flying shuttle

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The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention by William Rosen

Albert Einstein, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, barriers to entry, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, computer age, Copley Medal, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, delayed gratification, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, fudge factor, full employment, Higgs boson, independent contractor, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, iterative process, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph Schumpeter, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge economy, language acquisition, Lewis Mumford, moral hazard, Network effects, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Singer: altruism, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Simon Kuznets, spinning jenny, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, zero-sum game, éminence grise

That is not, however, the case with the flying shuttle itself, which indisputably revolutionized the craft of weaving. It didn’t do so by making the skills of the artisan redundant. Quite the opposite, in fact. Kay’s flying shuttle made it possible for weavers to produce a wider product, which they called “broadloom,” but doing so was demanding. Weaving requires that the weft threads be under constant tension in order to make certain that each one is precisely the same length as its predecessor; slack is the enemy of a properly woven cloth. Using a flying shuttle to carry weft threads through the warp made it possible to weave a far wider bolt of cloth, but the required momentum introduced the possibility of a rebound, and thereby a slack thread.

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More significantly, in the same year, Kay patented a new shuttle that was initially known as a wheel shuttle, then a spring shuttle; no one called it a flying shuttle until 1780. Before Kay’s invention, looms had been operated by weavers passing the shuttle, which carried the weft, through the warp threads by hand. As a result, any loomed cloth was going to be about the width of a human wingspan. By putting the shuttle on wheels and attaching cords to either end, Kay’s invention permitted it to “fly” by pulling the cord in either direction. It would take another fifty years for its use to become widespread, but despite its relatively leisurely adoption, the flying shuttle made Kay, if not wealthy, then at least prosperous; in 1738, he described his profession as that of “inventor,” but by 1745, had promoted himself to the status of “gentleman.”

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For nearly fifteen years, he was a maker of wigs, recalling, “I was a barber,31 but I have left it off, and I and another are going up and down the country buying hair and can make more of it.” No doubt he found the trade in hair pleasant enough, at least until 1767, when he met, in a pub, an itinerant clockmaker with the confusing (to historians, anyway) name of John Kay. This John Kay had nothing to do with flying shuttles, but he did have an interest in the other side of clothmaking, and he boasted to his new drinking companion, just as he collapsed over his last drink, that he could build a machine that would spin cotton on rollers. As both men later recalled,32 Kay woke up to find the onetime wig maker looming over him demanding a small model as proof of the clockmaker’s boasts.

The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution by Charles R. Morris

air freight, American ideology, British Empire, business process, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, clean water, colonial exploitation, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Dava Sobel, en.wikipedia.org, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, if you build it, they will come, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, lone genius, manufacturing employment, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, refrigerator car, Robert Gordon, scientific management, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, undersea cable

Arkwright also had the insight to hire clockmakers to build his machines, for they had the most contemporary experience with precision gearing. The foot-treadle, flying shuttle, heddle loom achieved very high manual production rates. At each push of the treadle, the heddles raised and lowered alternate warp (long) threads, creating a shed to pass the weft (cross) thread through, and the batten pushed the new weft thread firmly into place. The flying shuttle allowed the operator to remain seated and very rapidly pull the weft threads back and forth through the alternating sheds. Mechanized looms worked exactly the same way, but at much higher rates of speed.

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Arkwright’s second major mill got most of it right and was the prototype for a new British industry. Mechanization in the textile industry was an alternating race between spinning and weaving. The fly-shuttle foot-pedal heddle loom was a highly rationalized machine that quickly pressured the capacity of the hand-spinning industry, forcing the pace of mechanization. Mechanized spinning shifted the pressure back to weaving. The fly-shuttle loom almost cried out for mechanization; the challenge lay in tuning the pressures on the threads to produce acceptable cloth while minimizing breakage, the way a skilled human did by feel.

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Eugénie, Empress Euler, Leonard Evans, Oliver Factories block-making machines and mass-production shipbuilding water-powered Fair trade Farming Feeling piece(fig.) Ferguson, Niall Ferris wheel Fillmore, Millard Finance prebellum Finney, Charles Grandison Fitch, Charles Flintlocks(fig.)(fig.) Flying shuttle(fig.) Fogel, Robert Foods Foot, Adonijah Forbes, James Bennett Ford Ford, Henry: on meatpacking Forging engine(fig.) Ft. Erie Fourdrinier paper-making machinery Francis, James B. Franklin Institute Free trade Freedman’s Bureau, epidemics and French, Daniel Frick, Henry Fukuyama, Francis Fulton, Robert Furnaces Furniture, production of Galileo Gamble, James Garland, Hamlin Gary, Elbert Gauges parts(fig.)

Running Money by Andy Kessler

Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, Apple II, bioinformatics, Bob Noyce, British Empire, business intelligence, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, Charles Babbage, Corn Laws, cotton gin, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, flying shuttle, full employment, General Magic , George Gilder, happiness index / gross national happiness, interest rate swap, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, Long Term Capital Management, mail merge, Marc Andreessen, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, packet switching, pattern recognition, pets.com, railway mania, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Suez canal 1869, Toyota Production System, TSMC, UUNET, zero-sum game

American Indians had them, so did the Greeks and the Egyptians—everyone used looms to weave clothing. But while looms are very simple, they are extremely labor-intensive. This wasn’t a grandma whistling away process—a weaver must pay careful attention. In 1733, John Kay patented a wonderful device called the flying shuttle, and loom productivity popped. So much so that in 1755, a mob broke into John Kay’s house and destroyed one of his flying shuttle looms. While weaving got faster, making thread or yarn was still old-fashioned. Now weavers demanded more yarn of higher quality. Cheap cotton from the New World began to make inroads against itchy wool and even comfortable but expensive silk.

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See Britain Enron, 290 Ethernet, 139, 190, 191 Exar, 208 exchange rates, 164, 165, 276 Extreme, 140 Fabless Semiconductor Association, 269–70 fabs (fabrication facilities), 91, 129–34, 199, 250, 251 factories. See manufacturing Faggin, Federico, 126 Fairchild Semiconductor, 101–3, 124 family offices, 109–10 Fidelity Investments (Fido), 11, 27, 30, 31 file sharing, 190 Fleet Bank conference (1999), 175–79, 188 Fleet Boston Robertson Stephens conference (2000), 217–20, 225 flying shuttle, 64 Forbes, 40, 195 Forbes ASAP, 195 Foundry, 140 Francis, Stu, 44 Full Service Network, 194 Fulton, Robert, 92 Index Gates, Bill, 121, 125, 126, 127, 258 GDP, 237, 274 GDS-II files, 252, 254 General Electric, 274 General Magic, 97–98, 142 General Motors, 172, 241, 243, 267, 269, 277 genomic sorting, 296 GeoCities, 213 George III, King, 51, 56 Ghana, 280, 281–83, 294, 295 gigabit companies, 139–40 Gilder, George, 183 Global Crossing, 183, 187, 290 GM.

The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch by Lewis Dartnell

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, clean water, cotton gin, Dava Sobel, decarbonisation, discovery of penicillin, Dmitri Mendeleev, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, global village, Haber-Bosch Process, invention of movable type, invention of radio, invention of writing, iterative process, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Kim Stanley Robinson, lone genius, low earth orbit, mass immigration, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, nuclear winter, off grid, Oklahoma City bombing, Richard Feynman, safety bicycle, tacit knowledge, technology bubble, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, trade route

All of this is hard to reproduce satisfactorily with rudimentary mechanisms. The key advance over the basic weaving loom that I described was the invention of the flying shuttle. The simplest way to transfer the weft yarn through the shed gap between raised and lowered warp fibers is by passing a reel of thread from one hand to the other across the loom. But this is a slow action, and also limits the breadth of the fabric to that which can be comfortably reached with your arms. The flying shuttle is a reel of thread encased within a heavy, boat-shaped block that is jerked by a string from side to side of the loom along a smooth runner, playing out weft as it races across.

