50 Things That Made The Modern Economy

With Tim Harford

Gillette Adverts stand against toxic masculinity.

Budweiser makes specially decorated cups to encourage non-binary and gender fluid people

to feel pride in their identity.

These examples of woke capitalism, of corporations promoting progressive social causes, feel

ostentatiously up to the moment. But woke capitalism isn't as new as you might think.

Back in 1850, social progress had further to go.

A couple of years earlier, American campaigner Elizabeth Kady Stanton had caused controversy

at a women's rights convention by calling for women to get the vote.

Even her supporters worried that that was too ambitious.

Meanwhile, in Boston, a failed actor was trying to make his fortune as an inventor.

He had rented space in a workshop showroom, hoping to sell his machine for carving wooden

type, but wooden type was falling out of fashion.

The device was ingenious, but nobody wanted to buy one.

The workshop owner invited the inventor to take a look at another product he was struggling

with, a sewing machine, and it didn't work very well.

Nobody had succeeded in making one that did, though inventors had been trying for decades.

The opportunity was clear. True, the time of a seamstress wasn't expensive.

As the New York heralds said,

We know of no class of work women who are more poorly paid for their work or who suffer

more privation and hardship.

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