Speaker 1: With technology with tech Stuff from technolog Hey there, and
Speaker 1: welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland, and
Speaker 1: this episode is part three, the epic finale of our
Speaker 1: series on the Industrial Revolution. In parts one and two,
Speaker 1: I looked at the textile and iron industries respectively, as
Speaker 1: well as how steam engines came about and how technology
Speaker 1: helped transform those trades into enormous industries. And in this
Speaker 1: episode will cover everything from transportation to what it was
Speaker 1: like to be a member of the working class at
Speaker 1: that time, and how we started to see some new
Speaker 1: lines dividing different classes. It used to be that it
Speaker 1: was the nobles versus the peasants, with clergy in the middle,
Speaker 1: really clergy off to the side on their own kind
Speaker 1: of ladder. But things changed in the Industrial Revolution. So
Speaker 1: during this period in Britain's history, which as you may remember,
Speaker 1: is in the mid eighteenth to mid nineteenth century, so
Speaker 1: the 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 rails 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 cards 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, that it's not likely to tip over, and
Speaker 1: you 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 Colebrookdale, 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 seven Reynolds came up with the
Speaker 1: idea of replacing wooden rails with cast iron rails. He
Speaker 1: thought that this would be a much better use of
Speaker 1: cast iron. It would be better than the wooden ones
Speaker 1: because the wooden rails would break down over time. They
Speaker 1: could also just collapse depending upon how heavy the load was,
Speaker 1: and cast iron would last longer and be able to
Speaker 1: withstand greater weights. Now, there's no historical record of anyone
Speaker 1: doing this before Reynolds, so he might have actually been
Speaker 1: the person to invent this. But it's not safe to
Speaker 1: just declare it, So it's possible someone else did. We
Speaker 1: just don't have a record of it. So I guess
Speaker 1: for practical purposes, we can say he invented the idea
Speaker 1: before 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 custle,
Speaker 1: the 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 Well. He was born in August
Speaker 1: of 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 Mockford
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 said 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: steady 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: tower is that have cables attached from the tower first
Speaker 1: to each other, and also there's vertical cables that attached
Speaker 1: the main cables between the two towers and the bridge.
Speaker 1: The towers actually support most of the weight. Specifically, they
Speaker 1: support the force of compression. See compression pushes down on
Speaker 1: the surface of the bridge. That compression is transferred to
Speaker 1: the cables or chains that are attached the edges of
Speaker 1: the bridge, the frame of the bridge, and that gets
Speaker 1: transferred to the towers. Then you have supporting cables that
Speaker 1: connect the towers to anchorage points on either side of
Speaker 1: whatever you're building the bridge across, like a river, and
Speaker 1: these cables support the tension forces created by the bridge.
Speaker 1: So 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 antsie of out how
Speaker 1: things actually would work. Once everything was ready to go,
Speaker 1: and luckily for us, physics tends to obey the law,
Speaker 1: so the designs worked out in everyone's favor, but no
Speaker 1: one was entirely sure at the time. Now, Telford's next
Speaker 1: project was the Aqueduct, which must not be named because
Speaker 1: I'm tired of trying to pronounce Welsh words, which was
Speaker 1: a phenomenal success and that came as a great surprise
Speaker 1: to numerous critics who were absolutely convinced it would fall
Speaker 1: apart as soon as water was flowing, and it didn't.
Speaker 1: It stayed together and ended up increasing the speed of
Speaker 1: transportation in that part of England. After the aqueduct, or
Speaker 1: well Wales, I should say England and Wales because it
Speaker 1: was connecting the two. But after that Aqueduct, Telford became
Speaker 1: the head engineer of the Caledonian Canal in Scotland. That's
Speaker 1: a really big canal. It's sixty miles long and the
Speaker 1: construction was a huge boon for Scotland at the time
Speaker 1: because many people in Scotland had become homeless, and the
Speaker 1: reason they became homeless is pretty dastardly. It was in
Speaker 1: the wake of what has become known as the Highland Clearances,
Speaker 1: which 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 it 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. The families had, I mean only
Speaker 1: a few Highlanders are immortal. As the documentary series Highlander
Speaker 1: teaches us, it's a really dark time in Scottish history
Speaker 1: and it really dealt severe damage to Gaelic culture as
Speaker 1: a result. What what seems to have happened the way
Speaker 1: it tends to be described is that a lot of
Speaker 1: clan leaders, for various reasons political reasons that were handed
Speaker 1: down from the crown, from royals, had decided that rather
Speaker 1: than be considered a clan leader, which came with a
Speaker 1: bunch of responsibilities, including if someone in your clan acted up,
Speaker 1: you were held responsible as leader, they started to call
Speaker 1: themselves landlords instead, and that was a slippery slope that
Speaker 1: led to these evictions. So Telford's canal took three decades
Speaker 1: to construct, and it meant that he had to rely
Speaker 1: heavily on a lot of labor from this part of Scotland,
Speaker 1: so it gave a lot of people work when they
Speaker 1: went home to harvest crops. He ended up hiring Irish workers,
Speaker 1: which caused some real problems in the area. People locals
Speaker 1: were upset at that, but Telford was already running over
Speaker 1: budget and behind time, and unfortunately for everybody, by the
Speaker 1: time the canal was finished, it was actually not terribly useful,
Speaker 1: and that's because it just took two long to make
Speaker 1: and technology had changed while the canal was being built.
