Transcription
Hello, welcome back to our lecture series for Western Civilization 102. Uh, we have been discussing events occurring in Europe, basically leading up until World War One. Today, our topic is the Second Industrial Revolution, which I've mentioned a little bit in the past about. Um, of course, we've learned about the First Industrial Revolution, and so you'll learn about, of course, what is different concerning the second. Actually, it spreads into Asia and Japan and Russia. Also, of course, in our upcoming lectures, we'll start to get into our World Wars and, of course, the Great Depression. And you may have learned something about the World Wars, the Great Depression, of course, if you've ever taken an American history class, but we'll focus, since this is Western Civilization, we'll focus on what's taking place with these World Wars and the Great Depression, of course, centered in European affairs and not from, of course, the United States and and how we get involved into it.
Because, as you'll see, you learned in previous lectures about the unification of Italy, the unification of Germany. All of this helps to upset the balance of power in Europe, and which will be one of the reasons that will start to, um, have a breakdown in the alliance system, the very complicated alliance system in Europe. And of course, when we come back on future lectures, you'll learn about how this alliance system breaks down. And because we're not, of course, just experiencing the Second Industrial Revolution, there's a lot of events taking place in Europe. This was a very, very busy, chaotic time in European history. So with World War One approaching, 1914, in June, with the assassination of the Archduke of Austria, Francis Ferdinand, or you may have seen it as Franz Ferdinand, and his wife, of course, was also killed. A, you'll see, of course, there are a lot of, a lot of events taking place among the European powers, a lot of treaties, a lot of some secret treaties, a lot of conferences. We'll see that there will be problems in North Africa and Morocco because we had on a previous lecture, we talked about imperialism and how a lot of these European countries were creating colonies, not only, of course, for, you know, to send settlers, etc., but, you know, to create trading, to have somewhere that they can obtain resources, natural resources, etc.
And so not everything, of course, that is occurring in Europe before World War One is on the European continent. We have a series of crises that take place, some in Morocco, some, of course, in an area called the Balkans, which is the region around Greece and Serbia and, um, Bosnia Herzegovina is another area as well. So let's learn more about what's taking place in Europe before World War One.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries witnessed what historians refer to as the Second Scientific and Second Industrial Revolutions. These terms can be a little bit misleading. It's not as though the First Scientific Revolution ever stopped, or that the First Industrial Revolution ever did either, but the Second Scientific and Second Industrial Revolutions witnessed important new developments in both science and industry, and an even closer linkage between science and the technology that made industry possible. Therefore, the terms have some utility.
An important thing to consider as we approach these two subjects is that by the late 19th century, in the Western World, there had developed what might be called "The Cult of Science." I, I don't mean cult in any sort of weird, uh, sense of belief, but what, what the term is used to imply is a belief that science will eventually solve our problems. There's a great enthusiasm for science, a great deal of interest in science, even by amateurs, and a belief that scientific progress would go on and on, uh, forever, and that it would eventually solve our problems. We're very much products of this today. By and large, even those of us who are pessimists tend to believe that science, sooner or later, will find a cure for cancer, that science will solve our energy problems, and that it will do all sorts of other things as well. That attitude to science is rooted in the 19th century, and it's one of the really important intellectual developments of that whole period.
Another thing about that is that it leads people to actively explore new areas of science and to come up with all sorts of new inventions, and indeed to begin looking into areas that people had not even thought about before. Another thing that it does is that it leads to the development of materialism as a philosophical outlook. Now, I want to stress here that I don't mean materialism in the sense of acquiring wealth, that went on too, nor do I mean materialism in any kind of anti-religious sentiment, but materialism in the sense of thinking in terms of the relationship between matter and energy and how that affects everything.
Another notion that, that becomes very prominent here, uh, thanks in part to the French philosopher, I'll go to Kant, is the idea of positivism, which also looks very much to science for answers to philosophical problems. Now, during this period, with the Second Scientific Revolution, we see a number of fundamentally important discoveries, and one of the interesting things about this is that many of these discoveries sort of challenge the complacence of the earlier 19th century because they, they challenge a number of the assumptions that the 18th century Enlightenment and the 17th century Scientific Revolution had given to subsequent generations.
