Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I 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 I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: and how the tech are you? It is time for
Speaker 1: a tech Stuff classic episode. This week we are wrapping
Speaker 1: up a three part series. So the first two parts
Speaker 1: published on the previous two fridays. If you have not
Speaker 1: listened to them, I recommend you check those out first.
Speaker 1: This is How the Industrial Revolution Worked, Part three It
Speaker 1: originally published on December two, two thousand fifteen. In this episode,
Speaker 1: we'll cover everything from transportation to what it was like
Speaker 1: to be a member of the working class at that time,
Speaker 1: and how we started to see some new lines dividing
Speaker 1: different classes. It used to be that it was the
Speaker 1: nobles versus the peasants, with clergy in the middle, really
Speaker 1: clergy off to the side on their own kind of ladder.
Speaker 1: But things changed in the Industrial Revolution. So during this
Speaker 1: period in Britain's history, which as you may remember, is
Speaker 1: in the mid eighteenth to mid nineteenth century, so the
Speaker 1: seven the mid seventeen hundreds to the mid eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: transportation was getting a major overhaul. Roads had been in
Speaker 1: really poor shape ever since the Romans had left Britain
Speaker 1: and they were in need of repair and redesign. Shipping
Speaker 1: by boat was really popular, and many of Britain's rivers
Speaker 1: became important conduits for trade goods. Engineers would actually start
Speaker 1: to begin to design canals to connect various rivers together
Speaker 1: in order to speed up transportation. And then there were
Speaker 1: the rail systems. So railroads pre date trains and locomotives
Speaker 1: by a lot, because people figured out fairly early on
Speaker 1: that it's a lot easier to push or pull a
Speaker 1: heavy cart that's along a set of hard rail than
Speaker 1: it is to move that same cart against the ground,
Speaker 1: that it will roll more smoothly and you have to
Speaker 1: use less effort to get it from point A to
Speaker 1: point B. So at first wooden rails were used and
Speaker 1: carts would have flanged wheels to allow them to stay
Speaker 1: on the rails securely. Not all carts were like this,
Speaker 1: not all rail systems were like this, but it was
Speaker 1: generally one of the accepted standards across the world by
Speaker 1: this point, where people knew if you built the wheels
Speaker 1: in this way so that they essentially kind of hug
Speaker 1: the rails, it's not likely to tip over, and you
Speaker 1: can move at a good clip. By a good clip,
Speaker 1: we're talking a couple of miles per hour, usually because
Speaker 1: you're carrying so much stuff. Now, typically you'd use horses
Speaker 1: to pull the carts along the rails. People did experiment
Speaker 1: with other things, uh, But one of the pioneers in
Speaker 1: railroads in England was Richard Reynolds. Now, Reynolds was an
Speaker 1: iron master who worked at Brookdale, and that's the iron
Speaker 1: works that was founded by Abraham Darby. You can listen
Speaker 1: to the previous episodes on this series and you'll hear
Speaker 1: me talk about the Darby family. Well, Reynolds became friends
Speaker 1: with Abraham Darby, the second, so the son of Abraham Darby.
Speaker 1: And in seventeen sixty Reynolds came up with the idea
Speaker 1: of replacing wooden rails with cast iron rails. He thought
Speaker 1: that this would be a much better use of cast iron.
Speaker 1: It would be better than the wooden ones because the
Speaker 1: wooden rails would break down over time. They could also
Speaker 1: just collapse depending upon how heavy the load was, and
Speaker 1: cast iron would last longer and be able to withstand
Speaker 1: greater weights. Now, there's no historical record of anyone doing
Speaker 1: this before Reynolds, so he might have actually been the
Speaker 1: person to invent this, but it's not safe to just
Speaker 1: declare it, so it's possible someone else did. We just
Speaker 1: don't have a record of it, so I guess for
Speaker 1: practical purposes, we can say he invented this idea before
Speaker 1: long tramways all across Britain were following his his lead,
Speaker 1: and so he was using rails in order to move
Speaker 1: giant carts of coal or iron back and forth between locations.
Speaker 1: But soon these were being used all over the place
Speaker 1: for various reasons, and so they started convert wooden railways
Speaker 1: into iron railways. This is fifty years before the invention
Speaker 1: of the locomotive, which turned railways into a major means
Speaker 1: of transport, not only in Britain but all across the world.
Speaker 1: And we'll get to the locomotive a bit later, but
Speaker 1: just imagine for fifty years, this was a way of
Speaker 1: getting heavy loads of cargo to load from location to location,
Speaker 1: but there were no trains, it was just horse drawn carts.
Speaker 1: In the last episode, I also talked about the punt
Speaker 1: custalta aqueduct, punt consulta child mangle. Every single time I
Speaker 1: try and say it's okay. The Welsh have trouble with
Speaker 1: this one too. That's just one example of the innovations
Speaker 1: and transportation that were introduced in the Industrial Revolution. Uh.
Speaker 1: It was during this time that nations like the United
Speaker 1: Kingdom and the United States really began to build extensive canals,
Speaker 1: roads and railways to speed up that travel. And I
Speaker 1: mentioned Thomas Telford as the architect who designed and built
Speaker 1: the pot Consulta aqueduct. That was the one that was
Speaker 1: a raised aqueduct made out of an iron trough that
Speaker 1: connected two rivers together, and it spanned a valley so
Speaker 1: that the waterway actually passed above the valley. It didn't
Speaker 1: have to descend into the valley and then go back up,
Speaker 1: it went straight across. He made several important contributions to
Speaker 1: England's transportation systems, not just this aqueduct, and his designs
Speaker 1: were adopted by engineers and other countries like the United States.
Speaker 1: So it might be worth looking into who Telford was like.
Speaker 1: Who was Thomas Telford. He was born in August of
Speaker 1: seventeen fifty seven on the border between England and Scotland.
Speaker 1: He's generally considered a Scottish architect. His father died when
Speaker 1: he was just a baby, and his mother relied on
Speaker 1: her relatives to help raise the child. Essentially, Telford was
Speaker 1: raised by his his relatives, not by his mother, and
Speaker 1: at age fourteen he became apprenticed to a stonemason. He
Speaker 1: was really keen to learn everything there was to learn
Speaker 1: about construction, and so he would actually study at night
Speaker 1: after working a full day shift with the stonemason. After
Speaker 1: learning his trade with the stonemason, and by the time
Speaker 1: he was twenty five, he had worked on several important
Speaker 1: construction projects and including some in Edinburgh, Scotland, and he
Speaker 1: ended up picking up stakes to move to London. That's
Speaker 1: where Telford met Sir William Chambers, who was a prominent
Speaker 1: Scottish architect, and Chambers had begun work on Somerset House
Speaker 1: or Somerset House if you prefer if you're being more
Speaker 1: British with it, and Telford ended up joining the crew. Now,
Speaker 1: if you're not familiar with London, Somerset House may sound
Speaker 1: like it's a quaint cottage. It's not. House is a
Speaker 1: not an accurate word to describe this massive building. It's
Speaker 1: an enormous neo classical structure, and it was big enough
Speaker 1: so that it could house the Royal Academy of Arts,
Speaker 1: the Royal Society, the Society of Antiquaries, and the quarters
Speaker 1: for the Navy Board and offices for the King's Barge Master.
