Am I Pregnant?

So you think you might be pregnant?  Congratulations, or I'm sorry, depending upon your view of the whole thing.  Regardless, it would probably be best to take a pregnancy test just to make sure.  Nothing causes anxiety and worry quite like the unknown.  It’s as easy as counting to three.  Just whip down to your local pharmacy, pee on a stick (hopefully in the privacy of your own home or at the very least a public bathroom), and wait to see how many lines pop up.  Thank goodness we live in such a modern age.  Otherwise one might be forced to go through some pretty ridiculous methods just for a little peace of mind.  

The idea of pregnancy tests goes all the way back to the ancient Egyptians, and like the tests of today, it was based on urine.  When a woman thought she was pregnant 5,000 years ago, she would confirm it by peeing on a bag of barley and a bag of wheat.  If the wheat sprouted she was supposedly having a girl, if the barley sprouted she was going to have a boy, and if neither sprouted she had one less thing to worry about in a time when most people died in their thirties.  Amazingly enough, modern testing has shown this test to be accurate 70 percent of the time, though the whole gender part was complete bupkus.

The ancient Egyptian’s grain test was actually the high point for most of human history.  Though the Greeks and Romans were decidedly awesome at philosophy and engineering, they were fucking idiots when it came to human anatomy.  During most of this period the go to pregnancy test was for a woman to shove an onion up her pussy.  If a day later her breath stank like onions then she wasn't pregnant.  For those not willing to shove vegetables up various orifices, a second method was for a woman to eat a bunch of honey.  If she got sick, she was pregnant.  It goes without saying that neither of these methods made one damn bit of sense.  

The Dark Ages were mainly a time of people realizing they were pregnant when their guts got big and a baby popped out.  Luckily, as book learning became a thing again during the Middle Ages, so did trying to develop a viable pregnancy test.  Similar to their ancient Egyptian forebears, these early scientists decided that urine was the key, though as with all things in the Middle Ages, they made it as gross as it could possibly be.  When a woman thought she was pregnant, the doctor would have her piss in a glass jar and then would spend several minutes examining it, smelling it, and even tasting it before rendering a verdict.  It should probably be mentioned that the same method was used for pretty much every medical diagnosis of the time.  For those not willing to let some guy drink their piss, there was also the latch key method, which involved putting a latch and key in a basin full of urine.  If an impression of the key and latch were left in the bottom of the basin after a few hours it signified being pregnant.  

As we moved into the modern era, it was generally decided that just not knowing for sure for a few months was better than having some kook drink your pee.  Luckily, modern science found a completely reliable non-pee drinking method by the 1930’s.  The scientists of the day, apparently having way too much free time to think of weird experiments, discovered that injecting a knocked up woman's pee into a mouse or rabbit caused them to ovulate.  The discovery quickly led to labs being set up across the western world where women could mail in vials of their urine.  The rabbits and mice were of course killed because dissection was the easiest way to find out if they were ovulating, which probably seemed a pretty small sacrifice for a little peace of mind.  Luckily for the rabbits, in the 1950's it was discovered that the same test could be done on frogs without killing them, since it could easily be observed whether or not the frogs produced eggs.  This remained the standard test for the next two decades. 

The modern pregnancy test first became widely available in the 1970's.  It worked via certain types of antibodies which......you know what, it's not important, just know it was better than killing rabbits or shoving onions up vaginas.  With the new at home pregnancy test completely taking over the market, laboratories across the western world released thousands of frogs to live out their lives not being prodded by urine soaked needles.  However, though the frogs in these labs mostly came from Africa, the lazy scientists opted to release them just outside the laboratory doors.  As a result, various diseases were introduced and numerous native amphibian populations plummeted.  So there you go, congratulations.       

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ConstantineTheAfrican_examines_patients_urine,_full_size_image.jpg   

Walter

In the spring of 1928, a boy by the name of Walter Collins went missing from his home in Los Angeles.  His frantic mother, Christine, soon after contacted the police who treated the whole thing as a rather humdrum affair and barely gave Christine the time of day, a reaction likely due to the fact that the boy's father was in prison having been convicted of eight armed robberies.  Unfortunately for the police, but most definitely fortunately for Christine, the story was soon after picked up by a police reform supporting reverend who just so happened to have his own radio show.  What started as a little known missing persons case turned into a nationwide extravaganza, forcing the L.A. police to get off their asses and actually do their jobs.  Facing increasing negative publicity, the police put their best foot forward, following up on hundreds of leads.  

After five months of these shenanigans, the police finally announced that Walter had been found alive and well in Illinois.  The boy was brought back to L.A. for a public reunion at which point Christine bluntly pointed out that he was most definitely not Walter.  Really wanting to close the case, the police convinced Christine that the boy totally was her son and that she should just take him home to try him out for a couple of weeks.  Upon getting home, Christine's suspicions were further heightened by the fact that not only was the so-called Walter suddenly three inches shorter, but that he had also magically become circumcised.  When Christine pointed out these little facts to the police, they provided a doctor who politely told her that trauma could shrink the spine and that whomever took Walter must have just had him circumcised.  Amazingly still unconvinced, Christine got a letter from her dentist stating that the boy's teeth didn't match Walter's dental records.  However, when she showed it to the police, they had her locked in a mental ward, something the police could just do at the time if they decided you were difficult or inconvenient.  They then followed up by leaking stories to the papers suggesting Christine was an unfit mother.  