If you think back to discussion of the First Scientific Revolution, it reached its apex with the teachings of Isaac Newton and with the idea that the universe can be explained, that the universe functions according to unchanging, inflexible natural laws, and that in order to understand the universe, all that is necessary to do is to apply human reason. Therefore, the universe came to be seen as a machine, God as sort of the great machine builder, or the great clock maker, as the image often was, and the universe as comprehensible and not mysterious at all. Moreover, people came to believe in the 18th century, during the Enlightenment, that the application of reason to other areas than science could make other things explicable and could lead to a more rational approach to life, to politics, to religion, to society, to the economy, and to everything else. And so there was this sort of comfortable notion in the 18th century that one could be guided by enlightened, rational, scientific ideals to a more perfect, more comprehensible way of living.
In a lot of ways, the new science of the Second Scientific Revolution undercut that. This is not to say that it was not rational, that it did not involve the application of reason. Rather, what it did was to make the universe and man himself seem far, far more complex. One of the places where we see this is in what might be described as the new physics, a physics which challenged Newtonian physics in some fairly fundamental ways, and which indeed showed that there are not necessarily universal laws that can be applied at all times, in all places, in all circumstances.
Now, one of the things that, uh, this entails is an extension of physics into new areas, in particular into the realm of astrophysics and into the realm of subatomic physics. Newtonian physics still works just fine if you're an engineer or if you're a baseball player. There is still a reaction for every action, just as Newton said. But when one starts looking at astrophysics, at the universe as a whole, or at subatomic physics, things begin to change. And around the turn of the century, there are a whole series of discoveries that open up whole new areas to think about.
For example, Conrad Röntgen discovered X-rays. Now, we think of X-rays primarily now as a medical tool, and they certainly are a very valuable medical tool, and indeed a way in which the Second Scientific Revolution feeds into the Second Industrial Revolution. But X-rays reveal a whole realm of the physical universe that nobody had even discovered before, radiation. And indeed, this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are whole other areas of study that the discovery of X-rays leads to, uh, to, to get to gamma rays, for example, and to the whole notion of atomic radiation.
Pierre and, uh, Marie Curie discovered radium, a radioactive element, one which unfortunately ultimately killed both of them with radiation poisoning. But here is something that just doesn't fit with the old Newtonian way of looking at things. In the Newtonian universe, you have matter and you have energy, and they're two separate things. But with radiation, with radium, here you have matter breaking down into energy in ways that cause a rethinking of how the physical universe operates.
Around the turn of the century, Ernest Rutherford developed a fairly accurate nuclear model of the atom. Now, the idea that matter might be broken down into units as small as atoms was not something new. The ancient Greeks had believed that, two and a half thousand years before Rutherford came up with his model. But Rutherford comes up with a model that suggests that atoms can be broken down into even smaller parts, into protons, neutrons, and electrons. And of course, subsequent science has shown that the particles are even smaller than that, and subsequent science has also shown that those particles do not behave in the same way that larger particles behave.
Max Planck began to develop quantum theory, a theory which helps to explain why subatomic particles don't behave in the same way that atoms and larger particles behave. And all of these showed that a new system of physics, a new system of mathematics to support that physics, was necessary to answer questions which Newton's physics did not answer, and indeed questions which Newton's physics had not even asked.
The man who more than anybody else provides those answers, though he opens up as many questions as he answers, was Albert Einstein. Albert Einstein first propounded his theory of relativity in 1905, and it's a theory that has continued to motivate physicists ever since and to puzzle most non-physicists. Along with it, I don't propose to give here a scientific explanation of the theory of relativity, that involves mathematics and more time than we have. However, the historical significance of relativity is something that even the non-physicist can grasp with just a little application.
Essentially, what Newton had said is that time and space are absolute. Time does not change, it's one of those universal laws. Space does not change, it's one of those universal laws. But Newton, I'm sorry, Einstein said that both are relative. Time and space are relative to the observer. And later on, he also applied to that other things like gravitation and a study of motion to discover that there is another variable that we have to throw into the picture, and that is the variable of mass. For if you set an object in motion, the mass of that object increases. That's why if somebody throws a baseball and hits you with it, that's going 50 miles an hour, it feels one way, and if they throw a baseball that's going 100 miles an hour and hits you, it feels a different way. The mass is greater at the time of impact.
