Speaker 1: Get technology with tech Stuff from stolom. Hey there, and
Speaker 1: welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. Now,
Speaker 1: in our last episode, we started to look at the
Speaker 1: beginning of the Industrial Revolution, which started in England in
Speaker 1: the mid eighteenth century. Though, as I mentioned in that
Speaker 1: previous episode, it's actually really hard to point at any
Speaker 1: historical event, not just the Industrial Revolution, but really any
Speaker 1: big event and definitively carve out exactly when it began,
Speaker 1: because history just doesn't work like that. Things develop and
Speaker 1: bleed into one another. But at any rate, generally speaking,
Speaker 1: we tend to look at seventeen seventeen fifties somewhere around
Speaker 1: there as the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Now, in
Speaker 1: that last episode, I focused mainly on the textile industry
Speaker 1: because it's a great illustration of how quickly things changed
Speaker 1: just within a few decades and went from something that
Speaker 1: used to be a specialized skill among weavers that would
Speaker 1: do you know, maybe a couple would work together, uh,
Speaker 1: but that would be it, and it would be something
Speaker 1: that would be produced on a very small scale, to
Speaker 1: a full blown industry which would end up employing thousands
Speaker 1: of people. Now, in this week's episode, we're gonna look
Speaker 1: more closely at how iron shaped the Industrial Revolution and
Speaker 1: how innovations and inventions in the iron industry really changed things.
Speaker 1: And it's it's fascinating and also kind of complicated. Now,
Speaker 1: first of all, iron is the second most common metal
Speaker 1: in the Earth's crust. The most common would be aluminum.
Speaker 1: But we would never really use chemically pure iron, you know,
Speaker 1: the fe stuff to build anything of any significance. And
Speaker 1: that's because of a couple of things. Pure iron is
Speaker 1: really malleable, so that it means it's really easy to shape,
Speaker 1: so that's good. And you can even cut pure iron
Speaker 1: using something like a knife. If you've got a hunk
Speaker 1: of chemically pure iron, you can cut through it. It
Speaker 1: does take some effort, it's not like it's gonna slice
Speaker 1: through like butta, but you can do it. You can
Speaker 1: use a hammer to beat pure iron into sheets, or
Speaker 1: you 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: oxydizes so quickly. Instead, we mind 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 load stone,
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
Speaker 1: be now, the iron ore in Britain, because that again
Speaker 1: is where the Industrial Revolution began, had really high concentrations
Speaker 1: of sulfur and phosphorus, and both of those things will
Speaker 1: make iron brittle if you don't get rid of them.
Speaker 1: So until the Industrial Revolution, iron masters hadn't really quite
Speaker 1: worked out how to do that on an efficient basis.
Speaker 1: For that reason, British iron was often used in very
Speaker 1: cheap items like nails. Now, this was also a little
Speaker 1: tricky because iron making iron required a lot of labor,
Speaker 1: a lot of backbreaking hard work, and that drove up
Speaker 1: the price of the final product. So Britain was starting
Speaker 1: to supplement its own iron supplies by importing about half
Speaker 1: of all the iron that was using from Sweden. The
Speaker 1: iron from Sweden did not have the high concentrations of
Speaker 1: sulfur or phosphorus, so it wasn't as problematic, and Britain
Speaker 1: just couldn't produce enough of its own despite ample supplies
Speaker 1: of iron ore. Now, once we get hold of iron ore,
Speaker 1: we have to smelt it. That's in order for us
Speaker 1: to get to the iron that's inside of it. Now,
Speaker 1: this involves heating the ore up to the melting point
Speaker 1: of iron. We also use fuels that will produce chemicals
Speaker 1: that can bond with the iron during this process, which
Speaker 1: changes iron's physical characteristics. We're talking chemical reactions here, and
Speaker 1: what we're really doing is creating iron alloys. And an
Speaker 1: alloy is a mixture that has a metal with something else.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it's another metal, sometimes it's a different substance. But
Speaker 1: these are chemical mixtures that have their own features that
Speaker 1: are a front from the features of the individual elements
Speaker 1: or or ingredients in that mixture, so you're getting something new.
