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01:10This is the life, isn't it, hmm?
01:12The bit you dream about all year, getting away from the rat race,
01:15soaking up all the sun and the fun somewhere exotic, good stuff.
01:19And with new package tour destinations all the time and costs going down and so on,
01:24a lot of people can go to places that they could never have dreamt of going to just a few
01:28years ago.
01:30And yet, the whole concept of time off is a new thing.
01:34It's only been around as long as we've had the world we live in today, the world back home.
01:38You know, working to the clock, the daily routine, the job prospect, making the money,
01:42the car, the house, all the possessions we all share, as long as we've got a job.
01:47The whole rat race.
01:48All that, like time off, it's machine made.
01:52Everything you do, everything around, is mass produced.
01:56Everything from your underwear to this cruise liner.
02:27All that, like time off, it's female única.
02:28Let's go, sit down, do it, everything on your and I too.
02:28Well, I can't do it.
02:30Life today consists of thousands of identical bits made by other people for you to buy.
02:36Just like they buy what you make with the money they earn from selling you the things they make.
02:41And then once a year everybody stops doing it to each other and does it with the tourist industry.
02:46And they're just as mass-produced as everybody else.
02:48Just as dependent on the power that we all take so much for granted, you're not quite sure what I'm
02:54talking about.
02:55Power?
02:56Look at all this in terms of what you couldn't have if you had to make it and move it
03:01with your own bare hands.
03:16The irony is, our modern ability to escape to sunny foreign parts like the Caribbean, get away from home, started
03:24with a bunch of people who were here in the West Indies 300 years ago.
03:35The irony is, all they wanted to do, desperately, was get out of here and go home.
03:58Now, although these 18th century African slaves were doubtless homesick, they're not the ones I'm talking about.
04:04I mean, the people who owned these people.
04:13If you were English and you wanted to make oodles of boodle, you came out here.
04:17To malaria, yellow fever, dysentery, hookworm, and the most valuable real estate in the world.
04:23One steamy Caribbean island made more profit than all the American colonies together.
04:36It was sugarcane and slavery that did it.
04:38Good job slaves were cheap, thanks to the way they were worked.
04:41Most of them only lasted seven years after they got here.
04:50Sugar producers then were like oil producers now.
04:53What they had, everybody wanted.
04:55And like oil producers now, ostentatious expenditure was their thing, made life bearable.
05:01Buccaneers and humidity earned the Caribbean the name Dunghill of the Universe.
05:10And at the bottom of the heap, so to speak, were the Africans.
05:13Brutalised, savagely flogged for the slightest mistake, living at virtually starvation level.
05:19The way to control thousands of slaves was keep them frightened.
05:25The planters discouraged riots with a particularly effective trick.
05:29They burnt the rioters' legs off.
05:31But anyway, out of sight, out of mind, eh?
05:38After years of gilded hardship, the planters' dream was to use his profits to buy estates in England
05:43and retire to live surrounded again by labourers, destitute and poverty-stricken.
05:48But English!
06:01Of course, a new sunburnt squire from over the seas passed all this misery by without a second glance
06:06as they rocketed from one set of good times to another.
06:10Their life was one long spending spree, interspersed with hunt and shoot and fish and parties and booze.
06:15They bought horsies and jewels and more land and villages and titles and more plantations back in the Caribbean
06:21and jobs in Parliament and positions at court, you name it.
06:28Oh, and manor houses and servants too, of course.
06:47And then, about 1700, having run out of things to buy, some of these bucolic buffoons up in East Anglia
06:55started ploughing the ill-gotten gains into improving their land.
07:05You see, the big problem of the time was livestock.
07:10In winter, when nothing grows, cows have this unfortunate habit of still being hungry.
07:16Well, that's okay, you just slaughter them.
07:19Then what do you do for meat the following year?
07:22The new alternative was water meadows.
07:25You cover your meadow with one inch of running water, keeps off the frost
07:29and the grass grows for the animals throughout the year.
07:32Or better, the new continental wonder root, the turnip.
07:36Grew in autumn, ready in winter. Animals loved it.
07:40Another high-tech import was clover.
07:43It put nitrogen in the soil, though they didn't know it.
07:45And it would turn the worst scrub into instant arable.