Speaker 1: This is a big, big building, massive in fact, and
Speaker 1: it had a whole bunch of challenges that were associated
Speaker 1: with it, not just because it was huge, but because
Speaker 1: it was going to be the quarters for the King's
Speaker 1: barge Master as well as for the Navy Board. It
Speaker 1: had to be built up against the River Thames. There
Speaker 1: had to be direct access to the Thames River, so
Speaker 1: that was a big challenge. And if you're not if
Speaker 1: you've never seen it, you should look at the pictures
Speaker 1: of the Somerset House. The middle section of the structure
Speaker 1: is what Telford specifically worked on. If you're looking at
Speaker 1: a modern picture, you're going to see this really big
Speaker 1: building that has wings on either side, but those east
Speaker 1: and west wings were actually built later in the Victorian era.
Speaker 1: It's that central structure that is what Telford worked on
Speaker 1: as part of Chambers's crew. So Telford would go on
Speaker 1: to work for a man named Sir William Pulteney who
Speaker 1: was the richest man in Britain at that time, or
Speaker 1: at least one of them. Telford became the Surveyor of
Speaker 1: public Works in Shropshire, which was a position that was
Speaker 1: created just for him. There had not been a surveyor
Speaker 1: of public works before Telford. He would become a pioneer
Speaker 1: in a new field that would eventually become known as
Speaker 1: civil engineering. In two he designed and built the Montford
Speaker 1: Stone Bridge across the River Severn, and that was the
Speaker 1: one that was so important in the textile industry. If
Speaker 1: you listen to the first episode in this series, I
Speaker 1: talked about how important seven was and uh in its
Speaker 1: association with Lancashire and the iron working and coal industries.
Speaker 1: Telford also began to build suspension bridges, which was a
Speaker 1: new idea at the time, and folklore has it that
Speaker 1: when Telford built his first suspension bridge he had to
Speaker 1: study his nerves with a prayer before allowing the cables
Speaker 1: to take on the weight of the structure, because even
Speaker 1: though he had worked out the math, he still could
Speaker 1: not be absolutely certain that this was going to work.
Speaker 1: And suspension bridges are actually a really cool technology. It actually,
Speaker 1: I guess will benefit us to describe how those work.
Speaker 1: With a suspension bridge, typically, what you have are a
Speaker 1: pair of very tall towers and uh these towers are
Speaker 1: attached to the bridge via cables. You know, the typical
Speaker 1: bridge has columns or pylons or piers underneath it that
Speaker 1: holded up, but a suspension bridge doesn't. It has these
Speaker 1: towers that have cables attached from the tower first to
Speaker 1: each other, and also there's vertical cables that attached the
Speaker 1: main cables between the two towers and the bridge. The
Speaker 1: towers actually support most of the weight. Specifically, they support
Speaker 1: the force of compression. See compression pushes down on the
Speaker 1: surface of the bridge. That compression is transferred to the
Speaker 1: cables or chains that are attached the edges of the
Speaker 1: bridge the frame of the bridge, and that gets transferred
Speaker 1: to the towers. Then you have supporting cables that connect
Speaker 1: the towers to anchorage points on either side of whatever
Speaker 1: you're building the bridge across, like a river, and these
Speaker 1: cables support the tension forces created by the bridge. So
Speaker 1: suspension bridges don't need any columns or pylons under them.
Speaker 1: That frees up a lot of the space beneath the bridge.
Speaker 1: But engineers like Telford who were aware of how the
Speaker 1: bridges should work. We're a little antsy about how things
Speaker 1: actually would work once everything was ready to go, And
Speaker 1: luckily for us, physics tends to obey the law. So
Speaker 1: the designs worked out in everyone's favor, but no one
Speaker 1: was entirely sure at the time. Now, Telford's next project
Speaker 1: was the Aqueduct, which must not be named because I'm
Speaker 1: tired of trying to pronounce Welsh words, which was a
Speaker 1: phenomenal success and that came as a great surprise to
Speaker 1: numerous critics who were absolutely convinced it would fall apart
Speaker 1: as soon as water was flowing, and it didn't, stayed
Speaker 1: together and ended up increasing the speed of transportation in
Speaker 1: that part of England. After the aqueduct, or well Wales,
Speaker 1: I should say England and Wales because it was connecting
Speaker 1: the two. But after that Aqueduct, Telford became the head
Speaker 1: engineer of the Caledonian Canal in Scotland. That's a really
Speaker 1: big canal. It's sixty miles long and the construction was
Speaker 1: a huge boon for Scotland at the time because many
Speaker 1: people in Scotland had become homeless, and the reason they
Speaker 1: became homeless is pretty dastardly. It was in the wake
Speaker 1: of what has become known as the Highland Clearances, which
Speaker 1: is a very polite way of describing what actually happened.
