Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from my Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Radio and
Speaker 1: how the tech are you. It's time for a classic episode,
Speaker 1: and we're going to continue where we left off last
Speaker 1: week in last week's classic episode about the Industrial Revolution.
Speaker 1: This is part two of three. This episode originally published
Speaker 1: on November two thousand and fifteen. Fortunately, unlike a lot
Speaker 1: of my topics I cover on tech Stuff, the Industrial
Speaker 1: Revolution has not changed significantly in the last seven years.
Speaker 1: So let's sit back and listen. Now. In that last episode,
Speaker 1: I focused mainly on the textile industry because it's a
Speaker 1: great illustration of how quickly things changed just within a
Speaker 1: few decades and went from something that used to be
Speaker 1: a specialized skill among we vers that would do you know,
Speaker 1: maybe a couple would work together, but that would be it,
Speaker 1: and it would be something that would be produced on
Speaker 1: a very small scale, to a full blown industry which
Speaker 1: would end up employing thousands of people. Now, in this
Speaker 1: week's episode, we're gonna look more closely at how iron
Speaker 1: shaped the Industrial Revolution and how innovations and inventions in
Speaker 1: the iron industry really changed things, and it's it's fascinating
Speaker 1: and also kind of complicated. Now, first of all, iron
Speaker 1: is the second most common metal in the Earth's crust.
Speaker 1: The most common would be aluminum. But we would never
Speaker 1: really use chemically pure iron, you know, the fe stuff
Speaker 1: to build anything of any significance. And that's because of
Speaker 1: a couple of things. See, pure iron is really malleable,
Speaker 1: so that it means it's really easy to shape, so
Speaker 1: that's good. And you can even cut pure iron using
Speaker 1: something like a knife. If you've got a hunk of
Speaker 1: chemically pure iron, you can cut through it. It does
Speaker 1: take some effort, it's not like it's gonna slice through
Speaker 1: like butta, but you can do it. You can use
Speaker 1: a hammer to beat pure iron into sheets, or you
Speaker 1: can even draw it into wires. And it's great stuff.
Speaker 1: I mean, it conducts heat, it conducts electricity. It's also
Speaker 1: really easy to magnetize, so it's got a lot of uses.
Speaker 1: But it isn't strong or hard enough in order to
Speaker 1: use for building structures like bridges or buildings or canals
Speaker 1: or or even common tools. It's not strong enough to
Speaker 1: to do that. It will end up bending too too much.
Speaker 1: So all of that is kind of a moot point
Speaker 1: because there's something else about iron that gives it a
Speaker 1: huge drawback. We don't see much pure iron because it's
Speaker 1: got a habit of getting really familiar with oxygen. Oxygen
Speaker 1: corrodes iron, particularly in moist conditions, so that causes a
Speaker 1: chemical reaction in which pure iron forms an iron oxide
Speaker 1: that we call rust. So that's essentially what's happening, is
Speaker 1: this chemical reaction with iron and oxygen creates this iron
Speaker 1: oxide of rust that we don't really want. You know,
Speaker 1: there's always about you know, you have to scrub down
Speaker 1: the rust and get rid of it, or else it
Speaker 1: just continues to corrode. Well, because iron reacts so readily
Speaker 1: to oxygen, we don't mind iron in its pure form.
Speaker 1: In fact, we just we don't find it because it
Speaker 1: oxidizes so quickly. Instead, we mine iron oxides that are
Speaker 1: locked inside various types of ore, including hematite, which is
Speaker 1: the most plentiful ore that contains iron, limonite or limonite,
Speaker 1: depending on how you want to pronounce it, sometimes called
Speaker 1: bog iron, and magnetite, which is also known as loadstone,
Speaker 1: among others. There are a few other versions of iron
Speaker 1: ore as well. Not all ores contain the same percentage
Speaker 1: of iron by volume, and we mine iron both in
Speaker 1: underground mines and in surface mining. It all depends upon
Speaker 1: where you are and where the iron deposits happened to be. Now,
Speaker 1: the iron ore in Britain, because that again is where
Speaker 1: the Industrial Revolution began, had really high concentrations of sulfur
Speaker 1: and phosphorus, and both of those things will make iron
Speaker 1: brittle if you don't get rid of them. So until
Speaker 1: the Industrial Revolution, iron masters hadn't really quite worked out
Speaker 1: how to do that on an efficient basis. For that reason,
Speaker 1: British iron was often used in very cheap items like nails. Now,
Speaker 1: this was also a little tricky because iron making iron
Speaker 1: required a lot of labor, a lot of backbreaking hard work,
Speaker 1: and that drove up the price of the final product.
Speaker 1: So Britain was starting to supplement its own iron supplies
Speaker 1: by importing about half of all the iron it was
Speaker 1: using from Sweden. The iron from Sweden did not have
Speaker 1: the high concentrateations of sulfur or phosphorus, so it wasn't
Speaker 1: as problematic, and Britain just couldn't produce enough of its
Speaker 1: own despite ample supplies of iron ore. Now, once we
Speaker 1: get hold of iron ore, we have to smelt it.
Speaker 1: That's in order for us to get to the iron
Speaker 1: that's inside of it. Now, this involves heating the ore
Speaker 1: up to the melting point of iron. We also use
Speaker 1: fuels that will produce chemicals that can bond with the
Speaker 1: iron during this process, which changes iron's physical characteristics. We're
Speaker 1: talking chemical reactions here, and what we're really doing is
Speaker 1: creating iron alloys. And an alloy is a mixture that
Speaker 1: has a metal with something else. Sometimes it's another metal,
Speaker 1: sometimes it's a different substance. But these are chemical mixtures
Speaker 1: that have their own features that are different from the
Speaker 1: features of the individual elements or or ingredients in that mixture,
Speaker 1: so you're getting something new. The main ingredient we mix
Speaker 1: with iron to produce useful material is carbon, and if
Speaker 1: you get the mix of carbon to iron just right,
Speaker 1: you produce steel. Steel is an iron alloy that has
Speaker 1: around two or less carbon in it. Other types of
Speaker 1: iron hab between two to four of carbon in the alloy,
Speaker 1: and mixing other metals or substances will create different types
Speaker 1: of steel or iron. So how do you mix carbon
Speaker 1: into the iron? What exactly are you doing here is
Speaker 1: there's some sort of powder that you're pouring in. Well,
Speaker 1: one way is by using a carbon rich fuel as
Speaker 1: the means of heating up your iron to melt it
Speaker 1: in the first place. So if you're using something a
Speaker 1: fuel that has a lot of carbon in it, then
Speaker 1: some of that carbon gets transferred into the iron as
Speaker 1: it melts. Charcoal is a great example, and iron masters
Speaker 1: in Britain and really all over Europe relied very heavily
Speaker 1: on charcoal for centuries when smelting iron ore. But if
Speaker 1: you remember from our last episode, I talked about a
Speaker 1: man named Abraham Darby who came up with an alternative
Speaker 1: to charcoal, and it was coke. Now, coke is a
Speaker 1: fuel product you make by baking coal in an airless
Speaker 1: oven or furnace at a really high temperature, and at
Speaker 1: that high temperature, some of the coal begins to ash.