07:49That's when they started saying somebody was in clover when he was well off.
07:56And then one of them had a really brilliant idea.
07:59Take a group of fields and rotate the crops in them.
08:03Wheat first, then corn, then turnips, then clover, then wheat again, and so on.
08:09Does good things to the soil, gives you four times the yield.
08:13And then, in 1720, came something that nobody could have ever expected.
08:18Thirty years of incredible weather.
08:21Bumper harvests, food prices down, wages up.
08:25The result? What we call the ploughman's lunch.
08:28Actually, a real improvement in the peasant's diet.
08:31Beer in a glass, white bread, potatoes, fresh vegetables.
08:36Life became just a bit like those ads you see on television for Country Fresh X.
09:01I said just a bit, because by our standards, life in Merry England, with its totalitarian landlords hanging people for
09:09stealing a shilling,
09:10and no travel without a permit, wasn't at all like the chocolate box constable painting view of it we get
09:15nostalgic about.
09:22Still, as far as English peasants were concerned, good times were here.
09:26Real luxuries like cottages with walls of stone instead of cow dung.
09:30Jobs in the building trades that were booming because of the spare money around,
09:35and the families everybody was having because they could afford to.
09:38And as the population went up, so did the demand for equipment and implements,
09:42and most of all for furnishings and household goods.
09:47Now, if the general riffraff were making hay like this down on the farm,
09:51think how much the landlords were making.
09:54In no time at all, England had a most unusual cash flow problem.
09:59Too much cash, and not enough flow.
10:02No way to move the money around.
10:05Fortunately, however, we'd recently gone Dutch.
10:15You see, the Dutch had had this amazing new folding stuff for decades.
10:19And what the existence of paper money meant was that they already had a credit system going,
10:24and a central bank to make it all respectable enough for people to take this paper promise
10:28instead of the real thing in gold.
10:32Why were the Dutch so clever?
10:34Well, they were running the shop at the time.
10:36The biggest trade is in Europe, the Dutch,
10:37with entrepreneurs out everywhere from Japan to South America
10:40bringing home everything from pomegranates to parrots
10:43and selling it all back here in Europe at cut-throat prices.
10:46Your throat.
10:47And in financing all this mercantile marketeering,
10:50the Dutch banks were, of course, streets ahead of everybody else
10:53in the fine art of taking a percentage.
10:56So on the good old English principle of
10:58if you can't beat them, join them,
10:59in 1688, we invited a Dutchman over to kind of be king.
11:04And sure enough, he brought with him the secret that would make England great.
11:08How to live up to your neck in debt.
11:11The first thing he did was to borrow a million from a bunch of happy investors
11:14who set up the Bank of England to do it.
11:16In return, of course, for a fat profit, the right to raise taxes, and to print money.
11:22And then, we were away.
11:25You wanted to borrow?
11:27Well, new Dutch-type laws made it easy to get a mortgage on your land.
11:30Or you could write IOUs that would circulate just like the new open cheques.
11:35Investment?
11:36With the newly invented limited companies, all you risked was your share.
11:39Oh, and there were the new stocks and shares.
11:41And if they were in shipping or property?
11:44Well, marine insurance and fire insurance took the risk out of that.
11:48Net result? More money going round.
11:50Lower interest rates? More borrowing.
11:52For more investment in more companies, so more money going round.
12:00So, why was I telling you that on a boat in a Dutch harbour?
12:03Well, the irony is that having pinched their credit system,
12:06generated in the first place by overseas trade from ports like Horn in Northern Holland,
12:12we then went on to pinch their overseas trade.
12:16Quite took the wind out of their sails, that did.
12:19By 1740, we were smugly celebrating our cleverness with this modest little jingle.
12:24harmony
12:25twelve
13:25That's a little pile, that, isn't it?
13:27Money from overseas trade.
13:29Well, petty cash, really.
13:32Some really rather English things started
13:34because of the spectacular loads of filthy lucre
13:38finding its way into this country from India and the colonies.
13:41Things like this are a national taste for tea with sugar.
13:46They both arrived on the English pallet from east and west at the same time, you see.
13:52Tea merchants made a fortune.
13:55One of the other English things was being something in the city.
13:59All that commission to be made from insuring ships and new ideas like import-export.