Of course, Einstein wasn't spending his time throwing baseballs at people. He was spending his time thinking in terms of how this works on a macro level. And what he discovered, along with the idea that mass increases with velocity, is the notion that as you approach the speed of light, mass increases infinitely. So essentially, what he is discovering here is that matter can be affected by velocity. Mass is increased by velocity, and as you approach the speed of light, which is sort of Einstein's new constant, that mass, it increases to, uh, almost infinity, or, or theoretically to infinity. Furthermore, he discovered that in the presence of very massive objects, that space can be warped. We think of this primarily today in terms of the warping of space around very massive objects called black holes, but it is Einstein's physics that first demonstrates this.
So, what in short does this do? Well, Einstein's notions undermine the certainty of Newtonian physics when it comes to the astrophysical perspective. We discover that mass changes with velocity, we discover that space can be warped, we discover that the speed of light is a more meaningful constant than any other. But it all, we also discover that this affects time, that time, too, is relative. Einstein predicted, for example, that if you took two twin brothers and you kept one twin brother on the Earth and you sent the other twin brother in a spacecraft into space at a very high rate of speed and brought him back 50 years later, that he would have aged much, much less than the brother left on Earth because the passage of time is affected by velocity.
Now, this is a difficult concept for many people to get their heads around, although it's become a, a common factor in the science and science fiction of the 21st century. But in fact, this has been proved, in a matter of speaking. Not that we've done it with twins and speed of light spacecraft, but it has been done with atomic clocks. Identical atomic clocks that are accurate to an incredibly small degree, and what they've done is keep one atomic clock on the Earth, send one into a subspace in a very fast airplane, and indeed, time passes more slowly for the clock in the plane. So time is relative, space is relative. It's a brave new universe, according to Einstein. And that really, in a lot of ways, undermines the certainty that Newton had given people about the universe. Indeed, we have come once more to see the universe as a mysterious place, not as a mysterious place that we can't understand at all, but a place so large, so complex, so chaotic in some ways, that it is simply beyond human comprehension at this point. And that's a very different sort of universe than the one that Newton left us.
And this, this has effects that go beyond just physics. Uh, it has, it is influenced the way that people think about philosophy, uh, even about such things as, you know, the meaning of life. Now, another given, if you will, of the First Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment was the idea that we can apply human reason to solve all problems. But what if human reason is not as infallible as the Enlightenment suggested? What if human reason itself is suspect? Well, we start to see that idea being posed at the same time as the new physics is undermining Newton, by what might be called the new psychology. And nowhere is this more evident than in the work of the Austrian doctor and psychologist Sigmund Freud.
Now, Freud remains a major influence on psychology even today. He also has become something of a caricature. Many people have not read all of Freud and therefore don't see the complexity of his thought, and at the same time, many of Freud's ideas are no longer a part of mainstream psychological theory. But the impact that he has in the time that we're discussing right now is enormous, whether we have kept particular aspects of his thinking or not.
Earlier students of psychology, or what we call psychology today, had been mostly interested in trying to find organic causes for changes in emotional or mental, uh, health or emotion, emotional or mental behavior. And indeed, we know today that that there are many organic causes for those things, many biochemical changes in the brain that can be influenced in a positive way by the right sort of medication. But Freud was interested in something else. He was interested in how human behavior is affected by the subconscious. He postulated the notion that the subconscious has an enormous amount to do with conscious behavior. Indeed, he postulated the notion that the self really can be broken down into three different levels of existence: the id, the ego, and the superego. And that much of what the id suggests to us, that it has to do with, with appetites, whether hunger or sexual appetite or other desires, that much of that is in fact subconscious, and it's things that we aren't even aware of.
Now, one of the things that Freud emphasized was the whole notion of sexual repression. It's perhaps not surprising that he focused so much on this during the 19th century, during the so-called Victorian era, where it wasn't considered polite to talk about a lot of sexual matters, and where there was indeed a good deal of sexual repression, even if sex went right on just the same. But Freud's notion was that as a result of sexual repression, and as a result of the repression of fear and other emotions, we have all sorts of anxieties, all sorts of inhibitions, all sorts of desires that we're not really conscious of. And that in fact, much of what we do that we think of as rational is in fact not based upon the application of pure reason, but rather upon subconscious appetites, subconscious fears, subconscious anxieties, subconscious desires.
Now, modern psychology may have reduced somewhat the role of sexual repression in Freudian psychology, but the notion that we are affected by the subconscious is still taken very seriously. And indeed, we use the term rationalize today to describe a process where we come up with a reason, a, a supposedly rational reason for doing things that may be more emotional in nature than they are reasonable or rational in nature. Again, we don't have to explore this, uh, in, in the depth that Freud did, or in the depth that you might do so in a psychology class, to see the historical impact here. What Freud's discoveries and ideas seem to suggest is that man is a far less rational creature than he liked to believe in the 18th and 19th century, and that much of what we think of as reason may not indeed be reason at all.
