Industrial civilization - Topics

Chinese blast furnaces and cast iron a thousand years before Europe Data centers now use more electricity than some small countries Mass production made goods cheap and most work meaningless What makes a technology general purpose? Railroads imposed standardized time zones on people who liked local noon Industrial civilization runs on a fuel it cannot replace in time Standardized screws did more for industry than any single machine Is industrial civilization a phase or the whole modern story? Child labor laws were resisted by families that needed the wages The gap between invention and adoption is usually longer than people think Smog killed thousands of Londoners in 1952 and finally forced a law Industrial farming feeds eight billion people and erodes the soil doing it Resistance to new technology: were the Luddites actually wrong? Why coal and not wood decided which countries got rich first The factory clock disciplined workers long before any boss did Does deindustrialization mean a country stops being an industrial civilization? Patent systems and the pace of invention — is the link real? Is the information economy just industrial civilization with cleaner air? Why the Industrial Revolution began in Britain and not in China Every city built around the car is now paying for it Did a middle class exist before the industrial era? Company towns built loyalty and trapped whole families