Crash Course Module 1

Subtopic 1
Intro to History of Science
(00:00) to (02:00) Hello, and welcome to our new series, Crash Course History of
Science. My name is Hank Green, and I've wanted to produce this course for years. I'm
obsessed with how people throughout the ages have uncovered truths about the
universe and converted these into a wealth of technological wonders. This process has
decreased the suffering of millions of humans, even as it's sparked entirely new
problems.
Regardless of the outcomes of scientific inquiry, the process itself is fascinating. The
world you inhabit today is full of gadgets that once belonged to science fiction. We can
model what the Earth looked like millions of years ago, or zoom in and observe the
atoms that make up our own bodies.

We are going to be telling that inspiring story. We'll be thinking about thinking with
Aristotle, digging canals in Song Dynasty China, listening to robot musicians in medieval
Turkey, fighting an electrical war in New York City, and discovering the shape of DNA in
Cold War England.

But the history of science is not only a story of humanity's collective movement from
ignorance to knowledge, for two different reasons. First, as much as scientists today
may not like to always admit it, we are still pretty ignorant. And we don't agree on what it
would mean to reach the ultimate Truth, with a capital T.

Take a big question that we've been asking for a long time, like "what is stuff". While
modern physicists will tell you that stuff is made of atoms and that atoms are made of
quarks and leptons, we still don't know why quarks exist or why there appears to be far
more matter in the universe than we can account for. Even something as basic as "stuff"
needs a lot more sciencing!

Second, and more importantly for historians, science isn't a stable idea, or even a single
idea. That's why, in this episode, we're going to be thinking about some ways to answer
a deceptively simple question: what is the history of science the history of?

 (intro music) (02:00) to (04:00) Today, "science" can mean both our body of knowledge
about the world as well as the methods we use to create that knowledge, or how we
know the stuff that we know. Within that "how," there are two main practices—things
that we do to systematically generate knowledge.

One, observe some specific aspect of the world. For example, Darwin spent decades
obsessively observing the subtle variations in different kinds of barnacles, orchids,
turtles, birds, and other living things. This led him to theorize how they had changed
over time. My dude loved barnacles!
Two, conduct an experiment to answer some question about the world. Did Galileo drop
two metal balls of different masses from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, to show that they
fall at the same rate and disprove Aristotle's theory of gravity? Probably not. But Dutch
thinkers Simon Stevin and Jan Cornets de Groot did conduct that experiment soon
after. 

Today, we have much larger "towers" for testing theories in physics. The Large Hadron
Collider is seventeen miles long!

Finally, when I say systematically, I mean that there are rules about observing or
experimenting—rules that anyone can follow. That notion of anyone being able to be a
scientist is super important. In fact, a lot of contemporary scientists have three Latin
words tattooed on their arms: "Nullius in Verba," "on no one's word."

Let's explore this phrase, because it's important. In this series, The Thought Bubble is
going to bring to life different wonders from the history of science. Today, our wonder is
pretty abstract: the wonder of the reproducible experiment.

"Nullius in Verba" is the motto of the Royal Society, this group of knowledge-makers
that was founded in 1660 as a, quote, "College for the Promoting of Physio-
Mathematical Experimental Learning," and re-founded in 1663 as the Royal Society of
London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge. And it's still around today.

 The Society was started as a place to debate new ideas about nature. Its members
demonstrated experiments in front of each other while witnessing the proofs behind
their theories. They wrote up these theories in the Society's Philosophical Transactions,
one of the world's oldest peer-reviewed scientific journals. (04:00) to (06:00) Influenced
by Francis Bacon's ideas, which would eventually become associated with the "scientific
method," the founding members of the Royal Society chose a motto with an
unambiguous meaning: Don't believe something just because someone tells you it's
true. Test out each new hypothesis, or educated guess, yourself. In other words, your
individual proof of how some natural phenomenon works should be something that
anyone can reproduce.

This idea had an enormous impact on the history of science. Later members of the
Royal Society included stars like Ike Newton, Ben Franklin, Mike Faraday, Chuck
Darwin, even Big Al Einstein, who was about as British as sauerkraut. In fact—plot twist!
—the early scientists who adopted the creed "Nullius in Verba" were not actually
"scientists."