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., vii, 10, 275 Encyclopédie (Diderot), 8, 19 energy and power, 15, 165–85 batteries for, see batteries consumption per person, 166 from fossil fuels, 31, 57–58, 105, 165, 166, 190 generation and distribution of, 178–85 mechanical, 166–74 solar, 13, 47 steam engine for, 170n, 172–73, 182, 197, 201, 277, 290–91 steam turbine for, 182–83, 185, 206–7 thermal, 104–9, 166, 172, 182 water turbine for, 180–82, 181 waterwheel for, 166–68, 167, 170, 171–72, 178–79, 180, 203, 213, 276 windmill for, 46, 169, 170, 171–72, 178–80, 179, 213 see also electricity generators Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI), 106n engines: diesel, 188, 190 gasoline, 187, 188 internal combustion, 201–6, 204, 208 steam, 170n, 172–73, 182, 197, 201 Enlightenment, 276 enzymes, 81–82 equinoxes, 259, 261, 265 ethanol, 43, 89, 91, 120, 158, 159, 189–90, 202, 206, 241 ether, 159, 163, 241 evolution, 279 explosives, 104, 110, 116, 118, 122, 235–38, 242, 247 fabrics, see textiles fats and oils, 112, 188 animal, 191 linseed, 219 saponification of, 84, 112–13, 114–15, 211–12 vegetable, 108–9, 188, 190 feather pen, 214 fermentation, 80, 84, 88, 90–91 ferrous sulfate, 241 fertilizers, 57, 58, 69, 70, 72, 73, 76, 77n, 110, 121, 237, 238, 247–48, 250, 278–79 manure, 61, 69, 70, 73–76, 237, 243, 247, 250 Feynman, Richard, 9–10 fire: starting, 34–35 using, 104–5, 123–24 fires, destructive, 28 firewood, 106, 165, 176 fishing, 198 flash paper, 238 flax, 96, 108, 211 Fleming, Alexander, 12, 162, 164 Florey, Howard, 163 flour, 39, 86, 87 flying shuttle, 101 food, 33, 38–41 canned, 40, 92, 291 cereal preparation, 86–91 cooking, 79–81, 124 growing, see agriculture poisoning from, 79–81, 84 pottery vessels for, 80–81, 95, 124–26 spoilage of, 80, 161, 163 food preservation, 80, 81–85, 91–95, 161 by canning, 92, 291 by drying, 82, 91–92 by fermenting, 80, 84 by pickling, 84, 89, 91–92, 118 by refrigeration, 93–95 by salting, 82–83, 91–92 by smoking, 83, 91–92 fool’s gold, 222 forceps, 149–50, 150 fore-and-aft rigging, 198–99 forests, 27, 30, 106 fossil fuels, 31, 57–58, 105, 165, 166, 190 Foucault’s pendulum, 256n Four Quartets (Eliot), 275 foxglove, 155 Frank, Pat, 165 fuels, 41–42, 119, 124 biofuels, 74–75, 119, 191, 206–7, 208 gasification and, 191–93, 192, 194 kerosene, 108–9 fungicide, 118 Gaia hypothesis, 7 Galápagos Islands, 272n galena, 222, 227 Galileo, 172 gallium, 234–35 galls, 214 iron gall ink, 213–14, 218–19 gangs, 21 gas, 165 biogas, 74–75 natural, 44, 173, 185, 191 gasification, 191–93, 192, 194 gasoline, 41, 120, 173, 188–189, 191, 202, 206 alcohol in, 189–90 gasoline engine, 187, 188 gelatin, 116, 161, 241–42 generators, see electricity generators germ theory, 160, 161n glass, 49, 110, 124, 138–44, 235n, 243, 249 lenses, 142–43, 161 mirrors, 240n production of, 138–40 recycling of, 140 windows, 140, 141 glassblowing, 140–41 global warming, 31–32, 45, 294 glue, 116 glycerol, 115–16, 190, 238 Golding, William, 35n golf courses, 47 Goražde, 48–49, 48 GPS navigation devices, 42 grains, 39 Gregorian calendar, 262 guano, 238, 248, 250 guayule, 194–95 guncotton, 238, 241 gunpowder, 112, 236–37, 276 Gutenberg, Johannes, 215, 217, 218, 219 Haber-Bosch process, 57, 232, 248–51 hand washing, 112, 148 harness, 196 Harrison, John, 272, 273 harrow, 62, 63, 195 health care, see medicine heart rate, 155, 156 heat, 105 in canning, 92 herbicides and pesticides, 57, 77n, 279 Hippocrates, 155 hoe, 60, 61 Homo sapiens, 293 horses, 195–98, 197 hourglass, 254–55 houses, 29 Hurricane Katrina, 20–21 hydrocarbons, 104, 108, 188, 249 hydrochloric acid, 121 hydrogen, 193, 232, 233 chloride, 121, 244n in Haber-Bosch process, 57, 232, 248–51 hydrolysis, 211–12 hypothesis, 288 I Am Legend (Matheson), 24 “I Am Legend” scenario, 24 incubators, 150 indigo, 115 inductor, 224–25 industrial chemistry, 242–51, 253, 278–79 Industrial Revolution, 15, 70, 96, 105, 171, 242–43, 276–78, 290 infectious diseases, 112, 147–48 influenzas, 147 ink, 213, 216, 218–20 India, 219 iron gall, 213–14, 218–19 insects, 29 internal combustion engine, 201–6, 204, 208 International Space Station, 30–31 Internet, 50 inverter, 48 iodine, 114, 158, 241 “I, Pencil” (Read), 4 iron, 130, 135–38, 241, 249, 277 cast, 136, 137, 276 disulfide, 222 gall ink, 213–14, 218–19 pig, 136–37 pyrite, 227 smelting, 135–36, 137 sulfate, 214 wrought, 276 Japan, 13 kerosene, 108–9 knowledge, 210, 277, 278, 279–80, 287 lactobacillus bacteria, 88 Laennec, René, 152 lampblack, 219 lamps: arc, 178 electric, 177–78 fluorescent, 142 light bulbs for, 142, 178, 180, 183, 227, 290 oil, 108–9, 184 language, 210 lard, 113, 115 Las Vegas, Nev., 45 latex, 194 lathe, 132–35, 134, 205, 206 latitude, 267–69, 270 lavender, 155 lead sulfide, 222 Leblanc, Nicolas, 244–45 Leeuwenhoek, Antoni Van, 160n legumes, 70, 71, 73, 248 lenses, 142–43, 161 Leonardo da Vinci, 97, 201, 213 light: electric, 177–78 see also lamps light bulbs, 142, 178, 180, 183, 227, 290 lignin, 211, 212 lime, 109–12, 115, 120, 139, 212 mortars, 126, 127–29 quicklime, 110–12, 139, 140, 233, 245 slaked (limewater), 111, 112, 115, 120, 127, 212, 237 limestone, 110, 111, 237, 245 linen, 96, 211 linseed oil, 219 liquified petroleum gas (LPG), 191 livestock, 69, 71–73, 146–47, 247 location, determining, 253–54, 265–74 compass for, 265–66, 276 latitude in, 267–69, 270 longitude in, 267–68, 270–71 sextant for, 269–70, 269, 273 lodestones, 265 London, 28 longitude, 267–68, 270–71 Lord of the Flies (Golding), 22, 35n Los Angeles, Calif., 45 Lovelock, James, 7–8 lye, 115, 116, 190 Mad Max, 2 “Mad Max” scenario, 24 Magellan, Ferdinand, 199 magnesium, 233 magnetism, 12 electromagnetism, 174, 176–77, 184, 220–25 magnetometer, 288 Maillard reaction, 79 maize (corn), 53–54, 66, 67, 84n, 86 malaria, 155, 160 Manhattan, 256n, 266–67, 268, 270 manure, 61, 69, 70, 73–76, 237, 243, 247, 250 materials, 103, 123–44 clay, 124–25 glass, see glass lime mortars, 126, 127–29 metals, see metals plastics, 49–50, 116, 118, 235n, 279 wood, see wood mathematics, 288 Matheson, Richard, 24 Mayan civilization, 145 McCarthy, Cormac, 2 McVeigh, Timothy, 250n measles, 147 measures and units, 287–88 barometer, 141, 144, 284–86 metric system, 282–84 for temperature, see temperature measurement meat, 67, 69, 73 preserving, 82 mechanization, loss of, 195–201, 197 medicine, 6, 144, 145–64 childbirth and neonatal care, 149–50 clinical trials in, 157 examination and diagnosis, 150–54 infectious diseases, 112, 147–48 microbiology, 160–64 surgery, 151, 155, 158–59 medicines, 6, 42–44, 154–57, 279 antibiotics, see antibiotics expiration dates on, 43–44 for pain relief, 155–57, 158–59 medieval Europe, 170–71, 275–76 Mendeleev, Dmitri, 234–35 menthol, 155–56 mercury, 286 Mesopotamia, 138 metals, 49, 104, 110, 130–38 alloys, 130, 195, 235n aluminum, 115n, 132, 133, 174n, 232–33 iron, see iron smelting, 135–36, 137, 140, 249 steel, 29, 49, 124, 130–32, 136–38, 277 welding, 131–32 metalworking, 132–35, 133, 134, 195, 200 methane, 74, 191, 193, 249 methanol, 118–19, 190 metric system, 282–84 microbiology, 160–64 microorganisms, 80, 81, 279, 291 microphone, 225–26 microscope, 141, 143–44, 160–61, 288 milk, 39, 84, 85, 92 Millennium Seed Bank, 54 Miller, Walter M., Jr., 123 millet, 66, 67, 86 mill pond, 168 millstone, 86, 95 mirror, 240n Moldova, 3n morphine, 156 Morse code, 221 mortars, lime, 126, 127–29 motor, car, 173 Napoleon I, Emperor, 282n Napoleon III, Emperor, 233n nature, 279, 287 urban spaces reclaimed by, 26–30, 27, 106 navigation, see location, determining New Orleans, La., 20–21 New York City, 256n, 266–67, 268, 270 nitrates, 237, 238, 243, 247, 248 nitric acid, 121–22, 159, 238, 247, 250 nitrocellulose, 238 nitrogen, 69, 70, 72, 73, 75, 88, 115, 178, 238, 247–51 in Haber-Bosch process, 57, 232, 248–51 nitroglycerin, 238 nitrous oxide, 159, 250 Nobel, Alfred, 238 north pole, 263–65, 264 North Star (Polaris), 263, 269 nuclear war, 22 oats, 60, 66, 67 Off-Gridders, 48 oil, crude, 116, 119–20, 189, 279 oil lamps, 108–9, 184 oil paints, 219 oils, see fats and oils Oklahoma City bombing, 250n opium, 156 oral rehydration therapy (ORT), 148 Oryx and Crake (Atwood), 103 oscillator, 257–58, 271 oscillator circuit, 224–25 oxen, 195, 196 oxidizing agents (oxidants), 104, 236, 238 oxygen, 232, 233, 279 explosives and, 236 “Ozymandias” (Shelley), 209 pain relief, 155–57, 158–59 paints, 118 oil, 219 pandemic, 23 Pantheon, 29 paper, 210–13, 215, 218, 232, 238, 243, 276 pasteurization, 92 pathology, 154 pellagra, 84n Pelton turbine, 181, 181, 182 pen, 214 pendulum, 283 clock, 257–59, 271, 289–90 Foucault’s, 256n penicillin, 12, 162, 163–64 periodic table, 234–35, 242 pesticides and herbicides, 57, 77n, 279 Petri dishes, 161, 162 pharmaceutical compounds, see medicines phones, 3–4, 13, 50–51 phosphorus, 57, 75–76, 110 photography, 104, 114, 122, 235, 238, 239–42 observing stars and, 263, 265 pickling, 84, 89, 91–92, 118 piezoelectric crystal, 226 piston, 173 pitch, 119 plastic bottles, for solar water disinfection, 37–38 plastics, 49–50, 116, 118, 235n, 279 plate tectonics, 279 plow, 58, 60–61, 62, 63, 195 Polaris, 263, 269 polyethylene terephthalate (PET), 50 poppy, 156 population, 24–25 potash, 17, 76, 114, 115, 120, 139, 212, 233, 234, 237, 243–44, 249 potassium, 57, 75, 76, 114, 233, 234 bitartrate, 226 carbonate, 114 hydroxide, 115, 190, 249 nitrate (saltpeter), 237–38, 248, 250 sodium tartrate, 226 potatoes, 60, 65, 67 potter’s wheel, 125, 203, 206 pottery vessels, 80–81, 95, 124–26 POW radios in World War II, 226-27 power, see energy and power Preppers, 21, 33, 48 pressure gauge, 284–85 printing, 214–20, 276 printing press, 12–13, 215–19 prisons, 21–22 propane, 191 pyrites, 121 pyrolysis, 116–20, 117, 192 quicklime (calcium oxide), 110–12, 139, 140, 233, 245 quinine, 155 rack and pinion mechanism, 205 radio, 51, 221–29 amplitude modulation in, 223 earphones or speakers for, 225–26, 227 location determination and, 273 microphone for, 225–26 oscillating circuit in, 224–25 receiver for, 222, 225, 228 transmitter for, 222–23, 225 radioactivity, 279 railways, 188 rapeseed, 60, 109, 171, 190 razor blade rectifier, 227, 228 Read, Leonard E., 4 reaper, 69 rectifier, 227, 230n razor blade, 227, 228 recycling, 49–50 refrigerators, 93–95 Renaissance, 11, 275, 276 rennin, 85 repopulation, 24–25 resin, 219–20 resonance, 224 rhinovirus, 147 rice, 65–66, 66, 67 Road, The (McCarthy), 2 roads, 187–88 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 33 Rochelle salt, 226 Roman Empire, 11 Röntgen, Wilhelm, 153 rubber, 193–95 “Ruin, The,” 79 rye, 60, 66, 67, 86 sailing ships, 198–200 salicylic acid, 157 Salon of 1767 (Diderot), 253 salt (sodium chloride), 82, 113, 121, 232, 240, 244, 245, 247 in food preservation, 82–83, 91–92 in oral rehydration therapy, 148 producing, 83 saltpeter, 237–38, 248, 250 saltwort, 244 sand, 138–39, 140, 144 saponification, 84, 112–13, 114–15, 211–12 satellites, 42, 239n sawmill, 171, 206 scales, balance, 283, 284 science, 275–91 experimentation in, 287–89 measures and units in, see measures and units as process, 289 roots of, 280–81 socioeconomic environment and, 277–78 technology and, 289–91 tools of, 281–86, 287 scientific method, 278–81, 286–89 scientific revolution, 259, 276 screw press, 218 scurvy, 157n scythe, 61, 67, 68 sea level, 31, 45 seaweed, 114 seed drill, 62, 64, 195 seismometer, 287 sewage systems, 57 sewage treatment, 75 sextant, 269–70, 269, 273 Shampoo Planet (Coupland), 231 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 209 shelter, 33, 34–35 ships, 198–200 shipwrecks, 30 Shirky, Clay, 9 sickle, 61, 67, 68 silica, 138, 139–40 silver chloride, 240 silver nitrate, 240 Sirius, 261 smallpox, 147 smelting, 135–36, 137, 140, 249 soap, 112–16, 190, 243 saponification in, 84, 112–13, 114–15, 211–12 social contract, 20–22 soda, 243–47, 246 ash (sodium carbonate), 114, 118, 120, 139, 140, 212, 226, 243, 244, 245 caustic (sodium hydroxide), 115, 190, 212, 232, 233, 234, 243, 244, 244n sodium, 233, 234 acetate, 118 bicarbonate, 245 carbonate (soda ash), 114, 118, 120, 139, 140, 212, 226, 243, 244, 245 chloride, see salt hydroxide (caustic soda), 115, 190, 212, 232, 233, 234, 243, 244, 244n hypochlorite, 212 thiosulfate, 240 soil, 57, 58–64, 70–72, 76, 110 solar power, 13, 47 solar water disinfection (SODIS), 37–38 solstices, 255–56, 261 Solvay process, 245–47, 246 solvents, 119 soot, 219 sorghum, 66, 67 south pole, 264 Soviet Union, 3n, 198n speakers, 225–26 spectrometer, 287 spinning, 96–97, 277 spinning wheel, 97, 97 Staphylococcus, 162 stars, 239n, 261, 262, 263–65, 269, 270 Barnard’s, 262–63, 263 constellations of, 261 latitude and, 268 North (Polaris), 263, 269 steam engine, 170n, 172–73, 182, 197, 201, 277, 290–91 steampunk, 15 steam turbine, 182–83, 185, 206–7 steel, 29, 49, 124, 130–32, 136–38, 277 steering wheel, 205 Stephens, John Lloyd, 145 stereotype, 218n stethoscope, 152 Stonehenge, 256 strontium, 233 substances, 102, 103–22 acids, 82, 84, 92, 104, 113, 116, 120–22 alkalis, 82, 84, 104, 113, 114, 116, 120, 212, 234, 243 lime, see lime soap, see soap for thermal energy, 104–9 wood pyrolysis, 116–20, 117, 192 sugar(s), 82, 89, 90, 190, 240n in oral rehydration therapy, 148 sulfur dioxide, 240 sulfuric acid, 120–22, 159, 214, 238, 241 sulfuryl chloride, 121 Sun, 269, 270 coronal mass ejection from, 22, 24 equinoxes and, 259 proving Earth’s orbit around, 260n solstices and, 255–56 sundial, 256–57, 259–60, 270–71 superglue, 42–43 surgery, 151, 155, 158–59 Svalbard Global Seed Vault, 55, 55 tallow, 191 tea tree oil, 155 technology, 289–91 telegraph, 220–21 telescope, 140, 143, 161 temperature measurement, 285–86 thermometer for, 141, 144, 152, 285–86, 287, 288 Texas City, 250n textiles, 212–13, 232, 276, 277 for clothing, 98–101 linen, 96, 211 spinning yarn for, 96–97, 277 spinning wheel for, 97, 97 weaving, 98, 277 weaving loom for, 98–100, 99, 101–2 thermal energy, 104–9, 166, 172, 182 thermionic emission, 228–29 thermometer, 141, 144, 152, 285–86, 287, 288 Three Gorges dam, 180 threshing, 68 threshing flail, 61 Thwaites, Thomas, 4 time telling, 253–60, 266 calendar for, 253, 260–65 clocks for, see clocks hourglass for, 254–55 sundial for, 256–57, 259–60, 270–71 toaster, 4 tooth fillings, 174n tractor, 63, 197–98 trade, 198 train lines, 188 transformer, 183–84 transmission, car, 204 transport, 185, 187–208 electric vehicles for, 206–7 fuels for, 188–93 gasification and, 191–93, 192, 194 keeping vehicles running, 188–95 and loss of mechanization, 195–201, 197 powered, reinventing, 201–8 roads for, 187–88 rubber for, 193–95 trees, 17 triode, 229 trip hammer, 171, 171, 179, 203, 276 tuberculosis, 147 turpentine, 119, 219–20 type setting, 216–18, 217 urea, 115 urine, 73, 74, 115 vacuum, 284 vacuum tubes, 141–42, 153, 227–30 Varro, Marcus Terentius, 161n vinegar, 84, 118, 120 violence and crime, 20–22 vitamin B3, 84n vitamin D, 72, 84–85 vitriol, 120 voltaic pile, 175, 178 walkie-talkies, 51 Washington, DC, 45 waste, human, 73–75 Waste Land, The (Eliot), vii, 10 water, 81, 103 for apartment buildings, 44–45 destruction caused by, 28–30 water, drinking, 33, 36–38, 109–10, 124, 148 oral rehydration therapy, 148 water clock, 205, 206, 254 water turbine, 180–82, 181 steam, 182–83, 185 waterwheel, 166–68, 167, 170, 171–72, 178–79, 180, 203, 213, 276 Watt, James, 170n weaving, 98, 277 weaving loom, 98–100, 99, 101–2 welding, 131–32 wet collodion process, 241 wheat, 53–54, 55, 60, 66, 67, 68, 70, 71, 73, 86, 89 wheelbarrow, 12, 276 Wikipedia, 9 willow, 155, 157 wind, 168–70 windmill, 46, 169, 170, 171–72, 178–80, 179, 213 windows, 140, 141 winnowing, 68 Wiseman, John “Lofty,” 33 wood, 17, 123–24 ashes, 17, 76, 113–14, 115 charcoal from, 106–7, 116, 124, 135, 184 firewood, 106, 165, 176 gasification of, 191–93 paper from, 211–13 pyrolysis of, 116–20, 117, 192 smoking food with, 83, 91–92 wood alcohol (methanol), 118–19, 190 wool, 96–98 World Health Organization, 37 World War II, POW radios in, 226–27 writing, 210–14, 215 Wyndham, John, 53 X-rays, 12, 141, 153, 221, 239 yeast, 89–91 yogurt, 84, 85, 88 Zeer pot, 93 CREDITS Text 1: Excerpt from Rameau’s Nephew and Other Works by Denis Diderot, translated by Jacques Barzun and Ralph H.