Speaker 1: It was built well and it's considered to be a
Speaker 1: marvel of engineering, but ship building had changed so dramatically
Speaker 1: by the time the canal was finished. Steamships had become
Speaker 1: the new standard, and steamships needed more space than what
Speaker 1: the canal could provide. The canal was actually too small
Speaker 1: to accommodate steamships and so it wasn't as used used
Speaker 1: as heavily as it had been planned. Now Telford would
Speaker 1: go on to create super waterways. It's kind of like
Speaker 1: super highways there were these interconnections that uh that put
Speaker 1: various canals finally in contact with each other, so that
Speaker 1: made shipping much more efficient. And in eighteen twenty he
Speaker 1: became the very first president of the Institution of Civil
Speaker 1: Engineers in Britain, so essentially kind of invented the discipline
Speaker 1: of civil engineering, or at least was instrumental in the
Speaker 1: invention of that discipline. Tell made another major contribution to
Speaker 1: England's transportation system as well. One of his most important
Speaker 1: improvements involved raising the foundation of a road in the
Speaker 1: center of the road to aid in draining water. So
Speaker 1: he he was very good at building roads. He used
Speaker 1: these large flat stones as the foundation and by raising
Speaker 1: that center, water would drain off it much more effectively.
Speaker 1: It wouldn't pool and destroy the road over time, and
Speaker 1: his work was so successful that it became the standard
Speaker 1: road design in England and beyond. One of Telford's contemporaries
Speaker 1: and rivals was a guy named Isambard Kingdom Brunel. And
Speaker 1: if that name sounds at all familiar, well you might
Speaker 1: remember him when we did our episode on subways. He
Speaker 1: was very important in that episode. He was the son
Speaker 1: of a French engineer the French engineer had actually fled
Speaker 1: to England during the French Revolution, so Brunell grew up
Speaker 1: 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. Uh 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 up, down 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. 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 considered 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, patents
Speaker 1: for steamboats state all the way back to sixteen 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 His approach
Speaker 1: was to use a Newcoming engine, although again he never
Speaker 1: built such a boat as far as we can tell.
Speaker 1: For an actual working boat, you have to actually look
Speaker 1: fifty years later, so three that's when Clode Francois Dorote
Speaker 1: Joefrey Dabam, who, as you can imagine from that name,
Speaker 1: was a French nobleman, built a boat powered by a
Speaker 1: Newcoming two cylinder engine, and he demonstrated on a river
Speaker 1: in France and showed that such a boat could actually
Speaker 1: sail against the river's current under its own power. It
Speaker 1: didn't require manpower or animal power to turn some sort
Speaker 1: of device in order to go against the current. It's
Speaker 1: really kind of challenging to explain how monumental this was
Speaker 1: in the transportation industry at the time. But people realize
Speaker 1: the 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 the piston in it. You
Speaker 1: could keep it the same temperature, and you allowed the
Speaker 1: condenser to pull steam in and condense into water. And
Speaker 1: water started getting a trans Atlantic accident on there for
Speaker 1: some reason, turn into water and uh create that vacuum
Speaker 1: pressure that would pull a piston downward. And also because
Speaker 1: around this time when people began to experiment with double
Speaker 1: stroke engines, that's when you use steam to provide both
Speaker 1: the push on the upstroke of a piston and the
Speaker 1: pull on the downstroke of the piston, and makes an
Speaker 1: engine much more efficient because it's doing work in both
Speaker 1: ways rather than just pulling and then allowing gravity to
Speaker 1: reset the piston. Watson's invention would become the foundation for
Speaker 1: working steamboats in the future. Now, I've talked a lot
Speaker 1: about Britain in these episodes, because Britain is the birthplace
Speaker 1: 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 can sisted of an inventor named
Speaker 1: John Stevens, his wealthy brother in law Robert Livingstone, and
Speaker 1: a machinist named Nicholas J. Roosevelt. Their efforts were somewhat
Speaker 1: hampered by Livingston, who felt that since he was providing
Speaker 1: all the cash, he should have a major input into
Speaker 1: how the boat was actually constructed, despite the fact that
Speaker 1: he didn't have the expertise of the other two. But
Speaker 1: the other two had very little bargaining power because Livingstone
Speaker 1: was the guy footing the bill. So despite protestations from
Speaker 1: Roosevelt and from Stevens, Livingstone's design was what stuck, and
Speaker 1: the resulting boat barely moved in still water. In fact,
Speaker 1: on the first test it didn't go anywhere. The second test,
Speaker 1: it moved very slowly in stillwater, something like three miles
Speaker 1: per hour, so it could not really fight against the current,
Speaker 1: and it also shook itself apart after a short while.