Speaker 1: So this was a period when aristocratic people, so clan leaders, nobles,
Speaker 1: decided they would make a great deal of sense to
Speaker 1: evict Scottish families from their ancestral homes in order to
Speaker 1: convert that land into sheep grazing territory, so converting it
Speaker 1: from farms into gray's land. And Highlanders were forced to
Speaker 1: leave their homes, and some of them had been in
Speaker 1: those homes for centuries. Are the families had, I mean
Speaker 1: only a few Highlanders are immortal. As the documentary series
Speaker 1: Highlander teaches us, it's a really dark time in Scottish
Speaker 1: history and it really dealt severe damage to Gaelic culture
Speaker 1: as a result. What what seems to have happened the
Speaker 1: way it tends to be described, is that a lot
Speaker 1: of clan leaders, for various reasons political reasons that were
Speaker 1: handed down from the crown from royals, had decided that
Speaker 1: rather than be considered a clan leader, which came with
Speaker 1: a bunch of responsibilities, including if someone in your clan
Speaker 1: acted up you were held responsible as leader. They started
Speaker 1: to call themselves landlords instead, and that was a slippery
Speaker 1: slope that led to these evictions. So Telford's canal took
Speaker 1: three decades to construct, and it meant that he had
Speaker 1: to rely heavily on a lot of labor from this
Speaker 1: part of Scotland, so it gave a lot of people
Speaker 1: work when they went home to harvest crops. He ended
Speaker 1: up hiring Irish workers, which caused some real problems in
Speaker 1: the area. People locals were upset at that, but Telford
Speaker 1: was already running over budget and behind time, and unfortunately
Speaker 1: for everybody, by the time the canal was finished, it
Speaker 1: was actually not terribly useful, and that's because it just
Speaker 1: took too long to make and technology had changed while
Speaker 1: the canal was being built. It was built well, and
Speaker 1: it's considered to be a marvel of engineering, but ship
Speaker 1: building had changed so dramatically by the time the canal
Speaker 1: was finished. Steamships had become the new standard, and steamships
Speaker 1: needed more space than what the canal could provide. The
Speaker 1: canal was actually too small to accommodate steamships, and so
Speaker 1: it wasn't as used used as heavily as it had
Speaker 1: been planned. Now Telford would go on to create super waterways.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like super highways. There were these interconnections
Speaker 1: that uh that put various canals finally in contact with
Speaker 1: each other, so that made shipping much more efficient. And
Speaker 1: in eighteen twenty he became the very first president of
Speaker 1: the Institution of Civil Engineers in Britain, so essentially kind
Speaker 1: of invented the discipline of civil engineering, or at least
Speaker 1: was instrumental in the mention of that discipline. Telford made
Speaker 1: another major contribution to England's transportation system as well. One
Speaker 1: of his most important improvements involved raising the foundation of
Speaker 1: a road in the center of the road to aid
Speaker 1: in draining water. So he was very good at building roads.
Speaker 1: He used these large flat stones as the foundation, and
Speaker 1: by raising that center, water would drain off it much
Speaker 1: more effectively. It wouldn't pool and destroy the road over time,
Speaker 1: and his work was so successful that it became the
Speaker 1: standard road design in England and beyond. One of Telford's
Speaker 1: contemporaries and rivals was a guy named Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
Speaker 1: And if that name sounds at all familiar, what you
Speaker 1: might remember him when we did our episode on subways.
Speaker 1: He was very important in that episode. He was the
Speaker 1: son of a French engineer. The French engineer had actually
Speaker 1: fled to England during the French Revolution, so Brunell grew
Speaker 1: up in England, although he also studied in France post revolution.
Speaker 1: Brunell worked on many important projects throughout his career, but
Speaker 1: he's probably best remembered for his tunnels and his underground systems.
Speaker 1: He designed underground passages that even passed beneath bodies of
Speaker 1: water like the River Thames, and he also designed several
Speaker 1: rail railways and steamships in his time. Speaking of steamships,
Speaker 1: the idea had been kicking around since the days of
Speaker 1: Leonardo da Vinci, but until the eighteenth century, no one
Speaker 1: had managed to actually make a practical steamship. People had tried.
Speaker 1: There were several challenges that were facing engineers at the time.
Speaker 1: A big one was to create a mechanism that would
Speaker 1: translate the reciprocal motion of a piston into a rotary
Speaker 1: motion that could turn a wheel. So pistons move up
Speaker 1: and down or left and right in a cylinder, whereas
Speaker 1: wheels turn in a circle. So you have to figure
Speaker 1: out a way to translate one style of motion into another.
Speaker 1: And it took a while before that happened. In other words,
Speaker 1: how do you get that simple update own or left
Speaker 1: right motion to become a circle? Well, Thomas Newcomin came
Speaker 1: up with that. That was the invention that he said
Speaker 1: he was most proud of, even beyond his improvements to
Speaker 1: the basic steam engine. Uh. It was essentially kind of
Speaker 1: a ratchet that allowed for this translation of motion. It
Speaker 1: was the first big step to solving that particular problem.
Speaker 1: Will be back to talk more about the Industrial Revolution
Speaker 1: in just a second, but first let's take this quick break. Now,
Speaker 1: the other big challenge was to create a steam engine
Speaker 1: capable of providing enough power to actually move a boat
Speaker 1: through the water. Now, as I mentioned in the last episode,
Speaker 1: early steam engines relied on using condensation to create a
Speaker 1: vacuum and pull a piston downward. They did not use
Speaker 1: steam to create pressure and push the piston upward because
Speaker 1: the materials they were using couldn't withstand that intense pressure
Speaker 1: that steam would create, and they were concer they're too dangerous.
Speaker 1: It was just a recipe for disaster. You would have
Speaker 1: a boiler explode and that could be deadly. Now, pattents
Speaker 1: for steamboats date all the way back to six eighteen,
Speaker 1: when David Ramsey was awarded a patent for his design. Now,
Speaker 1: there's no evidence that Ramsey ever managed to actually build
Speaker 1: anything approaching a steam powered boat, and other inventors followed suit.
Speaker 1: There was one named John Allen who patented a steamboat
Speaker 1: design in seventeen nine, and another one was proposed by
Speaker 1: Englishman Jonathan Holes in seventeen thirty six. Holes approach was
Speaker 1: to use a Newcoming engine, although again he never built
Speaker 1: such a boat as far as we can tell. For
Speaker 1: an actual working boat, you have to actually look fifty
Speaker 1: years later, so three that's when Cloude Francois Dorote Joefrey Dabam,
Speaker 1: who as you can imagine from that name, was a
Speaker 1: French nobleman, built a boat powered by a new Coming
Speaker 1: two cylinder engine, and he demonstrated on a river in
Speaker 1: France and showed that such a boat could actually sail
Speaker 1: against the river's current under its own power. It didn't
Speaker 1: require manpower or animal power to turn some sort of
Speaker 1: device in order to go against the current. It's really
Speaker 1: kind of challenging to explain how monumental this was in
Speaker 1: the transportation industry at the time, but people realize the
Speaker 1: promise of steam power would be to make everything easier,
Speaker 1: including the shipment of cargo and people. So Joe Frey's
Speaker 1: invention actually broke apart in the river. It was not
Speaker 1: it was not designed to last very long. It shook
Speaker 1: itself apart. Essentially, the boat began to split, the engine
Speaker 1: began to fall apart. He was able to pilot the
Speaker 1: boat back to the river bank before it completely disintegrated
Speaker 1: on him and got to shore safely. He would just
Speaker 1: a few years later flee France himself because that was
Speaker 1: just as the French Revolution was getting into the swing
Speaker 1: of things. Now, James Watt, who we talked about in
Speaker 1: the last episode, invented the condenser, which made it much
Speaker 1: more efficient. It being steam engines made steam engines much
Speaker 1: more efficient. You no longer had to heat up and
Speaker 1: cool down the cylinder that had the piston in it.