Speaker 1: That ash will end up melding with the the coal
Speaker 1: itself and it converts into this other fuel called coke,
Speaker 1: which is once it cools down, grayish in color and
Speaker 1: has a very porous structure. When you burn coke, it
Speaker 1: creates carbon monoxide, among other things, which is important in
Speaker 1: this process of creating iron useful iron. But why would
Speaker 1: anyone worry about switching from charcoal to coke in the
Speaker 1: first place. I mean, charcoal is pretty simple. You just
Speaker 1: have to burn wood to make charcoal. Uh. And in fact,
Speaker 1: this is where the problem would come in. In order
Speaker 1: to fuel a single iron works for one year, it
Speaker 1: would take two acres of forest to supply enough charcoal
Speaker 1: for operations. So for one iron works, you would need
Speaker 1: two hundred acres of woods. And keep in mind that
Speaker 1: once you've gone through that that two acres of forests
Speaker 1: in a year, you're not gonna be able to use
Speaker 1: those same two hundred acres the next year because it's
Speaker 1: going to take time for that forest to grow back.
Speaker 1: So we saw a steady decrease in the forests of
Speaker 1: Britain during this time period. At this time, iron works
Speaker 1: were mostly located in forests because it was cheaper to
Speaker 1: ship the iron ore and iron from the iron works
Speaker 1: or to the iron works, and from the iron works
Speaker 1: then it was to ship charcoal around, so they located
Speaker 1: the iron works near the fuel, not the iron ore,
Speaker 1: which seems counterintuitive at first, but eventually the growth of
Speaker 1: the iron industry and the fact that more and more
Speaker 1: people were building ships during this time period for England
Speaker 1: meant that England was using up more wood than it
Speaker 1: could replenish, So charcoal became more expensive because forests were
Speaker 1: being chopped down, wood was becoming a scarce commodity comparatively
Speaker 1: speaking compared to how it had been in previous centuries,
Speaker 1: so it became really expensive to use forests just to
Speaker 1: generate charcoal. So an alternative fuel was definitely needed to
Speaker 1: make British iron and actual commodity. Now, some iron masters
Speaker 1: tried using coal as fuel, but burning coal produces sulfur,
Speaker 1: and that sulfur would react to the melted iron ore
Speaker 1: and produce an iron that was too brittle to be
Speaker 1: of much use. Coke, however, didn't produce nearly as much
Speaker 1: sulfur when burned, and the carbon monoxide coke produces wind
Speaker 1: burn would mix with the melted iron ore to create
Speaker 1: useful iron. And if you listen to that last episode,
Speaker 1: you heard that Abraham Darby had developed a process for
Speaker 1: making pig iron by using coke as the fuel while
Speaker 1: smelting iron ore, but his approach wasn't adopted by the
Speaker 1: iron industry during his lifetime. There are a couple of
Speaker 1: reasons for that that, you know, the iron industry didn't
Speaker 1: immediately swap to using coke instead of charcoal. One of
Speaker 1: those reasons is that Darby pretty much kept his process
Speaker 1: a secret and only told his son, Abraham Darby the second,
Speaker 1: how to do it. At the time, anyone wanted to,
Speaker 1: you know, get an advantage over their competitors, what they
Speaker 1: did was they kept their methods secret. Some people would
Speaker 1: choose to patent ideas to protect them. Others decided that
Speaker 1: patents were bad because if you if you file a patent,
Speaker 1: the information on how you do something becomes public knowledge
Speaker 1: and eventually passes into the public domain. So other than
Speaker 1: patent of process, some people would try and keep it
Speaker 1: a secret. That's what Derby did. But the other reason
Speaker 1: is that Darby didn't live to a very ripe old age.
Speaker 1: He actually had a really long illness and died at
Speaker 1: age thirty eight in seventeen seventeen. Now, his grandson, Abraham
Speaker 1: Derby the third would build the first iron bridge in
Speaker 1: the late seventeen seventies. But the Derby's method was really
Speaker 1: only good for creating a particular type of iron called
Speaker 1: cast iron. And I'll talk more about what cast iron
Speaker 1: is in just a minute. But first, let's talk about
Speaker 1: the smelting process. All right. So let's say you've got
Speaker 1: yourself an iron furnace. Typically we would talk about a
Speaker 1: blast furnace. Blast furnaces are really giant cylinders. We're talking
Speaker 1: some of them being around thirty to forty ft tall
Speaker 1: and twenty to thirty ft square at the base, often
Speaker 1: built into the side of a hill. So that way, uh,
Speaker 1: in order to bring materials to the blast furnace, which
Speaker 1: you would deposit in the top of the furnace, you
Speaker 1: would climb the hill as opposed to putting scaffolding up
Speaker 1: or a long ramp or however you would you know,
Speaker 1: be able to have an access point to get to
Speaker 1: the top of the furnace. Now, if you want to
Speaker 1: imagine what these things look like, they did like a
Speaker 1: look like a tapering cylinder. So the top is a
Speaker 1: bit narrower than the bottom. Uh. The topmost portion of
Speaker 1: the cylinder is called the shaft, and that's where you
Speaker 1: would feed the fuel, the iron ore and some other
Speaker 1: materials called flux, which is typically limestone. The purpose of
Speaker 1: the flux is to absorb some of the other elements
Speaker 1: inside the iron ore that you don't want corrupting your iron.
Speaker 1: You don't want it to mix with the iron so
Speaker 1: that it makes it have properties that you weren't intending.
Speaker 1: So you've got your your flux, your fuel in this
Speaker 1: case coke or charcoal, and then the iron ore itself.