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, antiwork, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, discovery of the americas, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liberation theology, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, post-industrial society, precariat, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey

Most of you will have guessed how, except for the last one, which is, unbeknown to most people, done in North Korea, where they make a synthetic fibre called vinalon, or vinylon, out of limestone.* All these ‘magical’ developments have been possible only because we have constantly invented better technologies, namely, better machines and better chemical processes. Starting from Abraham Darby’s coke-smelting technique in steel-making and John Kay’s flying shuttle for textile weaving in the early eighteenth century, an endless stream of technologies has emerged to change the world. We discussed some of these in Chapter 3. The steam engine, the internal combustion engine, electricity, organic chemistry, steel ships, (wired and wireless) telegraphy, aeroplanes, computers, nuclear fission, semiconductors and fibre optics are only the most important examples.

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., graphene) and nano-technologies are emerging to transform the world yet again. In the early days of the Industrial Revolution, new technologies were often developed by individual visionaries. As a result, until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many technologies were known by their inventors’ names – Kay’s flying shuttle, Watt’s steam engine, the Haber–Bosch process and so on. From the late nineteenth century, with technologies becoming increasingly complex, fewer and fewer of them have been invented by individuals. Companies started developing the capability to generate new technologies through R&D in their corporate labs.

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In the poorest ones, child labour is still prevalent, while a lot of people are still tenants of semi-feudal landlords. Anything between 30 per cent and 90 per cent of the workforce in these countries may be self-employed, many of whom are engaged in subsistence farming. * Yes, that’s the scientist, who also doubled as an alchemist and a stock market speculator. * These included the flying shuttle (1733) and spinning jenny (1764) in the textile industry, coke-smelting (1709) in steel-making and various processes for large-scale sulphuric-acid manufacture (the 1730s and the 1740s) in the chemical industry. * To simplify the story, the 1932 famine happened because too much food was shipped out of the rural areas, following the 1928 agricultural collectivization.

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond by Daniel Susskind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low skilled workers, lump of labour, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, precariat, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor, working-age population, Y Combinator

(In fact, by the middle of the nineteenth century, Britain would be producing half of all the world’s cloth.)8 But when word spread about what Hargreaves was up to, his neighbors broke in, demolished the machine, and, somewhat gratuitously, destroyed his furniture, too. When Hargreaves tried to set up a factory elsewhere, he and his business partner were set upon by a mob.9 John Kay, a contemporary of Hargreaves, appears to have suffered a similar fate when he invented the flying shuttle in the 1730s. His home, it is said, was likewise ransacked by furious weavers, who “would have killed him had he not been conveyed to a place of safety by two friends in a wool-sheet.”10 A nineteenth-century mural in the town hall in Manchester, England, depicts his surreptitious flight from danger.11 These were not isolated incidents.

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The Productivity Effect Perhaps the most obvious way that the complementing force helps human beings is that new technologies, even if they displace some workers, often make other workers more productive at their tasks. Think of the British weavers who were fortunate enough to find themselves operating one of Kay’s flying shuttles in the 1730s, or one of Hargreaves’s spinning jennies in the 1760s. They would have been able to spin far more cotton than their contemporaries who relied on their hands alone. This is the productivity effect.29 We can see this productivity effect at work today, too. Take a taxi driver who uses a sat-nav system to follow unfamiliar roads, an architect who uses computer-assisted design software to craft more complex buildings, or an accountant who uses tax computation software to handle harder, more intractable calculations.

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See Great Britain equine flu evolution exclusion expert systems explicit knowledge eye diseases Facebook Big Tech and changing-pie effect and competition and concerns about political oversight and facial expressions fallacy of artificial intelligence farming, impact of automation on feedback finance industry flexibility flying shuttle Ford, Henry Fourier, Charles freckle machine free markets free time freight delivery Freud, Sigmund Frey, Carl frictional technological unemployment identity mismatch and impacts of insufficient demand and overview of place mismatch and skills mismatch and Furman, Jason The Future of the Professions (Susskind and Susskind) Future Politics (Susskind) Gagarin, Yuri Galbraith, John Kenneth Gates, Bill GDP per capita General Data Protection Regulation general intelligence, artificial General Problem Solver generosity, diversity and “The Genesis of Inequality” (Rousseau) Germany Gett Giant Evils Gini coefficients globalization go (board game) goals, automation and God Golden Age of Security Goldin, Claudia golems Good, Irving John Google ambition and Big Tech and changing-pie effect and competition and concerns about political power and priority shift and productivity effect and regulations and software and Gordon, Robert government.

Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, call centre, carbon tax, charter city, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cognitive load, Columbian Exchange, coronavirus, cosmic microwave background, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cyber-physical system, dark matter, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Eroom's law, fail fast, false flag, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, Haber-Bosch Process, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, hive mind, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, lockdown, lone genius, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Gell-Mann, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, nudge unit, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-truth, precautionary principle, public intellectual, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Slavoj Žižek, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, techlash, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, total factor productivity, transcontinental railway, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, When a measure becomes a target, X Prize, Y Combinator

In Britain and the Netherlands especially, there was a sense that a wide range of people could now seriously propose new ideas and that they should be praised and valued for doing so. This mentality was everywhere from architecture to the making of clothes. Anton Howes points out that the invention of John Kay's flying shuttle, an innovation that made cotton weaving far more efficient, could have happened at any time in thousands of years.5 All it required was wood and string. It was a practical step that did not rest on specialist technical or scientific insight. Yet until 1733 no one had fully thought to do it. Many of the key technologies of the time were arguably similar, Richard Arkwright's water frame, one of the central industrial inventions, among them.

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They are all connected – ideas in science and philosophy, politics and technology, directed and undirected, lucky accidents and long programmes, all co-evolving and informing one another.8 Whether you were a grand philosophe at an aristocratic Parisian salon or a sooty-handed Derbyshire engineer, you could be part of a revolution in ideas, built from ideas. What's more, it's clear that the set of ideas behind the Great Divergence were of unusual consequence. Some were utterly practical, like the flying shuttle or the seed drill, others more abstract, like Newtonian mechanics. Some originated in one realm but led to another – steam engines were the product of tinkerers, built without exact underlying scientific principles, but their invention and refinement later led to an understanding of thermodynamics.

