We pick up our story on the quickening pace of life with the Industrial Revolution. Our hosts, Tim Berglund and Rachel Pedreschi, examine agriculture, the steam engine, the machine power of factories, the evolution of print, and the advent of the telegraph. News is getting faster, productivity continues to rise, and life won't be slowing down anytime soon. New episodes every Tuesday from March 12-June 4.
Keyboard and Quill is created and made possible by StarTree, hosts of the Real-Time Analytics Summit for data professionals. Get 30% off registration.
SPECIAL THANKS TO: Rachel Pedreschi and Claritype Link: claritype.com
-- Story by Tim Berglund and Rachel Pedreschi Produced by Peter Furia, Noelle Gallagher, and Tim Berglund Edited by Noelle Gallagher and Peter Furia Original music and sound by Jeff Kite, keyboardist for The Voidz
We pick up our story on the quickening pace of life with the Industrial Revolution. Our hosts, Tim Berglund and Rachel Pedreschi, examine agriculture, the steam engine, the machine power of factories, the evolution of print, and the advent of the telegraph. News is getting faster, productivity continues to rise, and life won't be slowing down anytime soon. New episodes every Tuesday from March 12-June 4.
Keyboard and Quill is created and made possible by StarTree, hosts of the Real-Time Analytics Summit for data professionals. Get 30% off registration.
SPECIAL THANKS TO: Rachel Pedreschi and Claritype Link: claritype.com
-- Story by Tim Berglund and Rachel Pedreschi Produced by Peter Furia, Noelle Gallagher, and Tim Berglund Edited by Noelle Gallagher and Peter Furia Original music and sound by Jeff Kite, keyboardist for The Voidz
- Okay, alright.- Hi.- And then, you're-- One more time.(light music)- You're listening to-- Keyboard and Quill.- From StarTree, creators of the Real-Time Analytics Summit.- And Podcast.(bright rhythmic music continues)- Hi, I'm Tim Berglund.- I'm Rachel Pedreschi. This is Keyboard and Quill.- In part one, we looked at the quickening pace of life from literal pre-history, the hunter-gatherer origins of people through agriculture and the development of writing, and prints of writing including the printing press in Europe, and kinda stopped there.- It was 45,000 years. We were really tired afterwards.- We were, but we're ready for part two. We're gonna pick up here in the middle of the 1700s, in England.- Okay, let's do that. Shall we fire up the time machine again then?- It's time.- Yay!(time machine whirring)(air whooshing)(gentle string music)- Now, why England, why 1755? It seems-- Yeah, that seems very random.- Oddly specific.- Yes.- Well alright, things were about to change. Now, the previous decades had seen a dramatic increase in agricultural productivity. It was little things like crop rotation and just kind of getting better at planting. You know, there were no machines, there was no hydrocarbon fertilizers, just people are better at growing things.- Okay. They were getting good at growing things, you're saying?- Yes, yes. Which is good 'cause we're gonna need fewer people to be farmers very soon. So, life as this hypothetical English farmer in 1755 is coming at the end of a series of boosts in productivity, not just agricultural, but many centuries of solid economic growth.- And they're coming faster and faster, it seems.- Faster and faster. So you have about $2,000 GDP per capita at this point in England compared to around $1,000, 300 years earlier so.- And no concept of that 45,000 years ago.- No. Right, right, right. That was-- A couple cave paintings.- Yeah-- I mean, that's worth a couple bucks, right?- No money, but you know, very, very minimal economic production. So, it's a wealthier place. You know, on the farm, are you gonna call that fast paced? No, you're not. You still move around by walking, riding a horse, there are printing presses. Do you read? I actually don't have literacy data on them, but you're farmer, you probably don't. You live life near where you were born and you don't go that far. You get news from the city, but not that often. And does it matter? You know, life goes on kind of as it has.- And you probably stay in the same valley that you were born in, and you farm the same way that your parents farmed.- Yeah, life by modern standards is slow, but it's about to get a lot faster.(gentle ethereal music)- Return now, in your imagination, 200 years ago. It was an England of quiet villages, by far the greater portion of the population was engaged in farming or other rural occupations. But the standard of living was low. And then, within the next 100 years, the nation was transformed.(train whistling and chugging) Villages became towns, towns became cities, and manufacturing was transferred from quiet homesteads to factories. This transformation we call the Industrial Revolution.- And that wasn't just limited to England, right, the Industrial Revolution swept through-- Absolutely, global. It started in England, that's why we went to where we are, 1755, English farmer.