So, the new physics undermines the ideas of the First Scientific Revolution, of the idea of the universe as an explicable, comprehensible place based on universal law. The new psychology undermines the idea of man as a rational creature. Now, this, of course, does not mean that we go back to 1500 in the way that we approach science, or in the way that we approach reason or psychology. We remain today very much the products of the First Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. Newton's ideas still work in many respects, Enlightenment ideas still work in many respects. But what both Freud and Einstein do is to suggest a greater level of complexity, and that greater level of complexity requires more work to understand, and it also poses much greater challenges, suggesting that not only may we never fully understand the universe, but we also may never plumb all the depths of the human psyche. Well, that then suggests that the universe is not quite so understandable, and that man himself is not quite so rational.
The third major scientific development of the 19th century also suggested that the world may be a somewhat more hostile place than we thought before, and that comes with the, the ideals of Charles Darwin, the great evolutionary scientist. Now, I want to emphasize at the beginning of this discussion here that what Darwin proposed in the 19th century about biological evolution was not new. The ancient Greeks again had developed a fairly sophisticated theory of biological evolution, but that had fallen by the wayside during the Middle Ages. And so, in a sense, Darwin is rediscovering what the Greeks had already argued a long time before. Moreover, Darwin did not suddenly spring into existence out of whole cloth. He didn't discover all of this on his own. He based his ideas about evolution on the works of others, and perhaps most importantly, Darwinian evolution, uh, is, is frequently misconstrued, frequently and accurately portrayed. Darwin did not ever at any point suggest that man evolved from monkeys. Let's just get that straight. What he suggested rather was that all modern life evolved from earlier, simpler forms of life. Darwin himself, of course, has been modified a great deal, just as Freud has, just as Einstein has. But the, the main thrust of his work is the notion that all modern plant, animal, and human life is the product of evolution.
Now, another thing I want to dispel is the notion that Darwin talked about the survival of the fittest. That's not his terminology. That is the terminology of the social Darwinists, who I will address shortly. Rather, what Darwin talked about was a process called natural selection. And where he gets that idea from is, is several places. Number one, he was very much influenced by the thinking of a man by the name of Thomas Malthus, who had written a great deal about humans and about human population and about human competition for resources. Malthus believed that as populations grew, that there would be increasing competition for resources, which of course is right. Malthus also believed that as population grew, it would reach a breaking point, a, what he, what has come to be known as a Malthusian crisis, where things would begin to collapse. Now, that doesn't mean that Darwin embraced all of that. It doesn't mean that modern science embraces all of that, but it got Darwin interested in looking at how populations, both human populations and animal populations, compete to exist.
Another thing that influenced him very much was the work of a geologist, uh, by the name of Charles Lyell, who had discovered that geological formations have evolved, if you will, over a very long period of time. Mountains are the result of geological processes, continental drift is a product of geological processes, and so on. And this got Darwin thinking in terms of what we might call deep time, that is an existence of the Earth and an existence of life that goes back not a few thousand years, but many millions of years, or in the case of the Earth, billions of years. Moreover, the notion that the geological structure of the Earth evolves also got him interested in thinking about the possible evolution of life. But what really sealed it for Darwin was his actual observation of natural life, observing, for example, finches that from island to island differ slightly because of how they have evolved on different islands, our observation of other animals that have developed particular mutations that are appropriate to survival in their particular environment.
Now, again, as with physics, as with psychology, we cannot explore all of the aspects of evolution here. That is something for a biological evolution class. But the impact of Darwin is something that we can consider here. Darwin published his Origin of the Species in 1859, in which he argued that all existing species evolved from earlier, simpler forms of life. He offered some examples, he offered an explanation of how this happens. It's through a process, as I said, that he calls natural selection. In natural selection, some individuals, want to speak, within a species will have characteristics that make it more likely that they will survive. They're stronger, they're faster, they're smarter, they're better able to adapt to their particular environment. If they survive longer, they will reproduce more, and therefore the next generation will have more of the characteristics of survivability than the previous one. And over very long periods of time, as in hundreds of thousands or millions of years, this can lead, in Darwin's thinking, to whole new species. So also can the process of mutation. If a mutation happens to be useful, then it will be reproduced.