Speaker 1: You would put all that down the shaft. If you
Speaker 1: look down the cylinder, then the next section is called
Speaker 1: the bosch. This is a roughly circular chamber where uh
Speaker 1: it gets incredibly hot. And below the bosch, at the
Speaker 1: base of the blast furnace was the hearth or crucible,
Speaker 1: and that's where the molten iron would accumulate before being
Speaker 1: drawn off by the iron master. Drawn off just means
Speaker 1: essentially drained from the furnace chamber. So this was actually
Speaker 1: a pretty complicated process. Uh. In fact, they were called
Speaker 1: blast furnaces because you would blow large drafts of air
Speaker 1: into the furnace and what we're called blasts. The earliest
Speaker 1: blast furnaces were cold air furnaces, meaning that the the
Speaker 1: air being blown into the furnace had not been preheated
Speaker 1: in any way. The air would typically be forced through
Speaker 1: an entry point that's down the cylinder. It's not at
Speaker 1: the top, so you're not blowing air down into a chimney. Rather,
Speaker 1: you would have an entry point inside the furnace and
Speaker 1: air would come in there towards the bottom. You want
Speaker 1: it near the bottom to fan the flames, and that
Speaker 1: would allow you to keep the fire burning at the
Speaker 1: right temperature. And you would do this with an enormous
Speaker 1: set of bellows. So you've probably seen bellows. These are
Speaker 1: the devices made to actually blow air into a an area,
Speaker 1: usually some form of furnace or fire that would provide
Speaker 1: the blasts of air. And in the early Industrial Revolution
Speaker 1: they were powered by a water wheel. And when I
Speaker 1: say an enormous pair of bellows, I mean we're talking
Speaker 1: a big, big piece of machinery. They would be more
Speaker 1: than twenty ft long and four or five ft wide,
Speaker 1: So these were huge and would create very powerful blasts
Speaker 1: of air. Now, later iron masters would actually rely upon
Speaker 1: steam engines to power a blower for the furnace. But
Speaker 1: we'll talk more about steam engines towards the end of
Speaker 1: this episode. So if you wanted to start up in ironworks,
Speaker 1: you've just you've just decided to get into the business,
Speaker 1: and you're an eighteenth century England then what you would
Speaker 1: need to do is build your blast furnace in a
Speaker 1: in a good location, get all the stuff ready, like
Speaker 1: the bellows and everything all prepared, and then you would
Speaker 1: need to get your furnace up to the right temperature
Speaker 1: before you actually started to add iron ore. Uh. You
Speaker 1: would do this in a process that was called blowing in.
Speaker 1: Now that involved bringing a large amount of fuel into
Speaker 1: the furnace, whether it's charcoal or coke or whatever. You
Speaker 1: would have to ignite the fuel and allow it to
Speaker 1: gradually heat the furnace over about a week's worth of time,
Speaker 1: and once it was up to the proper temperature, you
Speaker 1: could finally get started with iron working. And when you're
Speaker 1: ready to smell iron, you feed the fuel, flux and
Speaker 1: iron ore into the top of the furnace. You're essentially
Speaker 1: dumping things down this this cylinder, this chimney. Now, as
Speaker 1: those materials fall through the length of the furnace, they
Speaker 1: begin to heat up. There's a lot of very hot
Speaker 1: gases that are rising up through this cylinder, and the
Speaker 1: material passes through those hot gases, getting hot before they
Speaker 1: even get toward the hearts the crucible. The fuel begins
Speaker 1: to burn and the iron starts to heat up to
Speaker 1: melting temperature. The iron ore reacts with the charcoal or
Speaker 1: the coke, and that absorbs the oxygen in the iron
Speaker 1: oxide that was locked away inside the iron ore. Now
Speaker 1: this is a process called reduction, and what you're left
Speaker 1: with is liquid iron and slag. Slag is actually not
Speaker 1: that hard to get rid of. You would think that
Speaker 1: this is a big, messy, slushy liquid that's molten hot,
Speaker 1: but in fact, liquid iron is very heavy and slag
Speaker 1: would float to the top, so you'd have the liquid
Speaker 1: iron underneath and the slag on top. When you are
Speaker 1: ready to draw off the molten iron, you would open
Speaker 1: up a tap hole located in the heart level of
Speaker 1: the blast furnace, so towards the base of this cylinder.
Speaker 1: And typically these taps also had a little gate on them,
Speaker 1: and the gate would go up and down, and by
Speaker 1: setting the gate at the right height, you can allow
Speaker 1: the molten iron to pass through and it would hold
Speaker 1: back the slag. So that way you just get the
Speaker 1: molten iron and the slag is left behind, because again
Speaker 1: the slag is floating at the top of this molten material.
Speaker 1: We'll be back with more about the Industrial Revolution after
Speaker 1: this quick break, so that molten iron would then run
Speaker 1: through a channel a trench essentially, and branch off into
Speaker 1: smaller channels on either side that acted as molds. So
Speaker 1: imagine that you've dug into some sand, uh some some
Speaker 1: some shapes for ingots, and you draw off this molten iron.
Speaker 1: It flows down a large channel and then splits off
Speaker 1: into these smaller channels that are inget molds. Essentially, that
Speaker 1: cooling iron would solidify into the ingots, and those ingots
Speaker 1: were called pigs and the iron is referred to as
Speaker 1: pig iron. And you might wonder, well, where did this
Speaker 1: name come from? Why is it pig iron? Is it
Speaker 1: dirty iron? What? What's the deal? Well, the reason for
Speaker 1: the name is that iron workers thought that the the
Speaker 1: little channels leading away from the central channel were similar
Speaker 1: to suckling piglets that were feeding from a sow. That
Speaker 1: the idea that these little splits, these channels were like piglets.
Speaker 1: And that's why it's called pig iron. I am not
Speaker 1: making that up. Pig iron is sort of a transitional
Speaker 1: point for usable iron. By the way, it's stronger than
Speaker 1: pure iron by about a hundred times, but it's still
Speaker 1: too weak to be of practical use for certain certain
Speaker 1: purposes like that, you can use it for tools and stuff,
Speaker 1: but you typically would use pig iron again by reheating
Speaker 1: it and doing something else with it. Now, the next
Speaker 1: basic type of iron after pig iron is cast iron,
Speaker 1: which is really not that different from pig iron. Uh.
Speaker 1: It's the stuff that the Darbies were making in their
Speaker 1: iron works. It has the same high carbon content around
Speaker 1: three to four percent as pig iron does. Now, there
Speaker 1: a lot of examples of stuff made from cast iron.
Speaker 1: Cast Iron skillets are probably my favorite version of something
Speaker 1: made from this material. And you would typically make a
Speaker 1: cast iron object by pouring the iron into a mold
Speaker 1: and allowing it to cool in that shape. And the
Speaker 1: reason you would want to do that is because cast
Speaker 1: iron is hard and it's brittle, which makes it very
Speaker 1: difficult to shape even when you heat it up. So
Speaker 1: if you pour the molten material into a mold so
Speaker 1: that it takes whatever shape you want and let it cool,
Speaker 1: you're in good shape. But if you let it cool
Speaker 1: at all and then you try and work with it,
Speaker 1: it tends to break, It tends to resist being being shaped,
Speaker 1: so it's not terribly useful. In that case. Um. So
Speaker 1: that's why it's called cast iron. It's best used if
Speaker 1: you cast it into molds. Cast iron, by the way,
Speaker 1: is also prone to rust, which made it less useful
Speaker 1: for material that was constantly exposed to the elements or
Speaker 1: was in damp areas. Now the next type of iron
Speaker 1: is wrought iron. To you are o U g HT
Speaker 1: wrought iron like a wrought iron fence. We produce wrought
Speaker 1: iron by taking pig iron and heating it up again
Speaker 1: in a different type of iron works called a finery.