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., and Uzzi, Brian (2007), ‘The Increasing Dominance of Teams in Production of Knowledge’, Science, Vol. 316 No. 5827, pp. 1036–9 Xinhua (2019), ‘China to build scientific research station on Moon's south pole’, Xinhua, accessed 18 January 2021, available at http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-04/24/c_138004666.htm Yueh, Linda (2018), The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today, London: Penguin Viking Index ‘0,10’ exhibition 103 ‘0-I’ ideas 31 Aadhaar 265 abstraction 103 AC motor 287, 288 academia 209 Académie des sciences 47 Adam (robot) 235–6 Adams, John 211 Adler, Alfred 188 Adobe 265 Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) 180, 247, 253, 296, 317 AEG 34 aeroplanes 62–6, 68–70, 71, 219 Aeschylus 3 Africa 267, 279–80, 295 age/ageing 122, 158–60, 193 AGI see artificial general intelligence Agrarian Revolution 252 agricultural production 92–3 AI see artificial intelligence Akcigit, Ufuk 193 Alexander the Great 159 Alexander, Albert 52 Alexandrian Library 4, 295, 304 algorithms 175, 185, 196, 224, 235, 245 aliens 240–1, 306, 308–9, 337 Allison, Jim 58 Alphabet 193, 225, 265, 294, 295 AlphaFold software 225–6, 227, 228–9, 233 AlphaGo software 226–7, 228, 233 AlQuraishi, Mohammed 225, 226, 229 Amazon 84–5, 214, 272 Amazon Prime Air 71 American Revolution 139 amino acids 223, 226 Ampère, André-Marie 74–5 Anaximander 35 ancestors 10–12 ancient Greeks 1–6, 7–8, 291, 303–4 Anderson, Kurt 106 Angkor Wat 43 anthrax 47–8, 51 Anthropocene 14–15 anti-reason 211–12 anti-science 211–12 antibacterials 234 antibiotics 38, 52–3, 124, 125, 217, 315 resistance to 235 Apollo missions 70, 315, 316, 317, 318 Apple 33, 85, 159, 185, 186, 193, 272, 296, 312 Aquinas, Thomas 36 AR see augmented reality archaeology 153–4 Archimedes 1–6, 7–8, 19, 27, 32, 37, 39, 291, 304 architecture 103, 115, 188 ARIA 297 Aristarchus 5 Aristotle 24, 108, 282, 304 Arkwright, Richard 25, 26, 34, 253 Armstrong, Louis 103 ARPA see Advanced Research Projects Agency art 99–104, 107–8, 176–7, 236, 321, 339 Artemis (Moon mission) 71, 218 artificial general intelligence (AGI) 226, 237–8, 249, 250, 310, 313, 330, 341 artificial intelligence (AI) 225–9, 233–41, 246–7, 248, 249–52, 262, 266, 300, 310, 312–13, 323, 329, 330, 331, 338 arts 152, 293 see also specific arts Artsimovich, Lev 147 arXiv 116 Asia 264, 267–8, 273, 275 Asimov, Isaac, Foundation 45 Astor, John Jacob 288 astronomy 30, 231, 232 AT&T 85, 181, 183, 185, 197 Ates, Sina T. 193 Athens 24, 295 Atlantis 154 augmented reality (AR) 241–2, 338 authoritarianism 112–13, 284 autonomous vehicles 71, 72, 219 ‘Axial Age’ 108 Azoulay, Pierre 317–18 Bach, J.S. 236 bacillus 46 Bacon, Francis 25, 259 bacteria 38, 46, 53 Bahcall, Safi 31 Ballets Russes 99–100 Baltimore and Ohio railway 67 Banks, Iain M. 310 Bardeen, John 182 BASF 289 Batchelor, Charles 286 Bates, Paul 226 Bayes, Thomas 289 Beagle (ship) 36 Beethoven, Ludwig van 26 Beijing Genomics Institute 257, 294–5 Bell Labs 180–4, 186–8, 190, 206, 214, 217, 289, 296, 322 Benz, Karl 68, 219, 330 Bergson, Henri 109 Bessemer process 80 Bezos, Jeff 71, 326 Bhattacharya, Jay 201, 202, 321 Biden, Joe 59 Big Bang 117, 174, 181 Big Big Ideas 79–80 big ideas 5, 8, 11, 13–19 adoption 28 and an uncertain future 302–36 and art 99–103 artificial 223–38 and the Big Ideas Famine 13 and bisociation 36 blockers to 17–18 and breakthrough problems 46–73, 77, 86, 98, 222, 250, 301 and the ‘burden of knowledge’ effect 154–65, 175, 178, 235, 338 and business formation 95 ceiling 18 conception 37 definition 27–8, 40–1 Enlightenment 132–40, 136–40 era of 109–10 erroneous 176 evidence for 222, 223–54 execution 37 ‘fishing out’ mechanism 152 future of 45, 98, 302–36, 337–43 harmful nature 41–2 how they work 23–45 and the Idea Paradox 178–9, 187, 191, 217, 226, 250, 254, 283–4, 301, 312, 342 and the Kardashev Scale 337–43 long and winding course of 4, 5, 35–8, 136 and the low-hanging fruit paradox 149–54, 167, 178 and luck 38–9 moral 136, 138 nature of 169–72 necessity of 41–3 need for 42–3 normalisation of 171–5, 178 originality of 28 paradox of 143–79 and patents 97 process of 37–8 purchase 37–8 and resources 128 and rights 132–40 and ‘ripeness’ 39 and short-termism 192 slow death of 106–7 slowdown of 98 society's reaction to 216 and specialisation 156, 157–8 today 21–140 tomorrow 141–343 big pharma 31, 60, 185, 217–18, 226 Big Science 118–19 Bill of Rights 137 Bingham, Hiram 153 biology 243–8, 300 synthetic 245–6, 251, 310, 329 BioNTech 218, 298 biotech 195–6, 240, 246, 255–8, 262, 266, 307 bisociation 36 Björk 104 Black, Joseph 26 ‘black swan’ events 307, 310 Bletchley Park 180, 296 Bloom, Nick 91, 92, 93 Boeing 69, 72, 162, 165, 192, 238 Bohr, Niels 104, 118, 159 Boltsmann, Ludwig 188 Boston Consulting Group 204 Botha, P.W. 114 Bowie, David 107 Boyer, Herbert 243 Boyle, Robert 232 Brahe, Tycho 36, 229, 292 brain 166, 246–8, 299–300 collective 299, 300–1 whole brain emulations (‘ems’) 248–9, 341 brain drains 197 brain-to-machine interfaces 247–8 Branson, Richard 71 Brattain, Walter 182 Brazil 266–7, 268, 279 breakthrough organisations 294–9 breakthrough problems 46–73, 77, 86, 98, 222, 234, 250, 301 breakthroughs 2–5, 27–8, 32–7, 41, 129, 152, 156 and expedition novelty 333 hostility to 187 medical 58–60 missing 175 near-misses 160 nuclear power 145 price of 87–98 and short-termism 192 slowdown of 87, 94 society's reaction to 216 and universities 204 see also ‘Eureka’ moments breast cancer 94 Brexit referendum 2016: 208 Brin, Sergey 319, 326 Britain 24, 146, 259, 283, 297 see also United Kingdom British Telecom 196 Brunel, Isambard Kingdom 67 Brunelleschi 232 Bruno, Giordano 216 Buddhism 108, 175, 264–5, 340 Buhler, Charlotte 188–9 Buhler, Karl 188–9 ‘burden of knowledge’ effect 154–65, 175, 178, 235, 338 bureaucracy 198–87, 280–1 Bush, George W. 211 Bush, Vannevar 168, 314–15, 317 business start-ups 95–6 Cage, John 104 Callard, Agnes 111 Caltech 184 Cambridge University 75, 76, 124, 235–6, 257, 294–6 canals 67 cancer 57–61, 76, 93–4, 131, 234, 245, 318 research 59–61 capital and economic growth 88 gray 192, 196 human 275, 277 capitalism 36, 111–13, 186, 189, 191–8 CAR-Ts see chimeric antigen receptor T-cells carbon dioxide emissions 220–1 Cardwell's Law 283 Carey, Nessa 244 Carnap, Rudolf 189 Carnarvon, Lord 153 cars 289 electric 71 flying 71 Carter, Howard 153 Carter, Jimmy 58 Carthage 3, 43 Cartright, Mary 163 CASP see Critical Assessment of Protein Structure Prediction Cassin, René 135 Catholic Church 206, 230 Cavendish Laboratory 76, 294 Cell (journal) 234 censorship 210–11 Census Bureau (US) 78 Centers for Disease Control 212 Cerf, Vint 253 CERN 118, 233, 239, 252, 296 Chain, Ernst 52, 60, 124 Champollion, Jean-François 155 Chang, Peng Chun 135 change 10–13, 18–19, 24 rapid 30, 32 resistance to 222 slowdown 85 chaos theory 163 Chaplin, Charlie 104 Chardin, Pierre Teilhard de 300 Charpentier, Emmanuelle 244, 256 chemistry 49, 56, 104, 117, 118, 124, 149–50, 159, 241, 244 chemotherapy 57 Chicago 10 chicken cholera 46 chimeric antigen receptor T-cells (CAR-Ts) 58, 61 China 15, 25, 71–2, 111, 112, 138, 208, 213, 216, 255–64, 265, 266, 267, 268, 275, 277, 279, 280, 283, 284–5, 312, 313, 314, 319, 328 Han 259, 260 Ming 284, 308, 309 Qing 260 Song 24, 259–60, 306 Tang 259–60 Zhou 259 Christianity 108, 303–4, 340 Church, George 245 cities 270–2, 308–9, 340 civilisation collapse 42–4 decay 187 cleantech 195 climate change 219–21, 284, 313–14, 338 clinical trials 218 cliodynamics 339 coal 23, 24, 26, 80, 220 Cocteau, Jean 101 cognitive complexity, high 332–3 cognitive diversity 281–3 Cognitive Revolution 252 Cohen, Stanley N. 243, 244 collective intelligence 339 collectivism 282 Collison, Patrick 117, 272 colour 75 Coltrane, John 104 Columbian Exchange 177 Columbus 38 comfort zones, stepping outside of 334 communism 111, 133, 134, 173, 217, 284 companies creation 95–6 numbers 96–7 competition 87, 283 complacency 221–2 complexity 161–7, 178, 204, 208, 298, 302, 329 high cognitive 332–3 compliance 205–6 computational power 128–9, 168, 234, 250 computer games 107 computers 166–7, 240, 253 computing 254 see also quantum computing Confucianism 133, 259 Confucius 24, 108, 109, 282 Congressional Budget Office 82 connectivity 272 Conon of Samos 4 consciousness 248, 340 consequences 328–9 consolidation, age of 86 Constantine 303 convergence 174, 311–12 Copernicus 29, 30, 41, 152, 171, 229, 232, 292 copyright 195 corporations 204–5 cosmic background microwave radiation 117, 181 cotton weaving, flying shuttle 24–5 Coulomb, Charles-Augustin de 74–5 counterculture 106 Covid-19 (coronavirus) pandemic 13, 14, 15, 55, 86, 113–14, 193, 202, 208, 212, 218, 251–2, 263, 283–4, 297–8, 309, 318, 327 vaccine 125, 245 Cowen, Tyler 13, 82, 94–5, 221 cowpox 47 creativity 188, 283 and artificial intelligence 236 crisis in 108 decrease 106–8 and universities 203 Crete 43 Crick, Francis 119, 296 CRISPR 243, 244, 251, 255–8, 299 Critical Assessment of Protein Structure Prediction (CASP) 224–6, 228 Cronin, Lee 242 crop yields 92–3 cultural diversity 281–3 cultural homogenisation 177 cultural rebellion 106–7 Cultural Revolution 114, 305 culture, stuck 106 Cunard 67 Curie, Marie 104, 144, 203, 289–90, 332 Daniels, John T. 62–3 Daoism 259 dark matter/energy/force 338 DARPA see Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Darwin, Charles 34, 35–6, 37–8, 41, 77, 109, 118, 171, 289 Darwin, Erasmus 35 data 233 datasets, large 28 Davy, Sir Humphrey 149, 150 Debussy, Claude 100–1 decision-making, bad 43–4 Declaration of Independence 1776: 137 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen 1789: 137 DeepMind 225–9, 296 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) 315 democracy 111–12 Deng Xiaoping 261 deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) 119, 223–4, 243, 251, 255, 339 DNA sequencing 56 Derrida, Jacques 109 Deutsch, David 126, 203 Diaghilev, Sergei 99–101 Diamond, Jared 42 Digital Age 180 digital technology 241–2, 243 diminishing returns 87, 91, 94, 97, 118, 123, 126, 130–1, 150, 161, 169, 173, 222, 250, 276, 285, 301 Dirac, Paul 159–60 disruption 34, 96, 109, 119, 157 diversity, cultural 281–3 DNA see deoxyribonucleic acid Dorling, Danny 171 Doudna, Jennifer 244, 251, 256 Douglas, Mary 290 Douthat, Ross 14, 106 drag 65 Drake equation 306 Drezner, Daniel 214 drones, delivery 71, 72 Drucker, Peter 189 drugs 55–7, 124, 235 Eroom's Law 55, 57, 61, 92–3, 119, 161, 234, 245, 338 and machine learning 234 research and development 55–7, 61, 92–4, 119, 161, 172–3, 217–18, 234, 245, 315, 338 see also pharmaceutical industry Duchamp, Marcel 103, 171 DuPont 184 Dutch East India Company 34 Dyson, Freeman 120 dystopias 305–8 East India Company 34 Easter Island 42–3 Eastern Europe 138 ecocides 42–3 economic growth 240, 272, 273, 316 endogenous 94 and ideas 88, 89–92, 95 process of 87–8 slowdown 82, 83, 84, 85, 178 economics 87–9, 98, 339, 340 contradictions of 87 Economist, The (magazine) 188 Edelman annual trust barometer 209 Edison, Thomas 183–4, 286–9, 290, 293 education 127, 277, 324–8 Einstein, Albert 11, 29, 74, 77, 104, 109, 117, 119, 124, 159–60, 203, 332 Eisenstein, Elizabeth 231 Eldredge, Niles 30 electric cars 71 electricity 11, 74–7, 81, 286–7, 289 electromagnetic fields 76 electromagnetic waves 75, 76 elements (chemical) 149–50 Elizabeth II 144–5 employment 204–5 Encyclopædia Britannica 97, 128, 155 ‘End of History’ 112 energy 337–8, 341–2 availability 85 use per capita 85 see also nuclear power engineering 243 England 25, 144–5, 309 Englert, François 118 Enlightenment 130, 136–40, 252 see also Industrial Enlightenment; neo-Enlightenment Eno, Brian 295 entrepreneurship, decline 96 epigenetics 164 epigraphy 236–7 epistemic polarisation 210 Epstein, David 334 Eratosthenes 5 Eroom's Law 55, 57, 61, 92–3, 119, 161, 234, 245, 338 ethical issues 256–7 Euclid 3, 304 ‘Eureka’ moments 2–5, 35, 36–7, 129, 163 Europe 95, 247, 258–60, 268, 268, 271, 283, 304, 308 European Space Agency 71 European Union (EU) 206, 216, 262, 266 Evans, Arthur 153 evolutionary theory 30, 35–6 expedition novelty 333 experimental spaces 296–8 Expressionism 104 Facebook 34, 159, 170, 197 Fahrenheit 232 failure, fear of 335 Faraday, Michael 75 FCC see Future Circular Collider FDA see Food and Drug Administration Federal Reserve (US) 82 Feigenbaum, Mitchell 163 fermentation 49 Fermi, Enrico 143, 159, 306 Fermi Paradox 306 Fernández-Armesto, Felipe 109 fertility rates 269 Feynman, Richard 77, 166, 332 film 104, 106–7, 108, 115 financialism 191–8, 206–7, 214, 217, 219 Firebird, The (ballet) 99–100 ‘first knowledge economy’ 25–6 First World War 54, 99, 104, 187, 188–9 Fisk, James 182 Fleming, Alexander 38, 52, 60, 332 flight 36, 62–6, 68–70, 71, 335 Flint & Company 64 flooding 220, 284 Florey, Howard 52, 60, 124, 332 Flyer, the 62–4, 66, 72 Foldit software 225 Food and Drug Administration (FDA) 55, 60, 93, 212 food supply 81 Ford 34, 253 Ford, Henry 68, 104, 219 Fordism 81 Foucault, Michel 110 Fraenkel, Eduard 124 France 49–51, 54, 64, 67, 95, 279, 309, 332 franchises 31 Franklin, Benjamin 119, 211 Frederick the Great 292 French Revolution 137, 275 Freud, Sigmund 34, 36, 77, 104, 171, 188, 190, 216 frontier 278–9, 283–4, 302, 310–11 Fukuyama, Francis 111–12 fundamentalism 213 Future Circular Collider (FCC) 239 futurology 44 Gagarin, Yuri 70 Galen 303 Galileo 206, 231, 232, 291, 322 Galois, Évariste 159 GDPR see General Data Protection Regulation Gell-Mann, Murray 77 gene editing 243–4, 251, 255–8 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) 206 General Electric (GE) 33, 184, 265, 288, 333 General Motors 289 Generation Z 86 genes 223–4 genetic engineering 243–4, 251, 253, 255–8 genetic science 163–4, 202 genius 26 genome, human 119, 202, 244, 255–7, 296, 313 genome sequencing 243–4 germ theory of disease 50–1, 53 Germany 54, 95, 96, 279, 283, 292, 332 Gesamtkunstwerk 99 Gibson, William 241 Glendon, Mary Ann 135 global warming 147 globalisation 177 Go 226–7 Gödel, Kurt 41, 168 Goldman Sachs 197 Goodhart's Law 199 Google 34, 85, 185, 197, 240, 272, 318 20 per cent time 319–20 Google Glass 241 Google Maps 86 Google Scholar 116 Google X 294 Gordon, Robert 13, 83, 94–5 Gouges, Olympe de 137 Gould, Stephen Jay 30 Gove, Michael 208 government 205, 207, 214, 216, 252, 267–8, 297 funding 185–6, 249, 252, 314–19, 321 GPT language prediction 234, 236 Graeber, David 13–14, 111 grants 120, 185–6, 195, 202, 316, 317, 319, 321–3 gravitational waves 117–18, 119 Great Acceleration 309–10 Great Convergence 255–301, 339 Great Disruption 96 Great Enrichment (Great Divergence) 23, 26, 258 Great Exhibition 1851: 293, 309 Great Stagnation Debate 13–14, 16, 17, 45, 72, 82–3, 87, 94–6, 129, 150, 240, 279, 338 Greenland 42 Gropius, Walter 103 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) 82, 90, 128, 278, 318 GDP per capita 23, 78, 82 growth cultures 25 growth theory, endogenous 88–9, 94 Gutenberg, Johannes 36 Guzey, Alexey 200, 322 Haber, Fritz 332 Haber-Bosch process 289 Hadid, Zaha 152 Hahn, Otto 144 Hamilton, Margaret 316 Harari, Yuval Noah 114–15, 236 Harris, Robert 307 Harvard Fellows 200 Harvard, John 156 Harvey, William 34, 291–2 Hassabis, Demis 229, 233 Hayek, Friedrich 189 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 36 Heisenberg, Werner 41, 159, 168, 332 heliocentric theory 5, 29, 118, 232, 304 helium 145 Hendrix, Jimi 105 Henry Adams curve 85 Hero of Alexandria 39 Herper, Matthew 55 Hertz, Heinrich 76 Herzl, Theodor 188 Hesse, Herman 307 Hieron II, king of Syracuse 1–2 Higgs, Peter 118 Higgs boson 117–18, 119, 239 Hinduism 133 Hiroshima 144 Hitler, Adolf 138, 188 Hodgkin, Dorothy 124, 332 Hollingsworth, J.

Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Thomas Ramge

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Apollo 11, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, banking crisis, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, gig economy, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land reform, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, low cost airline, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, random walk, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, universal basic income, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

And it was well before the windmill replaced humans grinding grains and the printing press supplanted scribes. In fact, the ancient invention (or perhaps discovery) of the wheel itself enabled cargoes to be transported much more efficiently than through human carriage. The strategy to favor machines over humans gathered speed with the introduction of John Kay’s flying shuttle and James Watt’s steam engine in the eighteenth century. Initially, machines often were only marginally more efficient. They required considerable institutional support (such as appropriate laws, financial instruments, and the like), but improvements over time (including organizational changes) increased their efficiency by leaps and bounds, and they ultimately became indispensable in virtually all sectors.

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See Great Recession/financial crisis financial intermediaries, 12, 146–156 choice expansion in, 215–216 payment solutions and, 146–147 regulations affecting, 139–140 traditional role of, 138–139 See also banks Finkel, Eli, 83, 84 Finland, 147, 191 fintechs, 11 banks investing in, 149–156 niche markets targeted by, 147, 152 worldwide investments in, 149 firms, 87–107, 109–131 Amazon as, 88–89, 106 automation in, 109, 111–112, 113–120, 128, 130–131 centralization in (see centralization) cognitive constraints and, 102–104 communicative coordination and, 26, 28–33, 90, 102 comparison of markets and, 28, 111 competition between markets and, 30, 107 decline in influence of, 12–13, 33 delegation in, 97–101, 106, 117 efficiency as focus of, 112–113 estimated number of, 28 human-centric, 214–215 internal talent management in, 126–129 intuition and heuristics in, 104–106 key difference between markets and, 32–33, 90 “noise” reduction strategies in, 100–101 organizational innovation in, 97, 110–111, 120–131 profits of, 195–197 reporting methods in, 90–97 rise in importance of, 33 shift to markets from, 10–11, 30–32, 125–126 structure of, 29–30 superstar, 195–197 tax credits for job creation proposed, 200–202 Flores, Fernando, 175–176 flying shuttle, 111 Forbes, 209 Ford, Henry, 29–30, 114 Ford Motor Company, 29–30, 31, 33, 98, 99–100 Fortune magazine, 208 Fox News, 178 Freightliner, 182 Friedman, Milton, 190 Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance, 109, 110–111, 113–114, 117, 120, 183, 188 fully automated luxury communism, 221 fundamental attribution error, 103 Funding Circle, 152, 163 Gates, Bill, 187 Gawande, Atul, 101 General Motors (GM), 98–99, 101 Germany, 134, 135, 136 gig economy, 186 Gigerenzer, Gerd, 105 Giza pyramids, 21 Glassdoor, 88 GoDaddy, 161 gold standard, 48 “Goobles,” 51 Google, 78, 110, 148, 151, 161, 196 antitrust case against, 165 feedback effects and, 30, 163, 169 prediction markets and, 50–51 Google Glass, 138 Google Shopping, 52 government, central planning for, 175–179 grain (as currency), 47 Great Depression, 51, 136 Great Famine (Soviet Union), 177 Great Recession/financial crisis, 134–135, 136, 215 See also subprime mortgage crisis Great Wall of China, 21, 24 Grünenthal, 42 Guardian, 221 Hagel, John, 31 Harvard Business Review, 99 Harvard Business School, 96 Harvard Medical School, 101 Harvard University, 45 Hayek, Friedrich August von, 39, 46–47 health care sector, 213–214 heuristics, 104–106 Higgs boson, 22 Hollerith, Herman, 96, 99 Holvi, 147 Honda, 30, 32 Huawei, 196 human choice.

Frommer's Seattle 2010 by Karl Samson

airport security, British Empire, company town, flying shuttle, Frank Gehry, glass ceiling, global village, haute cuisine, land bank, machine readable, place-making, sustainable-tourism, transcontinental railway, urban sprawl, white picket fence

Prices are high, but the designs are meant to stand the test of time. 2025 First Ave. 20 6/441-6691. www.margaretoleary.com. Ragazzi’s Flying Shuttle Fashion becomes art and art becomes fashion at this chic boutique-cum-gallery in the Pioneer Square area. Hand-woven fabrics and hand-painted silks are the specialties, but, of course, such sophisticated fashions require equally unique body decorations in the form of exquisite jewelry creations. Designers and artists from the Northwest and the rest of the nation find an outlet for their creativity at the Flying Shuttle. 607 First Ave. 20 6/343-9762. www.ragazzisflyingshuttle.com. Synapse 206 Specializing in local, regional, and emerging national designers, this edgy little boutique in the Pioneer Square neighborhood is packed full of distinctive, often one-of-a-kind fashions.

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There are a dozen different kinds of whisks, an equal number of muffin tins, and all manner of cake-decorating tools, tableware, napkins, cookbooks—simply everything a cook would need. By the way, this is the original Sur La Table. 84 Pine St. 20 6/448-2244. www.surlatable.com. JEWELRY Unique artist-crafted jewelry can be found at Ragazzi’s Flying Shuttle and Twist . Facèré Jewelry Art Gallery A big rock on a gold band? How uninspired. At this tiny shop inside the City Centre shopping gallery, rings, earrings, necklaces, and brooches are miniature works of art made from a fascinating range of materials. If you’re searching for something unique with which to adorn your body, don’t miss this shop.

Culture and Prosperity: The Truth About Markets - Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor by John Kay

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, business cycle, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, computer age, constrained optimization, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, electricity market, equity premium, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, haute couture, Helicobacter pylori, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Phillips curve, popular electronics, price discrimination, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, second-price auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, tulip mania, urban decay, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , yield curve, yield management

This applies to the national economy, but there is no corresponding constraint at the level of the individual firm. An increase in exports by one firm will be matched either by an increase in imports or by a reduction in exports by some other firm. What is true for an individual company is not true for USA Inc. The John Kay who invented the flying shuttle was forced to flee to France by Luddites who feared his ingenuity would destroy their jobs. 5 The Luddites had good cause to be afraid for their jobs, many of which disappeared. There are many fewer jobs for bank clerks now that mechanical record keeping is undertaken by computers. But there are not fewer jobs overall.

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Lower costs from new technology must lead to lower prices or { 178} John Kay increased profits, or both. Even if there is no increase in spending on the products of industries directly affected-and there will often beexpenditures on the products of some other industries will increase and generate additional opportunities there. Over the two centuries since the Luddites first wrecked flying shuttles, productivity has increased more than fiftyfold. But instead of having 98% unemployment, we produce fifty times as much. Current technological changes are no different. In some instances, increasing exports may yield benefits to the national economy (and not just to those who actually export), and new technology will reduce overall employment (and not just the employment of those who are displaced by new technology).

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There are some publishers who put deliberate mistakes in their maps," said a spokesman for the Ordnance Survey. 14 Precious Knowledge ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• The AA had fallen foul of intellectual property legislation-it had infringed the Ordnance Survey's copyright. Such rules have a long history. Patents allowed people who invented new gadgets or processessuch as John Kay's flying shuttle and spinning frame-to enjoy exclusive rights to build and use them for a limited period. Copyright allowed writers and engravers to prevent other people from copying their works without permission. This protection continued until the death of the author, and beyond. And trademarks provide an easy means by which the Coca-Cola company or WalMart can stop other people from calling their products Coca-Cola or their shops Wal-Mart.

Worn: A People's History of Clothing by Sofi Thanhauser

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, big-box store, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Caribbean Basin Initiative, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, COVID-19, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, export processing zone, facts on the ground, flying shuttle, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, Honoré de Balzac, indoor plumbing, invention of the sewing machine, invisible hand, microplastics / micro fibres, moral panic, North Ronaldsay sheep, off-the-grid, operation paperclip, out of africa, QR code, Rana Plaza, Ronald Reagan, sheep dike, smart cities, special economic zone, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce

Following the ban, English merchants continued to do brisk business even with home markets closed, as the American and African markets were vast enough to support ever greater quantities of Indian cotton fabrics. This was, however, the bare beginning of a period of prosperity for the English, derived from controlling the world’s flow of cotton cloth. A series of mechanical developments in cloth manufacture ushered in the next phase of England’s domination of the global cotton textile trade. The flying shuttle was patented by John Kay in 1733. The shuttle, which had a small spool of thread embedded in it, ran on a track through the warp threads on the loom, replacing an operation formerly done by hand. This sped up the pace of weaving to such a degree that hand spinners could not make thread fast enough to feed the looms.

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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “The Company’s Gumashta”: Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 45. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “unprecedented mortality”: British East India Company, 45. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “crept into”: Defoe and McVeigh, A Review of the State of the British Nation, 33. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT The flying shuttle: Mirsky and Nevins, The World of Eli Whitney, 83. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “bag-cheeked”: Mirsky and Nevins, The World of Eli Whitney, 84–85. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT He hired a clockmaker: Hills, “Sir Richard Arkwright and His Patent Granted in 1769,” 257–60.