14:04Oh, trade was now quite respectable.
14:08Third thing, stately homes.
14:11See, with no tax on profits, that's what I said,
14:15a fellow had enough of the readies to buy himself a peerage,
14:18marry the right gal, invent an ancestral home.
14:21Mid-18th century, a lot of these went up.
14:24As the material wealth of certain Indian princes went down, you understand.
14:28Anglo-Palladian was all the rage, architecturally.
14:31We'd call it conspicuous consumption, I think.
14:35Care to see some?
14:39Well, here we are.
14:40And as you're no doubt thinking, yes, most of them bought it by the yard.
14:44This is what you get when money's no object.
14:47As a matter of fact, now was when modern house layout began.
14:51Dining rooms, sitting rooms, lavatories, that kind of stuff.
14:55But back to the decor.
14:56The idea was to rush off on the European Grand Tour
14:59and buy up Roman and Greek anything.
15:03Then get Chippendale to do the interiors,
15:06Adam to do the ceiling,
15:09bring in the Italians to paint anything left uncovered,
15:12and get Reynolds or Gainsborough to immortalise the wife.
15:25And impress your friends with your credit rating,
15:28which, of course, was what life was all about.
15:30Possessions, getting them, and having got, hanging on to.
15:35There was not much point in slaving over a hot colony for all this
15:38if you couldn't keep it, was there?
15:39Which brings us to the last English thing.
15:43The magic word, property.
15:46Better sit down for this weighty stuff.
15:52Library.
15:53They didn't read much, but you had to have one.
15:59Anyway, John Locke, philosopher,
16:0218th century influential, and bore.
16:05He's a fellow who made sure every Englishman's home was his castle.
16:09Revolutionary idea that the king couldn't grab your stuff any time he felt like it.
16:12They could everywhere else.
16:14Not England.
16:14Here, the government could hang you,
16:17but it couldn't touch your property or stop you passing it on.
16:20And, said Locke, that being the only purpose of government,
16:24to protect your property rights,
16:26the only sane kind of deal was a social contract.
16:29Note the trading vocabulary.
16:31Between you and the government,
16:32to allow everybody to pursue their own enlightened self-interest.
16:36A kind of mutual hands-off.
16:40Well, the stately homeowners loved it.
16:42And, since anybody with a wherewithal could buy into the upper crust,
16:45that attitude encouraged ambition and drive.
16:48We British became really rather dynamic back then.
16:51For a bit.
16:52Which left only one fly in the economic ointment.
16:55When you had ploughed all your money into agriculture and slaves and colonising and trade,
16:59and all you got for your effort was even more money,
17:02what then?
17:04Well, I said that everybody could buy into the game.
17:07Not quite.
17:08Fortunately for the rest of this programme,
17:10one rather earnest bunch couldn't.
17:14See Israel's gentle shepherd stand
17:19With all engaging charms
17:24Mark how he calls for tender acts
17:29And holds them in his arms
17:35This is the earnest lot I was talking about.
17:38The dissenters.
17:39Free churchmen who wouldn't sign loyalty oaths
17:42And got the book thrown at them.
17:44They couldn't meet in public,
17:45study at university,
17:47hold municipal office,
17:49go to parliament,
17:50join the army,
17:51preach within five miles of a city.
17:53Because they were considered to be
17:55potentially dangerous revolutionary fanatics.
17:58They were, however,
18:00allowed to have babies.
18:01The end and design of infant baptism
18:04by which right the parents
18:07solemnly dedicate their offspring
18:08to the service of God
18:10and to Jesus Christ who me has sent
18:12is to impress on the minds of the parents
18:15a sense of their duty towards them
18:18in their innocent and helpless age.
18:21There was one other thing
18:23the Quakers, Baptists, Unitarians, Presbyterians
18:26and Congregationalists were free to do.
18:29They could indulge in the one thing
18:30the snob English gentry
18:32considered beneath their dignity.
18:34They could go into industry.
18:36So, one thing you could be sure of.
18:38This kid was going to grow up
18:39wanting to do better than his tradesman father.
18:42That as soon as he becomes capable of learning
18:44you will instruct him in the Christian religion
18:46according to the best understanding
18:49and abilities you are endued with.