Speaker 1: Now you'd heat the pig iron up to the liquid
Speaker 1: point and mix it with other slag materials, which lowers
Speaker 1: the carbon content. By introducing non carbon material you create
Speaker 1: a new alloy and the overall percentage of carbon is reduced.
Speaker 1: As a result, wrought iron is easier to work with
Speaker 1: than cast iron, and it's not as susceptible to rusting.
Speaker 1: Wrought iron ended up becoming the most important type of
Speaker 1: iron in the Industrial Revolution until people finally figured out
Speaker 1: how to make steel on a consistent and large scale basis.
Speaker 1: So wrought iron ended up being really the king of
Speaker 1: iron once people were able to do it on a
Speaker 1: large enough and consistent enough basis. So what's the big
Speaker 1: deal with steel? I mean, why wasn't Why wasn't steel
Speaker 1: the material of choice? Well, steel is just another alloy
Speaker 1: of iron. First of all, it's not like it's a
Speaker 1: totally different material. It's an alloy. It has less carbon
Speaker 1: in it than other types of iron, like I mentioned before,
Speaker 1: less than two and sometimes has other materials mixed in
Speaker 1: to create the steel. Different types of steel used different
Speaker 1: materials mixed in with the iron, and it gives it
Speaker 1: various properties. People have been making steel in small amounts
Speaker 1: for centuries. It's not like it was brand new in
Speaker 1: the Industrial Revolution. But it was a laborious process and
Speaker 1: it was easy to mess up. You could make errors
Speaker 1: that would produce iron rather than steel. For a long time,
Speaker 1: people weren't entirely uh certain of the what was causing
Speaker 1: the output to be steel versus iron. Sometimes they just thought, oh, well,
Speaker 1: this was a good batch of iron, or not realizing
Speaker 1: that the process they were using, or the materials they were,
Speaker 1: the fuel they were using, the materials they were mixing
Speaker 1: with it, we're actually making a huge difference. It took
Speaker 1: a long time of experimentation to figure out the right approach.
Speaker 1: One man who improved steel making techniques was Benjamin Huntsman,
Speaker 1: who opened a steel plant in Sheffield, England, in seventeen forty.
Speaker 1: His steel was kind of controversial actually at the time.
Speaker 1: His fellow countrymen considered the steel to be too hard
Speaker 1: to be useful. These were people called cutlers, who would
Speaker 1: take the steel produced by someone like Huntsman and then
Speaker 1: try and shape it into useful tools, often cutting tools.
Speaker 1: That was the main use of steel for a really
Speaker 1: long time. But the cutlers said, no, the steel is
Speaker 1: too hard, it's not any good. However, Huntsman began to
Speaker 1: form relationships with cutlers who were in Europe, not in England,
Speaker 1: so in mainland Europe, and they began to rely heavily
Speaker 1: on his steel and he started to do a lot
Speaker 1: of business. Well. England at the time was incredibly protective
Speaker 1: of its various industries. They wanted to preserve their dominance
Speaker 1: in as many areas as possible, including textiles and iron
Speaker 1: and uh and later on steam power. So because of that,
Speaker 1: the cutlers in England began to reconsider their feelings about
Speaker 1: the difficulty of working with Huntsman Steele, so they began
Speaker 1: to use it as well. Now Huntsman tried to keep
Speaker 1: his methods a secret. He was one of those people
Speaker 1: who decided never to patent his processes because he wanted
Speaker 1: to try and maintain full control over them. However, one
Speaker 1: of his competitors named Samuel Walker, found out how Huntsman
Speaker 1: was making his steel and began to copy him. According
Speaker 1: to report, Walker's work was never quite as good as Huntsman's,
Speaker 1: but his steel was also sought after, and so soon
Speaker 1: this technique of making steel began to spread outward and
Speaker 1: more iron workers began to experiment making steel, but at
Speaker 1: this stage they were still making it in fairly small amounts.
Speaker 1: By the seventeen seventies, the iron industry in Britain was booming.
Speaker 1: Coke was the fuel of choice by this point, so
Speaker 1: this was decades after Darby had first started using coke
Speaker 1: as fuel, and by the seventeen seventies now everybody was
Speaker 1: really onto this and many iron works were in production
Speaker 1: at the time. In Plymouth, a man named Henry Court
Speaker 1: bought a small iron works just outside the city and
Speaker 1: began to experiment with new methods of producing wrought iron,
Speaker 1: and his experiments led to what was called the puddling process.
Speaker 1: Now This approach a little tricky to explain, particularly without
Speaker 1: the use of visual aids. It involved heating refined iron
Speaker 1: in a furnace. So you would first have to take
Speaker 1: iron ore and smelt it through one of the processes
Speaker 1: that talked about earlier, and then the refined iron you
Speaker 1: would get from that process would be used as the
Speaker 1: main ingredient for this new process. So you would take
Speaker 1: this refined iron uh and put it in a furnace
Speaker 1: and mix it with some iron oxides on purpose and
Speaker 1: stir the molten material using these very long rods. And
Speaker 1: the rods had hooks on the end. And we're called
Speaker 1: either puddling bars or rabble rebbels. So I guess like
Speaker 1: the hamburglar. He says, rabble rabble right. Well, anyway, they
Speaker 1: were called rebbels. You would have a worker hold one
Speaker 1: of these long bars. Uh. They would sometimes be called rabblers.
Speaker 1: This is not a joke. They really were uh. And
Speaker 1: of course you couldn't put them inside the furnace they
Speaker 1: would burn up and die. So what they would do
Speaker 1: is they use these working doors that were built into
Speaker 1: the sides of the furnace that would allow you to
Speaker 1: pass a rod through the door. Into the furnace itself
Speaker 1: so that you could stir the molten material from a
Speaker 1: safe distance UH and the rattlers would stir this mixture
Speaker 1: as they would continue to blast air at the mixture,
Speaker 1: and that would allow oxygen to react with the iron
Speaker 1: oxides in the molten material, and impurities would form slag
Speaker 1: that again would float on top of the iron or
Speaker 1: would vaporize into gases that could be vented out of
Speaker 1: the top of the furnace. During this process, carbon would
Speaker 1: begin to burn off in the iron, and as the
Speaker 1: carbon burns off, the melting temperature of the iron increases. So,
Speaker 1: in other words, in order to keep that iron molten,
Speaker 1: you would have to increase the temperature in the furnace.
