“Revolutionary” would probably be the on the bottom of the list of words you would associate with Australia (on top would probably be “Aahh spiders!” and seconded by “Aahh more spiders!”). But little do you know that most of the everyday things that have made the wheels of civilization turn more efficiently started in this country you previously thought inhabited solely by kangaroos and Hugh Jackman (well at least until now).
Here are five things we have to thank the Aussies for.
In the 1800s, paid labour in Australia was a punishment reserved only for slaves. They work for 14 hours a day, six days a week. They’re not entitled to any sick or holiday leaves. And the bosses can kick them out of employment at a drop of a hat. No questions asked. Add to that the erratic climate the country has. And you’ll have workers getting sick and dying.
Because of this in 18 August 1855, The Stonemasons Society in Sydney, one of the first labour unions in the country, demanded that laborers in the city work only for eight hours a day after six months. The stonemasons working on the Holy Trinity Church and the Mariners’ Church we’re not the blokes to wait, so they preemptively went on a strike, got their eight-hour workday right, but with reduction to their wages.
The stonemasons working in Melbourne University were not the ones to get upstaged, so they upped the ante. On 21 April 1856, they marched toward the Parliament House with nothing but titanium balls to demand that they work only for eight hours a week with NO loss on pay. And won.
The other countries of the world followed suit and patterned their working structure based on this hours. Each year, the country celebrates this victory of the working masses during May as the Labour Day.
Yes. You have to thank/blame the Aussies for that nine-to-five stay inside your cubicle.
We all have that friend who keeps posting a selfie or two online every hour in case we forgot what he/she looks like after the first 50 times he/she uploaded a picture of him/her. But like it or hate, selfies revolutionized the Internet and created new forms of connections that redefines how we view our social networks.
And it started with one drunk bloke. No really.
The very first “selfie” might have taken by American pioneer photographer Robert Cornelius in 1839, but the Oxford Dictionaries' international word of the year for 2013 was coined in an Australian internet forum on 13 September 2002 by a bloke describing his rather slapstick escapade.
"Um, drunk at a mates 21st, I tripped ofer [sic] and landed lip first (with front teeth coming a very close second) on a set of steps. I had a hole about 1cm long right through my bottom lip. And sorry about the focus, it was a selfie."
That’s right, we got that word because some inebriated mate couldn’t keep his balance, almost smashed his face, and decided to be proud of it in the Internet. Despite sounding too Aussie-ish, the word is now in mainstream usage.
It is safe to say that Wi-Fi is up there with the wheel and sliced bread in the list of the greatest things mankind came up with (at the bottom are Crocs and pop-up ads). It made access to online information easier and more convenient without strapping us to a boring desktop computer.
In 1991, Australian radio-astronomer Dr John O'Sullivan, together with a couple of colleagues, developed a significant patent used in Wi-Fi as a by-product of a failed research by Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), the Australian federal government agency for scientific research based in Canberra. The research originally aimsed to detect exploding black holes the size of an atomic particles (yes, they’re into some super villain stuff that time).
Currently, Wi-Fi is being enjoyed by millions of people around the world and probably deserves to be included in Maslow's hierarchy of needs of basic living along with food, water, and oxygen. The Australian scientists might successfully weaponize black holes that will eventually destroy our planet in the future, but at least they gave us Wi-Fi. Fair trade.
Seat belts are one of the few innovations that actually save lives in automobile accidents (seconded by airbags and “not browsing Facebook while on the road”). But seat belts are just that. It won’t prevent death and injuries all by itself. People has to wear it to work. And given that it is a mild inconvenience (“it ruffles my clothes and reduces mobility”), very few took advantage of it since its inception in the late 1800s.
But do you what worked better? Seat belt legislation. And Australia was the first country on Earth who realized they need to penalize people for not protecting themselves.
The earliest form of seat belt law was passed in the states of Victoria and South Australia in 1964, though they’re for belt anchorages only. In 1970, this law was upgraded to seat belts already. In the 1980s, the rest of the nation followed suit. Following the significant decline of mortalities, countries like Canada, United States, and United Kingdom legislated their own seat belts laws, and soon the rest of the world.
Google Maps is one of those things that did a great deals of help to you including finding your way when you’re lost, checking how your roof looks like from above, and tracing your crush’s house because actually stalking her would definitely earn you a restraint order.
Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin might be responsible for introducing the technology to the world, but the brains behind this were two brothers, Lars and Jens Eilstrup Rasmussen. The siblings were founders of a Sydney-based company Where 2 Technologies. In 2003, they created the mapping program, then called Expedition, which was originally designed to be downloaded as an application. A year later, Where 2 Technologies was eventually acquired by Google, developed Expedition as a web based product, and rechristened it Google Maps. And the rest is groundbreaking Internet history.