Speaker 1: The main ingredient we mix with iron to produce useful
Speaker 1: material is carbon, and if you get the mix of
Speaker 1: carbon to iron just right, you produce steel. Steel is
Speaker 1: an iron alloy that has around two or less carbon
Speaker 1: in it. Other types of iron hab between two to
Speaker 1: four percent of carbon in the alloy, and mixing other
Speaker 1: metals or substances will create different types of steel or iron.
Speaker 1: So how do you mix carbon into the iron? What
Speaker 1: exactly are you doing here is there's some sort of
Speaker 1: powder that you're pouring in. Well, one way is by
Speaker 1: using a carbon rich fuel as the means of heating
Speaker 1: up your iron to melt it in the first place.
Speaker 1: So if you're using something a fuel that has a
Speaker 1: lot of carbon in it, then some of that carbon
Speaker 1: gets transferred into the iron as it melts. Charcoal is
Speaker 1: a great example, and iron masters in Britain and really
Speaker 1: all over Europe relied very heavily on charcoal for centuries
Speaker 1: when smelting iron ore. But if you remember from our
Speaker 1: last episode, I talked about a man named Abraham Darby
Speaker 1: who came up with an alternative to charcoal, and it
Speaker 1: was coke. Now, coke is a fuel product you make
Speaker 1: by baking coal in an airless oven or furnace at
Speaker 1: a really high temperature, and at that high temperature, some
Speaker 1: of the coal begins to ash. That ash will end
Speaker 1: up melding with the the coal itself and it converts
Speaker 1: into this other fuel called coke, which is once it
Speaker 1: cools down, grayish in color and has a very porous structure.
Speaker 1: When you burn coke, it creates carbon monoxide, among other things,
Speaker 1: which is important in this process of creating iron useful iron.
Speaker 1: But why would anyone worry about switching from charcoal to
Speaker 1: coke in the first place. I mean, charcoal is pretty simple.
Speaker 1: You just have to burn wood to make charcoal. Uh.
Speaker 1: And in fact, this is where the problem would come in.
Speaker 1: In order to fuel a single iron works for one year,
Speaker 1: it would take two acres of forest to supply enough
Speaker 1: charcoal for operations. So for one iron works, you would
Speaker 1: need two hundred acres of woods. And keep in mind
Speaker 1: that once you've gone through that that two acres of
Speaker 1: forests in a year, you're not gonna be able to
Speaker 1: use those same two hundred acres the next year because
Speaker 1: it's 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 work
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 when
Speaker 1: burned would mix with a 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 rather 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 to thirty ft square at the base. Often built
Speaker 1: into the side of a hill. So that way, in
Speaker 1: order to bring materials to the blast furnace, which you
Speaker 1: would deposit in the top of the furnace, you would
Speaker 1: climb the hill, as opposed to putting scaffolding up or
Speaker 1: a long ramp or however you would you know, be
Speaker 1: able to have an access point to get to the
Speaker 1: top of the furnace. Now, if you want to imagine
Speaker 1: what these things look like, they did like a look
Speaker 1: like a tapering cylinder. So the top is a bit
Speaker 1: narrower than the bottom. Uh the topmost portion of the
Speaker 1: cylinder is called the shaft, and that's where you would
Speaker 1: feed the fuel, the iron ore and some other materials
Speaker 1: called flux, which is typically limestone. The purpose of the
Speaker 1: flux is to absorb some of the other elements inside
Speaker 1: the iron ore that you don't want corrupting your iron.