Speaker 1: And this is because the impurities that the carbon in
Speaker 1: this case is getting burnt off, and the melting point
Speaker 1: for pure carbon is higher than the melting point of
Speaker 1: or not pure carbon, but pure iron. The melting point
Speaker 1: of pure iron is higher than it would be with
Speaker 1: an iron carbon mix. So that meant that you had
Speaker 1: to continue to increase the temperature in the furnace. You
Speaker 1: would have to add more fuel to make the temperature
Speaker 1: go higher, and you would continue to do this process
Speaker 1: until you've burned off enough carbon so that the mixture
Speaker 1: itself begins to change. It uh in in puddling terms,
Speaker 1: it comes to nature. Now that means that the the
Speaker 1: iron itself has very different qualities, and by change, I
Speaker 1: mean it stops being a molten liquid instead becomes kind
Speaker 1: of a spongy mass of iron. So it's still shapeable,
Speaker 1: it's still very you know soft compare too solid iron,
Speaker 1: but it's no longer in liquid form. And it's at
Speaker 1: that point that the rabblers would have to hook the
Speaker 1: masks using the rabbles or the puddling bars, and once hooked,
Speaker 1: they then have to pull out these masses, these these
Speaker 1: puddles or puddle balls rather of iron, which were incredibly heavy.
Speaker 1: We're talking like eighty pounds or more. And they would
Speaker 1: grab the stuff with the bar, pull it out of
Speaker 1: the furnace and then take the puddle balls. They're still
Speaker 1: incredibly hot to some massive hammers. Now, originally those hammers
Speaker 1: were manually wielded by people who were known as shinglers um,
Speaker 1: but eventually they would be used with the water and
Speaker 1: steam powered hammers instead of manual labor, which was good
Speaker 1: because being a shingler was it was it was a
Speaker 1: specialized skill, but it also usually meant you didn't live
Speaker 1: very long. You had a very strenuous, difficult job with
Speaker 1: a high degree of danger to it. So the process
Speaker 1: of hammering the puddle balls would put them into a
Speaker 1: shape that resembled roof shingles, which is where the process
Speaker 1: kind of got its name is shingling. And you would
Speaker 1: do shingling not just to get the iron into a
Speaker 1: new shape. It was actually meant to hammer out slag
Speaker 1: and other impurities, and also to hammer out cracks that
Speaker 1: were inside the mass. So slamming a hammer against this
Speaker 1: puddle ball would create uh, you know, smushed the iron
Speaker 1: together so that that cracks would be would be completely
Speaker 1: sealed and once heated, or once shingled rather, you would
Speaker 1: then heat the iron again until it was malleable and
Speaker 1: then roll it out into bars of wrought iron or
Speaker 1: sometimes in the poles of iron. Uh. Quartz process sped
Speaker 1: up the production of of making wrought iron consider toerably,
Speaker 1: and he patented the approach in the seventeen eighties. So
Speaker 1: by Courts time, iron was beginning to become the material
Speaker 1: of choice for tools and for industrial machines, largely replacing wood,
Speaker 1: which had previously been the material of choice. So if
Speaker 1: you look at machines previous before, before like seventeen seventeen,
Speaker 1: you know, really seeing a lot of wood uh components.
Speaker 1: You know, even gears and things often would be made
Speaker 1: of wood rather than iron. Some cast iron was being
Speaker 1: used in gears and some other uh parts of machinery,
Speaker 1: but wood was largely the main material, with stone being
Speaker 1: used for foundations and things like that, for things like
Speaker 1: mills and that sort of stuff. But now by courts time,
Speaker 1: iron has become the really important material for tools, industrial machines.
Speaker 1: It's uh, it's really taking off. And looking at the
Speaker 1: amount of iron produced in England during these decades of
Speaker 1: the Industrial Revolution, you can see how these improvements in
Speaker 1: technology really made a huge impact. So here's an example.
Speaker 1: Just before the era of the Industrial Revolution, in seventeen forty,
Speaker 1: Britain was producing about seventeen thousand tons of pig iron
Speaker 1: per year. By seventy eight that Amountain had increased to
Speaker 1: nearly seventy thousand tons, So seventeen thousand to seventy thousand,
Speaker 1: and by seventeen ninety six, you know, it's not even
Speaker 1: a full decade later it was producing more than a
Speaker 1: hundred twenty five thousand tons of pig iron and that
Speaker 1: number would just continue to grow over the next century.
Speaker 1: So by the mid nineteenth century you're talking an enormous
Speaker 1: amount of iron being produced out of out of Britain,
Speaker 1: and it was being used in construction to make bridges
Speaker 1: and tunnels and iron rails. So the rails actually predated
Speaker 1: locomotives and trains. The rail system was men to allow
Speaker 1: carts to pass easily over land. Uh special cards would
Speaker 1: be pulled by horses or other animals, and it would
Speaker 1: be a while before the first steam powered train would
Speaker 1: pull carts along rails, but the rail system in general
Speaker 1: made it much easier to transport goods over land. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: there was also a lot of work in creating transportation
Speaker 1: lanes over water. As I mentioned in the last episode,
Speaker 1: Britain was really well positioned for the Industrial Revolution for
Speaker 1: a lot of reasons, and one of them is that
Speaker 1: it has a lot of port cities. So shipping was
Speaker 1: a big part of British industry. But within the countries
Speaker 1: of Britain, within England and Wales and Scotland in particular,
Speaker 1: it was really important to try and ship various materials
Speaker 1: between cities, and that meant creating special waterways, including canals,
Speaker 1: to connect rivers together that otherwise wouldn't easily meet. So
Speaker 1: there were a lot of canals, but one really impressive
Speaker 1: iron structure was the Potka Sulta Aqueduct, also known as
Speaker 1: the Stream in the Sky. Now that name is Welsh,
Speaker 1: if you could not guess before, and that means I've
Speaker 1: probably butchered the pronunciation, as the Welsh believed language is
Speaker 1: something no one should ever be able to actually speak.
Speaker 1: But this aqueduct was a raised waterway that allowed this
Speaker 1: canal to cross over a valley. Now, the goal here
Speaker 1: was to have a canal connecting two different rivers together,
Speaker 1: but there was a valley in the way, and how
Speaker 1: would you get the water to cross over the valley.