18:51By the middle of the 18th century
18:53the dissenters were doing all right
18:54considering in small time jobs
18:56and local commerce
18:57though some of them, Quakers
18:59had gone to Pennsylvania
19:01to get away from the prejudice
19:02and lack of religious freedom.
19:07I baptise thee in the name of the Father
19:10and of the Son
19:12and of the Holy Spirit.
19:19The dissenters had one thing going for them though
19:21they had an inexhaustible amount of optimism
19:24and a dedicated urge to succeed.
19:26Let us pray.
19:32Almighty God.
19:33However, with the road to power and position blocked
19:36you wouldn't have thought the poor kid had a prayer.
19:38But that's reckoning without these extraordinary people.
19:41Thanks to the way their talents had been channeled
19:44they were almost single-handedly
19:46to turn England from a bunch of seafaring farmers
19:48into a nation of technocrats.
19:56and thanks to the priority dissenters gave education
19:59leading England into the greatest revolution ever
20:02was going to be child's play.
20:12On the basis of if you can't join them, beat them
20:15the dissenters set up their own academies all over the country
20:18like this one at Ackworth in Yorkshire
20:20and started training their kids
20:22for the only job left open to them
20:24that of entrepreneurial millionaire tycoon
20:27ready and willing to profit from the fact
20:29that they were surrounded by potential customers
20:31with more money than cents.
20:33A. Because a dissenter's religion didn't oblige a tycoon
20:36to wait for his reward in heaven
20:37and B. Because these places were turning out
20:40the 18th century equivalent
20:41of the Harvard Business School graduate
20:43onto the greatest bull market the world has ever seen
20:46and not a competitor in sight.
20:53The secret of their success?
20:54A religion that put profit next to piety
20:57a workaholic attitude towards life
20:59and above all
21:00an educational system that was without equal
21:03one that was to lay the foundations of all modern schooling.
21:07In their classrooms
21:09they learnt what the real world was desperate for
21:12maths, foreign languages, engineering, accountancy, commerce
21:15and the latest science
21:17with up-to-date equipment
21:19and experimental learning techniques
21:21and everything taught in English
21:24not Latin.
21:26With the universities from which the dissenters were excluded
21:30turning out clerics whose idea of a balanced equation
21:33was how many angels you could get on the head of a pin
21:36these academy boys moved in on the manufacturing industries
21:39without opposition
21:40and
21:41backed by a
21:43nationwide
21:43dissenter
21:44old boy network
21:45determined to keep it in a family
21:48by
21:481760 or so
21:52they were a regular
21:53underground movement
22:07dissenters
22:08dissenters had most of the mining concessions in the country
22:10and here in the English woods
22:12was where they started their revolution
22:13with coal mines nobody wanted
22:15till a dissenter called Abraham Darby
22:18found a use for them
22:27people couldn't make enough household utensils to satisfy rising demand
22:30because until Darby solved the problem
22:33there just wasn't enough wood around to burn
22:35to heat the furnaces
22:36to smelt all the metal
22:38to make all the goods
22:48coal had a lot of wood
22:49impurities that produced bad metal
22:51so Darby burnt them out
22:52and used the coke
22:58and that's when things really took off
23:00because England was an island built on coal
23:02the fuel crisis was over
23:04just as well
23:05they were running out of trees
23:12these coke fired dissenter furnaces produced cast iron everything
23:16boxes
23:17boxes, grates, hearths, shears, sickles, pokers, rakes, kettles, frying pans, ladles, weights
23:26and the reason they made pots of money
23:31pots
23:35I said the fuel crisis was over
23:37that left another crisis
23:38one that really stymied any would-be millionaire businessman
23:41because it kept his business well away from the markets
23:45and up in the hills
23:47any business that needed power
23:55these water mills
23:56making anything you needed to bang
23:58grind
23:59draw
23:59saw
24:00spin
24:01anything but hot metal
24:02ran their mill wheels in mountain streams
24:05that's why they were up in the hills
24:07and so was all the industry
24:08specially textiles
24:17and producing up in the hills
24:20meant your deliveries
24:21weren't going to be exactly
24:22hot foot
24:23this was another reason why
24:40industry stayed small scale
24:41what was the point in producing tons of goodies
24:44if all it was going to do was fall off in the mire
24:47down some pack horse trail
24:48while racing to market at speeds between
24:50three miles an hour
