by the 20s, but in 1924 I think it would still have been known as "artificial amber" and no one would have known what you were talking about if you tried to talk about plastic.
Wikipedia says bakelite was invented in 1907. But if that's all they had, yeah; they probably either didn't know about it or call it plastic.
But they had fidget spinners and tiktok, right?
No, they didn't even have Vine at that stage.
It was like leaving in the stone age.
Yeah. It made me question why I even bought an iPhone.
I was talking to a friend about this recently. It's so surreal to think about when it's so prevalent in the modern world. Take a scan around your immediate environment and imagine if all the plastic was gone