To be surprised at how advanced the US were to us?

[Hownoobrooncoo]

was watching an old movie earlier set in The 50's and a character mentioned her glass of champagne her 85 calories - would anyone in the UK even have known what a calorie was back then?

The first microwave ovens appeared in the home in the 50's in the US as well, same as TV remote controls - Jesus, we were lagging behind.

Television use in the UK only stalled due to WW2 when the service was switched off and if you include the piped radio/TV service that was started by redifusion in I think the 1920's or so then technologically the UK was far ahead in cable as well. And of course the ceefax service which even was even able to be used to distribute computer programs during the nights if you had a BBC micro during the early 80`s was far ahead of anything the US had. And of course if you ever saw American television during the 70's 80's the picture quality was far poorer to the UK as they used less lines and had poor colour tint control compared to the PAL system

Text messaging was common from the outset in the UK with networks like Orange although for the first few years networks only allowed sms between handsets on the same network.

As for not being in the UK until the 70's thats nonsense. Italian immigrants in Glasgow london etc had introduced pasta and made it popular and even the BBC did a famous april fools joke on the news in the 50's trying to convince folks that pasta grew on vines like grapes.

My sis has a smartphone - they are pretty cheap out there apparently. Suppose it depends where you are, it's such a big country.

Nigel Slater writes about spaghetti in his book 'Toast' - not unheard of but not as common place as it is these days.

Ah, come on, I'm sure iphones are very common in the US.

It was only more common in the US as the US was made by millions of Italians Irish etc. so by the 1950's they were into their second third generations

My American friend recently watched me boil the kettle to get boiling water for pasta. She was amazed and delighted by this fantastic idea

My UK friend who has just come back from Ohio said her Ohio boyfriend had to go to the shop to get a special sim card to enable him to make international calls (hoping that's not just his excuse - she has a poor track record with picking good ones).

So yes I think mobile phone technology has been much slower to spread in the US. On the other hand, I remember the Rockford Files - Jim Rockford had an answerphone in the 70s - despite appearing to live in a caravan. I mean spaceage or what!

I think the cellphone business in N. America is quite fragmented and was hampered by them implementing their own network standard when digital phones came about.

Europe implemented GSM, which was interoperable from the start and allowed things like text messages in spare bandwidth from the get-go (I worked for a UK mobile phone company at the time and there was much excitement about being able to replicate pager functionality but not really any idea that consumers would actively want to use it).

I guess that Americans being Americans thought that GSM was a Commie plot or similar and that their way was best even when it was technologically inferior. Which is why the US did their damnedest to force their CDMA network onto a newly-liberated Iraq even though virtually everyone else in the world uses GSM

Some of the major N. American cities have implemented GSM now, but their users find themselves out on a limb if wandering elsewhere (which is why you get "quad-band phones" being advertised).

It's true. We use the stove to boil water.

Also, The Bell Jar was 50 years ago. Not 40.

thanks for the pasta details!

I did think it sounded wonky but it was Brits telling me this so who knows...

British sockets, electrical devices, have terrific safety features built in (own fuses and shut off switches at wall & all). It's nice that American power cords & plugs are so small, but lethal.

Re. pasta - I grew up in the North West in the 1970's and so far as I recall, spaghetti was the only dried pasta you could buy in the supermarkets, and then only in Safeway (which had an 'exotic foods' aisle) and only in mahoosively long blue packets (Buitoni was the brand). The idea of fresh pasta was just not entertained.

I took Domestic Science at school and remember making spag bog - the herbs, garlic and dry pasta were all sold to us via the school as we were not expected to have such items to hand and my parents eyed the result v. suspiciously ("foreign muck") until they ate it, whereupon it became a staple. That would have been around 1978.

Possibly it was more readily available elsewhere in the UK - I moved down to London in 1986 and pasta of all shapes & sizes was everywhere...

yes but in America you can have a socket in the bathroom, next to the sink!! So you can dry your hair etc in the actual bathroom.

Also, can I just mention mixer taps? The us may not be ahead in mobile technology but they have MIXER taps. Separate taps are not available to buy and are considered barbaric.

why wouldn't you want to first scald and then freeze your hands when washing them? Americans are weird

My American friend recently watched me boil the kettle to get boiling water for pasta. She was amazed and delighted by this fantastic idea

Ah, but the thing here is that there would be no point in her boiling water in the kettle first - most US kettles are stovetop anyway. I suppose because of their poxy low voltage sockets, plug-in kettles would take forever to boil. I looked for one when I lived there, I found one (a British brand) for an extortionate price, so didn't bother.

You could get macaroni as well as spaghetti in the 70s - I think macaroni cheese was less exotic than spag. bol. And of course there was tinned Heinz spag in tom sauce which was served as a vegetable

Mixer taps:

• seemingly a great invention, but most of them jut right out into the sink, making it very difficult to bend over and wash your face in said sink.

She lives here! She was just so used to not using the kettle that it didn't occur to her even when she can. I like to bring a little joy into people's lives like that [grin}

Mixer taps - ever been in a fairly recently built house in the UK? You'll find plenty.

I an a 60s baby and there was pasta back then, my dad was from Cyprus and we used to have recipes that used vermicelli and macaroni.

I think the Laurie Graham book Future Homemakers of America covers this. I'm sure it's the one where the military wives are in the UK after the war and are shocked by how primitive we seem compared to them.

Undad, Americans have accounted for the jutting problem by making sinks big enough to accommodate taps. Shocking I know.

Have just done a remodel on my house and I can assure you separate taps are still available to buy.

The US was miles ahead of the rest of the world in the 1950s as far as technology goes. They were the big innovators in the post war years. Unfortunately they forgot they were supposed to keep innovating and were rapidly overtaken by the Japanese.

And they don't know how to make decent cheese so we're better

Or sausages, or bread. They used to make those right, but now they all taste sugary in the mindless drive towards low-fat everything. Yuck!!