24:52and stop
24:54and this was the express service
24:56there were no roads worth mentioning
24:58so what with this stick-in-the-mud approach to transportation
25:01and industry scattered on isolated mountainsides
25:04all over the place
25:05the business of getting business to do more business
25:09was something of an uphill task
25:16still for the dissenters with no option but industry
25:19uphill or not
25:21it was money
25:29well here we are in the back of beyond
25:31that's anywhere north of london in 1760 or so
25:34you're one of those small scale dissenter industrialists
25:38you look around and what do you see
25:40i'll give you a clue
25:41not enough of this stuff around for a start
25:44ready cash
25:45but at the same time
25:47miles and miles of untapped supply and demand country
25:50on the one hand
25:52all those hooray henrys with their leftover wealth
25:54from overseas trade
25:56slaves
25:57rents
25:58land improvement
25:58and on the other
26:00local councils wanting money to build new bridges
26:03all over the country
26:05industrialists were short of the wherewithal to expand
26:08tradesmen were desperate for collateral to buy new stocks
26:11and people were looking for mortgages
26:13well as they say in these parts
26:14it was just a matter of finding a way to let the dog see the rabbit
26:18let the demand get at the supply
26:22well sure enough a way was found
26:24by the dissenters to give them credit
26:27or to give other people credit which is what happened
26:29because where no upright establishment english gent
26:32would have dreamt of taking banking to the provinces
26:35that wasn't beneath a certain quaker called lloyd
26:38this one i mean followed hotly by another called barclay
26:42by 1770 there were 10 banks outside london
26:46now if all went well
26:47industry would no longer have to lie around waiting for everything to go via london
26:52now the idea was that spare money in east anglia could for instance be
26:57directly available for investment in the midlands
26:58where small villages like manchester were only waiting for the check to arrive
27:04and that was the operative word waiting
27:11because until somebody did something about the state of the roads
27:14waiting was all anybody was going to be doing
27:27well guess who did do something about the state of the roads
27:30yes the dissenters they formed companies to finance gangs of irish laborers
27:35to cut routes across country following lines on a map
27:38navigators they were called or navis
27:41in 10 years they'd done 500 miles along which you could take stuff on a ride as smooth as silk
27:49the dissenter engineers built a transportation network
27:52that could take any amount of traffic you wanted to move on it
27:56at one stroke they had bridged the gap to high level production
27:59their road carried 400 times what a pack horse would
28:03because it wasn't a road
28:34you're calling a road
28:35if you could take a run
28:35and along with certain
28:45You could take up to 80 tonnes on a barge,
28:4880 tonnes of those boring bulk supplies
28:50without which high standards of living don't happen.
28:53And with genius engineering like staircase locks,
28:57you took your limestone, fertiliser, bricks, salt or whatever
29:00uphill and down dale with ease.
29:07In mid-18th century, thanks to the canals,
29:10things started moving around the country like never before.
29:13Non-stop, that is.
29:15Deliveries that had once taken months now took only days.
29:40Now, canals may look very quaint and snail's pace to you,
29:44but I'll have you know that in their time,
29:46they kicked the 18th century economy into high gear,
29:49they gave the country new engineering skills
29:51and they made a noise like money.
29:53You see, if you owned a bit of land with a coal mine on it
29:57and you used your agricultural revolution profits
29:59to cut yourself a canal to the nearest city,
30:02then bingo, like His Grace the Duke of Bridgewater
30:04who did just that in 1759, bingo, as I said,
30:07you were knee-deep in loot.
30:10I mean, look at it from a cash register point of view.
30:13In the old days, it rained, the roads got muddy,
30:16the transportation costs went up.
30:17Now, the more water the better.
30:20So, like the Duke, you move coal to Manchester
30:23for one-sixth the previous cost,
30:25but you sell it for one-half the previous price.
30:28Get it?
30:29And was it ever a seller's market?
30:32Millers, bakers, brewers, potters,
30:33all those guys who needed the fuel
30:35to make the stuff to sell to the growing city crowds.
30:38Plus, of course, the irresistible novelty
30:40of the way your canal could now bring to simple city folk
30:42exotic goods and materials from foreign parts,
30:45like the next county.