- What is it, was it James Watt and his apocryphal tale of his mother's tea kettle?- Mother's tea kettle. Yeah, he actually, James Watt actually does have a very legitimate part in this story. But it starts in 1764.- James Watt, how often have I told you not to waste your time?- I'm not wasting my time, mother, I am inventing something.- What are you inventing, laddie?- A steam engine.- The legend of young James Watt and his mother's tea kettle is of course untrue.- That was one of the worst Scottish accents I've ever heard.- That was difficult, I need to acknowledge that. For the sake of our Scottish listeners, I apologize. Apparently, there's this apocryphal story about James Watt inventing the steam engine by watching his mother's tea kettle boil or something. This is his, you know, Archimedes getting in the bath saying, "Eureka" moment.- Did that not happen either?- There's good reason to believe that happened.- Oh, okay.- This thing was just-- You could've crushed all of my Bill and Ted version of history.- And I don’t, yeah, I don't like that crushing all of the dreams, some of this stuff actually happened. We talked about this in the last episode, like with the printing press, there are these other ideas that precede the one that gets the press, if you will.- Ba-dum-bum.- We'll see it with the telephone, we'll see it with the telegraph. You know, there are all these bad attempts where the idea is out there.- It's like something's in the air.- Yeah. And there had been steam engines in use since 1712.- Oh wow, so it's been around for a while.- A while, yeah, a lifetime. And the reason why they don't get the press and they didn't change the world is cause they didn't work very well. It was kinda hard to use them. But this guy Watt, in 1776, deploys his new model of a steam engine for a Scottish ironworks, and there was no going back. After a short break, we'll be back with more on the Industrial Revolution.(warm rhythmic music)(warm rhythmic music continues)(warm rhythmic music continues)(warm rhythmic music fading)- I'm Rachel Pedreschi.- I'm Tim Berglund.- This is "Keyboard and Quill." We're gonna keep going with our show on the quickening pace of life with steam power.- This was one of those things where it spread like fire. You know, within 10 years, you had textile mills and ironworks, and all these things were running on copies of Watt's steam engine. It's a dramatic change. It's like the printing press, it's like the internet, it's like digital computers, it's that kind of transformational thing. What does this have to do with the pace of life?- Yeah, what does it have to do with the pace of life? Why are we talking about tea kettles?(Tim laughing) Tea kettles make my pace of life slow way down, let me tell you.- Do they? Okay, alright. It depends on the tea you're brewing, I suppose. Now, there's this motivation to centralize production. You've got this big source of energy, you're burning coal, you're making steam. That means you can build factories. People are starting to figure out how to build machines that are steam powered. Now there was a need to employ all these people in cities, in factories, and they couldn't also be growing food. So with people moving from the farm to the city, what do we know about life in the country versus life in the city? Faster paced.- Right. And so you didn't need as much, what you call here, metabolic energy in order to get the same amount of work done.- Right. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, all of the power that we could deploy against a task was metabolic. It wasn't all human, right? There were horses, oxen, whatever. But anything you're gonna do, you're gonna shape a piece of iron, you're gonna cut something, you're gonna do it with your hands or you're gonna do it with an animal or something like that. And now with the Industrial Revolution, fundamentally what's happening is we're transcending that metabolic limit and using coal initially to heat steam and move things. Now Rachel, it's a good thing we have a time machine, we are kinda jumpin' all over the place a little bit. So on that point of productivity, we're gonna set our time machine to the late 40s, and move over to the United States and listen to what folks were saying about the impact on productivity that the Industrial Revolution had brought.- Ooh, sounds cool.- This is a clip from 1949. Keep that in context as we play this clip.- We use machines to make our clothes, we use machines to grow our food. With machines we lay down concrete, with machines we tear up concrete. Printing, bookkeeping. From stitching shoes to stamping steel with giant hammers, to scooping up the earth 32 tons at a time. But it hasn't been this way very long, even with us. The scene is 1850.- Let's see how the work was divided. Animal power, 50%; manpower, 20%; machine power, 30%.- So this clip came out in 1949, I wonder what it was like then.- Let's ask.- Summarize the situation today. Animal power, 2%; manpower, little more than that; machine power, 94%.- And again, you know, we need to acknowledge it was definitely not all roses getting there. And that clip we just played from 1949 is certainly projecting a deep and rosy optimism. But, it's important to acknowledge there were difficult parts about the Industrial Revolution as well.- The life of the average English worker, and this term in those days included women and children of tender age, was a miserable struggle for existence