Speaker 1: You don't want it to uh mixed with the iron
Speaker 1: so 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 in 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 where 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 blast 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 the 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 heart 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 while 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: So that molten iron would then run through a channel
Speaker 1: a trench essentially, and branch off into smaller channels on
Speaker 1: either side that acted as molds. So imagine that you've
Speaker 1: dug into some sand, uh some some some shapes for ingots,
Speaker 1: and you draw off this molten iron. It flows down
Speaker 1: a large channel and then splits off into these smaller
Speaker 1: channels that are inget molds. Essentially, that cooling iron would
Speaker 1: solidify into the ingots, and those ingots were called pigs
Speaker 1: And the iron is referred to as pig iron. And
Speaker 1: you might wonder, well, where did this name come from?
Speaker 1: Why is it pig iron? Is it dirty iron? What?
Speaker 1: What's the deal? Well, the reason for the name is
Speaker 1: that iron workers thought that the the little channels leading
Speaker 1: away from the central channel were similar to suckling piglets
Speaker 1: that were feeding from a sow. That the idea that
Speaker 1: these little splits, these channels were like piglets. And that's
Speaker 1: why it's called pig iron. I am not making that up.
Speaker 1: Pig iron is sort of a transitional point for usable iron.
Speaker 1: By the way, it's stronger than pure iron by about
Speaker 1: a hundred times, but it's still too weak to be
Speaker 1: of practical use for certain certain purposes like that. You
Speaker 1: can use it for tools and stuff, but you typically
Speaker 1: would use pig iron again by reheating it and doing
Speaker 1: something else with it. Now, the next basic type of
Speaker 1: iron after pig iron is cast iron, which is really
Speaker 1: not that different from pig iron. Uh. It's the stuff
Speaker 1: that the Darbies were making in their iron works. It
Speaker 1: has the same high carbon content around three to four
Speaker 1: percent as pig iron does. Now there are a lot
Speaker 1: of examples of stuff made from cast iron. Cast iron
Speaker 1: skillets are probably my favorite version of something made from
Speaker 1: this material. And you would typically make a cast iron
Speaker 1: object by pouring the iron into a mold and allowing
Speaker 1: it to cool in that shape. And the reason you
Speaker 1: would want to do that is because cast iron is
Speaker 1: hard and it's brittle, which makes it very difficult to
Speaker 1: shape even when you heat it up. So if you
Speaker 1: pour the molten material into a mold so that it
Speaker 1: takes whatever shape you want and let it cool, you're
Speaker 1: in good shape. But if you let it cool at
Speaker 1: all and then you try and work with it, it
Speaker 1: 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 w r o U g HT wrought
Speaker 1: eye like a wrought iron fence. We produce wrought iron
Speaker 1: by taking pig iron and heating it up again in
Speaker 1: a different type of iron works called a finery. Now
Speaker 1: you'd heat the pig iron up to the liquid point
Speaker 1: and mix it with other slag materials, which lowers the
Speaker 1: carbon content. By introducing non carbon material you create a
Speaker 1: 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 iron.
Speaker 1: Once people were able to do it on a large
Speaker 1: enough and consistent enough basis. So what's the big deal
Speaker 1: with steel? I mean, why wasn't why steel the material
Speaker 1: of choice? Well, steel is just another alloy of iron.
Speaker 1: First of all, it's not like it's a totally different material.
Speaker 1: It's an alloy. It has less carbon in it than
Speaker 1: other types of iron, like I mentioned before, less than
Speaker 1: two and sometimes has other materials mixed in to create
Speaker 1: the steel. Different types of steel used different materials mixed
Speaker 1: in with the iron, and it gives it various properties.
Speaker 1: People have been making steel in small amounts for centuries.
Speaker 1: It's not like it was brand new in the Industrial Revolution,
Speaker 1: but it was a laborious process and it was easy
Speaker 1: to mess up. You can make errors that would produce
Speaker 1: iron rather than steel. For a long time, people weren't
Speaker 1: entirely uh certain of the what was causing the output
Speaker 1: 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 material else
Speaker 1: they were, the fuel they were using, the materials they
Speaker 1: were mixing with it, we're actually making a huge difference.