Speaker 1: You could keep it the same temperature, and you allowed
Speaker 1: the condenser to pull steam in and condense into water.
Speaker 1: And water started getting a trans Atlantic accident on there
Speaker 1: for some reason, turn into water and uh create that
Speaker 1: vacuum pressure that would pull a piston downward. And also
Speaker 1: as around this time when people began to experiment with
Speaker 1: double stroke engines. That's when you use steam to provide
Speaker 1: both the push on the upstroke of a piston and
Speaker 1: the poll on the downstroke of the piston, and makes
Speaker 1: an engine much more efficient because it's doing work in
Speaker 1: both ways rather than just pulling and then allowing gravity
Speaker 1: to reset the piston. Watson's invention and we become the
Speaker 1: foundation for working steamboats in the future. Now, I've talked
Speaker 1: a lot about Britain in these episodes, because Britain is
Speaker 1: the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, there's no question about that. Uh.
Speaker 1: A lot of innovations happened in Britain first and then
Speaker 1: eventually made their way to other parts of the world. However,
Speaker 1: when we start talking about steamboats, we actually have to
Speaker 1: shift our focus over to America. American engineers were facing
Speaker 1: a pretty big challenge that the Brits weren't facing. Specifically,
Speaker 1: they were not allowed to use British technology. Britain had
Speaker 1: passed laws making it illegal to share trade secrets or
Speaker 1: sell certain things like steam engines. So, in other words,
Speaker 1: all that information got caught up and stuck and stayed
Speaker 1: in Britain. Now, the reason for this was that Britain
Speaker 1: was really trying to maintain trade superiority for as long
Speaker 1: as it possibly could, and part of that was just
Speaker 1: keeping all this this information secret so that only Britain
Speaker 1: could take advantage of it. So American engineers were forced
Speaker 1: to design their own steam engines. Now they had a
Speaker 1: general idea of how the British ones were working, so
Speaker 1: it's not like they were going completely from scratch, but
Speaker 1: it still was a big challenge, and one trio that
Speaker 1: gave it a shot consisted of an inventor named John Stevens,
Speaker 1: his wealthy brother in law Robert Livingstone, and a machinist
Speaker 1: named Nicholas J. Roosevelt. Their efforts were somewhat hampered by Livingstone,
Speaker 1: who felt that since he was providing all the cash,
Speaker 1: he should have a major input into how the boat
Speaker 1: was actually constructed, despite the fact that he didn't have
Speaker 1: the expertise of the other two. But the other two
Speaker 1: had very little bargaining power because Livingstone was the guy
Speaker 1: footing the bill, So despite protestations from Roosevelt and from Stevens,
Speaker 1: Livingstone's design was what stuck, and the resulting boat barely
Speaker 1: moved in still water in fact, on the first test
Speaker 1: it didn't go anywhere. The second test it moved very
Speaker 1: slowly in stillwater, something like three miles per hour, so
Speaker 1: it could not really fight against the current, and it
Speaker 1: also shook itself apart after a short while. By the way,
Speaker 1: I don't think that Robert Livingstone was a dummy. He
Speaker 1: was a smart guy. In fact, he was instrumental in
Speaker 1: in American history. He's the guy who essentially brokered the
Speaker 1: Louisiana purchase deal between France and America. So very important historically,
Speaker 1: just not necessarily the guy you want on your team
Speaker 1: when you're designing a steam engine. However, Livingston met another
Speaker 1: man who also shared an interest in steam power, and
Speaker 1: that man was Robert Fulton. He was an American who
Speaker 1: originally wanted to make his living as an artist. He
Speaker 1: painted a portrait of Benjamin Franklin and felt that he
Speaker 1: was on his way to becoming a great artist, but
Speaker 1: his career path was cut short after he had a
Speaker 1: disappointing meeting with another Erican artist who was living in London.
Speaker 1: Fulton actually took his all of his money traveled to London.
Speaker 1: He had a letter of invitation our introduction for this
Speaker 1: American artist met with the American artist who is kind
Speaker 1: but essentially said no, I don't want you as a student.
Speaker 1: You don't have what it takes. But fortunately Fulton met
Speaker 1: Livingstone and they began to talk, and they realized they
Speaker 1: shared a lot of common interests, including engineering and specifically
Speaker 1: in steam engines. Fulton had become really obsessed with ships
Speaker 1: in general and steam engines in particular, and Fulton saw
Speaker 1: in Livingstone a potential source of funding for his work,
Speaker 1: pretty much the same way that Stevens had seen Livingston earlier.
Speaker 1: So Fulton and Livingston entered into a partnership in which
Speaker 1: they would split the profits of their work fifty fifty.
Speaker 1: That was a sore spot for Livingstone, who argued that
Speaker 1: his money was more valuable than Fulton's work. It Fulton
Speaker 1: was able to argue him down to the point where
Speaker 1: they agreed, we're going to take a half share each.
Speaker 1: So Fulton designed a steam powered, flat bottomed paddle boat.
Speaker 1: His original model actually used something similar to a bicycle
Speaker 1: chain to power the paddles, but he would eventually abandon
Speaker 1: that for more of a ratchet approach like the newcoming
Speaker 1: engine version would use. So the paddle boat itself wasn't
Speaker 1: a new idea that had actually been around for centuries,
Speaker 1: although of course it had been powered by either animals
Speaker 1: or people, not by steam. But Fulton's mechanisms to provide
Speaker 1: power gave it the new twist, and they filed a
Speaker 1: patent for the design back in eighteen o two. Fulton
Speaker 1: launched a steamboat named Claremont C L E R M
Speaker 1: O N T in New York in eight o seven.
Speaker 1: Now that would provide passage for travelers between New York
Speaker 1: City and Albany. So it made a trip to Albany
Speaker 1: and then made a trip back from Albody to New
Speaker 1: York City safely, and it proved that steam power could
Speaker 1: be used to transport people in cargo, so before long
Speaker 1: shipbuilders began to rely heavily on steam power, even for
Speaker 1: Transatlantic passages. Now I should add that the steamships traveling
Speaker 1: the ocean, those were not the same design as the
Speaker 1: flat bottomed boats that were meant to float on rivers
Speaker 1: here in America. The first ship to provide regular transatlantic
Speaker 1: service didn't come from America at all. It of course
Speaker 1: came from Britain. So while Britain did not pioneer the
Speaker 1: steam boat, they did pioneer the steam ship, and that
Speaker 1: first ship was called the S. S. Great Western, which
Speaker 1: was built by none other than is Embard Kingdom Brunel
Speaker 1: in eighteen thirty seven. So no longer were ships reliant
Speaker 1: on the winds, or on human powered ores or any
Speaker 1: other mechanism. They could have a steam engine drive them
Speaker 1: from location to location, no matter what the weather was
Speaker 1: or which way the current were going, and travel and
Speaker 1: shipping speeds increased dramatically, which drove up demand for trade.