Four months after all this took place, police made a grisly discovery at a chicken farm owned by a man named George Northcott near the town of Wineville, just outside of L.A.  George was of Canadian birth, and had come south to start the chicken farm with his teenage nephew Sanford Clark.  As you can probably already guess, George had been the one to kidnap Walter, along with two other boys, all of which he kept locked up in a chicken coop for reasons we don't really need to go into.  Five days after the kidnapping, George was visited by his mother, who growing suspicious, discovered the boys in the coop.  However, instead of calling the police as one would expect, she instead convinced her son that the best course of action would be to murder the shit out of them.  As one can imagine, this chain of events did not sit too well with Sanford, who told his sister about it when she visited that summer.  The sister, after getting safely back to Canada, then contacted the authorities, kicking off a chain of events that led to the arrest of everyone involved. 

By the time everything got figured out, Christine Collins had been in the mental ward for about three months.  Forced into a bit of a corner by the fact that Walter was being named one of Northcott's victims, the police finally got around to questioning the boy who also claimed to be Walter, who quickly admitted that his actual name was Arthur Hutchins.  Arthur was a runaway who had lied because he wanted a free trip to L.A. in hopes of meeting Tom Mix, the most famous cowboy actor of the time.  The police quickly admitted their mistake and released Christine, by which I mean they sat on their hands for ten days before getting around to it.    

George Northcott was convicted of murder and hung less than a year later, but only after several rounds of screwing with Christine over whether or not Walter might still be alive.  Christine of course sued the police, and won, but never got paid a cent.  However, the resulting scandal did result in the dismissal of a number of corrupt officials and it becoming illegal for the police to lock up whomever they felt like in the mental ward.  For her part, Christine never stopped believing that her son might still be alive.  She spent the rest of her life looking for him, dying in 1964.  Oh yeah, the town of Wineville also changed its name to Mira Loma, you know, because nobody wants to be known as that murder town.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Christine_Collins.png    

The Box

For most of human history, when something was shipped on a boat it was basically just strapped down to the nearest wall or post.  Holds on ships were a strange conglomeration of barrels, crates, bags, and god only knows what else.  All of the loading and unloading was done by longshoreman who did a good chunk of the work by hand.  It took days to load and unload ships, sometimes even longer than the actual sailing time.  Theft was not uncommon.  All of this combined made the shipping of goods overseas a costly venture, one only available to the richest and largest of companies.  However, that all changed in 1956 thanks to some random guy named Malcolm McLean.

When Malcolm graduated high school in North Carolina his parents lacked the funds needed to send him to college, but they did have enough for him to buy a used truck.  Malcolm worked the shit out of that old truck, so much so that by the 1950's he had the second largest trucking business in the country.  However, this apparently wasn't enough, because Malcolm soon after became obsessed with the idea of improving ocean shipping.  Seeing the tried and true methods as far too inefficient, Malcolm came up with the idea of packing goods into standardized 20 foot long boxes, which he creatively called containers.  While many other groups had tried similar ideas over the preceding decades, it was Malcolm who really went balls to the walls with it.  After selling his lucrative trucking firm, he purchased a shipping line and whipped himself up a few containers and modified a few ships to carry them.  

While originally laughed at when introduced, with most experienced shippers claiming Malcolm didn't know shit about ocean freight, they didn't laugh for long.  The loading of a container ship took only 10% of the manpower and 15% of the time as the old method, and at only 3% of the cost.  It was a simple concept, which really makes you wonder why no one did it earlier.  Shove a bunch of shit in a big metal box, haul it by truck or rail to the port, use a crane to load it on the ship, and there you go.  

Why the shippers were more than happy with this new development, the longshoreman and their unions were much less so.  The longshoreman unions had fought long and hard for a decent wage, and now some schmuck with a metal box was about to take it all away from them.  It's probably important to pause here and mention that when I say hard fought I don't just mean lots of strikes and protests.  No, I mean literal street brawls between union members and scabs where some people actually died.  The union fights of the early twentieth century were nothing like the union fights of today.  They were more like actual revolts against shitty working conditions and the treatment of workers as though they were just cogs in a machine.  It was some crazy shit. 

Anyways, the longshoreman resisted the introduction of containers for the better part of a decade, but their union leadership eventually came to recognize it was a fight they wouldn't be able to win.  In 1966, they negotiated a new contract with significant wage increases and an agreement whereas people would get paid off to retire early rather than just getting laid off.  Even with these stipulations, it was still a messy transition, resulting in the longshoreman going on strike for 134 days in 1971, the longest union strike in U.S. history.  However, the hands of progress were set against them.  The unions ultimately lost the strike, but they did recover somewhat by expanding their power to cover more jobs dealing with the handling and maintaining of containers. 

Today, some 18 million containers make 200 million trips per year, carrying 90 percent of the world's non-bulk ocean trade.  The spread of containers worldwide led to a forced standardization of trade never before seen.  For ships to be efficient, containers had to be the same set sizes.  Since the containers had to be certain sizes this meant that everything else had to be standardized as well.  Truck trailers, railcars, even wooden pallets, all had to be certain dimensions.  The significant drop in shipping costs and the international standardization led to an explosion in global trade which transformed the globe in ways we are still adjusting to today.  A container might be just a box, but it’s a box that changed the whole damn world.   

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Malcolm_McLean_at_railing,_Port_Newark,_1957_(7312751706).jpg