Speaker 1: It took a long time of experimentation to figure out
Speaker 1: the right approach. One man who improved steel making techniques
Speaker 1: was Benjamin Huntsman, who opened a steel plant in Sheffield, England,
Speaker 1: in seventeen forty. His steel was kind of controversial actually
Speaker 1: at the time. His fellow countrymen considered the steel to
Speaker 1: be too hard to be useful. These were people called cutlers,
Speaker 1: who would take the steel produced by someone like Huntsman
Speaker 1: and then try and shape it into useful tools, often
Speaker 1: cutting tools. That was the main use of steel for
Speaker 1: a really long time. But the cutlers said, no, the
Speaker 1: steel is too hard, it's not any good. However, Huntsman
Speaker 1: began to form relationships with cutlers who were in Europe,
Speaker 1: not in England, so in in mainland Europe, and they
Speaker 1: began to rely heavily on his steel and he started
Speaker 1: to do a lot of business. Well. England at the
Speaker 1: time was incredibly protective of its various industries. They wanted
Speaker 1: to preserve their dominance in as many areas as possible,
Speaker 1: including textiles and iron and uh and later on steam power.
Speaker 1: So because of that, the cutlers in England began to
Speaker 1: reconsider their feelings about the difficulty of working with Huntsman Steele,
Speaker 1: so they began to use it as well. Now, Huntsman
Speaker 1: tried to keep his methods a secret. He was one
Speaker 1: of those people who decided never to patent his processes
Speaker 1: because he wanted to try and maintain full control over them. However,
Speaker 1: one of his competitors named Samuel Walker found out how
Speaker 1: Huntsman was making his steel and began to copy him.
Speaker 1: According to reports, Walker's work was never quite as good
Speaker 1: as Huntsman's, but his steel was also sought after, and
Speaker 1: so soon this technique of making steel began to spread
Speaker 1: outward and more iron workers began to experiment making steel,
Speaker 1: but at this stage they were still making it in
Speaker 1: fairly small amounts. By the seventeen seventies, the iron industry
Speaker 1: in Britain was booming. Coke was the fuel of choice
Speaker 1: by this point, so this was decades after Darby had
Speaker 1: first started using coke as fuel, and by the seventeen
Speaker 1: seventies now everybody was really onto this and many iron
Speaker 1: works were in production at the time. In Plymouth, a
Speaker 1: man named Henry Court bought a small iron works just
Speaker 1: outside the city and began to experiment with new methods
Speaker 1: of producing wrought iron, and his experiments led to what
Speaker 1: was called the puddling process. Now, this approach is a
Speaker 1: little tricky to explain, particularly without the use of visual aids.
Speaker 1: It involved heating refined iron in a furnace. So you
Speaker 1: would first have to take iron ore and smelt it
Speaker 1: through one of the processes that talked about earlier, and
Speaker 1: then the refined iron you would get from that process
Speaker 1: would be used as the main ingredient for this new process.
Speaker 1: So you would take this refined iron uh and put
Speaker 1: it in a furnace and mix it with some iron
Speaker 1: oxides on purpose and stir the molten material using these
Speaker 1: very long rods. And the rods had hooks on the end.
Speaker 1: And we're called either puddling bars or rabble rebbels. So
Speaker 1: I guess like the hamburglar. He says, rabble rabble right. Well, anyway,
Speaker 1: they were called rabbels. You would have a worker hold
Speaker 1: one of these long bars. Uh. They would sometimes be
Speaker 1: called rabblers. This is not a joke, they really were, uh.
Speaker 1: And of course you couldn't put them inside the furnace
Speaker 1: they would burn up and die. So what they would
Speaker 1: do is they use these working doors that were built
Speaker 1: into the sides of the furnace that would allow you
Speaker 1: to pass a rod through the door into the furnace
Speaker 1: itself so that you could stir the molten material from
Speaker 1: a safe distance UH and the rattlers would stir this
Speaker 1: mixture 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 compared to solid iron,
Speaker 1: but it's no longer in lick would form and it's
Speaker 1: at that point that the rabblers would have to hook
Speaker 1: the masks using the rabbles or the puddling bars, and
Speaker 1: once hooked, they then have to pull out these masses,
Speaker 1: these these puddles or puddle balls rather of iron, which
Speaker 1: were incredibly heavy. We're talking like eighty pounds or more.