Speaker 1: You could build a series of locks which would allow
Speaker 1: you to very slowly lower or raise a barge in
Speaker 1: a series of stepped approaches, But that takes a lot
Speaker 1: of time. It's not terribly afici and if you want
Speaker 1: to get a lot done so Instead, there was a
Speaker 1: guy named Thomas Telford who proposed this raised aqueduct that
Speaker 1: would bypass the valley entirely by going over it. So
Speaker 1: essentially you're looking at a big iron trough and that
Speaker 1: holds all the water. Use arch stone pillars to support
Speaker 1: the trough, and you can see pictures of this or
Speaker 1: video even of this particular aqueduct, and it is pretty
Speaker 1: amazing to look at. So a barge could float down
Speaker 1: the canal and over the aqueduct without having to descend
Speaker 1: into the valley, and this saved a lot of time. Now,
Speaker 1: Telford's original design was met with a lot of skepticism,
Speaker 1: but he was allowed to build it and it ended
Speaker 1: up working out just fine. So it was a big
Speaker 1: success in the Industrial Revolution and really proved how far
Speaker 1: the the industry had come as far as iron production
Speaker 1: and making sure it is reliable and safe. And it
Speaker 1: also added a lot of confidence to areas like architecture
Speaker 1: for everything from bridge building to tunnels and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: We will continue our story about the Industrial Revolution after
Speaker 1: we take this break for some ads, it wasn't until
Speaker 1: eighteen fifty six that the steel industry really took off.
Speaker 1: That's when a man named Henry Bessemer came up with
Speaker 1: a method to produce steel in large amounts. So before
Speaker 1: the most reliable processes would only produce small amounts of
Speaker 1: steel over time, which made steel difficult to produce in
Speaker 1: quantities large enough for it to meet demand, and it
Speaker 1: also meant that the price was really high. But Bessemer
Speaker 1: came up with a lot of improvements. So Bessemer's father
Speaker 1: was an engineer, and Bestmer himself took after his dad.
Speaker 1: He was largely self educated and learned about engineering by
Speaker 1: observing his father's work and doing his own experiments. He
Speaker 1: generated an enormous fortune before ever getting into the steel
Speaker 1: business by producing a type of powder that was used
Speaker 1: in gold paints, and at the time, gold paints were
Speaker 1: in really high demand in Britain and in Europe. So
Speaker 1: he made a fortune off that and then used that
Speaker 1: to fund his other experiments. He also created a machine
Speaker 1: designed to crush sugarcane, but it was in the steel
Speaker 1: industry that he became a legend. So Bessemer was trying
Speaker 1: to create a harder type of iron, and it was
Speaker 1: all out of necessity. It's kind of a funny story.
Speaker 1: He had developed a type of artillery shell and he
Speaker 1: was trying to sell it to the French, but the
Speaker 1: French were looking at his his artillery shell, and they said,
Speaker 1: we can't take this because our cannons are made out
Speaker 1: of cast iron and they wouldn't be strong enough to
Speaker 1: fire this artillery shell without exploding, which in war would
Speaker 1: be not an incredibly effective tactic. So Bessemer decided that
Speaker 1: the best way to solve this problem would be to
Speaker 1: create a stronger type of iron so that the French
Speaker 1: could make their cannons out of that, and then he
Speaker 1: could sell the shells he had created to them. So
Speaker 1: it was a roundabout way of doing things, but ended
Speaker 1: up working out pretty well. So Bessemer started by using
Speaker 1: a blast furnace much like the one I've already described
Speaker 1: earlier in this episode. As he experimented, he found that
Speaker 1: oxygen in the furnace would remove some of the carbon
Speaker 1: from the pig iron that he was using. Inside the furnace,
Speaker 1: Blowing air through the purified iron caused it to heat
Speaker 1: up more, and the oxygen was heating up the remaining
Speaker 1: carbon inside the the melted iron as well as silicon,
Speaker 1: and this made the resulting molten material easy to pour,
Speaker 1: and the process became known as the Bessemer process. The
Speaker 1: result was that you would get these slag free ingots
Speaker 1: of metal. Combining this approach with a discovery from another
Speaker 1: engineer named Robert Forrester Mushnitt, Bessemer could use an iron
Speaker 1: manganese alloy to remove extra oxygen from the decarborized iron,
Speaker 1: and this is what allowed him to create steel. Now,
Speaker 1: Bessemer hit a snag when he discovered his process really
Speaker 1: only worked if he used phosphorus free iron ore. So
Speaker 1: if you remember I mentioned, materials like phosphorus and sulfur
Speaker 1: turn iron brittle, so it becomes less useful, it'll shear off.
Speaker 1: And Bessemer was just by chance using iron ore that
Speaker 1: didn't have a high phosphorus content. So when he was
Speaker 1: doing his experiments, everything was coming out great. But then
Speaker 1: when iron workers at large began to try his very process,
Speaker 1: they started getting very different results because much of that
Speaker 1: iron ore in Britain contained phosph us. Bessemer found the
Speaker 1: source of iron ore in northwestern England that was free
Speaker 1: of phosphorus, but that solution wasn't ideal because it meant
Speaker 1: that you had to get all your iron ore from
Speaker 1: one place. Now, another improvement in eighteen seventy seven made
Speaker 1: Bessemer's approach more useful. There was a another person named
Speaker 1: Sydney Gilchrist Thomas who created a furnace lining that removed
Speaker 1: phosphorus from the iron ore as it was heating up,
Speaker 1: which meant that iron workers didn't have to rely exclusively
Speaker 1: on that phosphorus free iron ore from Northwest England. The
Speaker 1: end product of this process was called mild steel. Now
Speaker 1: it's called mild steel because it was different from the
Speaker 1: steel produced by the earlier methods, the kind that that
Speaker 1: court was known for, because it didn't it wasn't it
Speaker 1: wasn't as hard, it wasn't only useful for cutting tools,
Speaker 1: which is pretty much what all the hard steel was
Speaker 1: used for in earlier versions. It was easier to work
Speaker 1: and became the material of choice for applications like girders, rods, wires, rivets,
Speaker 1: and other uses. So while iron had replaced wood earlier,
Speaker 1: now steele was beginning to replace iron. In the late
Speaker 1: eighteen sixties, there was a new process called the open
Speaker 1: hearth process that rivaled the Bessemer approach. Now, this technique
Speaker 1: was created by a German engineer living in England and
Speaker 1: his name was William Siemens. Siemens found a way to
Speaker 1: use the waist heat generated by a furnace to feed
Speaker 1: back into the furnace itself to increase the temperature inside
Speaker 1: the furnace. So what you would do is that you
Speaker 1: would have this hot air being given off by the
Speaker 1: furnace and he would pump that air back into the
Speaker 1: furnace using that same pathway, which meant that the air
Speaker 1: being blasted into the furnace was already preheated, so it
Speaker 1: was no longer the cold air blast. This is a
Speaker 1: hot air blast that in turn made the flame temperature
Speaker 1: hotter and using a combination of pig iron and scrap
Speaker 1: wrought iron, iron workers could use this technique to produce
Speaker 1: steel quickly. William Siemens would go on to invent the
Speaker 1: electric furnace in eighteen seventy nine, which provided another enormous
Speaker 1: boost to the steel industry in England. He also worked
Speaker 1: in electric telegraphy and in lighting, so this is also
Speaker 1: the era where people are experimenting with those technologies. Uh.
