TechStuff Classic: How the Industrial Revolution Worked, Part One

So typically we think of the Industrial Revolution as a period in which automation, mass production, urbanization, all of these things change the way that we humans live. And it's a time in which corporations came into being and we started to see the delineation of work between laborers and management, and the rise of unions and all sorts of stuff.

But it's even more complex than that, and the story doesn't have a clear beginning, middle, and end, which is problematic because we humans like stories that have a clear narrative. But as you guys know, history rarely follows that pattern. So before we can even talk about the Industrial Revolution, we need to see why it was such a big deal, which requires that we look way, way way back. And when I say way back, I'm talking about the Neolithic Revolution.

There are two big revolutions of human behavior and uh and and various things around that that have shaped the way we human beings exist here on the planet. The Neolithic Revolution was the first one, and this took place thousands of years ago, like somewhere between nine thousand and seven thousand BC. That was pretty much when this was

taking place. That's when he Winds began to discover agricultural techniques and we began to transition from hunter gatherer lifestyles where you're very nomadic and you're depending upon finding the food you need day to day, to an agrarian lifestyle where you're actually cultivating food in both crops and livestock. People began to settle down, and the vast majority of people were farmers. So most people, in fact, the vast majority of people were spending their days out in fields,

you know, tending to crops or livestock. Now, the term revolution gives you a couple of implications, and they can be a little misleading. Actually, it implies that we're talking about a moment of abrupt change in history. But that's not really the case with either the Neolithic or Industrial revolutions. These things took a lot of time. Now, the Neolithic Revolution took a great deal of time, we're talking about

a thousand years. But generally speaking, historians bracket the Industrial real Revolution as a period in history that began in seventeen sixty and ended around eighteen fifty in Britain. Europe and the United States and some other areas followed suit in timelines that kind of overlapped Britain's timeline, but Britain got the jump on everybody else. It really got started

in Britain. Now, seventeen sixty to eighteen fifty, that is just one decade short of a full century, and the seeds for the revolution were actually planted centuries before that. So we need to look at the sixteenth century, the fifteen hundred's, the Late Renaissance to kind of get an idea of the sort of things that led up to the Industrial Revolution. And that was a time when philosophy was transforming into science. It's when people began to learn more about how the world works and how to make

practical use of the knowledge they gained. We had really important thinkers like Francis Bacon, John Locke, Galileo Galilei, Aruke Spinoza, Renee des Cartes, and even earlier thinkers like Leonardo da Vinci, all of whom made significant contributions to human knowledge and philosophy. Now, these were the ideas that fueled the Renaissance and led into the Age of Enlightenment. And it's also important to point out that the Industrial Revolution wasn't just about technology.

It was marked by changes in demographics and culture, in socioeconomic conditions, agriculture, manufacturing, and shrade. There were a lot of conditions in place that allowed this transformation to happen in England specifically. In general, we're looking at the time in history when people began to leave the pastoral farms and head into cities to earn a living. Uh The term industrial revolution revolution was popularized by a nineteenth century

English economic historian named Arnold Toynbee. He popularized the term industrial revolution, and he originally defined it as seventeen sixty to eighteen forty, but other historians would begin to expand that outward, looking at a broader range of years to define the Industrial Revolution. They did identify a few trends as being fundamental for the Industrial Revolution to take place, and one of those very important elements was that populations

were growing throughout Europe. We were starting to see more and more people being born in Europe at the time, and it also meant that there were more people available to do work, and also that there was an increasing need to produce more food and clothing for everybody. And as you have probably heard in your lifetimes, necessity is the mother of invention. If you need something, someone's eventually going to come up with an idea of how to

meet that need, or you go without. Now this challengement that many people worked hard on ways to overcome the increase in need for clothing, food, that kind of stuff. And in Britain there were quite a few inventive people who designed machinery and systems to really meet those needs. And it also didn't hurt that England had a really healthy agricultural system with lots of farms spread throughout the country. It was really the right place in the right time

for change to happen. And before the Industrial Revolution, most people were making whatever they needed for themselves, or they would inherit some things from parents or other family members, and only occasionally would they buy something from another person or trade for it. It was pretty rare. There are certain certain um occupations that lent themselves to working well in this environment, but generally speaking, we're still talking mostly farmers.