Speaker 1: While steamboats were making waves in America. See what I
Speaker 1: did there when boats and waves. Back in Britain, engineers
Speaker 1: were experimenting with steam powered engines designed to push or
Speaker 1: pull carts on tracks, which were the first locomotives. We've
Speaker 1: got more to say in this classic episode of tech
Speaker 1: stuff after these quick messages. So there was an engineer
Speaker 1: named Richard Trevithick who built the first full scale locomotive
Speaker 1: in eighteen o four steam powered locomotive in eighteen o four.
Speaker 1: But he was way ahead of his time. Uh and
Speaker 1: while he built a working model, most people weren't ready
Speaker 1: for it. They didn't think it was a proven technology,
Speaker 1: and so he didn't receive enough support to move forward
Speaker 1: it into production. George Stephenson succeeded where Trevithick failed, building
Speaker 1: a successful steam engine in eighteen fourteen, and that engine's
Speaker 1: name was Blucker and it could pull thirty tons at
Speaker 1: a speed of four miles per hour. I'm told that
Speaker 1: the Brits actually pronounced it Blucher, which makes sense because
Speaker 1: it's spelled b l u with an umalout c ch
Speaker 1: e r uh. The correct pronunciation if you're going with
Speaker 1: the German or Prussian, as it turns out, is more blucker.
Speaker 1: But they were Blutcher. So it was named after a
Speaker 1: Prussian general who was a war hero in the Napoleonic Wars,
Speaker 1: and in fact, the following year, in eighteen fifteen, Blucher
Speaker 1: would lead an army in a very hasty march to
Speaker 1: a little battleground called Waterloo, which was the site of
Speaker 1: Napoleon's defeat. So Bluecher ended up being a great name
Speaker 1: for a device meant to move a lot of weight
Speaker 1: at a relatively fast pace. Now, the locomotive became a
Speaker 1: dominant force in transportation within a couple of decades. America's
Speaker 1: first locomotive was a British machine called the Stourbridge Lion,
Speaker 1: and it wasn't a huge success because the way of
Speaker 1: the machine was so great that the American rails split
Speaker 1: underneath it. They had to re engineer that. American engineer
Speaker 1: Peter Cooper built the first steam locomotive in America that
Speaker 1: was American made, and that one was called the Tom
Speaker 1: Thumb and it moved at a blistering eighteen miles per hour,
Speaker 1: which was pretty fast at the time, and carried thirty
Speaker 1: six passengers on its first run in eighteen thirty. So
Speaker 1: by the middle of the nineteenth century, transportation had completely transformed.
Speaker 1: In less than a century, road systems were redesigned, steamships
Speaker 1: were traveling across rivers and oceans, and locomotives could do
Speaker 1: the work of dozens of teams of horses. Steam engines
Speaker 1: continued to also power the growing industries like textile and
Speaker 1: iron working industries. They were actually powering the machinery in
Speaker 1: those factories. So all of this industry ended up having
Speaker 1: a big requirement. They needed people to do a lot
Speaker 1: of this work. So let's talk a little bit about
Speaker 1: what was like being a member of this working class
Speaker 1: that formed as a result of the Industrial Revolution, and
Speaker 1: these innovations. So keep in mind, all this stuff made
Speaker 1: production cheaper and easier, and and transportation cheaper and easier,
Speaker 1: So it meant that the price of goods was dropping.
Speaker 1: It meant that trade was exploding. It also meant that
Speaker 1: banks were being created in order to handle the monetary
Speaker 1: weight of what was going on. You had the British
Speaker 1: Empire growing as a result through both conquest and trade,
Speaker 1: so big time of change. It also meant that you
Speaker 1: had to have a lot of bodies in these factories
Speaker 1: to actually make the stuff work. Um and other things
Speaker 1: like conflicts throughout the world were creating more requirements for clothing,
Speaker 1: for weapons, for fuel, for all that sort of stuff,
Speaker 1: so there was a high demand. It was an exciting time.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about working. Perhaps the biggest revolution of
Speaker 1: them all really came down to how work was done
Speaker 1: before the Industrial Revolution. Let's say you're a cloth merchant.
Speaker 1: You're someone who sells cloth. That process is not very straightforward. First,
Speaker 1: you would have to purchase raw wool from shepherds. Then
Speaker 1: you would take it to spinners and you would hire
Speaker 1: spinners to spin the raw wool into yarn. You would
Speaker 1: then take that yarn to weavers and pay the weavers
Speaker 1: to weave that yarn into cloth, and then you would
Speaker 1: have to sell the cloth to customers. And that means
Speaker 1: each time you know you're you're selling, price of the
Speaker 1: cloth has to be great enough to cover all the
Speaker 1: expenses leading up to creating that cloth. That's why it
Speaker 1: was pretty expensive at the time. It wasn't until the
Speaker 1: Industrial Revolution, where this was streamlined and the cost for
Speaker 1: production went way down, that suddenly these these finished goods
Speaker 1: could be of a much better price. Some people actually
Speaker 1: called this earlier version of the way things were done
Speaker 1: a putting out process. You had to put out everything
Speaker 1: onto a different group of people in order to get
Speaker 1: something finished. Some people called it the domestic system, and
Speaker 1: some people referred to this sort of stuff as a
Speaker 1: cottage industry, meaning that people were actually working out of
Speaker 1: their own homes. It was a multi step process that
Speaker 1: employed lots of people to make a relatively small amount
Speaker 1: of product. But the Industrial Revolution changed all that. Now
Speaker 1: it was possible to produce huge amounts a product like textiles,
Speaker 1: but you will also needed a much larger group of
Speaker 1: people in order to actually run all the equipment. So
Speaker 1: while you could have one spinner run a machine that
Speaker 1: could spend multiple spools of yarn uh simultaneously, whereas before
Speaker 1: you would have to do it one at a time.
Speaker 1: You could do that, but it's still meant that in
Speaker 1: order to meet the major demand, you actually had a
Speaker 1: lot more people in place. Now, some merchants began building
Speaker 1: larger structures to house workers during work hours, so in
Speaker 1: other words, you are no longer relying on people working
Speaker 1: out of their houses. They would actually travel to a
Speaker 1: work location and work there for a shift, which makes
Speaker 1: sense because most of these factories were located next to
Speaker 1: rivers or other structures other natural boundaries that gave them
Speaker 1: some sort of advantage either in the production or the
Speaker 1: shipping or both of the material. So this was the factory. Originally,
Speaker 1: the word factory referred to the office of a manager
Speaker 1: of an estate, so a state manager's office was the factory.
