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Age of Invention: The Second Soul, Part I

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You’re reading Age of Invention, my newsletter on the causes of the British Industrial Revolution and the history of innovation, which goes out to 28,000 people. This is the first instalment of this year’s special series on unsung materials. To stay tuned, subscribe here: Here’s a riddle. There was a product in the seventeenth century that was universally considered a necessity as important as grain and fuel. Controlling the source of this product was one of the first priorities for many a military campaign, and sometimes even a motivation for starting a war. Improvements to the preparation and uses of this product would have increased population size and would have had a general and noticeable impact on people’s living standards. And this product underwent dramatic changes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, becoming an obsession for many inventors and industrialists, while seemingly not featuring in many estimates of historical economic output or growth at all. The product i

Age of Invention: The Second Soul, Part I Anton Howes Mar 08, 2024 204 19 31 Share You’re reading Age of Invention , my newsletter on the causes of the British Industrial Revolution and the history of innovation, which goes out to 28,000 people. This is the first instalment of this year’s special series on unsung materials . To stay tuned, subscribe here: Subscribe Here’s a riddle. There was a product in the seventeenth century that was universally considered a necessity as important as grain and fuel. Controlling the source of this product was one of the first priorities for many a military c

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