There really wasn't much of a middle class to speak of before the Industrial Revolution. There were men and women who specialized in certain crafts like carpentry or stonework, but most people just made do with what they had, and that was partly because the cost of produce seeing goods was quite high. It required a lot of labor, a lot of hard work by hand, and it also was not easy to get raw materials or to ship finished goods from one place to another. It was just pretty

challenging to make something and deliberate. On top of that, Europe was emerging from a socioeconomic system in which there were really three main classes of people. You had the nobility, including the royalty. You had the clergy, so everyone involved with the church and pretty much everybody else. Now. The nobility and clergy wielded power in different contexts. Sometimes those

contexts overlapped. Sometimes certain branches of the clergy were in power or not in power, particularly in England, where you had Protestants and Catholics kind of shifting the balance of power throughout the several hundred years from uh the King Henry the eighth era up to the Industrial Revolution. But by seventeen fifty things had changed a lot and a century earlier, around the sixteen fifties sixteen forties, really England had gone through a civil war in which the monarchy

was originally abolished. Uh. Then England was a protectorate for a little while, and then England reinstated the monarchy, but with some big changes. So essentially what happened was you had Parliament originally saying, you know, we don't think kings are such a great idea, and sorry, Charles, we're gonna

get rid of you. We're gonna chuck you and your head out, and we're gonna replace you with a parliament that will govern the country, and we're gonna put Oliver Cromwell as the Lord Protector of England sort of the head of this parliamentary body. Then after a while, uh, some shifting political conditions prompted Parliament to say, you know what, we kind of like it when we had a king

that was kind of awesome. We should we should do that at in We'll be back with more about the early years of the Industrial Revolution right after this break. So England reinstated the monarchy, but in the process Parliament also wanted to make sure the monarch didn't have as much power, so they underwent kind of another transformation, something similar to what had happened when King John had to

sign the Magna Carta back in the thirteenth century. The monarch and the House of Lords saw much of their power stripped away, and Parliament's House of Commons had a greater share of the power. The reason I even bring this up, and you might be saying, well, this is a technology podcast. This isn't stuff you missed in history class. Where are you talking about it? Well, the important part is that this was the decline of nobility in England. They were starting to see less and less power in

their grasp. They were no longer as a effective as they once were. There was instead a rise of a new class, a middle class emerging at the time, and you had merchants who were making a great deal of money and in many cases were much more powerful than nobles who might have a noble title, but not as much money as the merchants did, so we started to see a shift in power, and that condition was very

important for the Industrial Revolution to take place too. Now, among the merchants were some pretty interesting inventors, people who came up with new ways to make work more efficient. And one inventor's work that we need to talk about pre dates the Industrial Revolution by a few decades, but

without his contributions nothing would be the same. So back in seventeen o nine, just a few decades before the official Industrial Revolution, there was an iron master named Abraham Darby, and Darby sussed out how to smelt iron using coke as a fuel. Coke in this case, by the way, doesn't refer to a tasty soft drink. I live in Atlanta, and here coke it means. It means Coca cola. But that's not what I'm talking about when you're looking at smelting iron. Instead, I'm talking about a fuel that has

a very high carbon content. And there are a few different types of coke, but the one that concerns us

in the context of the Industrial Revolution was made from coal. Now, to make coke, you would put coal in an airless furnace or an oven, and you would bake it at really high temperatures, and during that process there would be ash that would form and it would fuse with the carbon inside the coal, and after you're done baking it, you end up with this kind of porous gray fuel solid fuel, and if you burn it, it creates no smoke, but it does release carbon monoxide. So why was Darby's

discovery such a big deal in the first place. Well before he had found a way to use coke as a fuel to smelt iron ore into pig iron, everyone was using charcoal. Charcoal is made by burning wood, which meant that iron works had to be located near or inside forests, and it made it hard to access the iron works, and it also led to deforestation. But England had a steady supply of coal and iron ore, which meant it was well poised to use this material in

lots of new ways. In the eighteenth century, the region northwest of Birmingham along the Southern River became the center for iron works in the early Industrial Revolution. Iron working would also become very important in other parts of the United Kingdom, such as Scotland. Now, in the next episode, i'll talk more about the iron industry and how that

guided England's development. But the important thing to remember is that iron was a vital material during the Industrial Revolution, and dar Rby's discovery would literally fuel it once it caught on. During Darby's own lifetime, however, most iron working facilities continue to rely upon charcoal for fuel, so it's only later that others recognize the value of adopting Darby's approach.