Speaker 1: By the way, don't think that Robert Livingstone was a dummy.
Speaker 1: He was a smart guy. In fact, he was instrumental
Speaker 1: in in American history. He's the guy who essentially brokered
Speaker 1: the Louisiana purchase deal between France and America. So very
Speaker 1: important historically, just not necessarily the guy you want on
Speaker 1: your team when you're designing a steam engine. However, Livingston
Speaker 1: met another man who also shared an interest in steam power,
Speaker 1: and that man was Robert Fulton. He was an American
Speaker 1: who originally wanted to make his living as an artist.
Speaker 1: He painted a portrait of Benjamin Franklin and felt that
Speaker 1: he was on his way to becoming a great artist,
Speaker 1: but his career path was cut short after he had
Speaker 1: a disappointing meeting with another American artist who was living
Speaker 1: in London. Fulton actually took his all of his money,
Speaker 1: traveled to London. He had a letter of invitation, our
Speaker 1: introduction for this American artist. Met with the American artist,
Speaker 1: who is kind but essentially said no, I don't want
Speaker 1: you as a student. You don't have what it takes.
Speaker 1: But fortunately Fulton met Livingstone and they began to talk
Speaker 1: and they realized they shared a lot of common interests,
Speaker 1: including engineering and specifically in steam engines. Fulton had become
Speaker 1: really obsessed with ships in general and steam engines in particular,
Speaker 1: and Fulton saw in Livingstone a potential source of funding
Speaker 1: for his work, pretty much the same way that Stevens
Speaker 1: had seen Livingston earlier. So Fulton and Livingstone entered into
Speaker 1: a partnership in which they would split the profits of
Speaker 1: their work fifty fifty. That was a sore spot for Livingstone,
Speaker 1: who argued that his money was more valuable than Fulton's work,
Speaker 1: but Fulton was able to argue him down to the
Speaker 1: point where they agreed, we're going to take a half
Speaker 1: share each. So Fulton designed a steam powered flat bottomed
Speaker 1: paddle boat. His original model actually used something similar to
Speaker 1: a bicycle chain to power the paddles, but he would
Speaker 1: eventually abandon that for more of a ratchet approach like
Speaker 1: the newcoming engine version would use. So the paddle boat
Speaker 1: itself wasn't a new idea that had actually been around
Speaker 1: for centuries, although of course it had been powered by
Speaker 1: either animals or people, not by steam, but Fulton's mechanisms
Speaker 1: to provide power gave it the new Twist, and they
Speaker 1: filed a patent for the design back in eighteen o two.
Speaker 1: Fulton launched a steamboat named Claremont C L E R
Speaker 1: M O N T in New York in eighteen o seven.
Speaker 1: Now that would provide passage for for travelers between New
Speaker 1: York City and Albany. So it made a trip to
Speaker 1: Albany and then made a trip back from Albany to
Speaker 1: New York City safely. And it proved that steam power
Speaker 1: could be used to transport people in cargo. So before
Speaker 1: long shipbuilders began to write rely heavily on steam power,
Speaker 1: even for Transatlantic passages. Now I should add that the
Speaker 1: steamships traveling the ocean, those were not the same design
Speaker 1: as the flat bottom boats that were meant to float
Speaker 1: on rivers here in America. The first ship to provide
Speaker 1: regular transatlantic service didn't come from America at all. It
Speaker 1: of course came from Britain. So while Britain did not
Speaker 1: pioneer the steam boat, they did pioneer the steam ship,
Speaker 1: and that first ship was called the S. S. Great Western,
Speaker 1: which was built by none other than Isambard 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 currents 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 with boats and waves. Back in Britain, engineers
Speaker 1: were experimenting with steam powered engines designed to push or
Speaker 1: pull cart on tracks, which were the first locomotives. So
Speaker 1: there was an engineer named Richard Trevithick who built the
Speaker 1: first full scale locomotive in eighteen o four steam powered
Speaker 1: locomotive in eighteen o four. But he was way ahead
Speaker 1: of his time uh and while he built a working model,
Speaker 1: most people weren't ready for it. They didn't think it
Speaker 1: was a proven technology, and so he didn't receive enough
Speaker 1: support to move forward into production. George Stephenson succeeded where
Speaker 1: Trevithick failed, building a successful steam engine in eighteen fourteen.