Speaker 1: But by the sixteen hundreds the word had limited use
Speaker 1: to refer to a place where manufacturing happened uh, and
Speaker 1: the real rise of the factory was truly the nineteenth century.
Speaker 1: The eighteen hundreds, the need for workers created opportunities for
Speaker 1: people who otherwise would have just remained farmers, or they
Speaker 1: would have had very little employment at all, so this
Speaker 1: drove a migration from farmlands to cities. People were moving
Speaker 1: to where work was. If there wasn't enough work where
Speaker 1: they were, they could go to a city and work
Speaker 1: at a factory, and cities were growing exponentially in that
Speaker 1: time period. Urban growth was exploding as a result of
Speaker 1: all this. So once upon a time, farming was the
Speaker 1: dominant occupation in all the world. But as a result
Speaker 1: of the Industrial Revolution, the percentage of people who are
Speaker 1: farmers compared to the overall population began to shrink, and
Speaker 1: it began to shrink pretty drastically. At the same time,
Speaker 1: we were making some progress in other areas like sanitation
Speaker 1: and medicine, so we were starting to learn how to
Speaker 1: maintain people's health, how to keep people from getting sick,
Speaker 1: how to keep water systems clean. We began to learn
Speaker 1: more about how to protect people when they are at
Speaker 1: their most vulnerable, such as during the act of childbirth. Also,
Speaker 1: lifespans were increasing because we were getting better at treating people. Largely,
Speaker 1: lifespans were increasing simply because we're getting better and making
Speaker 1: sure people reached the age of twenty one. There's this
Speaker 1: common misconception that the lifespan during the Middle Ages was
Speaker 1: around thirty years old. Because people died of old age
Speaker 1: when they were thirty. That's not the case. The reason
Speaker 1: why the the lifespan was so short was that your
Speaker 1: odds of making it to adulthood were pretty low. A
Speaker 1: lot of people died either when they were infants were children.
Speaker 1: But if you can make it too about eighteen or twenty,
Speaker 1: you had a good chance of living a nice long life,
Speaker 1: assuming you avoid major illness or injury. Uh. This era,
Speaker 1: the Industrial Revolution, was one where we started to get
Speaker 1: better about the practices that could lead to illness and injury.
Speaker 1: And because the machines were doing a lot of the
Speaker 1: hard work, it meant that people no longer had to
Speaker 1: do this by hand. Like the stuff that would require
Speaker 1: a lot of repetitive, monotonous motions or carrying heavy weight.
Speaker 1: A lot of that was being done done by machine
Speaker 1: now not by people, though not all of it, and
Speaker 1: monany was still a big problem. Working in a factory
Speaker 1: was not a picnic. It was hot and difficult and crowded,
Speaker 1: and and you were dedicated to a specific task, so
Speaker 1: you're doing that same task over and over again throughout
Speaker 1: the entire day. Women, men, and children all worked in
Speaker 1: factories during the Industrial Revolution. Entire families would typically the
Speaker 1: women and men would earn a tiny amount like ten
Speaker 1: cents an hour in the United States terms, whereas the
Speaker 1: children would be earning a penny an hour. Uh, it
Speaker 1: was not a way to get rich. It was and
Speaker 1: and typically an entire family would be working, often in
Speaker 1: the same factory because they couldn't afford to have a
Speaker 1: single person work and someone else looking after the home
Speaker 1: that they wouldn't make enough money. Wages were really low,
Speaker 1: pretty much as low as business owners could get away
Speaker 1: with in order to continue to maximize profits, and a
Speaker 1: work week was six days long and a shift could
Speaker 1: last between twelve and fourteen hours in a day. Well,
Speaker 1: we're almost ready to wrap up the Industrial Revolution, but
Speaker 1: before we can do that, we need to take one
Speaker 1: last break for ads. Meanwhile, that explosion and urban growth
Speaker 1: did not mean suddenly all these luxurious accommodations were appearing everywhere,
Speaker 1: and in a lot of citys we were seeing cheap,
Speaker 1: flimsy housing being hastily constructed to take advantage of all
Speaker 1: the incoming populations of workers. And landlords were a lot
Speaker 1: like factory owners. They were trying to maximize their profits.
Speaker 1: They would cram as many tenants as they could into
Speaker 1: a building in order to get as many renters as possible,
Speaker 1: So it was a fairly grim situation. Now, you might
Speaker 1: think that in that situation the workers would have some
Speaker 1: significant power because there were a lot of them. They're
Speaker 1: way more workers than there were factory owners. So you'd think, well,
Speaker 1: they could just band together and demand better conditions and
Speaker 1: the factory owners would ultimately have to bow to them
Speaker 1: if they were actually able to unionize. Well, the ruling
Speaker 1: powers in England didn't like that idea so much. Um
Speaker 1: England traditionally had had a lot of reluctance to allow
Speaker 1: lower classes to have any kind of power or say
Speaker 1: and help things were going, so why change things now.