30:47All this, and the only word you are hearing from the customer,
30:50is more, more.
30:52Well...
30:55In no time at all, there was a canal network
30:57stretching out from Birmingham,
30:58connecting coal fields, cities, ports.
31:00Everything looked super colossal, except for one dull thud.
31:04Those moron industrialists up on the hills,
31:06who wouldn't come down because that's where their water power was.
31:08And there were millions to be made,
31:10if only you could solve their problem.
31:12But how?
31:12And all the time, life and profits were slipping by.
31:15It was enough to make a good, honest, dissenting entrepreneur
31:18turn to drink!
31:23monkey She's dead
31:24she's dead
31:47and something like that.
31:57In a way, the problem of lack of power for industry was solved by turning to drink.
32:02This drink, Scotch.
32:05Cheers.
32:08See, by 1761, the recent union of England with Scotland that opened up enormous markets for the Scottish producers
32:15had the whiskey distillers here in the Highlands desperate to cash in.
32:19By getting output up and costs down.
32:22And when these canny 18th century Scotsmen talked about profit from whiskey,
32:26the most heated arguments were about heat.
32:29You'll see what I mean in the distillery, down there.
32:43The thing that got the distillers all steamed up about making this wonderful golden stuff
32:48was the cost of boiling the raw materials to start the distilling process.
32:52How much fuel at what expense?
32:54Because nobody had money to burn.
33:03And the other problem was exactly how much water you needed to condense the vapours back into the magic liquid.
33:15It was a Glasgow University professor called Joseph Black who found the answer
33:19because he said he used to wonder why a hot sunny day didn't melt all the snow on the hills
33:24around here.
33:25Obviously, because it took a lot more heat than you'd expect to melt ice.
33:31So, he took some and left it for 10 hours together with the same amount of near-freezing water.
33:38And as the water rose fairly quickly to room temperature,
33:42the thermometer showed it was warming at a rate of 14 degrees Fahrenheit every hour.
33:47Now, to do the same, melt and get up to room temperature,
33:51the ice had to be left for all 10 hours.
33:57So, at the general warming rate,
34:00that meant the ice had absorbed 10 times 14 degrees, 140 degrees of heat.
34:05But the thermometer in it had only gone from freezing to room temperature.
34:11So, obviously, when the ice changed to water,
34:14there was a lot of heat involved that didn't show on the thermometer.
34:18Hidden heat.
34:21So, did the same thing happen when you went from water to steam?
34:25Black put two identical amounts of water over the same slow fire.
34:29This one, from cold to boiling,
34:32heated up at a rate of about 40 degrees an hour.
34:34By the time this one had all boiled away in steam,
34:38it had absorbed no less than 810 degrees of heat.
34:42So, that was why it took so long to boil liquids away.
34:45Why steam scalded so much.
34:47Above all, why you needed so much water to condense it back into liquid.
34:51You had to take all that heat back out.
34:53The hidden heat.
34:54Black called latent heat.
34:58Well, that was it, bar the shouting.
35:01Black was able to come up with figures
35:02that would show how much fuel you would need
35:04for how long
35:05to vaporise how much liquid
35:07and then how much water you'd need
35:10to condense that steam back into liquid.
35:14Black's little experiment had two results.
35:17One, it made the distillers happy.
35:19And two, it changed the entire world.
35:36The fellow who made Black's experimental gear
35:39was another dissenter called James Watt
35:41who used Black's figures to perfect the engine
35:44that would drive us all into the machine age
35:47because it brought industry down out of the hills.
35:50And with typical dissenter know-how,
35:52Watt didn't sell his steam engine.
35:54He charged his buyers one-third of the fuel savings it made them
35:57every year.
36:02In 1781, Watt's assistant invented a way
36:05to use the push-pull action of the steam piston
36:07to turn a wheel.
36:08And industry no longer needed water power
36:11to drive its machine belts.
36:25The new factories, with their coal-fired steam engines,
36:28went up in the growing coal-field towns,
36:31growing because industrial expansion
36:32sucked in thousands from the countryside,
36:35to stand hour after hour
36:37over the new automatic cotton-weaving machines.