Speaker 1: William Siemens and Henry Bessemer both were knighted for their
Speaker 1: contributions to Britain, so that was very interesting because William Siemens,
Speaker 1: obviously he was German born, but became an English citizen
Speaker 1: and became a knight, and Bessemer was a self taught
Speaker 1: man who became a knight. So very interesting that both
Speaker 1: of them were able to create such important contributions to
Speaker 1: the entire nation. Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion of
Speaker 1: this tex Stuff classic episode right after we take this break. Now,
Speaker 1: both the best simer process and the open hearth process
Speaker 1: significantly reduced the amount of time it took to convert
Speaker 1: iron into steel, and that created a new industry in Britain.
Speaker 1: Before long, steel replaced iron and all those applications, just
Speaker 1: as iron had replaced wood back in the eighteenth century.
Speaker 1: But now we've got to backtrack a little bit to
Speaker 1: talk about steam engines. So all that's going on with
Speaker 1: the iron and steel industry from the seventeen forties up
Speaker 1: until the late eighteen hundreds, but steam engines actually go
Speaker 1: back before the Industrial Revolution. Now, in October two thirteen,
Speaker 1: tech Stuff did a full episode about steam engines and
Speaker 1: how they work. So I'll try to be brief because
Speaker 1: you can always go back and listen to that episode
Speaker 1: for a more detailed account of how steam engines came
Speaker 1: about and the developments over time. But here's a submarine.
Speaker 1: First of all, we've known about steam for quite some time.
Speaker 1: The ancient Greeks were aware of steam's ability to do work,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't really until the Industrial Revolution that anyone
Speaker 1: made real practical steam engines. And part of the reason
Speaker 1: for that is that steam is incredibly dangerous. Not only
Speaker 1: can it be hot enough to cause devastating burns, but
Speaker 1: if you want it to do useful work, you have
Speaker 1: to put it under pressure, and that means you have
Speaker 1: to have materials strong enough to deal with that pressure
Speaker 1: to contain the steam without failing, because if there is
Speaker 1: a failure, your device is going to fly apart, and
Speaker 1: what you've really created is a steam powered bomb, not
Speaker 1: entirely useful for industry. So it took a long time
Speaker 1: for engineers to figure out ways to harness steam in
Speaker 1: a way that wasn't inherently dangerous every time you used it.
Speaker 1: The development of the early steam engines actually predates the
Speaker 1: Industrial Revolution. In sixt a guy named Thomas Savory patented
Speaker 1: a device meant to draw water from mines using steam,
Speaker 1: and it would allow mining operations to continue. It worked
Speaker 1: on the principle of vacuum power, so the device would
Speaker 1: fill a chamber with steam. You would have a boiler.
Speaker 1: So you've got essentially a pot filled with water, and
Speaker 1: you put heat to the pot. The water begins to
Speaker 1: boil and gives off steam. Uh, there's a pipe leading
Speaker 1: from the pot to a chamber, so the chamber fills
Speaker 1: up with steam until you've got a nice amount of
Speaker 1: steam built up inside that chamber. You would then cut
Speaker 1: off the pathway between the chamber and the boiler. There
Speaker 1: would be another line leading from the chamber down into
Speaker 1: a mine, and the end of the line would be
Speaker 1: under the water level. As the steam cools, it condenses,
Speaker 1: and when it condenses, it's taking up less space, which
Speaker 1: is creating a vacuum that's negative pressure. So this vacuum
Speaker 1: would start to pull the water from the pipe. You know,
Speaker 1: the water that's in the mine that there's an end
Speaker 1: of a pipe that's underneath that water level, would pull
Speaker 1: water up the length of that pipe into the chamber. Now,
Speaker 1: once you've got a chamber filled with water, you have
Speaker 1: to get rid of that water, and often the way
Speaker 1: they would do that is they would close off the
Speaker 1: pathway down the pipe that goes down into the mine
Speaker 1: and heat it up and then expel the water with
Speaker 1: using steam power. Sometimes they would go upwards of eighty feet,
Speaker 1: or sometimes it would explode. Even if it worked properly,
Speaker 1: the invention had pretty tough limitations. It was really limited
Speaker 1: to shallow depths. You couldn't go very deep with this
Speaker 1: because the vacuum power wasn't strong enough to pull water
Speaker 1: up more than a few or so comparatively speaking to
Speaker 1: other types of pumps. Then alone came a guy named
Speaker 1: Thomas Newcomen who would come up with a significant improvement
Speaker 1: over savories approach, and he used a steam powered water pump. Now,
Speaker 1: the best way to imagine this is imagine a giant seesaw. Alright,
Speaker 1: one end of the seesaw is weighted down, so it's
Speaker 1: naturally in the down position at any given time. That's
Speaker 1: the pump end. That's the end that is attached by
Speaker 1: a chain to a pump that is designed to pull
Speaker 1: water up from underground. The other end of the pump,
Speaker 1: which is up in the air, is attached by a
Speaker 1: chain to a steam piston inside a cylinder. So you've
Speaker 1: got a cylinder and a piston. The piston is in
Speaker 1: the up position. It's dangling from the chain that's on
Speaker 1: the upper part of the seesaw. Now Newcomman's invention would
Speaker 1: fill the cylinder with steam. Again, you would have a
Speaker 1: boiler that would boil water generate steam. Steam would fill
Speaker 1: this cylinder up, and then you would cool the cylinder
Speaker 1: cylinder down, which would cause the steam to condense, creating
Speaker 1: a vacuum, and that vacuum would pull on the piston.
Speaker 1: So you have a pulling force that would pull on
Speaker 1: the upper end of the seesaw, pulling it down, making
Speaker 1: the lower end of the seesaw go up and pump
Speaker 1: water out of the mine. So again it's using steam
Speaker 1: as a vacuum source, not as a pushing source. It
Speaker 1: was never used to push in those early steam engines,
Speaker 1: only to pull, and that was largely because the materials
Speaker 1: being used to create the cylinders and boilers weren't strong
Speaker 1: enough to hold steam under greater pressures. So it was
Speaker 1: just too dangerous to create a steam engine that you
Speaker 1: steam as a pushing power. At that time, it made
Speaker 1: way more sense to create the pulling power because it
Speaker 1: was much less dangerous. Now new Cummins invention worked, but
Speaker 1: it was inefficient, and that's largely because it required you
Speaker 1: to heat the cylinder that has the piston in it.