Speaker 1: And that engine's name was Bluecker and it could pull
Speaker 1: thirty tons at a speed of four miles per hour.
Speaker 1: I'm told that the Brits actually pronounced it Blcher, which
Speaker 1: makes sense because it's spelled b l u with an
Speaker 1: oomal out c h e er uh. The correct pronunciation
Speaker 1: if you're going with the German or Prussian, as it
Speaker 1: turns out, is more blucker. But they were Blucher. So
Speaker 1: it was named after a Prussian general who was a
Speaker 1: war hero in the Napoleonic Wars, and in fact, the
Speaker 1: following year, in eighteen fifteen, Bluecher would lead an army
Speaker 1: in a very hasty march to a little battleground called Waterloo,
Speaker 1: which was the site of Napoleon's defeat. So Bluecher ended
Speaker 1: up being a great name for a device meant to
Speaker 1: move a lot of weight at a relatively fast pace. Now,
Speaker 1: the locomotive became a dominant force in transportation within a
Speaker 1: couple of decades. America's first locomotive was a British machine
Speaker 1: called the Stourbridge Lion, and it wasn't a huge success
Speaker 1: because the way of the machine was so great that
Speaker 1: the American rails split underneath it. They had to re
Speaker 1: engineer that. American engineer Peter Cooper built the first steam
Speaker 1: locomotive in America that was American made, and that one
Speaker 1: was called the tom Thumb and it moved at a
Speaker 1: blistering eighteen miles per hour, which was pretty fast at
Speaker 1: the time, and carried thirty six passengers on its first
Speaker 1: run in eighteen thirty. So by the middle of the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century, transportation had completely transformed. In less than a century,
Speaker 1: road systems were redesigned, steamships were traveling across rivers and oceans,
Speaker 1: and locomotives could do the work of dozens of teams
Speaker 1: of horses. Steam engines continued to also power the growing
Speaker 1: industries like textile and iron working industries. They were actually
Speaker 1: powering the machinery in those factories. So all of this
Speaker 1: industry ended up having a big requirement. They needed people
Speaker 1: to do a lot of this work. So let's talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about what was like being a member
Speaker 1: of this working class that formed as a result of
Speaker 1: the Industrial Revolution and these innovations. So keep in mind,
Speaker 1: all this stuff made production cheaper and easier, and and
Speaker 1: transportation cheaper and easier, So it meant that the price
Speaker 1: of goods was dropping. It meant that trade was exploding.
Speaker 1: It also meant that banks were being created in order
Speaker 1: to handle the monetary weight of what was going on.
Speaker 1: You had the British Empire growing as a result through
Speaker 1: both conquest and trade, so big time of change. It
Speaker 1: also meant that you had to have a lot of
Speaker 1: bodies in these factories to actually make the stuff work.
Speaker 1: Um and other things like conflicts throughout the world. We're
Speaker 1: creating more requirements for clothing, for weapons, for fuel, for
Speaker 1: all that sort of stuff. So there was a high demand.
Speaker 1: It was an exciting time. So let's talk about working.
Speaker 1: Perhaps the biggest revolution of them all really came down
Speaker 1: to how work was done before the Industrial Revolution. Let's
Speaker 1: say you're a cloth merchant. You're someone who sells cloth.
Speaker 1: That process is not very straightforward. First, you would have
Speaker 1: to purchase raw wool from shepherds. Then you would take
Speaker 1: it to spinners and you would hire spinners to spin
Speaker 1: the raw wool into yarn. You would then take that
Speaker 1: yarn to weavers and pay the weavers to weave that
Speaker 1: yarn into cloth, and then you would have to sell
Speaker 1: the cloth to customers. And that means each time you
Speaker 1: know you're you're selling, price of the cloth has to
Speaker 1: be great enough to cover all the expenses leading up
Speaker 1: to creating that cloth. That's why it was pretty expensive
Speaker 1: at the time. It wasn't until the Industrial Revolution, where
Speaker 1: this was streamlined and the cost for production went way down,
Speaker 1: that suddenly these these finished goods could be of a
Speaker 1: much better price. Some people actually called this earlier version
Speaker 1: of the way things were done a putting out process.