They were well-off alchemists and medical doctors, and they called themselves natural
philosophers, or "people who loved truths concerning the world around them." Natural
philosophy in seventeenth-century England was sort of like the contemporary natural
science mashed up with medicine, mathematics, some philosophy philosophy, and a
whiff of religion.

The word "scientist" was only coined recently, in historical terms, in the 1830s, and
caught on around 1840. It was made up by an English scientist named William Whewell
who was also a historian of science and a priest. So if we only cared about the history of
people called "scientists," our job would be easy–there aren't any until around 1840.
And most people called scientists, or natural philosophers, looked suspiciously similar to
one another.

 Take the Royal Society. Its members have been, until recently, almost exclusively rich
Englishmen. Even though their ranks have included many incredibly clever scientists,
they haven't represented anything like all knowledge makers. The sixty-second
President of the Royal Society, biophysicist Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, is the group's
first non-white leader. And there has never been a female president. But the history of
systematically knowing stuff obviously goes back much further than the Royal Society
and includes more types of people than English blokes. (06:00) to (08:00) Thus, science
is a historical and social concept, not one that's existed forever in the same way for all
people.

Because the history of science includes many systems of understanding the world, we
have to consider these systems on their own terms. It may seem simpler to focus on
just the winners of history, but hearing only the big Euro-American names – Plato,
Einstein – doesn't teach us much about the global system of science today. Taking the
time to highlight different knowledge worlds will help us see our own as relatively recent,
not entirely unified, and evolving.

For example, we'll learn about the Greco-Latin-Jewish-Arabic medicine of the medieval
Mediterranean world, millennia of Ayurvedic knowledge across the subcontinent,
traditional Chinese medicine, and Incan talking knots and engineering, just to name a
few. Each of these systems has its own social norms about what count as valid ways to
make and share knowledge. We'll look at modern scientific norms in a later episode.

And each of these can help us see the otherness of these past or different cultures as
not so other after all. We can see natural philosophers and other protoscientists as
amazingly smart people making sense of their world, not as, like, bad scientists. They
understood the world around them in the smartest way they could.

For example, according to medieval Mediterranean medicine, the organ in my head was
for venting waste heat, not for thinking. People in the past weren't stupid. They know
that if your head was chopped off, that was curtains for you. But they weren't sure what
all that weird gray stuff did.

And even today, though we can see a neuron fire in high resolution, we struggle to
understand what really goes on when it fires – that is, the role of a single neuron in
thinking – much less the answer to the question, what is consciousness?
The history of science really gets even juicier when incremental nagging questions
about the natural world add up and cause a scientific discipline or an entire society to
change in a revolutionary way. Later in the series, we'll look at moments of revolution
within the sciences alongside philosophers such as Thomas Kuhn and Michel Foucault,
who did not always agree. They show that science isn't only historical and social but
constructs entire worlds of knowledge in which we all find ourselves trapped. Don't
worry about that yet, though.
 (08:00) to (10:00)

By learning the history of science, we will automatically start to think about our own
knowledge world as historical—not finished, not capital-E enlightened. Around the
world, humans are still actively working to understand our universe, but they don't all
agree on how to do it. We may be able to make more accurate models of natural
phenomena, but we may never find the ultimate answers we seek.

At its limit, the history of science touches on the study of religion: the diverse and
changing nature of the never-ending human search for Truth, with a capital T. Our path
through past knowledge worlds is going to be a beautiful and powerful one. There are
many, many marvelous insights to celebrate. To help us keep our footing as we jump
across centuries and continents, we're going to keep our eyes on five big questions in
this series. Questions that, to this day, we do not have complete answers to.

First: What is stuff? From atoms to dark matter to space-time, what are things made of?
And "things," by the way, includes air, fire, and outer space. If you think I'm going to sit
here and not celebrate the death of phlogiston with you, you are sorely mistaken!

Number two: What is Life? What's the simplest way to define living things? Are viruses
alive? Is the Earth alive? Where did life come from? Where did current organisms come
from? How do we understand their interactions with each other and the world?