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., 161–64 El Salvador, 207, 210 embroidery, 111, 257 enclosure, resistance to, 11, 254 Enclosure Acts (England), 11 endangered breeds of sheep, 236, 250, 257, 261–63, 264 endosulfan, 71 Engels, Friedrich, 29 England control of Indian cotton by, 59, 60–65 effect of factories in, 64 history of sheep in, 252–54, 256 environmental degradation of carbon emissions, xii, 231, 237 from cotton production, 45–46, 48–49, 63, 78, 86–87, 89, 90, 94 from dyeing fabric, 191–92 effects on silk production, 104–6, 113, 114–15 from microfibers, 217–18 from rayon production, 168 see also water Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 51–52 EPZs, see export processing zones Erskine, Lillian, 172 Erskine-Hamilton study (1938), 172 ethephon, 44 ethics debates about, 291–92 U.S. silence on, xvii, 220–21 ETIM (East Turkestan Islamic Movement), 91 Europe Asian influence in, 117–18, 145 corporate accountability in, xvii, 220–21 fashion in, 120, 122 history of cotton in, 59–63, 81 history of linen in, xv, 8–9, 14, 25, 59 history of wool in, 252–56 rayon production in, 154, 160, 162 see also specific countries European Age of Reason, 10–11 Ewen, Stuart, 39, 139 exhibitions of Navajo weaving, 275–76, 277–78 exploitation, labor in cotton production, 45–47, 52–53, 63–64n, 63–65, 70–72, 85–86, 92–96 in garment industry, xv–xvi, xvii, 92–96, 173–75, 187–88, 196, 200, 203–8, 210–17, 219–21, 293 lack of accountability for, 220–21 persistence of, 293 in rayon and rubber production, 154, 156–61, 170–73, 180–82 of seamstresses, 30–31, 34, 37–38, 136, 196, 293 in sheep industry, 231–32, 254–55 in textile factories, 17–18, 20–21, 28–30, 73–74, 75, 76–77, 162, 162n, 166–69, 167n, 186 export processing zones (EPZs) Caribbean Basin Initiative, 204–7, 218–19 company contracts with, 198–99 description of, 197–98, 208–9 as extraction zones, 214 in Honduras, 202, 203–6, 207–16 local infrastructure and, 205 local manufacturing in, 206–7 poverty surrounding, 209–10, 214 F Fables d’Esope, Les (Boursault), 125 fabric, see cloth; fibers factories, see garment industry; textile production, factories for fakes, designer, 146–47 family, bourgeois ideal for, 28 farming, see agriculture fashion designers, 141–43, 190, 192, 197, 199, 206 origins and seasons of, 121, 125 Paris and, 122, 132–33 publications, 121–22, 125–26, 146 see also France, prerevolutionary fashion in Fashion Garments Limited, 197, 198–99 Fashion Institute of Technology, 296–97 fashion plates, 122 fast fashion, xii–xiii, 218 Federici, Silvia, 11 feminists, industrial vs. neoliberal, 173–74, 200 fertilizer, wool for, 263 fiber crafts, see crafts, fiber fiber production, revival of small-scale by denimheads, 237–43 mechanized, 232–33, 234–37, 243–49 wool for, xvi, 232–33, 234–37 (see also Woolfest) fibers from animals, xiv, 5, 230 (see also silk fabric; wool) petroleum-based, xiv, xv, 183, 188–94 (see also synthetic fabrics) from plants, xiv, 6–7, 230 (see also cotton; linen) see also rayon Fibershed, 268 filatures, silk, 102–4, 105, 114–15 Fingerlakes Woolen Mill, 232–33, 234–37 fisheries, collapse of, 86 flax in archeological records, 6 domestication of, 7 for linen, 3–4 in preindustrial Europe, 8 in preindustrial New England, 12 tow cloth from, 12 Flügel, J. C. (John Carl), 126 flying shuttle for looms, 61 Foley, Neil, 47 Forbes, 205 Fortune, 46, 156 France designers from, 141–43, 190 early sewing machine in, 33–34 and Parisian style, 122, 132–33 silk production in, 118, 122, 130–31 France, prerevolutionary fashion in, 118–32 Chinese silk’s influence on, 118 economic success of, 122 gender distinctions in, 126–27 international influence of, 122 Louis XIV’s use of, 120–24 Marie Antoinette and, 130–31 philosophical debate over, 129–30 political commentary with, 128–29 revolution’s effects on, 131–32 Rousseau’s influence on, 129–30 as social marker, 118–20, 124–27 women in business of, 127–28 Frank, Dana, 213 Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly, 36 G Ganado Ridge rugs, 280 Gandhi, Mohandas, 65–66, 300 garment industry in Asian countries, post–WWII, 95, 187, 193, 195, 197–201, 204, 205–6, 207, 220–21 in Caribbean and Central America, 202–8, 214–17, 218–19 designers in, 197, 199, 206 in EPZs (see export processing zones) fast fashion in, xii–xiii, 218 in India, 77–80 labor exploitation in, xv–xvi, xvii, 92–96, 173–75, 187–88, 196, 200, 203–8, 210–17, 219–21, 293 in Shanghai, 115–16 small choices for improvement in, 295–300 U.S., undercutting of unions in, 173–77, 188, 200, 293 U.S. offshoring of, 196–201, 202–8, 214–17, 218–19 U.S. silence on ethics of, xvii, 220–21 U.S. trade policies and destruction of, 187–88, 193–94, 195–96, 218–19 in Xinjiang, 92–96 Gastonia, N.C., 165–69, 178 gender discrimination, see money-making as male prerogative gender distinctions in clothing, 126–27 gender fluidity, Navajo, 287 genetically modified cotton seeds, 54, 70–71 Gengzhi Tu scrolls, 117 Genoa, N.Y., 232 genocide of Uyghurs, 94 Georgia, 45–46 Germantown, Philadelphia, 274, 275 Germany, 8, 154 Ghana, 293–94, 293n Gifford, Kathie Lee, 208 Givenchy, 190 Glanzstoff rayon factory, 161–64, 162n glyphosate, 51–52 Goody, Rabbit, xvii, 245, 247–49 Grand Carriage procession, 109 grand habit court dress, 121, 128 Greek myths, 284, 290, 291, 293, 295 Green, Cecilia, 207 Greensboro, N.C., 239, 242–43 Greenville, S.C., 178–80 Greenville News, The, 179–80 Griffith, D.

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, computer age, computer vision, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, decarbonisation, deskilling, digital rights, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, gigafactory, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, precariat, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Bankman-Fried, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working poor, workplace surveillance

Customs, standards, and traditions developed around the machines, which were worked in the weavers’ or knitters’ homes, or in small shops. The massive demand for English cloth continued to inspire innovations in both the machinery that made a worker’s life easier, and more disruptive technologies that promised a dramatic increase in the rate of production. In 1733, an apprentice craftsman named John Kay patented the flying shuttle, a device that let a single weaver, instead of two, work a broadloom. In the 1760s, a weaver and cotton spinner named James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny, which let a single worker spin multiple threads into yarn with the crank of a handle—previously it took six. Just a couple years later, Arkwright built his water frame, applying hydropower to the spinning device and assuring the production of vast volumes of yarn.

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He would have seen the intensity and intricacy of weaving work up close: the weaver’s darting hands, flicking wrists, and endlessly rising and falling knees all syncing up with the apparatus before him. The weaver depressing and releasing those pedal-like levers called treadles, one under each foot; throwing the flying shuttle; and angling the lathe, each step rapid-fire, creating a fine woven garment inch by inch. Movements so assured, they could perhaps have been said to be machinelike. Amidst the clanking din, Edmund Cartwright watched and made notes. He refined his prototype, not fully comprehending that the schemes bouncing around his skull would hit the gas on the Industrial Revolution, or what that might mean for men and women like the weaver he was watching at work. 1797 Mary Godwin The Polygon was in a state of chaos.

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The philosopher also helped inaugurate the tradition of insisting that exploiting the human laborer is a necessary evil on the path to full automation, which is always just around the bend. Notably, by the time Ben and George were having their debate, the weaving shuttle had already been automated, via a device called the flying shuttle, and yet there were plenty of servants and poor workers still to be found in England. Still, for nearly a millennium, before there were many meaningful real-world examples to draw on, dreams of automation presented in prose and poetry were optimistic. The concept was admired by elites, who may prefer not to own slaves or pay servants, and perhaps even by workers, who would prefer not to be either.

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, bread and circuses, BRICs, British Empire, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of the americas, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, invention of movable type, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, land reform, low interest rates, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, Paul Samuelson, price stability, profit motive, Robert Solow, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, working poor

Arkwright’s water frame could do it in 300 hours, and the self-acting mule in 135. Along with the mechanization of spinning came the mechanization of weaving. An important first step was the invention of the flying shuttle by John Kay in 1733. Though it initially simply increased the productivity of hand weavers, its most enduring impact would be in opening the way to mechanized weaving. Building on the flying shuttle, Edmund Cartwright introduced the power loom in 1785, a first step in a series of innovations that would lead to machines replacing manual skills in weaving as they were also doing in spinning. The English textile industry not only was the driving force behind the Industrial Revolution but also revolutionized the world economy.

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Artisans whose manual skills were being replaced by mechanization likewise opposed the spread of industry. Many organized against it, rioting and destroying the machines they saw as responsible for the decline of their livelihood. They were the Luddites, a word that has today become synonymous with resistance to technological change. John Kay, English inventor of the “flying shuttle” in 1733, one of the first significant improvements in the mechanization of weaving, had his house burned down by Luddites in 1753. James Hargreaves, inventor of the “spinning jenny,” a complementary revolutionary improvement in spinning, got similar treatment. In reality, the artisans were much less effective than the landowners and elites in opposing industrialization.

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, ASML, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, ChatGPT, choice architecture, circular economy, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, drone strike, drop ship, dual-use technology, Easter island, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, energy transition, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Extinction Rebellion, facts on the ground, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global pandemic, GPT-3, GPT-4, hallucination problem, hive mind, hype cycle, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lab leak, large language model, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, license plate recognition, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, Mustafa Suleyman, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Nikolai Kondratiev, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, profit motive, prompt engineering, QAnon, quantum entanglement, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, space junk, SpaceX Starlink, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steven Levy, strong AI, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, tail risk, techlash, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, TSMC, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, warehouse robotics, William MacAskill, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, zero day

In medieval times Pope Urban II wanted to ban the crossbow. Queen Elizabeth I nixed a new kind of knitting machine in the late sixteenth century on the grounds it might upset the guilds. Guilds harassed and smashed new kinds of looms and lathes in Nuremberg, Danzig, the Netherlands, and England. John Kay, the inventor of the flying shuttle, which made weaving more efficient and was one of the key technologies of the Industrial Revolution, was so scared of violent reprisals he fled from England to France. People throughout history have attempted to resist new technologies because they felt threatened and worried their livelihoods and way of life would be destroyed.

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See omni-use technology dystopia, 215–17 E East Germany, 192 eBay, 188–89 economic inequality, 153–54 Edison, Thomas, 35 ego, 140–41 electricity, 30–31 EleutherAI, 68–69 Elizabeth I (queen of England), 39, 40 Endy, Drew, 84 energy, 99–101, 198 engines, 23–25 ENIAC, 32 enzymatic synthesis, 83, 109 Epic of Gilgamesh, 5 Esvelt, Kevin, 273 EternalBlue, 161–62 ethnic cleansing, 195 ETH Zurich, 84 European Union, 125, 229, 260 evolution, 26–27, 79, 84 explanation, 243 explosives, 35, 110 Exscientia, 110 F Facebook, 150, 172, 258 facial recognition software, 194, 207 Fakhrizadeh, Mohsen, 165 feudalism, 184 Feynman, Richard, 259 fire, 26–27 flood myths, 5 flying shuttle, 39 Ford, Henry, 24 Ford Motor Company, 98 four features, defined, vii fragility amplifiers. See nation-state fragility amplifiers fragmentation. See decentralization Franklin, Rosalind, 80 frenzy phase, 132 fusion power, 100 G gain-of-function (GOF) research, 175–77 Gato, 111 gene editing containment and, 46, 265 CRISPR technology and, 81–82, 86, 129–30 ethical issues, 86 Genentech, 80 general-purpose technologies as accelerants, 92 containment and, 233 corporate concentration and, 190–91 defined, 26 internal combustion engine as, 25, 26 invisibility of, 27 omni-use and, 111 generative AI, 69, 73 See also large language models gene synthesis, 83–84, 247–48 genetically modified organisms (GMOs), 45, 46, 231 genetic engineering accessibility and, 82–83 autonomy and, 114 containment and, 46, 265, 269–70 genome sequencing, 80–81, 114 origins of, 80 See also gene editing; synthetic biology genetics, 55 See also synthetic biology Genghis Khan, 205 genome sequencing, 80–81 geopolitics AlphaGo and, 117–19, 120 arms race rhetoric and, 124–25, 126–27 China and, 120–24 as coming wave incentive, 119–27 containment and, 234 European Union and, 125 India and, 125–26 international cooperation and, 263–67 post-sovereign world and, 192 Sputnik and, 119–20 germline editing, 265 GitHub, 128–29 Gladstone, William, 131 global challenges, 137–40, 219 globalization, 107, 155–56 global warming.