in which there were two enemies:
the employer and the machine.- That's kinda how I feel about my Slack app today.- Yeah, I'm with ya on that, that's how I feel about email. But yeah, again, there were tremendous abuses of labor throughout a lotta the Industrial Revolution. It was a difficult transition in people trying to figure out the right way to make factories work.'Cause we'd had more than 10,000 years to figure out how to make farms work, and now all of a sudden, there's this huge explosion of investment and this totally new way of working. It was a little bumpy getting there. But let's stay focused on communication. We've been trying to keep the lens... In part one, we were tryna think about text as much as possible, and what did steam power do to the printing press?- So in 1814, the London newspaper, The Times, found out they actually deployed the first steam-powered printing press.- Oh, nice.- So what did this do to the cost of text, and to the amount of texts that we are regularly exposed to, and even-- I have a guess.- Yeah. And to the distribution of that news? We're gonna listen here to Tom Mullaney, from Stanford, talk about what happens when you can distribute information faster.- The first newspaper outfit is industrializing the production, and thereby driving the cost of production far lower. At that point in time, the original master is still being set by what are known as compositors, type setters, by hand. And this is a laborious, meticulous process, it takes hours, and hours, and hours. At the turn of the 20th century, the rise of a new technology completely changed that game once again, called hot metal composing, through the company Mergenthaler Linotype. The Linotype machine was this sort of pipe-organ-sized device, where an operator no longer set type by hand, they sat down at a keyboard and typed out the copy of the newspaper article or whatever it is. And this machine would, in real-time, load up molds that have the mold of the letter "T," the mold of letter "F." It would line those up based on what the person had keyboarded in. And then in real-time, it would injection mold a molten alloy that would be pressed into the mold and then cool near instantaneously, it cools very, very fast. And then the machine would spit out what is called a line of type, hence the term "Linotype." And you don't have to distribute it after, you literally dump it back into the molten pot and it melts down ready for the next round of injection molding. What does this mean? This means you can drive the cost of papers down, but also if you're the editor, if you're the publisher, you can hold off on the deadline for late breaking news. You can wait till later in the day to include news because you don't have to compensate for the time it takes to set the type. And so you can scoop your competitor.- Wow, that was really interesting.- It was, oh my goodness.- And fun side note, my father was a pressman for the Los Angeles Times for 35 years.- Okay so, you know, a small town newspaper.- Yeah, a little tiny newspaper. I grew up wandering around the pressroom and-- That is so cool.- Yeah. They used offset printers, which are very similar I think in theory to these Linotype, which is a great word. But in essence, this industrialization of text production allowed the unit cost of text to get cheaper. And people found that they have a higher demand for that information, so they wanna go faster.- It is really interesting that it gets cheaper, and there's all this more text, and people seem to want more. You know, it's like the Kylo Ren effect.(Tim and Rachel laughing) There's demand-- Did you really need to bring "Star Wars" into this?- More! I, it’s not gonna, I'm not gonna stop.- Okay.- I mean, I think you should challenge me for bringing the sequels into this, I'll take that critique. But yeah, you make text cheaper and they want more, and like you said, faster.- And what do you think this does to society?- Yeah, like how does this change the people? Let's see what Tom has to say about that.- Yeah, your morning paper has the breaking news, theirs doesn't. And so they have to move to hot metal composing to compete.- And what does that do to the consumers of this type? You don't think about it, but news is faster.