Three: Where are we? What is this place, the Earth? What is its place in the cosmos? Is
this the only universe?

Four: When are we? More questions of scale: How long have we been around? What
about living things? What about the whole universe? What came before that?

 And five: How can we agree on what we know? And how can I convince more people
that the stuff I know is accurate? For example, how can I show anti-vaccers that
vaccines are necessary and safe? Regarding technology, how should we talk about
what to do with our knowledge?  (10:00) to (12:00) All these questions have been
considered by people as far back as records exist. They also remain active areas of
study today. But that last theme is so important that it gets the final section.
Humans have always tried to describe the world for lots of reasons. In part, because it's
fascinating. Magnets, how do they work? And partly to control it.

Knowledge, as they told us in grade school, really is power. The power that knowing
stuff gives the knower is exactly why we should study the history of science.

Thus, one goal of this course is to highlight how the values (beliefs about right and
wrong) and ethics (acceptable behaviors) of scientists and engineers shape our world.
And how, conversely, sciences and technologies are shaped by the societies that
produce them. 

We have a responsibility as citizens to understand and to act accordingly. Our world

today looks radically dissimilar to that of 300 years ago. And to paraphrase Andy Weir,
we have scienced the heck out of it. 

We learned about stuff, made new technologies and are currently scrambling to learn
new stuff to solve the problems that our old technologies created. Facing an utterly
unprecedented total ecological catastrophe, we may need to "science" it even more, in
one way or another.

We'll talk more about this in future episodes. Learning the history of science can help
shine a light on this dark future.

Next time, pack your spanakopita, we're headed to Ancient Greece to invent natural
philosophy with the Pre-Socratics. Until then, this has been, on no one's word, Crash
Course: History of Science. 

Crash Course: History of Science is filmed in the Dr. Cheryl C. Kinney studio in
Missoula, Montana, and is made with the help of all of these nice people and our
animation team is Thought Cafe.

 Crash Course is a Complexly production. If you want to keep imagining the world
complexly with us, you can check out some of our other channels like Sexplanations,
How to Adult, and Health Care Triage.  (12:00) to (12:20) Hey! If you would like to keep
Crash Course free for everybody forever, you can support this series at Patreon, a
crowdfunding platform that allows you to support the content you love.

The Presocratics
Long ago, some philosophers worked very hard to separate myths from what they actually
knew about nature. Thales theorized that everything in the world is made of water.
Pythagoras was a mathematical-mystical vegetarian. And Democritus, we all know and love
as the Atom Guy... Meet the Presocratics!
[Intro Music Plays]

The Presocratics were named for their leader, Presocrates. That is a joke! They were
several different philosophers who lived before Socrates. Why start with the Presocratics?
Since people have systematically made knowledge about the world for millennia, there's no
single starting point. But a convenient place to get our footing is ancient Greece.

These Greeks were the cornerstone of scientific inquiry in western Europe. THeir theories
had a terrific run. Can you imagine coming up with a question about nature that puzzles
people for more than two thousand years? I can't even decide what to have for breakfast. 

A more practical reason to put on our thinking togas is that the ancient Greeks left behind
sources. Writing stuff down makes history possible and here's a pro tip: if you want to be
remembered in two thousand years, keep a diary! Preferably on vellum with metallic ink.
Also, get super famous sot aht your students make plenty of copies.

Not all of the people we think of as "ancient Greeks" actually lived in Greece. Their culture
stretched across a prosperous region called Ionia. And they weren't as ancient as soem
even ancient-er Greeks. We typically date ancient Greece as starting around 800 BCE, after
the fall of the Mycenaeans. Those are the dudes who burned down Troy because one of
them got dumped. Zero chill.

"Ancient" Greece ends witht he Roman conquest in 146 BCE. We're focusing on a science-
dense period from around 600 to 400 BCE. These Greeks live in small towns and are very
comfy out at sea. They trade and fight with each other a lot, and they sometimes have to
deal with invading Persians.

 (02:00) to (04:00)

They worship nature, but their land is deforested and eroded. They love setting up new
colonies all along the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. There is no public support for
anything like modern science. There aren't even schools in which to study science.

