In 1937, Sylvan Goldman, who owned supermarkets in Oklahoma City, invented the shopping cart: a folding chair on wheels carrying two baskets. Shoppers snubbed it: men found it unmanly, and women said it looked like a baby carriage. So Goldman hired people to pretend to shop with the carts. The idea caught on, and customers bought more, no longer limited by what they could carry in a basket.
That's the estimate from a WHO-led study published in The Lancet in 2024, covering the half-century since the Expanded Programme on Immunization was launched in 1974. It works out to about six lives saved every minute, mostly infants. The measles vaccine alone accounts for around 60% of those lives.
According to the World Gold Council, about 216,000 tonnes of gold have been mined in all of human history. Because gold is so dense (19.3 tonnes per cubic metre), it would fit in a cube about 22 metres on each side, roughly the height of a seven-storey building. Strikingly, about two-thirds of it has been mined since 1950.