And that's why, even though his his discovery predates the Industrial Revolution, it took a few decades for it to really play a major role in the iron working industry. And that's kind of why we don't don't include that in the Industrial Revolution itself. But as the iron and coal industries grew, so too did the textile industry in England. And that's really kind of the first place we can look at, the first the first factor of the Industrial Revolution. We can look at and see how um advances in

technology dramatically changed the way industry worked in England. So I'm going to focus on textiles or pretty much the rest of this episode. The growth of the textile industry was helped by a couple of really important geographic features. One is that Britain is an island, and as an island, it's got a lot of coastline, which means that there's lots of opportunity for people to build large ports cities. One of them, Liverpool served as an important port for

the textile trade. They would bring in cotton from the American colonies and also from India, and they would end up taking that cotton and moving it over to spinners and weavers, and then when textiles were done, they could ship the finished cloth off to other locations, whether that be in England or Europe, or even back to America. This was one of those things where UH England would take in raw materials from the American colonies, turn it into a finished product and then sell it back to

the American colonies. UH. The region of Lancashire became known for producing cotton goods in particular. So why was Lancashire ideal for textiles? The main reason is that the climate in Lancashire is wet and that makes it easier to work with cotton fibers because as cotton fibers dry out, they become brittle, and Lancashire was several had also has several fast flowing streams, which made it ideal for constructing water powered cotton mills a little bit later on in

the Industrial Revolution. Now, some of the inventions that made the textile industry possible in England require a bit of explanation, So we're gonna do some tech stuff. How stuff works

classic descriptions here. So the first one we need to talk about is an invention created by a weaver named John k It's a device that he made in seventeen thirty three and it's called a flying shuttle, which made weaving wide bands of cloth much more efficient for weavers, and it makes you wonder what the heck of flying shuttle is. So to do that, we have to start off with talking about looms. A loop m is essentially

just a device for weaving and a weave. If you ever look very closely at woven cloth, you'll see there are threads that are in vertical lines and threads that are in horizontal lines, and they weave between one another. So to make a weave, you would use a loom

to hold the threads of one direction. So let's say vertically. Uh, let's say that it's just a simple loom where you've got a frame and you have this this thread called the warp that is threaded up and down on the frame, so you've got odd and even numbered threads, and then you would take a second thread to go in a horizontal direction. This would be the weft, and you would weave that back and forth under and over alternating strings. So, starting with the odd numbers, let's say that you do uh.

String number one you go over, and string number two you go under, and string number three you go over. So for all the odd numbers you would go over, all the even numbers you would go under, and one full pass of that is called a pick. So if you were doing this on a very simple loom, where really you just have the strings there and you're doing all this by hand, it takes a while because you have to weave the the the weft back and forth

through all the strings. But gradually, there were some looms that use some moving parts that made this a lot easier. One used warp frames, where you would you would actually put two different sets of warp thread on these warp frames. One set would be all the odd uh odd threads and one set would be all the even threads. So imagine that it's almost like a sandwich in a way.

You've got one set of these threads. Let's say that's the odd ones that are laying more or less flat in respect to you, and then the other one is actually vertic coal. Uh, these will be the even threads. If you just passed your weft the horizontal line of threads straight across, and then you would use pedals to swap the positions of those two frames, and you know, they just they just passed between each other, and then

you pull the weft back across the other way. This would have at the same effect as weaving the thread up and down across those uh, those those vertical threads, but you're doing it much much faster. Um. However, if you are working by yourself, you pretty much were limited to doing of cloth about as wide as your arm. Beyond that you would need a second weaver to help you out. Until John k came up with this flying shuttle, and uh, that ends up making a huge difference. It

speeds up the weaving process significantly. So, by the way, the prod this of weaving is a little more complicated than just that. After you do a pick, you know, after you pass the weft through the warp, then you have to use a part of the loom called the red to batten the fabric. Now, a reed is like a comb and it is on the far side of where you're bringing the weft through the warp, and you use it to pull the new weft hard against the the previously woven cloth to pack it together to batten

it down. And you have to batten that thread after each pass. And so this is pretty painstaking and obviously if you're doing it by hand, it's really slow work. And if you're all by yourself, like I said, you're limited to that arms width of of cloth because otherwise you would not be able to pass the shuttle that's the device that actually holds the weft thread from one side to the other. Now Kay's invention solved all that. The flying shuttle reduced the number of weavers needed for

