Looking back at all the progress humanity has made through the last century, it's perfectly natural to feel a little bit moved by the power of human ingenuity and our thrive for constant improvement. It's natural, but also totally wrong. Because if you really look into the history of our technological development, you'll notice that the force driving us forward all this time wasn't our need to better ourselves or seek out truth in all its forms, but rather our desire to see naked people touch each other's junk.

5 Home Video Technologies

Nearly the entire technological world as you know it today owes its thanks to pornography: Take VHS for example. Before CDs or DVDs came along, the videotape cassette was the hottest shit since the Human Torch got drunk and binged on Taco Bell Fire Sauce. The idea that you could record and watch movies whenever you wanted was completely unheard of before VHS, and the concept singlehandedly revolutionized home entertainment. But it wasn't an instant success: Some of the early VCR models cost as much as $800 in today's money, and that's not even accounting for the blank tapes, which came at prices up to $50 a pop. And speaking of those blank tapes: The MPAA was so concerned about the ability to copy movies that they not only refused to support the system, but actually called it the Boston Strangler of the movie industry and tried to get it banned in a court of law.



You know who else used VCRs?

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The format had no corporate backing, it was heavily criticized, a bitch to program, and didn't even come with the Apple logo to help justify spending your kids' college fund on it. Why the hell would anybody buy it then?

To watch porn, of course.

Up until the end of the 1970s, smut films accounted for well over half of all videotape sales in the United States. In Great Britain and Germany that number was as high as 80%. This is largely because, prior to VHS, the only way to see two naked people boning was either paying to sit in an X-rated movie theater with a room full of lonely men in trench coats or a pair of powerful binoculars. The former was only seriously considered if you didn't mind accidentally sitting in what-you-will-pray-to-God-turns-out-to-be gum, and the latter required way too much patience for your more casual, weekend pervert. Porn on videotape changed all that, and the public desire for cable repairman schlong pulled the entire format into the limelight.