Darwin did not initially apply this to man in the Origin of Species, but a few years later, he published a second work, The Descent of Man, which argued that mankind, as an animal form, is also a product of evolution. Now, this, of course, has an enormous impact on science at the time. It is, for one thing, immensely controversial at first. By and large, modern biological science accepts evolution as a given, but it was not accepted as a given in the 19th century. Many of Darwin's fellow scientists were reluctant to accept his ideas, many of them questioned his methods, many of him questioned his evidence, and it was a huge controversy in the scientific community for many years.
It also created controversy outside the scientific community, most particularly in when in the case of the relationship between science and religion. Darwin's idea about how mankind originated would not square with a literal interpretation of the first and second chapters of the Book of Genesis, and therefore there was enormous controversy between science and religion over that difference. Again, that is as pronounced now, although it hasn't by any means gone away, but it was a huge controversy in the 19th century. A number of the mainline churches that now accept evolution, like, for example, the Roman Catholic Church, initially challenged it, initially suggested that Darwinism would lead to atheism and so on, although Darwin himself was not terribly interested in pronouncing upon religion.
Now, beyond that, another thing that, uh, sort of inadvertently arose from Darwinism was that movement, uh, I alluded to earlier, called Social Darwinism. Darwin himself was not responsible for this. This was rather the product of some social theorists who attempted to take Darwin's ideas and apply them to society. Most notable among them was a man by the name of Herbert Spencer. He is actually responsible for the idea of the survival of the fittest because he suggested that in human society, some individuals will be more fit to survive than others. And at a very superficial level, of course, that's true. If, if you are born with a resistance to cancer, you are probably less likely to get cancer than somebody who is born with a genetic susceptibility to it. But what, what Spencer goes on to suggest is that some ethnicities, some ethnic populations are more fit to survive than others.
Now, for him, this was, this was simply an enterprise in theorizing here, trying to take a scientific idea and apply it to society. But you can imagine what happened when people with other motives got a hold of this. Uh, others took Social Darwinism, not really necessarily following Spencer's intentions, but their own, and began to use it as a rationale for racism, for all sorts of notions that some races or some ethnicities are superior to others, and that they therefore have a greater right to survive. Social Darwinism became very prominent in the 1890s and the early 20th century, and it's not surprising that there is a rise in racism of all kinds all over the Western World during that period. In the United States, we're most familiar with it being directed against African Americans and Native Americans, but it's not just that. In almost every European state, and indeed in some Middle Eastern states as well, you find it being applied to ethnic minorities. And it also is applied, as we have already seen in the building of empires, where many Europeans see themselves as naturally superior to the people whom they are colonizing and see it as therefore their sort of scientific right to do so.
Now, beyond this, science also has an impact in the realm of industry. What we have been talking about so far is largely theoretical science, theoretical physics, theoretical psychology, theoretical biology. But of course, much of the scientific development of the late 19th and early 20th century had to do with more practical results, with taking applied, with taking practical science and applying it to specific problems, and we get a whole raft of new inventions as a result of this.
One reason we talk about a Second Industrial Revolution alongside the Second Scientific Revolution is that there are all these new discoveries that really change the whole way that industry works. For example, this is a period that sees the discovery of new energy sources. One of these is petroleum. Uh, the, the period of the Second Scientific Revolution, uh, sees the development of petroleum from a fairly tiny little industry that, you know, produced lamp oil into a massive industry that it remains today, which produces, uh, oil for all sorts of purposes, gasoline, jet fuel, and all of that. Now, that didn't happen overnight, but the discovery of the ways in which petroleum can be manufactured to make it more useful create a huge industry. And of course, petroleum is easier to deal with than coal, it is more abundant than coal once it's discovered, it is cleaner than coal, if it's not 100% clean, and therefore it opens up a whole new world. Petroleum becomes an industry itself, whether it's in drilling for oil, transporting oil, refining oil, selling oil, and what have you. But it also makes possible all sorts of other things, using petroleum products to power factories, and still later on, using petroleum to produce synthetics, synthetic rubber, or what we nowadays call plastic.