Speaker 1: They actually discouraged people from organizing into a labor force
Speaker 1: that could fight for the rights of employees by passing
Speaker 1: laws Britain passed. Britain's parliament passed the Combination Acts of
Speaker 1: eight hundred, and it actually made it illegal for workers
Speaker 1: to unionize. If you've tried to unionize workers, if you
Speaker 1: were an employee and you were trying to convince others
Speaker 1: to band with you, So that you could leverage your
Speaker 1: work against the factory owners and demand better conditions. You
Speaker 1: could be sentenced to either three months in prison or
Speaker 1: two months of hard labor. So it's pretty grim. And
Speaker 1: those acts remained law until eighteen twenty four, so a
Speaker 1: quarter of a century. Essentially, this was the law of
Speaker 1: the land. They were finally overthrown, and perhaps predictably, immediately
Speaker 1: after they were overthrown, there were a series of workers
Speaker 1: strikes throughout all of Britain, and in fact, the following
Speaker 1: year in Parliament attempted to reinstate the Acts, but that
Speaker 1: movement failed and they never were reinstated. Meanwhile, so you've
Speaker 1: got the working class, this very poor new class of
Speaker 1: people in Britain. They hadn't existed before. Before they would
Speaker 1: have been farmers or perhaps small uh skilled workers of
Speaker 1: some sort, like they might be a blacksmith or a weaver,
Speaker 1: but now they are factory workers, the working class. You
Speaker 1: had another new class as well, that would be the
Speaker 1: industrial capitalists. And these were the people who had the
Speaker 1: money to start up the businesses. They were the ones
Speaker 1: who were funding the building of a factory, the operation
Speaker 1: of an industry, and they would use the profits from
Speaker 1: that industry to improve that business, including the funding of
Speaker 1: canals and bridges and roads throughout all of Britain. So
Speaker 1: their work would benefit other people, but they were largely
Speaker 1: doing it to benefit their own business, to to maximize
Speaker 1: profits even more. And some of these people came from
Speaker 1: humble origins. They weren't all very highly educated people. Some
Speaker 1: of them came from families that were very similar to
Speaker 1: the families working in the factories. But because of their wealth,
Speaker 1: they wielded as much or more power as the traditional
Speaker 1: noble houses in England at that time. Um, remember this
Speaker 1: is a time when the noble houses, you know, the
Speaker 1: House of Lords, had largely lost a lot of its
Speaker 1: power and uh, nobility was now looked upon with something
Speaker 1: of of disdain because a lot of the noble noble
Speaker 1: houses no longer had any money. Uh they had titles
Speaker 1: and they had they had estates, but they didn't necessarily
Speaker 1: have wealth, whereas you had this new class of industrial
Speaker 1: capitalists who might not have any title to their name,
Speaker 1: but we're fabulously wealthy. So it was a very different
Speaker 1: time in Britain's history. Now that change, this whole change
Speaker 1: with the working class and the industrial capitalists that didn't
Speaker 1: go on without any resistance. In fact, weavers would lead
Speaker 1: the way. They protested the change from the cottage industry
Speaker 1: to factory production. Early on, you get stories about weavers
Speaker 1: who were upset at factories. They they felt one the
Speaker 1: factory was going to put them out of business, and
Speaker 1: two that factories were going to produce work that was
Speaker 1: inferior to what a weaver, a traditional weaver would make,
Speaker 1: So there was a bit of pride and a bit
Speaker 1: of self preservation in this. They would protest this change
Speaker 1: by breaking looms. This was a an era in which
Speaker 1: the term sabotage came to prominence. So there's a most
Speaker 1: likely apocryphal story that some weavers through their shoes into
Speaker 1: a loom essentially a giant water powered loom, in order
Speaker 1: to destroy it. So they're coming up the works with
Speaker 1: their shoes and shoes in French is sabo, So sabotage
Speaker 1: is this act of throwing one's shoes into machinery to
Speaker 1: destroy the machines, normally as part of a labor dispute.
Speaker 1: But most etymologists agree that that particular story is likely
Speaker 1: just a folk tale. So don't write to me and say, hey,
Speaker 1: you said sabotage comes from throwing shoes into machines, and
Speaker 1: it says here that's not true. I agree, It's just
Speaker 1: that the most widely used explanation comes from the mostly
Speaker 1: most likely untrue story that shoes have everything to do
Speaker 1: with sabotage. But there's another word that also came up
Speaker 1: during this era that also gets misused a lot, and
Speaker 1: that is the word luddite. Now, today, we usually interpret
Speaker 1: luddite as someone who opposes or doesn't adopt technological advances.
Speaker 1: So a person refusing to get a cell phone could
Speaker 1: be called a luddite by somebody like, Oh, you're such
Speaker 1: a luddite you won't even get a cell phone. So
Speaker 1: we use that term just I mean, you aren't going
Speaker 1: to embrace technology. You think it's bad for some reason.
Speaker 1: But in the Industrial Revolution, luddites were workers in England
Speaker 1: who destroyed machinery in waves of labor disputes during the
Speaker 1: early eighteen hundreds. Uh. They were doing so against the law, obviously,
Speaker 1: and Parliament got very nervous about this. Uh. They you know,
Speaker 1: England had already been through a civil war a couple
Speaker 1: of centuries earlier, and Parliament was not eager to have
Speaker 1: that happen again, so it began to assign soldiers to
Speaker 1: defend factories. Thousands of soldiers were deployed throughout Britain to
Speaker 1: guard factories against mobs of the working class. And the
Speaker 1: Luddites ended up taking their name from a man named
Speaker 1: ned Ludd who inspired and led them to cause mischief
Speaker 1: throughout all of England. This guy almost went Christopher walking here.
Speaker 1: This guy went all over England. He would show up
Speaker 1: in all sorts of villages everywhere to lead people in
Speaker 1: opposition to factory owners. And the British authorities were having
Speaker 1: a heck of a time tracking this guy down. It
Speaker 1: seemed like every time they were responding to one crisis,
Speaker 1: he would pop up somewhere else in England, almost magically.
Speaker 1: And the reason for this is because ned Lud was
Speaker 1: not a real person. He was a story. He was
Speaker 1: an idea concocted by the Luddites themselves, kind of as
Speaker 1: a symbol of their movement. Uh So, ned Lud was
Speaker 1: not a real person, but the Luddites did take their
Speaker 1: name from ned Lud. Now, there was someone who may
Speaker 1: have been named Lud or Ludham, who was working as
Speaker 1: a weaver in a factory who might have inspired the name,
Speaker 1: but the person himself didn't exist. Now, as it turns out,
Speaker 1: the Luddites weren't really organized in any meaningful way. They
Speaker 1: were very passionate, and they generally agreed on their cause,
Speaker 1: but they weren't this massive underground organization that Parliament was
Speaker 1: terrified of, and the workers actually suffered way more than
Speaker 1: any of the machinery they attacked dead. In April of
Speaker 1: eighteen twelve, a mob of workers were fired upon by soldiers.
Speaker 1: A factory owner ordered the soldiers to fire into the crowd,
Speaker 1: and as a result, three people were killed and at
Speaker 1: least eighteen were wounded, and more were killed in a
Speaker 1: different clash on the following day. So violent confrontations like
Speaker 1: these would continue for the next several years. Here's the thing.
Speaker 1: The Luddites weren't actually opposing industrial machines. They depended on
Speaker 1: those machines to do their work, so they were not
Speaker 1: anti technology. What the Luddites opposed were what they viewed
Speaker 1: as cruel labor conditions that exploited employee and benefited the owners.