widecloth to just one. And here's how it worked. Imagine you've got these two frames of vertical lines of thread, uh, and all the odd lines of thread are on one frame, all the even lines are on the second frame. Those two frames can move so that the shuttle can pass easily between the two sets. Moving the shuttle from one side to the other completes one line of the weave. Then you bring the frames together, pull the horizontal thread and tightly using that red comb so it's packed against

its processors. Then you switch which frame is up and which frame is down, and you pass it again. Just like I said, but case shuttle had wheels on it, and it allowed it to roll quickly in a channel between the two sets of of threads, the two sets of warp threads on the frames. You would pull a rope and this would make the shuttles quickly roll from one side to the other, like left or right or right to left. So you pull the rope, the shuttles

zooms across left or right. You swap the position of the frames and well, first you batten that weft uh and swap the position of the frames, and you pull the rope and it zips across the other side, and you repeat this process. And it really sped things up. And that was just the first of several inventions that made it easier and less expensive to produce cloth, particularly large amounts of cloth. We'll be talking about the industrial revolution a bit more, but first let's take a quick

break for these commercials. Alright, So the flying shuttle sped up weaving significantly. But now there was a new bottleneck in the textile industry, which was making yarn. Weavers could go through yarn faster than yarn could be spun. Yarn would be made by people called spinners. Traditionally, they would use spinning wheels, and normally you would need up to four spinners to port one weaver just to make yarn

fast enough for the weaver to be effective. But this flying shuttle made the weavers even more efficient, so you needed more than four spinners just to be able to produce enough yarn for the weaver to stay active, And so the supply couldn't meet up with the weaving speeds, and that was an issue. Meanwhile, let's let's talk about spinning wheels. It's another interesting technology. Spinning wheels twist fibers into yarn, and I could do an entire episode on

this process. I could probably get someone like Holly from Stuff You Missed in History class to talk about it too, But in general, here's how it works. You've got a large spinning wheel. You've probably seen pictures of these, But the large wheel provides the rotational force for a smaller component called a flyer. So the flyers kind of like a cylinder. Imagine a cylinder on its side. It's in the same plane of rotation as the spinning wheel. But

you then connect the two with a drive band. Um it looks a lot like any kind of belt you would imagine for connecting gears together. So in this case, the large wheel would be a big gear. The flyer is a smaller gear. So as the large wheel rotates, the band connecting it to the flyer makes the flyer rotate as well. But since the flyer is smaller than the big wheel, it's making more rotations per minute than

the big wheel. Uh. And most flyers actually have a section of different grooves the drive band can fit into, and each section is a different circumference, meaning you can adjust the speed of rotation or the ratio of rotation I should say, of the flyer. So it may be that one rotation of the big wheel is the same

as five rotations of the flyer. But then you can swap the band to a different groove that would be slightly smaller, like it would be a smaller circumference around the flyer, and then one rotation of the big wheel might be seven, and rotations of the flyer and then you could move to maybe an even smaller circumference groove on the flyer, and one rotation of the big wheel would be the same as eleven rotations on the flyer. If you're having trouble imagining this, it's a lot like

bike gears or even a transmission. That gear ratio is what determines the speed of rotation between two different rotating objects. So it's pretty interesting stuff that this was something that was important well before there wherever bicycles or cars um now. The flyer also contains a device called a bobbin. Bobbin is the thing that yarn winds around during yarn making. The bobbing itself is perched on a spindle. This would be the thing that sleeping Beauty pokes her finger on

and goes unconscious due to that. So you put the bobbin on a spindle that allows usually allows the bobbin to rotate freely around the spindle, so the spindle is almost like an axle and it allows yarn to wind around it. The purpose for the rotation of this device, by the way, isn't just to pull on fiber or to wind it around the bobbin. It also creates a twist in the fibers themselves, and it's that twist that

turns the fibers into yarn. Traditional spinning wheels have both the drive wheel and the bobbin along that same plane, meaning that the rotation is uh is in the same direction for the two. And it also meant that you were limited to one bobbin and one strand of yarn in the original spinning wheels. But then along came a guy named James Hargreaves who invented something called the spinning

