Tickets available for Session 8 of The Story of Industrial Civilization: Impacts on Commerce, Politics, and Culture

Tickets are now available for session 8 of my salon series with Interintellect, “The Story of Industrial Civilization”. Sunday, December 19, 10am Pacific.

Topic: Impacts on Commerce, Politics, and Culture

Transportation and information technologies combined to unite the world in a network of commerce and socialization. How did this transform both industry and personal life? In this salon, we’ll explore the second- and third-order effects of these technologies. How did containerization in the shipping industry help create a global market for materials and products? How did retail evolve from the medieval festival, to the rural general store, to the urban department store and supermarket? How did the railroads and the Internet each give rise to massive new mail-order businesses? How did the ability to travel encourage greater cultural exchange and understanding? And how has all of this changed the way we find and form relationships—romantic, business, or community? We’ll discuss these topics and see how the world went from isolation to globalization.

Sign up here.

Interview: “The Age of Unlimited Opportunity” with Austen Allred

Austen Allred and I talked about progress in an interview he titled “The Age of Unlimited Opportunity”. We covered various topics, including:

• The evolution of the threshing machine
• The development of hybrid corn
• The history of factory safety

Also available as an audio podcast on Anchor.fm.

See all my talks and interviews.

Blog interview: Uncharted Territories with Tomás Pueyo

Tomás Pueyo, whose blog you might know from his lucid writings on covid (such as “The Hammer and the Dance”), interviewed me on “The Past, Present, and Future of Energy”. Here’s an excerpt:

The internal combustion engine was the next generation of engines that depended on these refined liquid fuels. Contrasting these engines: steam engines have a huge boiler full of water, and you just literally build a fire underneath it, like you might build a campfire or a cook fire. They can run on anything that burns. As long as you can build a fire, you can run a steam engine. Some steam engines on farms were run on fence posts and corn husks. It’ll eat anything. Some machines that were conceived to go through fields were designed to run on straw. They would go through the fields reaping grain and eating the fuel they cut down as they moved forward.

The challenge with these engines is they’re large and heavy, and in big part that is due to the enormous boiler, which contains a bunch of water because of the inherent inefficiency of using water as a medium to transmit the energy.

The internal combustion engine cuts out the middleman. There’s no boiler, there’s no water. You just ignite the fuel directly in the piston to push it. But to do that, you need a liquid fuel that you can spray into the cylinder. You would not be able to do this with coal or wood because you can’t spray it in there.

And then when it burns, it needs to do so fairly cleanly so that you don’t have ash to dispose of. Refined liquid fuels like kerosene and gasoline were excellent for this purpose.

And so that was the fundamental technology enabling the internal combustion engine, which had a much higher power to weight ratio.

Fun fact: one of the early locomotives circa 1829 called The Rocket and invented by George Stevenson had about the same horsepower as the Ford model T—about 20—but the model T only weighed about 1200 pounds, whereas the Rocket weighed some 9,000 pounds. Same energy, much smaller package.

Read the full interview.

See all my talks and interviews.