Like before railroads, time in London was 4 minutes ahead of Reading and 14 minutes ahead of time in Bridgwater. Or at least created the standardization of time. Where will the 1% vacation?! Poor rich people they had to go the Hamptons, which aren't even that nice, they're just really expensive.Īnd there's the fact that railroads literally changed time. Then the wealthy migrated further away to places only accessible by air travel, like, I don't know, Ibiza, but now Ibiza is full of euro-trash because of inexpensive airlines. In a positive development for 99% of the population, railroads changed space, too, by opening up previously inaccessible like, vacation spots of the wealthy. And then they expanded space by creating suburbs and new towns. But railroads also shaped space and time in a manner totally unprecedented in human history by, for instance, speeding up travel times, which shrunk the world. I mean, sometimes nature was literally annihilated, as when tunnels were cut through hills and depressions were graded to make the railroad as straight as possible, as if drawn with a ruler. This wasn't just a fancy way of talking about how railways sped up travel, but also the way that the railroad destroyed traditional relationships with nature. For instance, the phrase "annihilation of time and space" was a pretty popular one when talking about railways. And the change was definitely seen as radical. That encompassed everything that industrialization was about.Īnd since railways changed the lives of middle- and upper-class people, who tend to write a lot, we know a lot about them. It wasn't just locomotion though the railway itself changed the idea of an industrial machine to include its surrounding infrastructure. It's not like you had a computer.īut the presence of railroads reminded you that you were in a different world from that of your parents or grandparents. You know, if you were a factory worker that stuff was around you all day every day slowly killing your soul, but if you were, say, a mortgage broker, your work life hadn't changed. Also, since not everyone worked in factories, railways were one of the few places that both middle- and upper-class people came face-to-face with industrial machinery. ( 1:12) So railroads were these big loud machines that people hadn't seen before, which makes them a pretty good metaphor for industrialization. But it contains a ton of interesting ideas, and it's one of those books that makes you think differently about the world.Īnd it's vitally important that we think about the role technology plays in our lives, including the technology of railroads. It's one interpretation of a series of events. So to be clear I'm not saying I agree with everything in this book. We want to introduce you to how exciting history can be and also how unsettled it is, how many arguments there still are. So in this Crash Course World History series, we're talking a lot about a lot of different world history books so that we can approach subjects from a variety of angles. We're going to talk about a small book by Wolfgang Schivelbusch called "The Railway Journey." But, uh, we are going to talk about, like, a specific and essential slice of Industrial Revolution that also like pleases my four-year old self a lot: railroads! I got this movie that's about to film, so yeah, no. Green! Are you going to do a whole series on the Industrial Revolution? Because that actually sounds really boring. John: Hi, I'm John Green this is Crash Course World History, and today, we are returning to a subject that could have a Crash Course series all of its own: the Industrial Revolution. Want to find Crash Course elsewhere on the internet? And the quality of boiler manufacturing improved, so the trains exploded less often, which also made people feel safer.Ĭrash Course is on Patreon! You can support us directly by signing up at All kinds of fears surrounded rail travel, but over time, people got over them. Like any new technology, railroads also scared people. People needed some sort of distraction to ensure they didn't have to talk to other people on the train. Railroads also changed habits, including increasing reading. The railroad changed human perception of time and space, making long-distance travel much faster and easier. You either walked where you wanted to go or rode on an animal to get where you were going. Prior to the invention of steam-powered railroads, pretty much all locomotion had been muscle-powered. In which John Green teaches you about railroads and some of the ways they changed the world, and how they were a sort of microcosm for the Industrial Revolution as a whole.
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