Jenny in sevent sixty four. Spinning Jenny. So what happened was, according to Hargreaves, he came up with this idea when one of his daughters accidentally tipped over a spinning wheel, and so hard Greaves, when he looked at the spinning wheel that was now on its side, notice that the bobbin was continuing to turn even it was now ninety

degrees out of alignment of its usual plane. And then it occurred to him that if he were to change the rotation of this where you use this vertical approach to bobbin's instead of a horizontal approach, you could end up driving multiple spindles with a single wheel. You could do this and make lots of different yarns all at the same time, different different strands of yarn. And uh,

he did make such a device. He created one and it was able to feed yarn to eight spindles at a time, which meant that you could produce eight times the yarn in the same amount of time it would normally take a spinner to do one. Uh. This is amazing. He's produced He's increased productivity by eight times. You keep in mind, remember I said a weaver typically would need four spinners to support the weaver's abilities. Now you have a possible, uh, a device that make a spinner create

eight spindles of yarn. So technically one spinner could support two weavers under that system. And it made quite a stir in his community, so much so that spinners who were worried about their jobs broke into his house and smashed the machine to pieces. But you can't stop progress. Once something's invented, it's gonna pretty much stay invented. And it became much easier to make yarn from either wool

or cotton using the spinning jenny. So this this pulling and twisting of fibers works with both wool and with cotton. You can do this to to create the yarn. By the time of hargreaves death in seventy eight, there were versions of the spinning Jenny that could feed up to eighties spindles simultaneously, but these devices still required human power to work, typically relying on a treadle system, So trundle being like a pedal that you use your foot to

two power you. You'd rock your foot back and forth, kind of like old sewing machines too. In order to create this rotational uh force, There'd be a there'd be a piston essentially, or or a stick really attached to one end of the treadle and around the hub of one of the big wheel, and as you tilt the treadle back and forth, it would cause the wheel to rotate. Now, because this required human power, it still meant that things were a little slow, and that you eventually would have

to take breaks because people need rest. But all that began to change when Richard Arkwright patented a machine in seventeen sixty nine that drew out cotton by passing the fibers through rollers before moving on to the yarn making process. So he created a device where rollers would essentially squish this fiber and make it faster to produce yarn. His original machine used horses to provide the power, so it

literally ran on horse power. But in seventeen seventy one he yeared out how to upgrade the system using water power. Now that created the opportunity for textile mills to grow, becoming mills water powered cotton mills and harnessing those stream powers of England to draw fiber from cotton and make yarn and then weave it into cloth ar great was incredibly successful. You would eventually employ around five thousand people and he even received a knighthood in seventies six first

contributions to English industry. Now, Hargreaves approach was suitable for creating the weft for a weaver. That's that long thread that you use on the shuttle. So this is the horizontal threads. If you think of the vertical threads as the ones that are at touched to the frame. This is the thread you pass back and forth over and over again. Has to be really long because each time it passes, you know you still need to have more

thread to complete the weaving. So our Great's invention was was really good at creating the fiber for the warp, and hargreaves His invention was really great eight for creating the fiber for the weft. These are two different types of of yarn in this case like it just was more suitable for one application versus the other. Now that meant that by combining the spinning Jenny and Arkwright's machine, you could create both types of yarn, and it ended up increasing the speed of yarn making. It was a

huge jump ahead. So now the textile industry is really taking off. Another inventor named Samuel Crompton would improve upon the spinning Jenny. He invented a new spinning machine in seventeen seventy nine. His machine was called the Crompton's Mule, and it combined features of the inventions from Hargreaves and from Arkwright, which meant that you could create yarn that would be that would work for both the warp and the left using this one device. And by the name,

the Crompton's Mule is actually a pun. So the spinning Jenny got its name from Hargreaves's daughter who knocked over the spinning wheel and get which gave him the idea. But a jenny is also the name for a female donkey, and if a donkey mates with a horse, the product is a mule. Thus Crumpton's mule is the descendant of the spinning jenny, which is cute, right, I mean, I

appreciate it, but I like puns. At this point, spinners could finally outpace weavers, so the flying shuttle originally made It made a demand on yarn that spinners were having trouble meeting. But now with the with Crompton's mule and these other devices, there was a yarm production that was outpacing the weaving. But the balance was restored when another inventor came along named Edmund Cartwright, who created a water driven loom and that's sped up the weaving process even more.

And Cartwright got the idea because he visited a water powered mill that Arkwright had des mind. So with this invention, there was now a new demand on cotton imports. So you see where the shifting demands have created the opportunity for people to invent machines to make things faster. First it was the need to speed up the weaving process. Then the need to speed up the yarn making process to meet the weaver's needs. Then weaving was falling behind.