The Greeks practiced natural philosophy, meaning "self-conscious inquiry into nature." A lot
their philosophies were about answering our first running question here on History of
Science - What is stuff? I mean, really? 

If you watched our first episode, you'll know that we can divide science into both a body of
knowledge and a set of methods. When you examine the work of these Pre-Socratic
philosophers, you can see two important things. 

First, they weren't scientists in a modern sense. They didn't make detailed, accurate
knowledge of nature based on observation. But they did come up with theories that tried to
account for why stuff is the way it is.

In their wonky-sounding theories, we still find many of the themes that would drive centuries
of further inquiry - the divide between the abstract and material, or identifying the smallest
possible particle of stuff.
Second, as these natural philosophers tried their best to separate myth from truth, they
developed first drafts of many of the methods we still use and value today. 

Natural philosophy became a quest for abstract knowledge. This is important because it
means the Pre-Socratics started making general claims about the real world - laws that
would apply in every situation, not just specific instances.

The Pre-Socratics also developed "schools of thought" that spread their ideas around
geographically and down the centuries. These weren't physical schools, they were groups
of teachers and students who thought about the same problems. 

One of the reasons we know about these schools of thought is because they operated as
individuals who took credit for their ideas and whose names were passed down. This
practice differed from many other cultures of inquiry and became a foundation for how
Europeans later systematically made knowledge. 

But the big method of knowledge-making here, and the one that we're going to focus on,
was rational debate. Between all those schools and individuals and abstract theories, there
was a lot of disagreement. 

 (04:00) to (06:00)

To convince people they were right, a natural philosopher had to use reason, logic, and
observation to attack the wrong-seeming theories of others and bolster his own
awesomeness. 

In fact, some historians argue that there's a link between rational debate about political
constitutionality, or how humans should govern themselves, and rational debate about the
constitution of nature, or how the world governs itself. 

Now there are more Pre-Socratics than we could possibly mention so here are a few
highlights. This is our rogues' gallery of natural philosophers who all had their own theories
and they argued - they rationally debated themselves into the history of science. 

The first European natural philosopher whose ideas survived down to the present was
Thales: the first individual known to have proved a mathematical theorem - Thales's
theorem. In fact, early historians attributed lots of firsts to Thales making it hard to tell
exactly what he really accomplished. Regardless, being the first at a whole way of doing
thought is pretty unusual. 

Thales set the natural world off as separate from the divine. For him, the world was
something comprehensible by the powers of the human intellect. It became an object, a
thing like other things. This meant leaving the gods out. 

For example, Thales held that wind, not a god, caused the Nile to flood. This was a general
natural explanation for a phenomenon. Thales was not, however, irreligious. He believed
that all things have a god or a soul within them. 
Thales was also the founder of the first European school of philosophy - the Milesians. The
Milesian school was known for its theory of matter - a theory of stuff. This theory held that
water was the primary substrate or the most basic element. The Earth floats on water like a
ship. Earthquakes happen when the water rocks back and forth. The soul of things may
have not been material, but their stuffness was water. We'll come back to this essential
dualism of soul versus matter in future episodes.

 (06:00) to (08:00)

[Later plato and aristotle were dismissive of theles and part of their argument] was that
thales once predicted an upcoming harvest to chord the market on the olive oil using his
philosophy for personal gain. Is that okay? Depends on who you ask.

Thales' star student was Anaximander. He's thought to have been the first european
philosopher to write down his own ideas. Like thales, anaximander believed that nature is
ruled buy discoverable laws, but anaximander rejected thales' watery universal substrate
proposing instead, a formless initial state called the apeiron. Anaximander proposed that
this primal formlessness would then devolve into opposite properties that could be
experienced, like hot-cold, wet or dry, heavy-light etc.

Anaximander worked in astronomy, geography,  and mathematics. One of his contributions

was introducing the gnoman, the part of the sundial that casts the shadow degrees. These
had already been used in china for two millennia. The gnoman was good for more than just
telling time. It helped people better understand the movement of the sun and it helped
anaximander develop a model of the cosmos that envisioned heavenly wheels punctured by
holes letting light through - One of our earliest examples of natural philosophers trying to
conquer the "where are we" question.

