Four Overlooked Machines That Help the World Go Round

In the modern world, we focus huge amounts of praise and affection upon our digital devices. We couldn’t live without our smartphones, we say – or we couldn’t possibly work without our laptop. But, in actual fact, there are other, lesser-known machines that truly help the world go round. This article is all about celebrating those machines – and sharing their effectiveness in the global economy with you. Machines come in all shapes and sizes – and many keep our economy ticking over day after day and year after year.

Conveyor Belts

That’s right – the humble conveyor belt tops our list. Why? Well, if you think of all of the world’s production facilities added up and consider just how many miles of the conveyor belt they use to shift products and materials along their production lines, you’re already looking at thousands of miles. This isn’t to take into account retail uses of conveyors – at the checkout of the store, for instance. The exciting world of Fluent Conveyors also supplies waste disposal units, airport luggage transporters, and raw material extraction companies. Without conveyor belts, millions of workers would be employed carrying items from A to B. They’re a hugely important part of our global economy.

Plastic Cash

Brought into focus by the coronavirus pandemic, our ability to use a piece of plastic to pay for most of our purchases has been a huge innovation in the last thirty years – especially the NFC (near field communication) ability to pay with ‘contactless’ technology. It’s difficult to quantify how many lives might have been saved by the use of plastic rather than physical cash in worldwide transactions in 2020, but it’s fair to say that the machines that process these payments – the humble Point-of-Sale card machine – is another under-appreciated hero of the global economy.

GPS

As the world goes round, we spin upon it. And we regularly get lost, confused, and end up getting our phones out to check where on earth we are. That’s something that might happen each and every day – and there are millions of call-ups to Google Maps’ GPS service every hour. That’s a huge volume of searches each year. But this technology isn’t Google’s – or any other map provider’s, for that matter. It’s a simple GPS – helped along by satellites and smart technology that helps you to map yourself against your environment — a true life-saver for millions.

MP3

Finally, those over the age of 25 will probably remember how difficult it was to carry around one’s own music to listen to when they were young. You’d have to clip a large machine to your belt, into which you would feed a CD or a tape. If you fancy listening to a number of different albums across a day, you’d also need to bring a bag to store extra CDs and tapes. It was a pain. Now, with MP3 technology and the Spotify innovations of this world, music is far simpler to sample and enjoy – everywhere.

These machines help the world go round and help people enjoy a more friction-free life each and every day.