Refrigeration brought distant production centers and the North American population together. It tore down the barriers of climates and seasons. And while it helped to rev up industrial processes, it became an industry itself.
Allowed all types of food to be made available year-round
Ice was harvested and stored in China before the first millennium. Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans placed large amounts of snow into storage pits and covered this cooling agent with insulating material.
For centuries, people preserved and stored their food — especially milk and butter — in cellars, outdoor window boxes or even underwater in nearby lakes, streams or wells.
food preservation used time-tested methods: salting, spicing, smoking, pickling and drying.
The strength of currencies has become a source of tension between some of the world's biggest economies, especially the US and China.
Brazil's finance minister went as far as to warn that his country would not stand idly by as international currency wars threatened its competitiveness.
What was he talking about?
Watch this animated guide to find out about why countries are falling out with each other because of their currencies.
The premise of the work is simple — get to know your potential customers as well as possible before you make a product for them. But when those customers live, say, in a mud hut in Zambia or in a tin-roofed hutong dwelling in China, when you are trying — as Nokia and just about every one of its competitors is — to design a cellphone that will sell to essentially the only people left on earth who don’t yet have one, which is to say people who are illiterate, making $4 per day or less and have no easy access to electricity, the challenges are considerable.
Text messaging, or S.M.S. (short message service), turns out to be a particularly cost-effective way to connect with otherwise unreachable people privately and across great distances. Public health workers in South Africa now send text messages to tuberculosis patients with reminders to take their medication. In Kenya, people can use S.M.S. to ask anonymous questions about culturally taboo subjects like AIDS, breast cancer and sexually transmitted diseases, receiving prompt answers from health experts for no charge.
A cellphone in the hands of an Indian fisherman who uses it to grow his business — which presumably gives him more resources to feed, clothe, educate and safeguard his family — represents a textbook case of bottom-up economic development, a way of empowering individuals by encouraging entrepreneurship
For this reason, the cellphone has become a darling of the microfinance movement
companies like Wizzit, in South Africa, and GCash, in the Philippines, have started programs that allow customers to use their phones to store cash credits transferred from another phone or p
urchased through a post office, phone-kiosk operator or other licensed operator
Interestingly, the recent post-election violence in Kenya provided a remarkable case study for the cellphone as an instrument of both war and peace.
Carrying a full-featured cellphone lessens your needs for other things, including a watch, an alarm clock, a camera, video camera, home stereo, television, computer or, for that matter, a newspaper. With the advent of mobile banking, cellphones have begun to replace wallets as well.