The last great thinker associated with Milesians was empedocles, who was probably also
influenced by pythagoras and Parmenides. Almost every greek philosopher had a book
called "On Nature". It's super confusing. In empedocles on nature, he put forward the theory
of the 4 classical elements: earth, air, fire, and water; mixed by two forces - love and strife.
While this theory, of course, seems hopelessly misguided now, remember that simply by
asking what is stuff, the milesians were moving away from mythology and toward modern
physics.

Probably the presocratic philosopher most well known today is pythagoras. That triangle
guy! Pythagoras studied the philosophy of the milesians, but, he was a more mystic thinker.
Which is a nice way of saying pythagoras was a cult leader. He believed in reincarnation
and outlawed beans, seeing them as impure, probably.

 (08:00) to (10:00)

Historians love to debate the bean thing. At least we're pretty sure he was a vegetarian.
How can you be a vegetarian without beans? Pythagoras was focussed on the pure
dovetails, the fact that we think of him as having introduced the notion of idealism to
science. Idealists generated abstract models of perfect stuff. This was unlike milesians, who
were materialists. They started theorizing about actual stuff. In terms of math, pythagoras's
idealism meant a shift from practical arithmetic inherited from egypt and Mesopotamia to a
new pure geometry.

For pythagoras, numbers were not just a way of counting stuff. They were sacred.
Pythagoras loved whole numbers. He hated irrational numbers such as the square root of 2.
He called the square root of 2, the alagon (?), or the unutterable. To even know that
irrational numbers existed, you had to join the cult of the pythagoreans and work your way
into the innermost circle. This is so great! (Hank laughs)

For our purposes, the thing that pythagoras added to science is the role of the mathematical
proof. Egypt and babyloneans knew about the pythagorean triplets, that is like the whole
number solutions to the pythagorean theorem. That was useful. A practical guide that could
be implemented by ancient engineers. But pythagoras understood it and proved it in a
purely mathematical abstract. With pythagoras, creating an elegant abstract proof became a
model for justifying a new claim to knowledge.

Another major thread in greek thought before socrates was the atomism. The theory that
the world is made of particles that you can't divide any further. This was associated with
Democritus, who made heavy use of rational debate through dialogues - our wonder of this
period. For this, he is the star of this episode's thought bubble.

Democritus held that everything is made of atoms - indestructible, uncreated, always in

motion, and infinite in number; and they came in all kinds of shapes and sizes. In his focus
on matter, democritus was a materialist, like the milesians.

 (10:00) to (12:00)

He's even credited with holding a bottle of air underwater to show that air is made of stuff.
Thus giving rise to the experiment as a way to illustrate a theory. Still, democritus had a lot
to prove. He would ask "what is air?" And people would be like "nothing, democritus!" and
that's when he would say, "that's where you're wrong!"

Most famously democritus argued against other theorists, Parmenides, and Zeno, using
something that we call the Void Hypothesis.

Democritus was like - "Everything is made of little indivisible bits of stuff. I call them atoms."

And Zeno is all "but Democritus, my friend, what is between two atoms?"

Then democritus says "Nothing. Between the atoms, there is only, a void."

And then Zeno replies, "you're caught in a paradox, friend. If everything is made of atoms
and the void is a thing, then the void is made of atoms. But then, what is between the atoms
of the void?" And then, presumably Zeno dropped the 450 BCE equivalent of the mic and
the crowd went wild!
Thanks thought bubble!

This was rational debate. This particular debate would go on for centuries. But more
importantly, the structure of the dialog, the celebration of rational debate as almost a
sporting event for these nerds, was a new and valuable way to analyze our universe. This
debate is just one example of how the presocratics elevated being curious about the world
into natural philosophy.

It's important to remember that the natural philosophers of ancient greece live in a different
world, both physically and socially from that of like jeopardy and GitHub. But the way that
these group of thinkers framed problems about stuff, change, nothingness, mathematical
elegance, perception, truth, and the cosmos has echoed across the centuries.

Next time, we'll watch plato and aristotle duke it out over idealism and empiricism. It's gonna
be a throwdown for the ages!