Speaker 1: You had to put out everything onto a different group
Speaker 1: of people in order to get something finished. Some people
Speaker 1: called it the domestic system, and some people referred to
Speaker 1: this sort of stuff as a cottage industry, meaning that
Speaker 1: people were actually working out of their own homes. It
Speaker 1: was a multi step process that employed lots of people
Speaker 1: to make a real, at least small amount of product.
Speaker 1: But the Industrial Revolution changed all that. Now it was
Speaker 1: possible to produce huge amounts of product like textiles, but
Speaker 1: you also needed a much larger group of people in
Speaker 1: order to actually run all the equipment. So while you
Speaker 1: could have one spinner run a machine that could spend
Speaker 1: multiple spools of yarn uh simultaneously, whereas before you would
Speaker 1: have to do it one at a time. You could
Speaker 1: do that, but it's still meant that in order to
Speaker 1: meet the major demand, you actually had a lot more
Speaker 1: people in place. Now, some merchants began building larger structures
Speaker 1: to house workers during work hours, so in other words,
Speaker 1: you are no longer relying on people working out of
Speaker 1: their houses. They would actually travel to a work location
Speaker 1: and work there for a shift, which makes sense because
Speaker 1: most of these factories were located next to rivers or
Speaker 1: other structures other natural boundaries that gave them some sort
Speaker 1: of advantage either in the production or the shipping or
Speaker 1: 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: began to shrink pretty drastically. At the same time, we
Speaker 1: were making some progress in other areas like sanitation and medicine,
Speaker 1: so we were starting to learn how to maintain people's health,
Speaker 1: how to keep people from getting sick, how to keep
Speaker 1: water systems clean. Uh, we began to learn more about
Speaker 1: how to protect people when they are at their most vulnerable,
Speaker 1: such as during the act of childbirth. Also, lifespans were
Speaker 1: 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 shut 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 or children.
Speaker 1: But if you could 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. Uh. Working in a
Speaker 1: factory was not a picnic. It was hot and difficult
Speaker 1: and crowded, and and you were dedicated to a specific task.
Speaker 1: So you're doing that same task over and over again
Speaker 1: throughout the entire day. Women, men, and children all worked
Speaker 1: in factories during the Industrial Revolution, entire families would Typically
Speaker 1: the women and men would earn a tiny amount, like
Speaker 1: ten cents an hour in the United States terms, whereas
Speaker 1: the children would be earning a penny an hour. Uh.
Speaker 1: It was not a way to get rich. It was,
Speaker 1: and and typically an entire family would be working, often
Speaker 1: in the same factory because they couldn't afford to have
Speaker 1: a single person work and someone else looking after the
Speaker 1: home 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. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: that explosion and urban growth did not mean suddenly all
Speaker 1: these luxurious accommodations were appearing everywhere, and in a lot
Speaker 1: of cities we were seeing cheap, flimsy housing being hastily
Speaker 1: constructed to take advantage of all the incoming populations of workers.
Speaker 1: And landlords were a lot like factory owners. They were
Speaker 1: trying to maximize their profits. They would cram as many
Speaker 1: tenants as they could into a building in order to
Speaker 1: get as many renters as possible. So it was a
Speaker 1: fairly grim situation. Now, you might think that in that
Speaker 1: situation the workers would have some significant power because there
Speaker 1: were a lot of them. They're way more workers than
Speaker 1: there were factory owners, so you'd think, well, they could
Speaker 1: just band together and demand better conditions and the factory
Speaker 1: owners would ultimately have to bow to them if they
Speaker 1: were actually able to unionize. Well, the ruling powers in
Speaker 1: England didn't like that idea so much. Um England traditionally
Speaker 1: had had a lot of reluctance to allow lower classes
Speaker 1: to have any kind of power or say and how
Speaker 1: things were going, so why change things now. They actually
Speaker 1: discouraged people from organizing into a labor force that could
Speaker 1: fight for the rights of employees by passing laws Britain passed.
Speaker 1: Britain's parliament passed the Combination Acts of sev eighteen hundred,
Speaker 1: and it actually made it illegal for workers to unionize.
Speaker 1: If you tried to unionize workers, if you were an
Speaker 1: employee and you were trying to convince others to banned
Speaker 1: with you so that you could leverage your work against
Speaker 1: the factory owners and demand better conditions, you could be
Speaker 1: sentenced to either three months in prison or two months
Speaker 1: of hard labor. So it's pretty grim. And those acts
Speaker 1: remained law until eighteen twenty four, so a quarter of
Speaker 1: the century. Essentially, this was the law of the land.