Speaker 1: And they would grab this stuff with the bar, pull
Speaker 1: it out of the furnace and then take the puddle balls.
Speaker 1: They're still incredibly hot to some massive hammers. Now, originally
Speaker 1: those hammers were manually wielded by people who were known
Speaker 1: as shinglers um, but eventually they would be used with
Speaker 1: the water and steam powered hammers instead of manual labor,
Speaker 1: which was good because being a shingler was it was
Speaker 1: it was a specialized skill. But it also usually meant
Speaker 1: you didn't live very long. You had a very strenuous,
Speaker 1: difficult job with high degree of danger to it. So
Speaker 1: the process of hammering the puddle balls would put them
Speaker 1: into a shape that resembled roof shingles, which is where
Speaker 1: the process kind of got its name is shingling. And
Speaker 1: you would do shingling not just to get the iron
Speaker 1: into a new shape. It was actually meant to hammer
Speaker 1: out slag and other impurities, and also to hammer out
Speaker 1: cracks that were inside the mass. So slamming a hammer
Speaker 1: against this puddle ball would create uh, you know, smushed
Speaker 1: the iron together so that that cracks would be would
Speaker 1: be completely sealed and once heated, or once shingled rather,
Speaker 1: you would then heat the iron again until it was
Speaker 1: malleable and then roll it out into bars of wrought
Speaker 1: iron or sometimes in the poles of iron. Uh. Quartz
Speaker 1: process sped up the production of of making wrought iron considerably,
Speaker 1: and he patented the approach in the seventeen eight ease.
Speaker 1: So by Courts time, iron was beginning to become the
Speaker 1: material of choice. For tools and for industrial machines, largely
Speaker 1: replacing wood which had previously been the material of choice.
Speaker 1: So if you look at machines previous before, before like
Speaker 1: seventeen seventeen, you know, really seeing a lot of wood
Speaker 1: uh components. You know, even gears and things often would
Speaker 1: be made of wood rather than iron. Some cast iron
Speaker 1: was being used in gears and some other uh parts
Speaker 1: of machinery, but wood was largely the main material, with
Speaker 1: stone being used for foundations and things like that, for
Speaker 1: things like mills and that sort of stuff. But now
Speaker 1: by courts time, iron has become the really important material
Speaker 1: for tools, industrial machines. It's uh, it's really taking off.
Speaker 1: And looking at the amount of iron produced in England
Speaker 1: during these decades of the Industrial Revolution, you can see
Speaker 1: how these improvements and technology really made a huge impact.
Speaker 1: So here's an example. Just before the era of the
Speaker 1: Industrial Revolution, in seventeen forty, Britain was producing about seventeen
Speaker 1: thousand tons of pig iron per year. By seventy eight
Speaker 1: that Amountain had increased to nearly seventy thousand tons, so
Speaker 1: seventeen thousand to seventy thousand, and by seventeen ninety six
Speaker 1: you know, it's not even a full decade later it
Speaker 1: was producing more than a hundred twenty five thousand tons
Speaker 1: of pig iron and that number would just continue to
Speaker 1: grow over the next century. So by the mid nineteenth
Speaker 1: century you're talking an enormous amount of iron being produced
Speaker 1: out of out of Britain and it was being used
Speaker 1: in construction to make bridges and tunnels and iron rails.
Speaker 1: So the rails actually predated locomotives and trains. The rail
Speaker 1: system was meant to allow carts to pass easily over land.
Speaker 1: Uh special cards would be pulled by horses or other animals,
Speaker 1: and it would be a while before the first steam
Speaker 1: powered train would pull cards along rails, but the rail
Speaker 1: system in general made it much easier to transport goods
Speaker 1: over land. Meanwhile, there was also a lot of work
Speaker 1: in creating transportation lanes over water. As I mentioned in
Speaker 1: the last episode, Britain was really well positioned for the
Speaker 1: Industrial Revolution for a lot of reasons, and one of
Speaker 1: them is that it has a lot of port cities.