Another new source of energy was electricity. Knowledge about electricity is not anything new. One, one of the many famous myths of American history that actually turns out to be true on inspection is the notion of, of Benjamin Franklin flying a kite and trying to get it struck by lightning. He actually did do that. So Franklin knew about electricity, but the application of electricity on a large scale to produce power is really a late 19th, early 20th century thing. And of course, once you have electricity, that changes the whole way that people live, that changes the whole way that factories are run, and it too creates an industry, producing electricity, building electrical plants, building electrical transmission networks, and so on, producing electrical lights and all sorts of other electrical products. So the introduction of petroleum and electricity alone would probably be enough of a reason for us to talk about a Second Scientific Revolution. If you want to get some personal sense of this, just try spending a few hours doing without anything that involves petroleum or electricity, either in its production or in its application, and you'll get the notion. Of course, here in South Louisiana, where we have hurricanes on a regular basis, we get to experience this inadvertently from time to time, but it really is quite stunning when you start ruling out the things in your life that depend upon one or the other.
Now, another thing that is immensely important in the Second Scientific Revolution is the development of a better method of steel production. People, of course, have been manufacturing iron products since the ancient Hittites discovered how to do so about three thousand or four thousand years ago, but steel, tempered steel, which is stronger, which can, can take more of a beating, which can be refined, uh, into smaller and smaller structures, is a relatively new development. And a lot of the production of steel depends upon heat. The hotter you get the, the liquid or molten metal, the better you can make the final product. And in the late 19th century, we see the introduction of a better way of making steel by Henry Bessemer, the inventor of the Bessemer furnace, which produces much greater heat and a much higher tempered steel. It's not an accident that we start to see the building of much, much longer and higher bridges in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and bridges, of course, are immensely important to transportation. They have immense strategic and commercial value. They are possible because of steel. We also see a transformation in the construction industry. Skyscrapers become possible because of the strength of steel girders. There are no skyscrapers before the Second Industrial Revolution. They become a commonplace thereafter.
Another thing that develops in this period is the first attempts to make synthetic products. Almost all products made prior to the Second, uh, Scientific and Industrial Revolutions were made from natural sources. But beginning in the late 19th century, one of the first areas in which synthetics were introduced was into the making of dyes. Dyes previously had come from plants, from animals, what have you. In the late 19th century, a method is discovered for taking coal tar and turning that into dyes, and that sets people to thinking, well, what other synthetic products can we make? And of course, again, if you look around you today at the number of things made from synthetic metal, synthetic rubber, I.E. plastic, it's, it's almost unlimited.
Another very important invention in the late 19th century was high explosives. The development by Alfred Nobel of dynamite in 1867 had both a military application and a peacetime technical application. On the one hand, high explosives, uh, in World War One will become a much more important means of waging war and making war into a much deadlier enterprise than it had ever been, along with things like the machine gun. But dynamite also has a great many peaceful applications. For example, it became possible to build roads much more easily if you could dynamite your way through a hill that was in the way. It became much easier to do mining if you could use dynamite to, to loosen veins of coal or other products rather than having to do it with brute physical force. Uh, Nobel, by the way, felt a bit guilty about unleashing this deadly force on the world, which is why he set up the system of Nobel Prizes, which include, among others, a Nobel Prize for Peace.
Another invention in this period of immense importance is the development of the radio, which we tend to associate with Marconi, although the radio was being developed by a number of different people at the same time. If you think about it, the radio itself depends upon radio waves, it depends upon the new physics. It begins to change the way people think about the physical world once it becomes evident. But radio has all sorts of applications. For example, it has a military application. Once you can put radios on ships, it is possible to communicate instantaneously with your Navy wherever your Navy happens to be. The same is true of commercial ships, whereas in the past it had been impossible to communicate with merchant ships and until they came home. Now you can communicate with them instantaneously. Also true on land, also true with all other forms of transportation. And very quickly, people began to discover that radio could have other applications as well. It could have commercial applications. You could do programming on radio, you could do advertising on radio, you could produce news on radio. Again, the applications are almost boundless.
And just as there were important changes in communication, which made communication almost instantaneous, also there were important changes in transportation with the invention in the late 19th century and early 20th centuries of the automobile, first of all, and in the early 20th century of the airplane. The automobile was initially greeted as kind of a gimmick, as is something that rich people would play with, but that would never have any real practical value. Most people thought that the horse would continue to be the most prominent means of transportation. And indeed, early automobiles were somewhat problematic in their dependability and operability. But of course, as we know, the automobile took off very quickly. It too becomes an industry, and it revolutionizes society. Those of you who are students at Southeastern, many of you are students at Southeastern who don't live in Hammond, Louisiana, you're able to come to Hammond, Louisiana, if you're not actually watching a class on television, because of the automobile. It changes the whole demographics of our behavior. The same thing is true of the airplane, a little bit later. Airplanes have a military application in World War One, and even more so since. They also have an immensely important, uh, application for transportation and for scientific exploration as well.