36:39They even shipped orphan children in from London
36:42to meet the insatiable demand
36:44for industrial labour of every kind.
37:00In the new mills and factories,
37:03they started for the first time ever
37:04doing the kind of work we would call work.
37:07I mean, repetitive, every day of the week,
37:10with Sundays off and regular wages.
37:13And they also started doing it at night, too,
37:15thanks to a new French lamp
37:17that lit the place up like noon.
37:19So, with machines that never tired
37:22or made a mistake 24 hours a day,
37:24and plenty of light to see by,
37:26production could go round the clock, too.
37:30Shift work was invented.
37:32Steam made an almost incredible difference.
37:35In 1800, one factory installed
37:37a 100-horsepower engine.
37:40It did the work of 880 men,
37:42ran 50,000 thread-winding spindles,
37:45created jobs for 750 people,
37:48and turned out 226 times more product
37:51than they had before steam.
37:55People from villages who'd never looked at a clock
37:57were worked like machines themselves,
38:00in unspeakable conditions,
38:02for regular wages.
38:43And, up to date,
38:45And, aside for the Standard時ísöpict facility,
38:58And there was a new kind of customer, too, living in the new suburbs.
39:04The up-and-coming middle classes had an appetite for possessions
39:08that couldn't be satisfied,
39:11thanks to a fellow who practically invented the idea
39:13of keeping up with the Joneses.
39:15He was Josiah Wedgwood Potter to the royal family.
39:19You knew that because it was on his bills, letterheads, catalogues, ads,
39:23and anywhere else he could get it.
39:27Whatever he made, vases, medallions, ornamental work,
39:32he made people want it for snob reasons.
39:36Even tableware.
39:38That's why the biggest seller, this stuff, was called Queen's Wear.
39:42You and the Queen eating off the same plates.
39:44Get it?
39:47By the end of the century, Wedgwood had exhibitions in London,
39:51invitation only, gentry only,
39:53ads in all the posh papers,
39:56travelling salesmen with free delivery and money-back guarantees,
40:00clients everywhere from China to the USA and the first steam-powered factory going night and day to keep up
40:07with demand.
40:08By the time he'd finished, if you didn't have Wedgwood, you were nobody.
40:14And for the first time ever, that kind of middle-class thing started to matter because consumerism had arrived, even
40:20in food.
40:22On your Wedgwood, you served the latest craze, the five-course meal.
40:28Soup.
40:31Fish.
40:34Meat.
40:36Dessert.
40:38Savory.
40:39With the new bottled sauces, of course.
40:42In every area of the market, the factories were churning out goodies by the tonne.
40:48Our modern expectation of continually rising standards of living started with the 18th-century industrial middle-class.
41:02And in the increasingly crowded cities, with new paved streets and gaslight, there was a new kind of building called
41:09a shop,
41:09with plate-glass windows, persuading you that what had been luxuries, like cutlery or table linen, were now the decencies
41:16of life.
41:17And the decencies? Well, they were now the absolute bare necessities, weren't they?
41:30But all this new spending power created new jobs, and that meant more training, and that meant more illiterates had
41:35to be taught to read and write.
41:37And with the presses available, that meant, in the long run, the voice of an entirely new group of people
41:43beginning to be heard.
41:46They were, not surprisingly, the workers.
41:49And basically what they were saying was, no, regular wages wasn't enough, when you lived in stinking slums with factory
41:55bosses who felt no responsibility towards you,
41:58other than as machine fodder to be worked till you dropped.
42:02They started coming together for support and protection in clubs and societies that would one day turn into trades unions,
42:09and an ideology that would stand for one side of the split in society that the Industrial Revolution created,
42:16between capital and labour, master and man, management and workforce, whatever you want to call it.
42:22A split essentially created by the machines that changed the meaning of the word work.
42:28Back in that 18th century world, we still keep alive in industrial museums like this one.
42:35The split, we don't need a museum for. It's alive all over the world,
42:40thanks to the other steam engine that exported our Industrial Revolution to everybody else.
42:46on the railways.
42:54The railways started very modestly.
42:57In 1825, the first 27 miles of track carried a few daredevils on a joyride.
43:04But basically, the railway was there to do what canals did, only faster, to carry bulk supplies.
43:10And then, in no time at all, there were railways all over the British Empire.
