Daniel Immerwahr

In 1904, Baltimore had an enormous fire.

And a fire that was so big and it went on for so long that, A, it completely overwhelmed Baltimore firefighters, but B, it just lasted long enough for Baltimore to desperately call for help from neighboring fire companies.

So Philadelphia, Annapolis, Wilmington, Harrisburg, and the other firefighters rushed to

to fight the fire.

And, you know, they had their hoses and they were ready to screw their hoses into the hydrants and get to work.

And when they started to do that, they realized that their hoses couldn't screw into the hydrants.

There was a fundamental material incompatibility, which basically left them completely unable to do anything.

And so they just watched as more than 1,500 houses burned in one of the worst fires in U.S.

history.

One of the examples I like is football, what we call football in the United States, a national sport.

No one agreed what a football was.

Different teams had dramatically different size and shapes footballs.

Just the central object of football, the football, went undefined.

In New York, you would stop on green.

And it was different in Buffalo.

And it just took a while before them to be like, oh, yeah, we should really have the same system in the same city.

The screw thread is the way in which you achieve metal-on-metal fastening.

And it turns out that the industrial world is full of occasions when you need to fasten one piece of metal or rigid object to another.

Like, that's the Industrial Revolution.

So you get these moments where, like, senators will start just talking about, like, the importance of the humble screw thread.