Crash Course History of Science is filmed in the Dr. Cheryl C Kinney studio in Missoula,
Montana and it's made possible with the help of all of these nice people and our animation
team is Thought Cafe.

 (12:00) to (12:32)

Crash Course is a Comlexely production. If you want to keep imagining the world
complexely with us, check out some of our other channels like the Financial Diet, SciShow
Space, and Mental Floss. And if you would like to keep Crash Course free for everyone
forever, you can support the series at patreon - a crowdfunding platform that allows you to
support the content you love. Thank you to all of our patrons for making Crash Course
possible with their continued support.

Subtopic 3
Hi, I’m John Green; this is Crash Course World History, and today we’re going to
discuss the series of events that made it possible for you to watch Crash Course. (0:07)
And also made this studio possible. And made the warehouse containing the studio
possible. A warehouse, by the way, that houses stuff for warehouses. That’s right, it’s
time to talk about the Industrial Revolution.

(0:18) Although it occurred around the same time as the French, American, Latin
American, and Haitian Revolutions - between, say, 1750 and 1850 - the industrial
revolution was really the most revolutionary of the bunch.
(0:28) Past John: No way, dude. All those other revolutions resulted in, like, new
borders and flags and stuff.

(0:33) Present John: [sigh] We’ve studied 15,000 years of history here at Crash Course,
Me from the Past. And borders and flags have changed plenty, and they’re going to
keep changing. But in all that time, nothing much changed about the way we disposed
of waste or located drinking water or acquired clothing. Most people lived on or very
close to the land that provided their food.

(0:50) Except for a few exceptions, life expectancy never rose above 35 or below 25.
Education was a privilege, not a right. In all those millennia, we never developed a
weapon that could kill more than a couple dozen people at once, or a way to travel
faster than horseback. (1:04) For 15,000 years, most humans never owned or used a
single item made outside of their communities. Simon Bolivar didn’t change that and
neither did the American Declaration of Independence.

(1:15) You have electricity? Industrial Revolution. Blueberries in February? Industrial

Revolution. You live somewhere other than a farm? Industrial Revolution. You drive a
car? Industrial Revolution. (1:26) You get twelve years of free, formal education?
Industrial Revolution. Your bed, your antibiotics, your toilet, your contraception, your tap
water, your every waking and sleeping second:

(1:39) Industrial Revolution.

[intro music]

(1:49) Here’s one simple statistic that sums it up: Before the industrial revolution, about
80% of the world’s population was engaged in farming to keep itself and the other 20%
of people from starving. Today, in the United States, less than 1% of people list their
occupation as farming.

(2:05) I mean, we’ve come so far that we don’t even have to farm flowers anymore.
Stan, are these real, by the way? I can’t tell if they’re made out of foam or digital. So
what happened? TECHNOLOGY! Here’s my definition:

(2:14) The Industrial Revolution was an increase in production brought about by the use
of machines and characterized by the use of new energy sources. Although this will
soon get more complicated, for our purposes today, industrialization is NOT capitalism -
although, as we will see next week, it is connected to modern capitalism. (2:29) And, the
industrial revolution began around 1750 and it occurred across most of the earth, but it
started in Europe, especially Britain. What happened? Well, let’s go to the Thought
Bubble.

 Thought Bubble (2:37)

The innovations of the Industrial Revolution were intimately interconnected. Like, look,
for instance, at the British textile industry: The invention of the flying shuttle by John Kay
in 1733 dramatically increased the speed of weaving, which in turn created demand for
yarn, which led to inventions like the Spinning Jenny and the water frame. (2:55) Soon
these processes were mechanized using water power, until the steam engine came
along to make flying shuttles really fly in these huge cotton mills.

(3:03) The most successful steam engine was built by Thomas “They Didn’t Name
Anything After Me” Newcomen to clear water out of mines. And because water was
cleared out of those mines, there was more coal to power more steam engines, which
eventually led to the fancying up of the Newcomen Steam Engine by James “I Got a
Unit of Power and a University Named After Me” Watt, whose engine made possible not
only railroads and steamboats but also ever-more-efficient cotton mills.