Speaker 1: So shipping was a big part of British industry. But
Speaker 1: within the countries of Britain, within England and Wales and Scotland,
Speaker 1: in particular, it was really important to try and ship
Speaker 1: various materials between cities, and that meant creating special waterways,
Speaker 1: including canals, to connect rivers together that otherwise wouldn't easily meet.
Speaker 1: So there were a lot of canals, but one really
Speaker 1: impress of iron structure was the Potka Sulta Aqueduct, also
Speaker 1: known as the Stream in the Sky. Now that name
Speaker 1: is Welsh, if you could not guess before, and that
Speaker 1: means I've probably butchered the pronunciation, as the Welsh believe
Speaker 1: language is something no one should ever be able to
Speaker 1: actually speak. But this aqueduct was a raised waterway that
Speaker 1: allowed this canal to cross over a valley. Now, the
Speaker 1: goal here was to have a canal connecting two different
Speaker 1: rivers together, but there was a valley in the way,
Speaker 1: and how would you get the water to cross over
Speaker 1: the valley. You could build a series of locks which
Speaker 1: would allow you to very slowly lower or raise a
Speaker 1: barge in a series of stepped approaches, but that takes
Speaker 1: a lot of time. It's not terribly efficient if you
Speaker 1: want to get a lot done so and dead. There
Speaker 1: was a guy named Thomas Telford who proposed this raised
Speaker 1: aqueduct that would bypass the valley entirely by going over it.
Speaker 1: So essentially you're looking at a big iron trough and
Speaker 1: that holds all the water. Use arch stone pillars to
Speaker 1: support the trough, and you can see pictures of this
Speaker 1: or video even of this particular aqueduct, and it is
Speaker 1: pretty amazing to look at. So a barge could float
Speaker 1: down the canal and over the aqueduct without having to
Speaker 1: descend 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 was 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. Now,
Speaker 1: it wasn't until eighteen fifty six that the steel industry
Speaker 1: really took off. That's when a man named Henry Bessemer
Speaker 1: came up with a method to produce steel in large amounts.
Speaker 1: So before the most reliable processes would only produce small
Speaker 1: amounts of steel over time, which made steel difficult to
Speaker 1: produce in quantities large enough for it to meet demand,
Speaker 1: and it also meant that the price was really high.
Speaker 1: But Bessemer came up with a lot of improvements. So
Speaker 1: Bessemer's father was an engineer, and Bessemer himself took after
Speaker 1: his dad. He was largely self educated and learned about
Speaker 1: engineering by observing his father's work and doing his own experiments.
Speaker 1: He generated an enormous fortune before ever getting into the
Speaker 1: steel business by producing a type of powder that was
Speaker 1: used in gold paints, and at the time, gold paints
Speaker 1: were in really high demand in Britain and in Europe.
Speaker 1: So he made a fortune off that and then used
Speaker 1: that to fund his other experiments. He also created a
Speaker 1: machine designed to crush sugarcane, but it was in the
Speaker 1: steel industry that he became a legend. So Bessemer was
Speaker 1: trying to create a harder type of iron, and it
Speaker 1: was 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 melted iron, as well as silicon, and
Speaker 1: this made the resulting molten material easy to pour, and
Speaker 1: the process became known as the Bessemer process. The result
Speaker 1: was that you would get these slag free ingots of metal.
Speaker 1: Combining this approach with a discovery from another engineer named
Speaker 1: Robert Forrester R. Mushnitt. Bessemer could use an iron manganese
Speaker 1: alloy to remove extra oxygen from the decarburized iron, and
Speaker 1: this is what allowed him to create steel. Now, Bessemer
Speaker 1: hit a snag when he discovered his process really only
Speaker 1: worked if he used phosphorus free iron ore. So if
Speaker 1: you remember I mentioned materials like phosphorus and sulfur turn
Speaker 1: 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 phosphorus. Bessemer found the source
Speaker 1: of iron ore in northwestern England that was free of phosphorus,
Speaker 1: but that solution wasn't ideal because it meant that you
Speaker 1: had to get all your iron ore from one place. Now,
Speaker 1: another improvement in eighteen seventy seven made Bessemer's approach more useful.