Speaker 1: They targeted manufacturers who used factories in a fraudulent and
Speaker 1: deceitful manner. What they really wanted was better wages. They
Speaker 1: wanted the assurance that people who were working the machines
Speaker 1: would actually be trained as apprentices and learn how to
Speaker 1: use the machines before being assigned a machine. Uh. This
Speaker 1: was sort of a point of a pride to make
Speaker 1: sure that the finished product was a good product and
Speaker 1: not just one that's super cheaply made in order to
Speaker 1: benefit the factory owner. And all of this seems like
Speaker 1: a pretty humble set of demands if you ask me,
Speaker 1: you know, they're they're just asking to be paid a
Speaker 1: fair wage and to make sure that the business isn't
Speaker 1: cutting corners when it comes to production. But now today
Speaker 1: we just considered ludite to be a term for somebody
Speaker 1: who doesn't like technology. It's kind of interesting considering that's
Speaker 1: not what the original intent was, although they did try
Speaker 1: and destroy machines in order to to get their point
Speaker 1: of us. Eventually workers were able to unionize legally, but
Speaker 1: it took decades after they unionized before conditions would start
Speaker 1: to really improve. Even into the Victorian era in the
Speaker 1: mid to late eighteen hundreds, factories were still crowded and dangerous,
Speaker 1: and London had more than its share of slums filled
Speaker 1: with working class families and the unemployed. All you have
Speaker 1: to read is any Charles Dickens novel and you'll understand.
Speaker 1: You'll see this, uh that this was still an issue
Speaker 1: in Britain decades after the unions were finally able to form. Now,
Speaker 1: what about the rest of the world. I've talked a
Speaker 1: lot about Britain, a little bit about America. Why haven't
Speaker 1: I talked about other places? Well, it's largely because the
Speaker 1: industrialization of other countries followed in the footsteps of Britain
Speaker 1: by a few but lagged a few decades behind um.
Speaker 1: And some places had better excuses than others. Like France
Speaker 1: and America both had pretty good excuses. They both are
Speaker 1: undergoing revolutionary wars around the same time Britain was undergoing
Speaker 1: its industrial revolution, and the war was taking way more
Speaker 1: of the focus of the people of France and the
Speaker 1: people of America than any sort of industrial revolution could America. Obviously,
Speaker 1: they concluded their revolutionary war well ahead of time before
Speaker 1: France did, before France had even had a revolution, and
Speaker 1: so we're able to move on, and so they caught
Speaker 1: up not too long after that. American ingenuity was something
Speaker 1: that people were very proud of and they were able
Speaker 1: to catch up to the Brits before too long. France
Speaker 1: had the other drawback that after the French Revolution, there
Speaker 1: were the Napoleonic Wars, which did not end until eighteen fifteen,
Speaker 1: so they didn't move into industrialization until after that. Essentially
Speaker 1: around that same time, the other nations in Europe began
Speaker 1: to follow suit, and so you started to see this
Speaker 1: pattern where countries were becoming industrialized following similar pathways that
Speaker 1: Britain followed, but several decades behind. So that's why we
Speaker 1: tell the story of the industrial Revolution largely with Britain
Speaker 1: in mind, because it acts as the model for everybody else.
Speaker 1: But once they got started, they actually caught up to
Speaker 1: Britain pretty quickly. So in other words, it didn't take
Speaker 1: the decades and decades and decades of work that happened
Speaker 1: in Britain to get up to about the same speed
Speaker 1: that Britain was currently at, and what followed was an
Speaker 1: unprecedented era of production and commerce. Other inventions would also
Speaker 1: contribute to a very rapidly changing world. You might remember
Speaker 1: I did an episode with Holly from Stuff You Missed
Speaker 1: in History Class about the sewing machine for example, which
Speaker 1: it's hard, it's hard to believe, but the sewing machine
Speaker 1: is the subject of one of the nastiest patent wars
Speaker 1: of all time. There were people who were willing to
Speaker 1: to kill or die for their designs of the sewing machine.
Speaker 1: But that was another big uh invention that came out
Speaker 1: around this time. And innovation was also changing farming, which
Speaker 1: was important because so many people were leaving the profession
Speaker 1: of farming to go to cities and try something else.
Speaker 1: A guy named Cyrus McCormick invented several large machines that
Speaker 1: were important in farming, including one that was in on
Speaker 1: a motorizer or mechanized I guess I should say a
Speaker 1: mechanized reaper designed to harvest crops far more quickly than
Speaker 1: you could by hand. So farmers could use machines to
Speaker 1: meet the demand of these larger populations of non farmers.
Speaker 1: You know, they were able to the one farmer was
Speaker 1: now able to do the work of ten or twenty
Speaker 1: farm hands using these machines because they were much more
Speaker 1: efficient and fast. When the Industrial Revolution was coming to
Speaker 1: an end in the middle of the nineteenth century, the
Speaker 1: stage was set. Not long after this period, we would
Speaker 1: see an unprecedented era of scientific discoveries. Some people refer
Speaker 1: to it as the Second Industrial Revolution, because that's when
Speaker 1: mass production really became a thing, when corporations came into existence,
Speaker 1: and when we started to see people harness things like
Speaker 1: electricity and discover radio waves, which ended up powering all
Speaker 1: these ideas, I mean literally powering in the case of electricity,
Speaker 1: all these ideas including radio and television that followed in
Speaker 1: that Second Industrial Revolution, And it also allowed for the
Speaker 1: age of discovery, where we had scientists all over the
Speaker 1: world starting to break new ground in our understanding of
Speaker 1: the universe, including in really weird areas like quantum physics.
Speaker 1: I hope you enjoyed that classics series from tech Stuff
Speaker 1: on how the Industrial Revolution worked. I thought that was
Speaker 1: a fascinating topic to really look into. You know, some
Speaker 1: of the stuff I knew a little bit about, but
Speaker 1: most of it was brand new for me at the
Speaker 1: time and really exciting to learn about how quickly new
Speaker 1: technologies were being developed and adopted and how much, you know,
Speaker 1: stress there was, how much how much conflict there was
Speaker 1: as various technologies were coming mature. And of course we
Speaker 1: still see that sort of stuff today. Typically we're seeing
Speaker 1: it in the digital realm more than in the engineering realm.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I mean it's it was the stuff of
Speaker 1: of real drama back then. If you have suggestions for
Speaker 1: topics that we should cover on tech Stuff, whether they're
Speaker 1: historical or futuristic or anything in between, there are a
Speaker 1: couple of different ways you can get in touch. One
Speaker 1: is to download the I Heart Radio app. It's free
Speaker 1: to download and to use. You can navigate over to
Speaker 1: the tech Stuff page. Just search tech Stuff in the
Speaker 1: search bar, bringing right to us. If you click into
Speaker 1: tech Stuff, you'll see that there's a little microphone I
Speaker 1: con and if you touch that, you can leave a
Speaker 1: message up to thirty seconds in length. If you prefer
Speaker 1: to send your message other in other ways, the best
Speaker 1: way to do it is over Twitter. The handle for
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Speaker 1: a tweet and tell me what it is you would
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