(3:26) And, for the first time, chemicals other than stale urine (I wish I was kidding) were
being used to bleach the cloth that people wore - the first of which was sulfuric acid,
which was created in large quantities only thanks to lead-lined chambers, which
would’ve been impossible without lead production rising dramatically right around 1750
in Britain, thanks to lead foundries powered by coal.

(3:48) And all these factors came together to make more yarn that could be spun and
bleached faster and cheaper than ever before, a process that would eventually
culminate in $18 Crash Course Mongols shirts. Available now at DFTBA.com. (4:02)
Thanks, Thought Bubble, for that shameless promotion of our beautiful, high-quality t-
shirts available now at DFTBA.com.

 Why Europe? (4:08)

So, the problem here is that with industrialization being so deeply interconnected, it’s
really difficult to figure out why it happened in Europe, especially Britain. And that
question of why turns out to be one of the more contentious discussions in world history
today.

(4:18) For instance, here are some Eurocentric reasons why industrialization might have
happened first in Europe: There’s the cultural superiority argument that basically holds
that Europeans are just better and smarter than other people. (4:29) Sometimes this is
formulated as Europeans possessing superior rationality. By the way, you’ll never guess
where the people who make this argument tend to come from - unless you guessed that
they come from Europe.

(4:39) And then, others argue that only Europe had the culture of science and invention
that made the creation of these revolutionary technologies possible. Another argument
is that freer political institutions encouraged innovation and strong property rights
created incentives for inventors.
(4:52) And, finally, people often cite Europe’s small population because small
populations require labor-saving inventions. Oh, it’s time for the Open Letter?

 Open Letter (4:57)

An Open Letter to the Steam Engine. But first, let’s see what’s in the secret
compartment today. Oh, it’s a TARDIS. Truly the apex of British industrialization.

(5:11) Dear Steam Engine,

You know what’s crazy? You’ve really never been improved upon. Like this thing, which
facilitates time travel, probably runs on a steam engine. (5:20) Almost all electricity
around the world, whether it’s from coal or nuclear power, is just a steam engine.

(5:26) It’s all still just water and heat, and it speaks to how truly revolutionary the
Industrial Revolution was that since then, it’s really just been evolution.

(5:34) Best Wishes, John Green

 Why Not China? (5:35)

So, you may have heard any of those rationales for European industrialization, or you
may have heard others. The problem with all of them, is that each time you think you’re
at the root cause it turns out there’s a cause of the root cause. (5:46) To quote
Leonardo DiCaprio, James Cameron, and coal mine operators, “We have to go deeper.”

(5:50) But, anyway, the problem with these Eurocentric why answers, is that they all
apply to either China or India or both. And it’s really important to note that in 1800, it
was not clear that Europe was going to become the world’s dominant manufacturing
power in the next hundred years. (6:02) At the time, China, India, and Europe were all
roughly at the same place in terms of industrial production.

(6:08) First, let’s look at China. It’s hard to make the European cultural superiority
argument because China had been recording its history since before Confucius, and
plus there was all that bronze and painting and poetry.

(6:17) It’s also kind of difficult to make a blanket statement that China was economically
inferior to Europe, since they invented paper money and led the world in exports of
everything from silk to china. I mean, pre-Industrial Revolution, population growth was
the surest sign of economic success, and China had the biggest population in the world.
I guess that answers the question of whether they’re digital.

(6:36) It’s also difficult to say that China lacked a culture of invention when they
invented gunpowder, and printing, and paper, and arguably compasses. And China had
more free enterprise during the Song dynasty than anywhere in the world.

(6:48) Some argue that China couldn’t have free enterprise because they had a long
history of trying to impose monopolies on items like salt and iron. And that’s true, but
when it comes to enforcing those monopolies, they also had a long history of failure.
(6:58) So really, in a lot of ways, China was at least as primed for an Industrial
Revolution as Britain was.

 Coal and Wages (7:02)

So, why didn’t it happen? Well, Europeans - specifically the British - had two huge
advantages: (7:07) First, Coal. When you trace the story of improved transportation, or
communication, or industrial efficiency, or better chemical manufacturing, it always
comes back to coal, because the Industrial Revolution was all about using different
forms of energy to automate production.

