SPEAKER_00: Amazing, fascinating stories of inventions, ideas and innovations. Yes, this is the podcast about the things that have helped to shape our lives. Podcasts from the BBC World Service are supported by advertising.
SPEAKER_02: 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy with Tim Harford Crazier than a half dozen opium-smoking frogs.
SPEAKER_01: That's how one observer described Guatemala's president, General Jorge Ubico. A general liked to dress up as Napoleon Bonaparte. He may even have believed himself to be Napoleon Bonaparte, reincarnate. Like many 20th century Latin American dictators, crazy General Ubico had a cosy relationship with the United Fruit Company. It became known as El Polpo, the octopus, because its tentacles reached everywhere. Ubico passed a law forcing indigenous Guatemalans to work for landowners, which is to say the United Fruit Company. The company owned most of Guatemala's arable land and it left most of it lying fallow, just in case it might be needed in future. The company claimed the land was worth next to nothing, so it shouldn't have to pay much tax on it. Ubico agreed. But then Ubico was overthrown. An idealistic young soldier, Joao Arbenz, rose to power. And he called El Polpo's bluff. If the land was worth so little, the state would buy it and let peasants farm it. The United Fruit Company didn't like this idea. It lobbied the US government, employing a PR agency to portray Arbenz as a dangerous communist. The CIA got involved. In 1954, Arbenz was ousted in a coup and bundled onto a flight to peripatetic exile. His daughter killed herself. He drank himself into oblivion and died in a hotel bathtub. Guatemala descended into a civil war that lasted for 36 years. You may be wondering what this has to do with an invention that made the modern economy. The answer? Bananas. One of the co-founders of the United Fruit Company was a man called Lorenzo Dow Baker. He started off as a sailor. In 1870, he had just ferried some gold prospectors up the Orinoco River when his boat sprang a leak on the way home to New England, so he docked in Jamaica for repairs. He had money in his pocket and he liked to gamble, so he bought bananas, backing himself to get them home before they spoiled. He managed it, just, sold them for a healthy profit and went back for more. Bananas became a delicacy in port cities such as Boston and New York. Ladies ate them with a knife and fork to avoid any embarrassing sexual connotations. But bananas were a risky business. Their shelf life was right on the cusp of the sailing time. When they arrived, they were too ripe to survive onward journey inland. If only you could keep them cool en route, they d ripen more slowly and reach a bigger market. Bananas weren t the only foodstuff prompting interest in refrigerating ships. Two years before Baker s first journey from Jamaica, Argentina s government offered a prize to anyone who could keep its beef cold enough for long enough to export it overseas. Packing ships with ice had led to costly failures. For a century, scientists had known that you could make it artificially colder by compressing some gases into liquids, then letting the liquid absorb heat as it evaporated again. But commercially successful applications remained elusive. Then, in 1876, Charles Télier, a French engineer, fitted up a ship, packed it with meat and sailed it to Buenos Aires as proof of concept. After 105 days at sea, the meat arrived, still fit to eat. By 1902, there were 460 refrigerated ships, or reefers, plying the world s seas, carrying a million tons of Argentina s beef, El Pulpos bananas, and much else besides. Meanwhile, in Cincinnati, an African-American boy was facing up to life as an orphan. He dropped out of school at age 12, got a job sweeping the floor at a garage, and learned how to mend cars. His name was Frederick McKinley Jones, and he grew up to be a prolific inventor. By 1938, he was working as a sound systems engineer when his boss s friend, who ran a trucking business, complained about the difficulties of transporting perishable goods by land. Reefers refrigeration units couldn t cope with the vibration of road travel, so you still had to pack your trucks with ice and hope you d complete the journey before it melted. That didn t always happen. Could the brilliant, self-taught Jones invent a solution? He could. The result was a new company, ThermoKing, and the last link in the cold chain, the global supply chain that keeps perishable goods at controlled temperatures. On a warm summer s day, let s say 25 degrees, fish and meat will last only a few hours. Fruit will be mouldy in a few days. Carrots might survive for three weeks, if you re lucky. In the cold chain, fish will keep for a week, fruit for months, and root vegetables for up to a year. Freeze the food, and it lasts for longer still. Refrigeration widened our choice of food. Tropical fruits, like bananas, could now reach anywhere. It improved our nutrition. It enabled the rise of the supermarket. If your home has no way to keep food cold, you have to make frequent trips to the market. With fridge freezers at home, you could do a big shop every week or two. That, in turn, transformed the labour market. Less need for frequent shopping frees up women to work. As low-income countries get wealthier, fridges are among the first things people buy. In China, it took just a decade to get from a quarter of households having fridges to nearly nine out of ten. Finally, the cold chain extended to perishable food, the economic logic of specialisation and trade. Yes, you can grow French beans in France, but perhaps you should fly them in from Uganda. Different growing conditions mean this kind of thing can make environmental sense as well as economic. One study found it was friendlier for the planet to grow tomatoes in Spain and transport them to Sweden than to grow them in Sweden. Economic logic tells us that specialisation and trade will increase the value of production in the world. Sadly, it doesn't guarantee that value will be shared fairly. Consider the state of Guatemala today. It still exports bananas, hundreds of millions of dollars' worth. It produces lots of other stuff too. Sheep and sugarcane, coffee and corn and cardamom. But it has the world's fourth highest rate of chronic malnutrition. Half its kids are stunted because they don't get enough to eat. Economists still don't fully understand why some countries grow rich while others stay poor, but most agree on the importance of institutions, things such as corruption, political stability and the rule of law. According to one recent ranking of countries' institutions, Guatemala came a lowly 110th out of 138. The legacy of General Ubico, the banana-driven coup and the civil war lives on. Cold chain technologies were designed to make bananas last longer, but banana republics, it seems, have a naturally long shelf life.
SPEAKER_02: Stephen Johnson offers delightful details of the history of keeping things cold in his book How We Got to Now. For a full list of our sources, please see bbcworldservice.com slash 50things.
SPEAKER_01: And then there was one. Yes, just one more of my 50 things to go. That's next week. But don't forget, there will be one more episode after that announcing and describing our winning 51st thing. So in the meantime, please do leave a rating and let your friends know all about the podcast. There are 49 episodes they have to catch up on. So spread the word.