- News is faster. Suddenly, and this is a famous theoretician of the nation state, Benedict Anderson, "Imagined Communities," it's been identified as probably the top 100 most important books ever published. The argument that he makes is that for someone living through this or in the aftermath, this changes our mind. Suddenly, the average person today with one Sunday newspaper will encounter more printed material than a person living in the early modern world might have encountered in a year of their life, just like one Sunday paper. But also, it has stories in seemingly real-time from all over the world. The war, the latest stock market news, the latest this. And it creates this vision and what he refers to as this "imagined community" that over time, the person actually begins to feel a connection and identification with a hypothetical community of people that they will actually never meet in their real life.- Dude, I mean, that's the story of social media right there, right? Like you can't-- Absolutely.- So imagine communities is social media.- Yeah, yeah. After a short break, we'll pick up the pace with the telegraph. But first, let's finance our next studio session.- At the tone, please record your message.(answering machine beeping)- Hi, this is Moritz Lau from Schermbeck, Germany. Keyboard and Quill is made possible by StarTree, hosts of the Real-Time Analytics Summit, an annual conference that brings together professionals in a data space to discuss harnessing actionable insights from real-time data. Join us to learn, teach, connect, and have an amazing time with the best community and user-facing, real-time analytics world.- Register now, at rtasummit.com.- I'm Rachel Pedreschi.- I'm Tim Berglund.- This is "Keyboard and Quill."- We're gonna keep going with our show on the quickening pace of life with the telegraph.(Tim's voice echoing) I wanna get to telecommunications a little bit, and I mean a little bit. We're gonna cover it in an episode dedicated to the topic, but I just wanna tell a simple story about the telegraph.- Okay.- And kinda start there. Now, the good old Morse code telegraph was first demonstrated in 1838, over two miles of wire, sort of the American schoolbook story of the message,"What Hath God Wrought," the first telegraph message, you know? It wasn't actually until 1844, six years later, and it was a longer demonstration and everything. But you know, at this point, you've got this way of transmitting text electronically. There are electrical telegraph networks that are suddenly spreading all over the United States, all over the world. And during this type story, Rachel, that you and Tom were just telling, now all of a sudden information can move at the speed of speed of light.- Yeah 'cause you don't need to actually distribute anything anymore.- Right. You know, if you think of the crassest example of a good old cuneiform tablet, that's this big chunky piece of porcelain or whatever.- Or a cave drawing that wasn't gonna go anywhere.- Yeah, it was very difficult to move cave drawings, it's very impractical for travel. And now, information is massless. And so you've got within a decade of the 1838 demo, 10,000 miles of telegraph wire in the United States. And within 20 years of the first telegraph demo, there was an undersea cable linking the US and Europe. So text messaging had come to the world. Not just the production of printed text being rendered cheaper by steam power, but the transmission of text was rendered instant and much cheaper by wires. The neat thing happening here was, I like to use the word dematerialization. You know, at its essence... Like Rachel, when you and I are talking, we're exchanging information. I mean, ideally, right?- I don't know if everything we exchange is information.- I understand you might...- Sometimes it's just random banter.- Just complete stupidity. I think as soon as I said that, I knew she was gonna object. But like, what is in-how much does information weigh, how long is it?- That's a deep philosophical question.- It is a nonsense question. Now, as soon as I say that, there's gonna be a materialist philosopher who's gonna come and wanna get in my face. Hopefully, they're not listening right now. But, the information is being reduced to kind of its fundamental massless state. The text in our lives is decoupling itself from the material things that we've been using to represent text.- And I feel like this is gonna come up, something around ones and zeros, and ons and offs.- It prefigures that, doesn't it? It really does. It's beginning with the telegraph, but with computers and software, it's gonna get carried to its extreme, at least as far as we can imagine.- I never really put two and two together that the steam engine and computers are so intrinsically linked in the evolution of modern communication.- Yeah. So you have the telegraph, then 1876, we're doing voice over wires, human speech is traveling over using electrical signals. Pretty soon, that gives way to radio, so we would be able to send telegraph messages and voice messages over radio. Radio emerges as this communications and entertainment medium. And you know, suddenly there are radio sets as consumer products that are in homes, and radio broadcasts as ad-supported services. All this stuff starts to happen very quickly.