(7:22) And England had large supplies of coal that were near the surface, which meant
that it was cheap to mine, so it quickly replaced wood for heating and cooking and stuff.
So that encouraged the British to look for more coal. (7:31) The only problem with coal
mining, aside from it being, you know, like, deadly and everything, is that the coal mines
flooded all the time. I guess coal mining is also a little problematic for, like, the health of,
you know, like, the planet.

(7:40) But, because there was all this incentive to get more coal out of the ground,
steam engines were invented to pump water out of the mines. And because those early
steam engines were super inefficient, they needed a cheap and abundant source of fuel
in order to work - namely, coal, which meant they were much more useful to the British
than anyone else. (7:56) So steam engines used cheap British coal to keep British coal
cheap, and cheap British coal created the opportunity for everything from railroads to
steel, which like so much else in the Industrial Revolution, created a positive feedback
loop. Because they run on rails, railroads need steel. And because it is rather heavy,
steel needs railroads.

(8:14) Secondly, there were Wages. Britain (and to a lesser extent the Low Countries)
had the highest wages in the world at the beginning of the 18th century. In 1725, wages
in London were the equivalent of 11 grams of silver per day. (8:24) In Amsterdam, they
were 9 grams. In Beijing, Venice, and Florence, they were under 4. And in Delhi, they
were under 2.

(8:30) It’s not totally clear why wages were so high in Britain. Like, one argument is that
the Black Death lowered population so much that it tightened labor markets, but that
doesn’t explain why wages remained low in, like, plague-ravaged Italy. (8:40) Mainly,
high wages combined with cheap fuel costs meant that it was economically efficient for
manufacturers to look to machines as a way of lowering their production costs. To quote
the historian Robert Allen: “Wages were high and energy was cheap. These prices led
directly to the industrial revolution by giving firms strong incentives to invent
technologies that substituted capital and coal for labor.”

 India and Cottons (9:01)

Ugh, Stan, I’m a little worried that people are still going to accuse me of Eurocentrism.
Of course, other people will accuse me of an anti-European bias. (9:07) I don’t have a
bias against Europe. I love Europe. Europe gave me many of my favorite cheeses and
cross-country skiing and Charlie Chaplin, who inspired today’s Danica drawing.

(9:17) Like, the fact of coal being near the surface in Britain can’t be chalked up to
British cultural superiority. But the wages question is a little different because it makes it
sound like only Europeans were smart enough to pay high wages.

(9:26) But here’s one last thing to consider: India was the world’s largest producer of
cotton textiles, despite paying basically the lowest wages in the world. Indian agriculture
was so productive that laborers could be supported at a very low cost. (9:38) And that,
coupled with a large population, meant that Indian textile manufacturing could be very
productive without using machines, so they didn’t need to industrialize.

(9:45) But more importantly from our perspective, there’s a strong argument to be made
that Indian cotton production helped spur British industrialization. It was cotton textiles
that drove the early Industrial Revolution, and the main reason that Britain was so eager
to produce cottons was that demand was incredibly high. (9:59) They were more
comfortable than woolens, but they were also cheaper, because cottons could be
imported from India at such a low cost.

(10:05) So, Indian cottons created the market and then British manufacturers invested
in machines (and imported Indian know-how) to increase production so that they could
compete with India. And that’s at least one way in which European industrialization was
truly a world phenomenon. (10:19) For those of you who enjoy such highly contentious
and thorny, cultural historical debates, good news. Next week, we’ll be talking about
capitalism.

(10:27) Thanks for watching, I’ll see you then.

 Credits (10:28)

Crash Course is produced and directed by Stan Muller. Our script supervisor is Danica
Johnson. The show is written by my high school history teacher, Raoul Meyer, and
myself. We are ably interned by Meredith Danko. And our graphics team is Thought
Bubble.
(10:40) Last week’s phrase of the week was "The New England Revolution." That was
challenging. If you want to suggest future phrases of the week or take a guess at this
week's, you can do so in comments, where you can also ask questions about today’s
video that will be answered by our team of historians.

(10:53) Thanks for watching Crash Course, and as we say in my hometown, don't forget
to be awesome.