Sunday, December 19, 2010

What were they talking about...

Around 1900?  Google has launched a real "time suck" - an app that shows how often a word was used in the gazillion books they have scanned.  So after fooling around see what came up when I tried the words "farm subsidies" and "biotech":

[Click to embiggen]

[Try your own words here]

So what did biotech mean back then or is something else going on here?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Perhaps the use of the term biotech in the early 1900s was in regards to plant breeding. Edward East and George Shull were working to understand inbred lines in corn and hybridization in that first decade. Others were also working on other aspects of plant breeding since Mendel's work was rediscovered and became widely known in the US about that time.