Speaker 1: Uh there was a another person named Sydney Gilchrist Thomas
Speaker 1: who created a furnace lining that removed phosphorus from the
Speaker 1: iron ore as it was heating up, which meant that
Speaker 1: iron workers didn't have to rely exclusively on that phosphorus
Speaker 1: free iron ore from Northwest England. The end product of
Speaker 1: this process was called mild steel. Now. It's called mild
Speaker 1: steel because it was different from the steel produced by
Speaker 1: the earlier methods, the kind that that court was known for,
Speaker 1: because it didn't it wasn't it wasn't as hard, it
Speaker 1: wasn't only useful for cutting tools, which is pretty much
Speaker 1: what all the hard steel was used for in earlier versions.
Speaker 1: It was easier to work and became the material of
Speaker 1: choice for applications like girders, rods, wires, rivets, and other uses.
Speaker 1: So while iron had replaced wood earlier, now steel was
Speaker 1: beginning to replace iron. In the late eighteen sixties, there
Speaker 1: was a new process US called the open hearth process
Speaker 1: that rivaled the Bessemer approach. Now. This technique was created
Speaker 1: by a German engineer living in England and his name
Speaker 1: was William Siemens. Siemens found a way to use the
Speaker 1: waist heat generated by a furnace to feed back into
Speaker 1: the furnace itself to increase the temperature inside the furnace.
Speaker 1: So what you would do is that you would have
Speaker 1: this hot air being given off by the furnace and
Speaker 1: he would pump that air back into the furnace using
Speaker 1: that same pathway, which meant that the air being blasted
Speaker 1: into the furnace was already preheated, so it was no
Speaker 1: longer the cold air blast. This is a hot air
Speaker 1: blast that in turn made the flame temperature hotter and
Speaker 1: using a combination of pig iron and scrap wrought iron,
Speaker 1: iron workers could use this technique to produce steel quickly.
Speaker 1: William Siemens would go on to invent the electric furnace
Speaker 1: in E nine, which provided another enormous boost to the
Speaker 1: steel industry in England. He also worked in electric telegraphy
Speaker 1: and in lighting, so this is also the era where
Speaker 1: people are experimenting with those technologies. Uh. William Siemens and
Speaker 1: Henry Bessemer both were knighted for their contributions to Britain.
Speaker 1: So that was very interesting because William Siemens, obviously he
Speaker 1: was German born, but became an English citizen and became
Speaker 1: a knight and Bessemer was a self taught man who
Speaker 1: became a knight. So very interesting that both of them
Speaker 1: were able to create such important contributions to the entire nation. Now,
Speaker 1: both the Bessemer process and the open Hearth process significantly
Speaker 1: reduced the amount of time it took to convert iron
Speaker 1: 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: text 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 the 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 wanted to do useful work, you have to
Speaker 1: put it under pressure, and that means you have to
Speaker 1: have material strong enough to deal with that pressure to
Speaker 1: contain the steam without fay link, 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 a guy named Thomas Savory patented a
Speaker 1: device meant to draw water from mines using steam, and
Speaker 1: it would allow mining operations to continue. It worked on
Speaker 1: the principle of vacuum power, so the device would fill
Speaker 1: a chamber with steam. You would have a boiler, so
Speaker 1: you've got essentially a pot filled with water, and you
Speaker 1: put heat to the pot. The water begins to boil
Speaker 1: and gives off steam. Uh, there's a pipe leading from
Speaker 1: the pot to a chamber, so the chamber fills up
Speaker 1: with steam until you've got a nice amount of steam
Speaker 1: built up inside that chamber. You would then cut off
Speaker 1: the pathway between the chamber and the boiler. There would
Speaker 1: be another line leading from the chamber down into a mine,
Speaker 1: and the end of the line would be under the
Speaker 1: water level. As the steam cools, it condenses, and when
