LITEROTICA PODCAST
LIT CAMS (200 Free Tokens)ADULT TOYSVOD MOVIES

I like Trains

oggbashan said:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephenson**7s_Rocket

https://rich1698.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/l.jpg
Click to expand...



"This is why Rocket's moment in history is unique. That soot-blackened locomotive sits squarely at the deflection point where a line describing human productivity (and therefore human welfare) that had been as flat as Kansas for a hundred centuries made a turn like the business end of a hockey stick. Rocket is when humanity finally learned to run twice as fast.

It's still running today. If you examined the years since 1800 in twenty year-increments, and charted every way that human welfare can be expressed in numbers— not just annual per capita GDP, which climbed to more than $6,000 by 2000, but mortality at birth (in fact, mortality at any age); calories consumed; prevalence of disease; average height of adults; percentage of lifetime spent disabled; percentage of population enrolled in primary, secondary, and postsecondary education; illiteracy; and annual hours of leisure time— the chart will show every measure better at the end of the period than it was at the beginning. And the phenomenon isn't restricted to Europe and North America; the same improvements have occurred in every region of the world. A baby born in France in 1800 could expect to live thirty years— twenty-five years less than a baby born in the Republic of the Congo in 2000. The nineteenth century French infant would be at a significant risk of starvation, infectious disease, and violence, and even if he or she were to survive into adulthood, would be far less likely to learn how to read..."
​


-William Rosen
The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention
New York, New York 2010.​

​


Wow! I don't know where William Rosen has been hiding all these years (the dust jacket blurb says Rosen is: "the author of the award-winning history Justinian's Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe, was an editor and publisher at Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, and the Free Press for nearly twenty-five years" ) but this book is a riveting, tour-de-force recounting of the Industrial Revolution that is beautifully written and thoroughly researched. Rosen is very clearly a bit of a polymath; he moves easily from the chemistry of iron and combustion to the geology of England's Midlands to the physics of Newcomen's steam engine to the inventions of John Smeaton.


I do not recall why I became aware of this book but in one of those incidents of pure serendipity, I espied it on the shelf of my library. I'm luckier for it. Libraries and bookstores have an awful effect on me; after fifteen minutes in one, I inevitably end up feeling stupid. This is a book that ought to be read by every person who purports to be educated.


This book has made me all too well aware of my near total ignorance of the events and persons responsible for the miracle of the Industrial Revolution. Silly me! I thought I knew something about it.

​
​


​
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

W
Incest -- what's the appeal?
2
Replies
36
Views
859
MindYaBitness
MindYaBitness
JohnEngelman
The Jewish Study Bible, Second Edition
Replies
2
Views
253
live4thebj
live4thebj
TheTwistedPixie
Guiltiness & Shame (this might be the dumbest post ever sry)
Replies
23
Views
953
Cultivateddesires
Cultivateddesires
X
GIVING and/or Getting (the story of me)
Replies
1
Views
96
xXxplorher
X
Shaglus_Ziegler
Chatting with the new fake “god AI.
Replies
0
Views
188
Shaglus_Ziegler
Shaglus_Ziegler
Back
Top