Essential Living Standards

Essential living standards means the goods and services that are required for life and health.   In other words, they are the quantity and quality of food, drink, clothing, shelter, and health care available to the average family.   Some inventions and discoveries affected all of these subjects:   The discovery and extended use of materials, such as chemical elements, petroleum, and coal, became parts of higher order materials used in building and home construction, power systems and all modes of transportation.   In turn, power, lighting, communication, computation and transportation inventions reduce costs for manufactured goods.   The dissemination of cheap technical literature was made possible by advances in paper production and printing.   Tools and machines enabled Americans to build bigger and better machines.   Improvements in measurement made interchangeable parts that enabled mass production of products in almost every industry.   Below are some of the technologies that affected the individual constituents of living standards.

Food

Food is essential to life because it contains energy and nutrients.   The history of of the United States contains a continuous account of farming and food cost reductions and quality improvements that make Americans the biggest and healthiest people on earth.   Food was made cheaper by a number of inventions in farm machinery, crop and animal husbandry, and food processing.   More and cheaper food was made available to more Americans by inventions in refrigeration, fertilizers and pesticides, and bulk handling.

Drink

Drink, which includes water, milk, and other beverages is essential to life.   The steady increases in U.S. population required ingenuity to bring potable water to large population centers.   This was accomplished by advances in water sanitation and reservoirs and conduit construction machinery.   Beverages were made cheaper and therefore more available by improvements in beverage processing.

Clothing

Substantial clothing was made available to all economic classes of Americans by the inventions in textile machinery and synthetic materials from plastics.

Shelter

Homes barns, factories, and office buildings were made available to more people at substantial reductions in construction costs.   Also, better and cheaper wood products, plastics, glass, steel, aluminum, copper, and other materials.   Significant improvements in heating, cooling, cooking, cleaning, and air conditioning made work at home more comfortable and productive.

Health Care

Health care in the form of medicines, medical practices, sanitation, and medical tools and machines increased life expectancy, and substantially reduced maternal, fetal, neonatal, and infant mortalities.

A study of the many technologies that improved basic living standards shows that one technology led to others that led to still others in an endless succession of inventions and discoveries that continues today.