Speaker 1: They were finally overthrown and perhaps predictably immediately after they
Speaker 1: were overthrown. There were a series of workers strikes throughout
Speaker 1: all of Britain, and in fact, the following year in
Speaker 1: Parliament attempted to reinstate the the Acts, but that movement
Speaker 1: failed and they never were reinstated. Meanwhile, so you've got
Speaker 1: the working class, this very poor new class of people
Speaker 1: in Britain. They hadn't existed before. Before they would have
Speaker 1: been farmers or perhaps small uh skilled workers of some sort,
Speaker 1: like they might be a blacksmith or a weaver, but
Speaker 1: now they are factory workers, the working class. You had
Speaker 1: another new class as well, that would be the industrial capitalists.
Speaker 1: And these were the people who had the money to
Speaker 1: start up the businesses. They were the ones who were
Speaker 1: funding the building of a factory, the operation of an industry,
Speaker 1: and they would use the profits from that industry to
Speaker 1: improve that business, including the funding of canals and bridges
Speaker 1: and roads throughout all of Britain. So their work would
Speaker 1: benefit other people, but they were largely doing it to
Speaker 1: benefit their own business, to to maximize profits even more.
Speaker 1: And some of these people came from humble origins. They
Speaker 1: weren't all very highly educated people. Some of them came
Speaker 1: from families that were very similar to the families working
Speaker 1: in the factories, but because of their wealth, they wielded
Speaker 1: as much or more power as the traditional noble houses
Speaker 1: in England at that time. Um, remember this is a
Speaker 1: time when the noble houses, you know, the House of Lords,
Speaker 1: had largely lost a lot of its power and uh,
Speaker 1: nobility was now looked upon with something of of disdain
Speaker 1: because a lot of the noble noble houses no longer
Speaker 1: had any money. Uh they had titles and they had
Speaker 1: they had the states, but they didn't necessarily have wealth,
Speaker 1: whereas you had this new class of industrial capitalists who
Speaker 1: might not have any title to their name, but we're
Speaker 1: fabulously wealthy. So it was a very different time in
Speaker 1: Britain's history. Now, that change, this whole change with the
Speaker 1: working class and the industrial capitalists, that didn't go on
Speaker 1: without any resistance. In fact, weavers would lead the way.
Speaker 1: They protested the change from the cottage industry to factory production.
Speaker 1: Early on you get stories about weavers who were upset
Speaker 1: at factories. They felt one the factory was going to
Speaker 1: put them out of business, and two that factories were
Speaker 1: going to produce work that was inferior to what a weaver.
Speaker 1: A traditional weaver would make, so there was a bit
Speaker 1: of pride and a bit of self preservation in this.
Speaker 1: They would protest this change by breaking looms. This was
Speaker 1: an era in which the term sabotage came to prominence.
Speaker 1: So there's a most likely apocryphal story that some weavers
Speaker 1: threw their shoes into a loom essentially a giant water
Speaker 1: powered loom, in order to destroy it. So they're coming
Speaker 1: up the works with their shoes, and shoes in French
Speaker 1: is sabo, so sabotage is this act of throwing one's
Speaker 1: shoes into machinery to destroy the machines, normally as part
Speaker 1: of a labor dispute. But most etymologists agree that that
Speaker 1: particular story is likely just a folk tale. So don't
Speaker 1: write to me and say, hey, you said sabotage comes
Speaker 1: from throwing shoes into machines, and it says here that's
Speaker 1: not true. I agree. It's just that the most widely
Speaker 1: used explanation comes from the mostly most likely untrue story
Speaker 1: that shoes have everything to do with sabotage. But there's
Speaker 1: another word that also came up during this era that
Speaker 1: also gets misused a lot, and that is the word luddite.
Speaker 1: Now today we usually interpret luddite as someone who opposes
Speaker 1: or doesn't adopt technological advances. So a person refusing to
Speaker 1: get a cell phone could be called a luddite by
Speaker 1: somebody like, Oh, you're such a luddite you won't even
Speaker 1: get a cell phone. So we use that term just
Speaker 1: I mean, you aren't going to embrace technology. You think
Speaker 1: it's bad for some reason. But in the Industrial Revolution,
Speaker 1: Luddites were workers in England who destroyed machinery in waves
Speaker 1: of labor disputes during the early eighteen hundreds. Uh. They
Speaker 1: were doing so against the law, obviously, and Parliament got
Speaker 1: very nervous about this. Uh They you know, England had
Speaker 1: already been through a civil war a couple of centuries earlier,
Speaker 1: and Parliament was not eager to have that happen again,
Speaker 1: so it began to assign soldiers to defend factories. Thousands
Speaker 1: of soldiers were deployed throughout Britain to guard factories against
Speaker 1: mobs of the working class, and the Luddites ended up
Speaker 1: taking their name from a man named ned Lud who
Speaker 1: inspired and led them to cause mischief throughout all of England.
