We call jelly "jelly". Where you are from, you call jelly, "jello".
Around five or six thousand years ago, someone sat in the sand. Then a man named Voyeuris Paparatzzis poured melted wax into the depression, and the first casting was made. Like all new technology, for the first few years, mold making was used primarily as a medium for the distribution of pornography, and tempting people into the original Egyptian pyramid schemes. But not very long after that, molds started to become used in more productive capers like war.
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| The very popular xS1000 model spearhead mold from 1400-1000 BCE |
Molds were useful tools in the waging of war because of their ability to rapidly reproduce things like spear, and arrow heads. Molds also came in handy when taking over a recently conquered country, because the conquerer could flood the market with counterfeit copies of the local currency, and inexpensive plastic furniture. This would destabilize and undermine the existing regime, leading to it's eventual collapse and subsequent overthrow.
Using war as a method of transportation, molds migrated all over the shop, and started to pop up everywhere. Soon the pottery, glass and jewelery manufacturing industry got hold of the idea, and began making household items.
Prior to the invention of the casting process, artisans would simply pour their molten silver onto the ground and hope it would spontaneously take the intricate dolphin shape they desired. Interestingly it was also around this time that prayer and swearing were invented.
Casting was about to change everything.
It's later, and the mold has found its place in mainstream society. At around this time a clerk working in the US patent office named Ike Andy predicted that "In the future there will be as many as seven of these so called molds in use around the world."
The future often surpasses our expectations.
It's now the future, and today, like many others, I have a jelly mold all of my own. So common and inexpensive has the mold become, that I owe nothing on my jelly mold and own it outright.
The world has come full circle, and now that everyone in the developed world has a jelly mold, we find ourselves so affluent, that we don't even use them. We now get robots to mold our jelly in massive jelly making robot dormitories, called "factories". Now, not only do we not mold our own jelly, we no longer even eat it. It's rapidly becoming something only the very young will have anything to do with, because it really only has the attribute "wobbly" going for it in the first place.
Now our once valuable molds sit idle in the cupboard next to the sink, even though future archaeologists will unearth our jelly molds, and rightly attribute great significance to them.
And that, is the history of the casting process.*
*Actual history may differ from that depicted.