Speaker 1: You have to heat it up and then you have
Speaker 1: to cool it down, and you have to heat it
Speaker 1: up and cool it down over and over again, which
Speaker 1: meant that you had to expend a lot of extra
Speaker 1: energy just to get the cylinder at the right temperature
Speaker 1: each time. And it also meant that heating it up
Speaker 1: and cooling it down would create a lot of stress
Speaker 1: on the material, so you'd have to replace the cylinder
Speaker 1: fairly regularly, because if you kept doing it indefinitely, it
Speaker 1: would become too weak to operate safely. But that all
Speaker 1: changed when a fellow named James Watt came around. James
Speaker 1: Watt invented a device called a condenser in seventeen sixty five.
Speaker 1: So the condenser was a pretty simple idea. It was
Speaker 1: a separate chamber that allowed steam to condense, and by
Speaker 1: creating a separate chamber, you didn't have to change the
Speaker 1: temperature of the cylinder anymore. You just kept the cylinder
Speaker 1: at a high temperature. You didn't have to lower it
Speaker 1: at all because once the steam was created in the cylinder,
Speaker 1: it could pass into the condenser chamber, cool down and
Speaker 1: create that vacuum poll. So this was a huge improvement
Speaker 1: on the efficiency of the newcoming engine. So what really
Speaker 1: made a big contribution here, now, late in his career,
Speaker 1: what would make something else that he was even more
Speaker 1: proud of. He thought that this was his most important
Speaker 1: invention out of everything he did. It was a solid
Speaker 1: mechanism that allowed the up and down motion of the
Speaker 1: piston to translate into the arc motion of that see
Speaker 1: saw pump I was talking about. Now, As I mentioned,
Speaker 1: earlier models used a chain to connect the pump to
Speaker 1: the piston. And there's a limitation right there, right because
Speaker 1: if you have a chain, you can only pull. You
Speaker 1: can't push a chain or a rope. If you try
Speaker 1: and do that, you don't get any useful work out
Speaker 1: of that. But by the late seventeen hundreds, you could
Speaker 1: actually create materials strong enough to contain steam under a
Speaker 1: decent amount of pressure. So what created this solid mechanism
Speaker 1: instead of a chain that would connect the end of
Speaker 1: a of a of a pump, you know, the the
Speaker 1: working in not the not the pumping end, but the
Speaker 1: other end to the piston. And because it was solid,
Speaker 1: it could push or pull, and the up and down
Speaker 1: motion of the piston was translated into this arc motion
Speaker 1: of the pump going see sawing back and forth, and
Speaker 1: that meant that you could actually use the piston to
Speaker 1: push and to pull. So by pumping steam into the cylinder,
Speaker 1: you could push the piston up, and by allowing the
Speaker 1: steam to condense, you could pull the piston back down.
Speaker 1: That meant you created a double acting piston. And this
Speaker 1: meant that you could make a steam engine much more
Speaker 1: efficient because it could work in both directions. Now, the
Speaker 1: steam engine had an enormous impact on both the textile
Speaker 1: and the iron industries, so that's kind of why I
Speaker 1: put it here at this point to talk about how
Speaker 1: it affected the other two industries I've already covered in
Speaker 1: this series. So factories began to use steam power in
Speaker 1: place of water wheels, or in addition to water wheels.
Speaker 1: Steam power freed up factories from having to be placed
Speaker 1: alongside a river. You could actually put a factory anywhere
Speaker 1: by creating steam engines to provide the power for whatever
Speaker 1: it was you were doing. So there were steam powered
Speaker 1: looms and textile mills, and steam powered blowers and iron works,
Speaker 1: so you didn't have to have the river to provide
Speaker 1: the water wheel power or You could even use a
Speaker 1: steam engine to pull water to continuously supply the water
Speaker 1: wheel with enough water to turn and provide the mechanical
Speaker 1: power that you needed. So there were combinations as well.
Speaker 1: Harnessing steam made these industries more efficient, and that led
Speaker 1: to lower prices on goods, and it also increased a
Speaker 1: need for workers. You began to be able to produce more,
Speaker 1: but you needed more people to work on the stuff
Speaker 1: you were doing. And that was great news for the
Speaker 1: population of Britain because the population was growing and there
Speaker 1: weren't enough jobs to go around otherwise. So this was
Speaker 1: creating a demand for jobs um and there were plenty
Speaker 1: of people to fill those jobs. And the Industrial Revolution
Speaker 1: was producing something besides just iron and cloth. It was
Speaker 1: producing the working class. Now that kind of leads me
Speaker 1: to the conclusion of this episode. There's a lot we
Speaker 1: could talk about with steam, obviously, including the development of
Speaker 1: the locomotive and steamships, but I'm going to save that
Speaker 1: for the final episode. So I'm going to conclude the
Speaker 1: series on the Industrial Revolution with the next one, and
Speaker 1: we'll look at how transportation was changing, including those steamships
Speaker 1: and locomotives. We'll talk about some of the conflicts that
Speaker 1: were going on around the same span of time, So
Speaker 1: that includes the American Revolution that took place during the
Speaker 1: Industrial Revolution in England, as well as the Napoleonic Wars
Speaker 1: and the American Civil War, and there were other conflicts
Speaker 1: as well, so that was a big part of what
Speaker 1: was driving innovation as well. It became necessity for the
Speaker 1: war efforts to create iron and steel products more efficiently
Speaker 1: and as well as textiles and other elements as well.
Speaker 1: So that's gonna be part of the discussion in the
Speaker 1: next episode. I hope you enjoyed that classic episode of
Speaker 1: tech Stuff. Next week we will wrap up this three
Speaker 1: part series and uh in the meantime, if you have
Speaker 1: suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of
Speaker 1: tech Stuff, whether it's a look back on big historical
Speaker 1: trends in tech or something that's cutting edge and brand new.
Speaker 1: You can do that in a couple of different ways.
Speaker 1: One is to download the I Heart radio app. It
Speaker 1: is free to download and to use. You can navigate
Speaker 1: over to tech Stuff using the little search bar. You'll
Speaker 1: see that there is a microphone icon. Let's you leave
Speaker 1: a voice message up to thirty seconds in length. Letting
Speaker 1: me know what you would like on on the show,
Speaker 1: or if you would prefer an alternative. You can always
Speaker 1: use Twitter and you can send me a tweet. The
Speaker 1: handle for the show is text Stuff hs W and
Speaker 1: I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is
Speaker 1: an I heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.