Speaker 1: This guy almost went Christopher walking here. This guy went
Speaker 1: all over England. He would show up in all sorts
Speaker 1: of villages everywhere to lead people in opposition to factory owners.
Speaker 1: And the British authorities were having a heck of a
Speaker 1: time tracking this guy down. It seemed like every time
Speaker 1: they were responding to one crisis, he would pop up
Speaker 1: somewhere else in England, almost magically. And the reason for
Speaker 1: this is because ned Lud was not a real person.
Speaker 1: He was a story. He was an idea concocted by
Speaker 1: the Luddites themselves, kind of as a symbol of their movement.
Speaker 1: Uh So, ned Lud was not a real person, but
Speaker 1: the Luddites did take their name from ned Lud. Now,
Speaker 1: there was someone who may have been named Lud or Ludham,
Speaker 1: who was working as a weaver in a factory, who
Speaker 1: might have inspired the name, but the person himself didn't exist. Now,
Speaker 1: as it turns out, the Luddites weren't really organized in
Speaker 1: any meaningful way. They were very passionate and they generally
Speaker 1: agreed on their cause, but they weren't this massive underground
Speaker 1: organization that Parliament was terrified of. And the workers actually
Speaker 1: suffered way more than any of the machinery they attacked dead.
Speaker 1: In April of eighteen twelve, a mob of workers were
Speaker 1: fired upon by soldiers. A factory owner ordered the soldiers
Speaker 1: to fire into the crowd, and as a result, three
Speaker 1: people were killed and at least eighteen were wounded, and
Speaker 1: more were killed in a different clash on the following day.
Speaker 1: So violent confrontations like these would continue for the next
Speaker 1: several years. Here's the thing. The Luddites weren't actually opposing
Speaker 1: industrial machines. They depended on those machines to do their work,
Speaker 1: so they were not anti technology. What the Luddites opposed
Speaker 1: were what they viewed as cruel labor conditions that exploited
Speaker 1: employees and benefited the owners. They targeted manufacturers who used
Speaker 1: factories in a fraudulent and deceitful manner. What they really
Speaker 1: wanted was better wages. They wanted the assurance that people
Speaker 1: who were working the machines would actually be trained as
Speaker 1: apprentices and learn how to use the machines before being
Speaker 1: assigned a machine. Uh. This was sort of a point
Speaker 1: of a pride to make sure that the finished product
Speaker 1: was a good product and not just one that's super
Speaker 1: cheaply made. In order to benefit the factory owner, and
Speaker 1: all of this seems like a pretty humble set of demands.
Speaker 1: If you ask me, you know they're they're just asking
Speaker 1: to be paid a fair wage and to make sure
Speaker 1: that the business isn't cutting corners when it comes to production.
Speaker 1: But now today we just considered luddite to be a
Speaker 1: term for somebody who doesn't like technology. It's kind of
Speaker 1: interesting considering that's not what the original intent was, although
Speaker 1: they did try and destroy machines in order to to
Speaker 1: get their point across. Eventually workers were able to unionize legally,
Speaker 1: but it took decades after they unionized before conditions would
Speaker 1: start to really improve. Even into the Victorian era in
Speaker 1: the mid to late eighteen hundreds, factories were still crowded
Speaker 1: and dangerous, and London had more than its share of
Speaker 1: slums filled with working class families and the unemployed. All
Speaker 1: you have to read is any Charles Dickens novel and
Speaker 1: you'll understand. You'll see this, uh that this was still
Speaker 1: an issue in Britain decades after the unions were finally
Speaker 1: able to form. Now, what about the rest of the world.
Speaker 1: I've talked a lot about Britain, a little bit about America.