So, all of these things drastically change the way that the world operates, creating new industries of their own, but facilitating other industries as well. And along with this, along with the Second Industrial Revolution, that is to some extent a product of the Second Scientific Revolution, we have dramatic changes in the way people do business. Of course, this occurs at a time between 1870 and 1914 when population was growing rapidly in the world. It occurs at a time where, at least in the Western World, the standard of living for pretty much all people was going up. The rich did get richer, but the poor became better off as well. And beyond that, what we see is the emergence of what we might call big industry, as factories get bigger and bigger, big business, as corporations come to take a much larger role in commerce, and in response to that, the development of what eventually becomes big labor. The key common element here is big business is done on a wider scale, manufacturing is done on a wider scale, labor is organized on a wider scale, and many of the things that we now take for granted as parts of, of the world of commerce, really come into existence in this period.
The idea of advertising is nothing new, but the idea of advertising on a wide scale, on radio and in print, is new. The idea of promotions, of sales, in other words, to get people to buy things, is not necessarily new, but the idea of using it as a calculated commercial device is indeed new in this period. What we see is marketing on a whole different scale. And in particularly, we see this because one of the aspects of the Second Industrial Revolution is the development of labor-saving devices, things like early versions of the vacuum cleaner, for example, or gasoline-powered lawn mowers, for example. All of these things are not strictly essential, perhaps, at the turn of the century, but they become desirable, and they are marketed as things that you absolutely must have, and they are marketed effectively in that way.
Now, suppose that there are products that you now feel you must have, but that you can't quite afford, but the marketers have convinced you that you must have them. Well, one of the things that develops in this period in response to that is credit. Not that credit is something new, but credit extended down to the lowest social classes, revolving credit, where you can buy now and pay a little bit every month. That's a new development. This is something which makes it possible for people who hitherto wouldn't have been able to afford very many things to buy things that they couldn't afford before.
Another thing that the Second Industrialization, our Second Industrial Revolution, does is that it makes all sorts of products much more accessible to people. We see the development in this period of canning on a much more widespread basis. We see the development of refrigeration on a much wider spread basis, which is really essential because with more and more people working in factories, these people can no longer take the time to grow their own food. They have to be able to buy it at a market in canned form or refrigerated form or what have you. Another thing we see is the development of cheap, uh, massively processed clothing. If you were working all day, you don't have time to sew your own clothes. You need to be able to buy cheap, mass-produced clothing, and that becomes available. And of course, with all these products come new, uh, means of marketing, like, for example, the department store. The department store didn't exist before the late 19th century. Now it is a commonplace, but the notion that you could go somewhere and buy cookware, buy clothing, buy all sorts of other things, all under one roof, is really a function of the Second Industrial Revolution.
Now, the Second Industrial Revolution also puts a tremendous number of people to work in factories and in mines. And indeed, as a result of the Second Industrial Revolution, population, for the first time in the history of man, becomes predominantly urban. For the first time ever, you have more people involved in non-agricultural endeavors than agricultural endeavors. You have more people living in the cities than living in the country, and that is a huge thing. And as working people begin to realize their numbers, they began to desire a bigger piece of the pie, so to speak. So you see a greater demand on the part of working people for, uh, what they consider fair wages, and thus the importance of unions. You also see a greater demand from working people for the right to vote, and thus there is a very direct link between the Second Industrial Revolution and the growth of democracy in the period between 1870 and 1914.
All right, so now that we've learned more about, uh, events taking place before World War One, when we come back for our next lecture, we will, of course, discuss the actual war itself and, um, what is happening in World War One, the different alliances that are created. Remember that the United States didn't enter until 1917, and the war is over in 1918. And of course, in upcoming lectures, we'll talk about the Great Depression, we'll talk about totalitarianism, which is a very important subject for this time in history, and the 1930s. Of course, the Soviet Union also will be looked at in depth as to what's happening there before World War II. Um, and of course, you know, World War II takes place, and we'll learn, you know, World War One, it was hoped that that would be the war to end all wars, and quite obviously, it isn't, because not too long after, we end up with World War II. So we'll, of course, learn all about that in our upcoming lectures. Until next time.