Tedium Highlight in Manufacturing: We wear clothes with clothing tags pretty much daily, but never think about it. Where did they come from? Credit two major forces: Unions and regulators. 

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Tag results: Manufacturing

Never A Dull Moment

How sharp knives disappeared from the dining room table, only to return, centuries later, in steak knife form. Kings, cardinals, and factories are involved.

Manufactured Gloss

Our continuing journey to write a Tedium glossary takes us through the manufacturing process—and the weird products it sometimes led to.

Math + The Mechanics

The story of the Curta Calculator, a stylish portable mechanical calculator that doesn’t use electricity and has a surprisingly dramatic origin story.

Who Sets the Prices?

The legal decision that fostered the idea of the manufacturer’s suggested retail price, and why it still sticks around even though that decision was overturned.

The Hard Pivot

Considering companies that ended up in a far different place from where they started. You know, like Samsung, Shell, Hasbro, and American Express.

Disposability Interchange

Considering the tension between disposability and interchangeable parts, and how right to repair opponents are trying to have it both ways.

The Can That Always Can

The history of WD-40, a chemical substance with an unusual origin story and a rust-fighting ability that has become a standby of workbenches the world over.

Vestigial Tales

Why the products you use every day, especially electronics, might come with parts or functions you weren’t expecting or have no actual use for.

Even Better Than The Real Thing

The history of the fake electronics that you sometimes see in furniture stores or in houses for sale. No, that 60-inch flat-screen TV doesn’t turn on.

Byproduct Breakdown

When you hear about economic struggles involving pork or oil caused by COVID-19, it’s worth remembering that their byproducts are everywhere. Yes, everywhere.

Dinwiddie’s Dream

NBA ratings are dropping, along with athletic shoe sales. So why is one player choosing this moment to push his own independent shoe brand?

Pens for Pennies

How cheap ballpoint pens, which are easy to lose and easy to make, changed the world due to their sheer disposability. They're really freaking cheap.

Click, Clack

The famed mechanical keyboard switch manufacturer Cherry has been around since the 1950s—but it's only been defined by keyboard switches in the past decade.

Robotic, But Lovable

Alexa’s Interface is treated as revolutionary, but you might be surprised to learn of your favorite opinionated cylinder’s predecessors from the mid-1980s.

Ban The Box

The defining debate of the early compact disc era centered around the longbox, a wasteful form of packaging pushed by retailers and paper manufacturers.

Rough Edges

Why ceramic coffee cups have a spot at the bottom that’s rough to the touch, despite the rest of the cup being glossy. It's kiln you that you don't know.

Total Eclipse Of The Counterfeit

For all of Amazon’s successes, it has a major achilles heel, and a controversy around the fake solar eclipse glasses it was selling perfectly highlights it.

Lemony Fresh

Lemon juice has long come in containers shaped like lemons. In the U.K., the containers hold an important legacy—both with pancakes and the legal system.

The Sound Of Science

Bose Wave stereo systems were legitimately innovative when they launched in the '90s—as was Bose itself. The marketing might make you forget that, though.

A Big Idea, Synthesized

Casio claimed it could fit the sounds of dozens of musical instruments into its keyboards. Maybe it wasn't totally true, but the Casiotone gave us a lot.
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