43:15Or was it railways that made the Empire happen?
43:18Either way, we were laying lines up the jungle here in Jamaica as early as 1843.
43:24The Imperial goods trains removed the wealth of the colonies to England extremely efficiently.
43:38But the thing that really sent to the steam engine people off the rails,
43:41because they were all ready to haul freight and nothing else,
43:44was the way the public wanted to go for a ride.
43:46It was as if, after centuries of being stuck down on the farm,
43:50they just couldn't resist the thrill of rocketing off to anywhere at 25 miles an hour.
43:56So while the population shot up, thanks to the general improvement in wages and diet,
44:01because now, of course, the trains were bringing fresh food into the cities every day,
44:05people started doing something else new.
44:07They started marrying people from the other end of the country for the first time.
44:12Fortunately for all, inbreeding was out.
44:21The railways really made the modern world happen,
44:25because they separated the consumer from the producer,
44:28so that today, you and I couldn't survive alone even if we wanted to.
44:32They united the country because they brought the papers with the national news in them,
44:36and the new postal services that let people talk to each other long distance.
44:52They boosted business with trainloads of raw materials, consumer goods, and salesmen.
45:13They set all the clocks to the same time.
45:15Whatever the weather, they delivered all the bits necessary to make a standardised work,
45:19like a nationwide conveyor belt.
45:21But above all, they started a kind of industrial feedback.
45:26They carried coal to smelt iron to make railways,
45:30that burned coal to carry coal to smelt iron,
45:32and so the spiral went up and up.
45:38All the industrial production figures go off the top of the graph in the middle of the 19th century.
45:43And then, as a result, here we are.
45:45Back in the tourist paradise of Jamaica where we began,
45:48among the sugar plantations that helped to start it all off.
45:52In a world healthier, wealthier, more diverse, more mobile,
45:57more optimistic than ever in history,
45:58because each one of us leads a life that would have taken dozens of servants
46:03and a small fortune before this all began.
46:07Thanks to the dissenters and the landowners and the colonial buccaneers
46:10and the industrial revolution they helped to make possible,
46:13we don't need servants.
46:15Thanks to machines, we have the muscle power to change the shape of the planet.
46:37That good weather back in 1720 and the industrial revolution started the population growing,
46:44matching the way the production figures were going, faster and faster upwards.
46:49Today, the population depends on finding more raw materials for production every day.
46:57In Jamaica, for instance, one quarter of the country is being scraped away
47:01because it contains bauxite.
47:03You make aluminium from it.
47:04Worldwide, we're pulling out of the ground two billion tonnes of oil,
47:09three billion tonnes of coal,
47:11750 million tonnes of iron,
47:13820 million tonnes of copper ore and so on.
47:16And that's in one year.
47:19Makes you wonder how much more there is to come.
47:35Of course, the other side of the coin is that if you live in a fun world,
47:39you've got to pay for the ride.
47:40The onward and upward style of Western life, the good times,
47:43the throwaway philosophy that goes with building a new model every year
47:47so that everybody can keep their jobs
47:49and they can increase their standard of living
47:51is really a 19th century way of doing things.
47:55That's what the industrial revolution gave us,
47:57the desire for more, bigger, better, cheaper, faster.
48:02And back then, there was hardly anybody around to make much of a dent
48:05in the raw materials they started to dig up to turn into amazing luxuries
48:09or bare necessities as we would call them now.
48:13Today, whole countries rely almost totally on the raw material that they have that we want.
48:19Chrome, copper, gold, silver, tin, platinum,
48:22or in this case, bauxite.
48:25And you've seen, it's easy enough to get at.
48:27Sure, we can alter the shape of the planet with our newfound industrial muscle.
48:32We can turn it into a giant hole in the ground.
48:34Then what?
48:53We can overcome it in a big size.
48:53We can block it, since we are a ancient city,
48:54How does it care about the river?
48:54How does it care about the river?
49:01I know, I know.
49:01We can bring our newfoundation.
49:01I know.
49:01We can dai, we can't take our newfoundation,
49:05but I know what we are.
49:05but I know it's done.
49:05But I know what we were doing here
49:09This is a bit of traffic.
49:36VIOLIN PLAYS
49:50VIOLIN PLAYS
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