Speaker 1: it condenses, it's taking up less space, which is creating
Speaker 1: a vacuum that's negative pressure. So this vacuum would start
Speaker 1: to pull the water from the pipe. You know, the
Speaker 1: water that's in the mine that there's an end of
Speaker 1: a pipe that's underneath that water level, would pull water
Speaker 1: 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 feet or so comparatively speaking
Speaker 1: to other types of pumps. Then alone came a guy
Speaker 1: named Thomas Newcomen who would come up with a significant
Speaker 1: improvement over savories approach, and he used a steam powered
Speaker 1: water pump. Now, the best way to imagine this is
Speaker 1: imagine a giant seesaw. Alright, one end of the seesaw
Speaker 1: is weighted down, so it's naturally in the down position
Speaker 1: at any given time. That's the pump end. That's the
Speaker 1: end that is attached by a chain to a pump
Speaker 1: that is designed to pull water up from underground. The
Speaker 1: other end of the pump, which is up in the air,
Speaker 1: is attached by a chain to a steam piston inside
Speaker 1: a cylinder. So you've got a cylinder and a piston.
Speaker 1: The piston is in the up position. It's dangling from
Speaker 1: the chain that's on the upper part of the seesaw.
Speaker 1: Now new Cooman's invention would fill the cylinder with steam. Again,
Speaker 1: you would have a boiler that would boil water, generate steam.
Speaker 1: Steam would fill this cylinder up, and then you would
Speaker 1: cool the cylinder cylinder down, which would cause the steam
Speaker 1: to condense, creating a vacuum, and that vacuum would pull
Speaker 1: on the piston, so you have a pulling force that
Speaker 1: would pull on the upper end of the seesaw, pulling
Speaker 1: it down, making the lower end of the seesaw go
Speaker 1: up and pump water out of the mine. So again
Speaker 1: it's using steam as a vacuum source, not as a
Speaker 1: pushing source. It was never used to push in those
Speaker 1: early steam engines, only to pull, and that was largely
Speaker 1: because the materials being used to create the cylinders and
Speaker 1: boilers weren't strong enough to hold steam under greater pressures.
Speaker 1: So it was just too dangerous to create a steam
Speaker 1: engine that you steam as a pushing power. At that time,
Speaker 1: it made way more sense to create the pulling power
Speaker 1: because it was much less dangerous. Now Newcoming's invention worked,
Speaker 1: but it was inefficient, and that's largely because it required
Speaker 1: you 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 week 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 most 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 seesawing back and forth. And that
Speaker 1: meant that you could actually use the piston to push
Speaker 1: 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've
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: are 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 a necessity for
Speaker 1: the war efforts to create iron and steel products more
Speaker 1: efficiently 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, and we'll also explore the development of the
Speaker 1: working class, the condition ends that workers experienced and how
Speaker 1: that pushed us into the modern era largely because of
Speaker 1: what technology was allowing us to do. And it wasn't
Speaker 1: all good. It was. Some of it was pretty grim.
Speaker 1: We're gonna get into some some rough stuff in the
Speaker 1: next episode. But if you guys have suggestions for future
Speaker 1: episodes of Tech Stuff, you should let me know, and
Speaker 1: it could be about the technology or a process or
Speaker 1: a company or personality in tech. And also if you
Speaker 1: have suggestions for any interview subjects you would like me
Speaker 1: to talk to or people you would like to have
Speaker 1: on the show as a guest host dropped me a line.
Speaker 1: My email address is text Stuff at how Stuff Works
Speaker 1: dot com, or you can contact me on Facebook for Twitter,
Speaker 1: I've gotten to handle text stuff. HSW, and I'll talk
Speaker 1: to you again really soon for more on this and
Speaker 1: bathans of other topics because it has to. What's that coming, really, really,