Our lives depend on it, and yet, most of us take technology for granted as a given and are embarrassingly ignorant about how it works. If you imagine for a few minutes what the world and your own life would look like without electric power, as you can see in today’s video, you’ll soon realize that you almost can’t do it. It is ubiquitous, and yet unbelievably fragile...In this fascinating documentary series, historian James Burke traces the technology of modernity back to its often surprising ancestral roots, and beautifully reveals in the process not only the law of unintended (and unexpected) consequences but the serendipitous twists and turns that have determined the fate of the world as we know it today.
In this first episode, he eloquently argues for a single human invention that opened the floodgates to the amount of innovation we have thousands of years after its modest invention. Dare to guess what it is? I’ll give you a hint: it’s not the wheel :)
For a moment there, I thought he was going to get all Ortega y Gassett on us, but alas :)
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