And now that they are both very fast compared to the way the process was just a few decades earlier. There was a greater need for raw material, raw cotton, and so the demand shifted from England to the places where they were importing cotton from, which was largely the American colonies. So I'm going to close out this particular episode with another famous invention that kept the industrial revolution rolling along strongly, and this one was an invention that

happened here in America. So keep in mind that the Industrial Revolution and did affect the United States. The United States did have an industrial revolution, it just started later in the US than it did in England. In fact, England had instituted bands on the exportation of machinery and knowledge. England government did not want the industrial knowledge to get outside of the country because they wanted to have a

competitive edge over other nations, particularly in Europe. But in America, there was a fellow named Eli Whitney who invented the cotton gin and I think pretty much everyone in elementary school at some point. Here's the story of Eli Whitney inventing the cotton gin. This was invented in the late seventeen hundreds. Now what is the cotton gin. Well, first of all, cotton, when you pick cotton, you're actually picking

a flower that looks like it's exploded everywhere. And cotton has a lot of seeds in it, and in order for you to turn cotton into yarn, you have to pick the seeds out, and that's very painstaking. It's a very slow process. Typically you would hand comb cotton with wire combs to get all the seeds out, and it takes time and a lot of effort. But the cotton

gin made the process much easier and faster. So what Eli Whitney did was he created essentially a spinning drum that has a handle crank handle attached to it, so

you turned the crank that makes the drums spin. On the drum, he had a set of wire teeth all along the drum side and that would just comb straight through the cotton bowls cotton balls being the name of the the raw cotton that you've picked off the plant, and that would pull out the seeds, so the seeds and and some strands of cotton would get dumped out the bottom of this device, and on the other side of it you would get cotton that had been cleaned, had been the seeds had been picked out of it,

and all you had to do was turn the crank and it was much faster and took way less work than having to use combs to hand pick the seeds out of the cotton. So demand in England for cotton was really high, and this was just one of the ways the industrial Revolution was spreading beyond Britain itself, and of course, in the case of the United States, we have to mention this development is also connected to some truly awful moments in history, including the displacement of Native

American tribes. Because you had Southern farmers who needed access to greater amounts of land, they wanted to grow more cotton. There was a lot of money in cotton. It was an incredibly valuable cash crop. Because the demand in England was so high for the cotton. Uh so the farmers wanted to have more land, and the easiest way they saw to get more land was to displace Native American tribes that had been living on that land for generations and making them move to other places and then they

repurpose that land to grow cotton. That was one of the really ugly things that was a result of this particular explosion of industry. The other was the reliance upon slavery, a horrible institution that was very popular in the South at this time in American history. So obviously both of those things are terrible, but they also both made the early Industrial Revolution possible. The way it it unfolded so terrible thing, but we do have to acknowledge it. So

we're just getting started with the Industrial Revolution. These are still the early years of the Industrial Revolution, but the textiles really led the way. They showed that something that originally took a very painstaking, slow handcrafted process could be

made easier through technology. And as it was made easier, it could also be made more cheaply, which also that there could be you could sell it to more people, there could be a greater demand actually, and that that in turn created a demand for people to work in this industry. It gave created jobs in this new emerging

middle class in England. Now, our next episode will look more at the iron industry and how that developed during the Revolution, including things like developing some pretty impressive architectural structures like bridges and canals, and will also talk about the development of the steam engine. And the third installment, I'm planning on talking more about how the Industrial Revolution took place in other parts of the world, including America.

Also that emergence of the working class and what conditions were like for the working class during the Industrial Revolution, How the technology of the time influenced the world we live in today, everything from just the way we think about work, the nature of work itself has been shaped

by technology. Also the way that developing nations today are having their own industrial revolutions and the problems that that are that creates, as well as we try and factor in things like how how can we encourage developing nations to be environmentally conscious when in our own past, both in in Europe and in the United States, we have gone through this same process, you know, a hundred and fifty to two hundred years earlier, but we didn't worry

about environmental concerns while we went through that process. That didn't that was not something that we thought about while that was going on, And yet we're placing those sort of demands on other people today. I hope you enjoyed that classic episode the first part of a three part series. Next week we will continue with part two. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out and let me know the best way to do that. Well, there's two ways.

One is to download the i Heart Radio app, which is free to download and use. You can navigate over to tech Stuff on the search bar and you can use a little microphone icon there to leave a voice message up to thirty seconds in length letting me know what you would like in future episodes. Or you can reach out to me on Twitter. The handle for the show is text Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon Y. Text Stuff is an

I heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.