setsneedtofeed@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Either Industrial Revolution was not named because of the burning of coal in and of itself. Coal burning for part was part of the widespread and rapid transformation of society. Coal played a part in facilitating previously unthinkable changes in a short time.
The adoption of cars has been more iterative and gradual. In the U.S. there are certain periods important for them such as, depending on how much you think it had an effect, the General Motors streetcar conspiracy. There was also the post WW2 push by Eisenhower to building National highways. But those didn’t radical and quickly change life in the way industrial revolutions did.
Similarly nuclear power production has not caused widespread fundamental change in a short period.
someguy3@lemmy.world 4 days ago
setsneedtofeed@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I’m not sure what you mean by this. The industrial revolutions were not just about burning coal.
someguy3@lemmy.world 4 days ago
It’s useful to think about things by turning them on their head, aka inverting them. In this case: Burning of coal facilitated the industrial revolution. Yes, yes, yes, I know all the things that it was not caused by the burning of coal, it as not “just about burning coal”, it was not named because of the burning of coal, things were iterative, etc, etc, etc. But it behooves you turn things on their head and think through them in different ways.
In the bigger sense of turning things on their head, we can look at energy sources as we go through history: We burned wood. Then we burned coal. Then we burned oil. Then we burned atoms.
nous@programming.dev 4 days ago
That is not a useful way of thinking of things. We have been burning oil and coal for a very very long time. Coal has been used in smiths to forge metal and oil to light lamps for 1000s of years.
It is not what we burnt that changed, it is what we did with the energy that changed things. Aka the steam engine was the real keystone technology in the industrial revolution. It was not the burning of oil that changed anything - but the internal combustion engine being put into cars.
setsneedtofeed@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I’m not sure if I entirely follow what you mean by “turning things on their head”. What are you getting at?
gandalf_der_12te@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 days ago
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