Hi. Welcome back. Last time we told some stories about what happened and why some remarkable new scientific capabilities are developed. Let's see how those capabilities are put to work. How the new forces are harnessed, and I can't emphasize this enough, is the Transport Revolution. Let's break that down. Railroads. Railroads allow you to move over land. They allow you to carry cargo over land. Remember, up until the year 1810, 1820, no one on land could move faster than animal power, wind, or water could carry them. Basically, nothing on land, or for that matter nothing on water, moved faster than about 10 miles per hour. And to carry cargo, like anything really heavy, on land was extremely expensive to do more than for a distance of oh, 30, 40, 50 miles. You know, just the size of wagons. The number of animals that would be needed to pull the wagon. So you relied on rivers, lakes, things like that. The railway just changes all of that. It allows you to have overland transportation. And imagine feelings of people who, for the first time, get into a conveyance and they're going 20 miles per hour, 30 miles per hour. People thought they were going to die from shock. No one in all of human history had ever moved this quickly, and they're experiencing it for the first time. Here's a really interesting painting that captures the spirit of this. It's by the British artist J.M.W. Turner, painted in 1844. It's called Rain, Steam, and Speed. One of the things to note about this painting is the sense of blur that's partly produced by how indistinct the whole situation is, as well as a little bit of the sense of speed. You see the train? It's crossing a new bridge. Over on the left-hand side of the painting, you see the old bridge? And the old little rowboat down below, the picturesque remnant of the now vanishing past disappearing into the mist. Let's look back at another part of the painting. Let's look at the way Turner has chosen to portray the new steam engine. It's really a surrealistic image. He's kind of cut away the way the engine looks to kind of show you an indistinct. fiery interior. There's no human being that's really visible there, maybe the faint outline of a fireman feeding fuel into the flames. But just more a sense of something blinding, some kind of light occurring within, driving the thing forward. Another fundamental feature of the Transport Revolution is steamships. Again, you just have to think about the steamship. Well if you had a sailing ship, you could go where the wind could take you. A steamship could take you almost anywhere you wanted to go if there was water there. Riverways? Before it was pretty time consuming and difficult to go upstream. Have any of you ever tried to row a boat upstream? It can be done, but it takes some time. A steamship, of course, just steams upstream. Here's a nice image of a steamship navigating its way up the Zambezi River in East Africa. The passengers gaily firing away at the elephant trumpeting its dismay. But the key point to notice from a historian's perspective about the image is the way the steamship is opening up the rivers. This will be especially important for the rivers of Africa. In addition to a Transport Revolution that now allows you to haul people and goods almost anywhere you want to take them, in new kinds of quantities, there's a Communications Revolution. Communications Revolution. Of course, trains and steam ships, they help, but so does electricity. [SOUND] Think about it. The telegraph. Using the telegraph, you can simply transmit messages by turning current on and off that's running through wires and decoding that into messages using something called Morse Code, for the name of the American who helped popularize the use of the telegraph and the system of signals used to send messages through it. By 1880, here are the standard routes that steamships and telegraph cables could follow to carry not only people and goods but also messages with unusual speed; the message is travelling at the speed of light from one cable station to another. The cables are in the light blue and [INAUDIBLE] see how they skip from point to point, from telegraph station to telegraph station, but going at the speed of electricity. Instead of messages taking weeks or months to reach their destination and weeks or months to gain a reply, now messages could travel in hours, minutes, seconds once the lines have been built. The telegraph is already in widespread use by the middle of the 1800s, and it will soon be followed, in the latter part of the 1800s, by the development of telephones, actual voice communication through wires. Here's one of the early telephone exchanges in the late 1800s in which you would contact an operator and ask the operator to connect you to someone else's wire and then she would do that. That was why they were called the telephone exchange. The operators were usually women hired, in part, because women were more likely to be polite to the people calling on the phone. And, of course, these steam engines could be of enormous use in factories. Now it's not just a matter of messing with cotton yarn. You're using engines to create machine tools that build other machines. In other words, you're creating an age of machines: machines of many, many kinds harnessing fossil fuel power not natural power. So one machine might have the power that earlier was reserved to 1000 horses, 2000 horses. Indeed, to express this conversion ratio, people would talk about hundreds of horsepower. So here we have the picture of industrializing Britain already by 1850. In purple, you can see the coal fields. The main point of the map is to give you a sense of how close many of the key industries are either to port facilities or to coal fields. For instance, the major cotton mills that are becoming the heart of a textile industry for the entire world are centered right here. With the mills, in turn, supplied by the fuel they can get from coal fields here, here, or in Wales. Britain and places like France, Germany, and others on the continent were literally becoming the power sources for a whole new age of industry. So, the next step is to see what all these new capabilities produce. Once these forces are harnessed, a whole new situation presents itself in which new problems arise, new opportunities arise. Next time we'll see how people cope.