Speaker 1: Why haven't I talked about other places. Well, it's largely
Speaker 1: because the industrialization of other countries followed in the footsteps
Speaker 1: of Britain by a few but lagged a few decades
Speaker 1: behind um. And some places had better excuses than others,
Speaker 1: Like France and America both had pretty good excuses. They
Speaker 1: both were undergoing revolutionary wars around the same time Britain
Speaker 1: was undergoing its industrial revolution, and the war was taking
Speaker 1: way more of the focus of the people of France
Speaker 1: and the people of America than any sort of industrial
Speaker 1: revolution could America. Obviously, they concluded their revolutionary war well
Speaker 1: ahead of time before France did, before France had even
Speaker 1: had a revolution, and so we're able to move on,
Speaker 1: and so they caught up not too long after that.
Speaker 1: American ingenuity was something that people were very proud of,
Speaker 1: and they were able to catch up to the Brits
Speaker 1: before too long. France had the other drawback that after
Speaker 1: the French Revolution there were the Napoleonic Wars, which did
Speaker 1: not end until eighteen fifteen, so they didn't move into
Speaker 1: industrialization until after that. Essentially, around that same time, the
Speaker 1: other nations in Europe began to follow suit, and so
Speaker 1: you started to see this pattern where countries were becoming
Speaker 1: industrialized following similar pathways that Britain followed, but several decades behind.
Speaker 1: So that's why we tell the story of the Industrial
Speaker 1: Revolution largely with Britain in mind, because it acts as
Speaker 1: the model for everybody else. But once they got started,
Speaker 1: they actually caught up to Britain pretty quickly. So in
Speaker 1: other words, it didn't take the decades and decades and
Speaker 1: decades of work that happened in Britain to get up
Speaker 1: to about the same speed that Britain was currently at,
Speaker 1: and what followed was an unprecedented era of production and commerce.
Speaker 1: Other inventions would also contribute to a very rapidly changing world.
Speaker 1: You might remember I did an episode with Holly from
Speaker 1: Stuff You Missed in History Class about the sewing machine,
Speaker 1: for example, which it's hard, it's hard to believe, but
Speaker 1: the sewing machine is the subject of one of the
Speaker 1: nastiest patent wars of all time. There were people who
Speaker 1: were willing to to kill or die for their designs
Speaker 1: of the sewing machine. But that was another big uh
Speaker 1: invention that came out around this time, and innovation was
Speaker 1: also changing farming, which was important because so many people
Speaker 1: were leaving the profession of farming to go to cities
Speaker 1: and try something else. A guy named Cyrus McCormick invented
Speaker 1: several large machines that were important in farming, including one
Speaker 1: that was in on a motorizer or mechanized I guess
Speaker 1: should I should say a mechanized reaper designed to harvest
Speaker 1: crops far more quickly than you could by hand. So
Speaker 1: farmers could use machines to meet the demand of these
Speaker 1: larger populations of non farmers. You know, they were able
Speaker 1: to the one farmer was now able to do the
Speaker 1: work of ten or twenty farm hands. You these machines
Speaker 1: because they were much more efficient and fast. When the
Speaker 1: Industrial Revolution was coming to an end in the middle
Speaker 1: of the nineteenth century, the stage was set. Not long
Speaker 1: after this period we would see an unprecedented era of
Speaker 1: scientific discoveries. Some people refer to it as the Second
Speaker 1: Industrial Revolution, because that's when mass production really became a thing,
Speaker 1: when corporations came into existence, and when we started to
Speaker 1: see people harness things like electricity and discover radio waves,
Speaker 1: which ended up powering all these ideas, I mean literally
Speaker 1: powering in the case of electricity, all these ideas including
Speaker 1: radio and television that followed in that Second Industrial Revolution,
Speaker 1: and it also allowed for the age of discovery, where
Speaker 1: we had scientists all over the world starting to break
Speaker 1: new ground in our understanding of the universe, including in
Speaker 1: really weird areas like quantum physics. So that wraps up
Speaker 1: our epic three episode arc on the Industrial Revolution, and honestly,
Speaker 1: I could have easily made this a four part series.
Speaker 1: This episode has been pretty long, but I could have
Speaker 1: gone into even more detail than I already did. And
Speaker 1: perhaps in the future I'll devote an entire episode on
Speaker 1: one of the technologies or one of the innovators I've
Speaker 1: talked about in these shows. For now, however, let's close
Speaker 1: the door on the Industrial Revolution. Next week, we'll have
Speaker 1: an entirely new topic to talk about. That promise, And
Speaker 1: if you guys have any suggestions for future episodes of
Speaker 1: tech Stuff, please get in touch with me. My email
Speaker 1: address is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com,
Speaker 1: or you can drop me a line on Twitter or Facebook.
Speaker 1: My handle at both of those is text stuff H
Speaker 1: s W. And I'll talk to you again really soon
Speaker 1: for more on this and bathos of other topics. Is
Speaker 1: it a stop works dot com, one