Yes I inverted it to burning coal is called the industrial revolution because I think it’s neat way to look at it.
I’m thinking through the history of energy: We burned wood. Then we burned coal. Then we burned oil. Then we burned atoms.
Yes I inverted it to burning coal is called the industrial revolution because I think it’s neat way to look at it.
I’m thinking through the history of energy: We burned wood. Then we burned coal. Then we burned oil. Then we burned atoms.
I’m not sure what you mean by this. The industrial revolutions were not just about burning coal.
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.
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.
If you didn’t have things to burn, then you couldn’t access certain advancements. Not nearly as easily anyway. We would have needed charcoal for steam engines. Or your example, how would we have processed ore into metal without coal (on any significant scale). Maybe charcoal again. Without something liquid (and very energy dense) combustion engines would have been very hard. Maybe ethanol, but production of that would have been hard. I think advancement has been very dependent on easy, energy dense energy sources.
We have been processing ore into metal with coal for thousands of years. It sounds like you are arguing that the industrial revolution has been happening for thousands of years. Which it has not.
We also made bread in the industrial revolution which is needed to feed the workers. Without feeding the workforce we could not access certain advancements. Is bread a corner stone technology of the industrial revolution? No it is not. It in no way defines what the industrial revolution was. Just like coal or oil.
You can run a steam engine off of coal, wood, oil, nuclear, basically anything that creates a lot of heat. Coal is more convenient in a lot of ways but it did not unlock anything special. If not for coal we could use wood or charcoal. That was the steam engine, not the fuel it runs on.
And if the advancements were because of these fuels that why did it not happen 1000s of years ago when we had access to them?
Treadles were the first source of power in the industrial revolution. Coal came way later.
I’m not sure if I entirely follow what you mean by “turning things on their head”. What are you getting at?
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/turn-on-head
I understand the turn of phrase. I don’t quite know what you mean in the application here.
They mean inverting the flow of logic, not looking at consequences but at causes, i guess.
I think they mean they just took a huge bong rip and suddenly became the smartest person in the room.
But hear me out, what if a bong took a huge rip out of you instead…
Source
? Your point being that we didn’t stop burning coal when we got oil? I am aware.
Yeah i basically just wanted to tell you that there’s actual data on stuff and if you wanna know, you gotta read it all, there’s a lot. I don’t know what it would help you and ask a question such as “is there a name for the time when we started to burn oil?” because if i give you an answer, what do you do with that answer? if you can’t embed it into a broader context, that answer seems pretty useless to me. So if you actually wanna know, maybe start reading it all. idk. maybe i come off arrogant, but that’s not my intention. i just don’t understand what your motivation for asking this question is?
Looking at that graph and extrapolating from your comment, you’re saying the industrial revolution started in 1900?