(gentle ethereal music) We started this whole thing with cave paintings, and you know, there's a similarity here, we're still trying to figure out how to express ourselves. And like you said, you can't really move a cave, but a TV broadcast, I mean, it's a real-time phenomenon. It's, as it were, in motion all the time.- We've taken this to extreme'cause not only can we read about anything or hear anything, but we can actually see anything that happens virtually anywhere in real-time.- Yeah, by the time you have TV and TV penetration in homes.- And we're not even at World War II yet.- We are not, no. All of this, like the dawn of TV, this is happening in the late 1930s. And you know, we're telling a very narrow portion of the story. There's a lot more going on in the 20th century, not all-- Just a few things.- Not all of it's good. And there are some other good things, like agricultural productivity that's being mechanized as machines take on more and more of the metabolic power. All of a sudden it's getting much easier to grow food, and fewer people live on farms, more people live in cities, again contributing to the overall quickening of the pace of life. And from this point, if we just kinda stop in the late 30s with the first commercial TV station, it's about 90 years before the first real smartphone. We started the last episode, this whole discussion, with thinking about my phone wiggling in my pocket when I get a credit card fraud notification in real-time.- Still a delightful image.(Tim laughing)- But we've got all the pieces in place now technologically for that progression to happen. There's lots more to talk about, but this is a good place to kinda recap. Where did we start? If you take this whole story in, this story of this relentlessly accelerating pace of life and pace of innovation, we started with hunter/gatherers becoming farmers.- And then those farmers formed towns and cities.- And in cities, people specialize. You might make leather goods, I might make things outta ceramic.- But in the production of those various goods, we needed contracts, and record keeping. And writing-- Led to alphabets-- And printing and movable type press-- And machines that spin wool into thread, that weave fabric, that power iron production.- And then we hit the limits of metabolism as an energy source-- And replaced it with steam. And we brought that to not just weaving, but printing, and there's newspapers and they're everywhere and they're affordable.- But then the telegraph comes and reduces these messages from objects to be carried to information being transmitted.- The telephone does the same with voice-- The television does the same with images-- And the world's information is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. It's right there available to you and comes from anywhere on the planet.- And we don't even have pocket computers yet.- No, we don't. We're stopping here in the late 30s. And from where we sit here, there is a lot to look forward to. Again, we're not tackling the whole history of the 20th century, there's a lot of very dark things that are not things to be looked forward to from here. But in terms of this progression, we'll develop digital computers, telecommunications networks are gonna improve drastically, things are gonna go digital. Undersea cables will mount a come back, we'll get fiber optic cables. Computers will get cheap enough for typical people in the developed world to have them in their homes. And we'll connect those computers, and phones will go mobile, and all these things will converge. I mean, you think life is fast paced in 1938, we've barely gotten started.(gentle rhythmic music) Many thanks to Dr. Thomas Mullaney from Stanford, and Dr. Mara Mills from NYU. You can find links to their work in the show notes.- Also, thank you to Coastal Kites for the music you heard during our interlude. It's available on Spotify and Apple Music. Our show is produced by Peter Furia, Noelle Gallagher, and Tim Berglund. It was written by Tim Berglund-- And Rachel Pedreschi. It was edited by Noelle Gallagher and Peter Furia. And our amazing original music and sound design were created by Jeff Kite of The Voidz.- "Keyboard and Quill" is made possible by StarTree, hosts of Real-Time Analytics Summit. Registered now, at rtasummit.com.- You can subscribe to"Keyboard and Quill" for free wherever you listen to podcasts, including Apple, Spotify, and YouTube. Please leave us a comment and a rating if you have a minute. And if you're a data professional, you should check out the"Real-Time Analytics" podcast, which we launched in early 2023. New episodes every Monday, link in the show notes. I'm Tim Berglund.- And I'm Rachel Pedreschi.- See you next time.(gentle rhythmic music)(gentle rhythmic music fading)