Frommer's Washington State by Karl Samson

airport security, British Empire, California gold rush, centre right, company town, flying shuttle, Frank Gehry, glass ceiling, global village, Great Leap Forward, land bank, machine readable, place-making, sustainable-tourism, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, transcontinental railway, white picket fence

The racks of this Belltown boutique are lined with drapey natural-fiber fashions in bold colors—plus, there are lots of accessories to accompany the clothes. 2300 First Ave. & 206/448-0355. Ragazzi’s Flying Shuttle Fashion becomes art and art becomes fashion at this chic boutique-cum-gallery in the Pioneer Square area. Hand-woven fabrics and hand-painted silks are the specialties, but, of course, such sophisticated fashions require equally unique body decorations in the form of exquisite jewelry creations. Designers and artists from the Northwest and the rest of the nation find an outlet for their creativity at the Flying Shuttle. 607 First Ave. & 206/343-9762. www.ragazzis flyingshuttle.com. Shopping The Spanish Table There are cases full of imported meats and cheeses, as well as all manner of other Spanish ingredients, and, if you’ve decided your life’s goal is to prepare the ultimate paella, this store will set you on the path to perfection.

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Helens Visitor Center at Silver Lake, 311 Museum & Arts Center (Sequim), 232 Museum at the Carnegie (Port Angeles), 240 Museum of Flight (Seattle), 120 Museum of Glass (Tacoma), 210 Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI; Seattle), 119–120 Museum of Northwest Art (La Conner), 187 Myrtle Edwards Park (Seattle), 110, 122 N National Motor Life Boat School, 263–264 Native Americans arts and crafts, Port Townsend, 226 arts and crafts galleries, Seattle, 134 history of, 15–16, 18–19 Kitsap Peninsula, 201–202 Makah Cultural and Research Center (Neah Bay), 238–239 Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture (Spokane), 350 Raymond Wildlife-Heritage Sculpture Corridor, 259 Natural attractions, best, 2 Natural environments, 21–24 The Nature Conservancy, 40 Nature of the Northwest, 42 Naval Undersea Museum (near Keyport), 204 Neah Bay, 238 Nefarious Cellars (Chelan), 286 Neighbours (Seattle), 147 Neumo's (Seattle), 143 New Orleans Creole Restaurant (Seattle), 143 Newspapers and magazines, 44 New Year's at the Needle (Seattle), 30 Nishinomiya Tsutakawa Japanese Garden (Spokane), 350 Nisqually, 305 Nordstrom Rack (Seattle), 136 Nordstrom (Seattle), 136 North Beach, 258 accommodations, 260–261 restaurants, 261 North Bend, 301 North Cascades Institute, 40, 42, 276 North Cascades Scenic Highway, 272, 275–277 North Cascades Visitor Center, 275–276 North Chuckanut Mountain Trailhead, 192 Northern Pacific Railway Museum (Toppenish), 331 North Seattle (Including Ballard, Fremont, Wallingford & the University District) accommodations, 85–86 attractions, 118–120 restaurants, 101–103 Northstar Winery (Walla Walla), 341 Northwest Carriage Museum (Raymond), 259 Northwest Craft Center (Seattle), 135 Northwest Fine Woodworking (Seattle), 135 Northwest Flower & Garden Show (Seattle), 28 Northwest Folklife Festival (Seattle), 28–29 Northwest Garlic Festival (Long Beach), 262 Northwest Maritime Center (Port Townsend), 225 Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture (Spokane), 350 Northwest Outdoor Center (Seattle), 42, 129 Northwest Pendleton (Seattle), 136 Northwest Puppet Center (Seattle), 124 Northwest Railway Museum (Snoqualmie), 301 Northwest Trek Wildlife Park (Eatonville), 217 O Obstruction Pass State Park, 177 Ocean Shores, 258 accommodations, 260–261 restaurants, 261 Odlin County Park (Lopez), 182 A Taste of Icicle Ridge Winery (Leavenworth), 293 Of Sea and Shore Museum (Port Gamble), 203 Ohanapecosh Visitor Center, 305 Ohme Gardens (Wenatchee), 294–295 Okanogan Estate & Vineyards (Leavenworth), 293 Okanogan National Forest, 279 Oktoberfest (Leavenworth), 30, 292 Old Apple Tree Park (Vancouver), 268 Olde Thyme Aviation (Seattle), 128 Old Man House Park, 203 Olga Pottery (Orcas Island), 176 Oliver's (Seattle), 145 368 16_607510-bindex.indd 36816_607510-bindex.indd 368 9/28/10 8:50 PM9/28/10 8:50 PM P Pacific Coast Cranberry Research Foundation Museum (Long Beach), 264 Pacific Crest Trail, 279 Pacific Northwest Ballet (Seattle), 141 Pacific Northwest Journeys, 70 Pacific Pines State Park, 265 Pacific Place (Seattle), 132, 138 Pacific Science Center (Seattle), 115 Padilla Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve (La Conner), 187 The Palouse, 345–347 Palouse Falls State Park, 346 Paradise, 305, 306 Paramount Theatre (Seattle), 141 Pasek Cellars (Leavenworth), 293 Passports, 30, 360 Patit Creek Cellars (Walla Walla), 340 Patricia Rovzar Gallery (Seattle), 134 Pearson Air Museum, 268 Pelindaba Lavender Farms, 167 Pelindaba Lavender Friday Harbor, 167 Pendleton Woolen Mills Store (Washougal), 268–269 Penn Cove Musselfest (Whidbey Island), 154 Penrose Point State Park, 207 Pepper Bridge Winery (Walla Walla), 341 Percival Landing (Olympia), 217 Peshastin Pinnacles State Park, 296 Petrol, 359 Pier 66 (Bell Street Pier; Seattle), 110 Pier 52 (Seattle), 109 Pier 55 (Seattle), 109 Pier 56 (Seattle), 109 Pier 57 (Seattle), 109 Pier 59 (Seattle), 110 Pier 67 (Seattle), 110 Pier 69 (Seattle), 110 Pike Place Fish (Seattle), 138 Pike Place Market (Seattle), 88, 112–114 accommodations around, 78–79 food vendors, 108–109 restaurants around, 92–96 shopping at, 131, 132, 135, 138 The Pike Pub & Brewery (Seattle), 146 Pill Hill (First Hill; Seattle), 62 accommodations, 83–84 attractions, 117–118 The Pink Door (Seattle), 144 Pioneer Square area (Seattle), 62, 112 accommodations, 77–78 entertainment, 139 nightlife, 142 restaurants, 91–92 shopping, 132, 133 Planning your trip, 26–45 Point Defiance Park (Tacoma), 211 Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium (Tacoma), 212 Police, 360 Polson Museum (Hoquiam), 257 Pontin del Roza Winery (Prosser), 329 Portalis (Seattle), 145 Port Angeles, 235–236, 240 Port Angeles Fine Arts Center, 241 Port Gamble, 203–204 Port Gamble Historical Museum, 203–204 Portlock Port Chatham Smoked Seafood (Seattle), 139 Port Orchard, 204 Portteus Vineyards (Zillah), 327 Port Townsend, 7, 224–231 Port Townsend Brewing Company, 231 Port Townsend Film Festival, 225 Port Townsend Marine Science Center, 226–227 Potholes Reservoir, 357 Poulsbo, 201–206 Poulsbo Marine Science Center, 203 Prescription medications, 37 Priest Point Park (Olympia), 217 Private Eye on Seattle, 125 Procession of Species (Olympia), 28 Prosser restaurants, 334–335 wineries, 327–329 Prosser Vintner's Village, 327–328 Puget Sound, 46–47, 121 Puget Sound Navy Museum (Bremerton), 204 Purple Haze Lavender Downtown Store (Sequim), 233 Purple Haze Lavender Farm (Sequim), 233 GENERAL INDEX Olmstead Place State Park, 322 Olsen Estates (Prosser), 328 Olympia, 215–224 Olympia Farmers Market, 216 Olympic Cellars (Sequim), 233 Olympic Discovery Trail, 233 Olympic Game Farm (Sequim), 232 Olympic Hot Springs, 237 Olympic Lavender Farm (Sequim), 233 Olympic Mountains, 220–221 Olympic Music Festival (Quilcene), 253 Olympic National Park, 220 east, 252–254 northern, 235–245 western, 245–252 Olympic National Park Visitor Center, 237 Olympic Peninsula, 47, 220 suggested itinerary, 56–57 Olympic Sculpture Park (Seattle), 110, 112 On the Boards (Seattle), 141 Orcas, 170 Orcas Historical Museum, 176 Orcas Island, 175–181 Orcas Island Artworks, 176 Orcas Island Pottery, 176 Orcas Spa & Athletic Center (San Juan Island), 165 Othello Sandhill Crane Festival, 28, 41 Otis Perkins County Park, 182 Outdoor activities, 14 best, 4 Oxford Inn (Yakima), 333 Hampton Inn Richland/ Tri-Cities (Richland), 333 Oysterville, 264 Ozette Lake, 239 Q Queen Anne Hill (Seattle), 64 accommodations, 79–83 restaurants, 96–99 Quileute Days (La Push), 246 Quinault, Lake, 249 accommodations, 250–251 restaurants, 252 Qwest Field (Seattle), 131 R Rachel (Seattle), 113, 114 Rafting. See also Whitewater rafting Columbia Gorge, 318 Hoh River, 248 Yakima, 332 Rafting and floating, Yakima River, 322 Ragazzi's Flying Shuttle (Seattle), 137 Rainier, Mount, 304–310 Rainier Square (Seattle), 132 Rainshadow Trail, 237 Rainy Lake, 277 Rainy Pass, 276–277 Rattlesnake Hills Wine Trail, 326 Raymond, 259 Raymond Wildlife-Heritage Sculpture Corridor, 259 Re-Bar (Seattle), 147 Redhook Ale Brewery (Woodinville), 148 Red Wine and Chocolate (Yakima), 325 Red Wine and Chocolate (Yakima Valley), 28 369 16_607510-bindex.indd 36916_607510-bindex.indd 369 9/28/10 8:50 PM9/28/10 8:50 PM GENERAL INDEX Regions in brief, 46–48 Reininger (near Walla Walla), 338–339 REI (Seattle), 138 Responsible tourism, 39–40 Restaurants best off-the-beaten-path, 12 cafes, coffee bars and tea shops, 104–107 Revelry Vintners (Walla Walla), 340 Rhododendron Species Foundation and Botanical Garden (Tacoma), 213 Rialto Beach, 247 Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge, 269 Riverfront Park (Spokane), 348 Riverside State Park, 352 Riverwalk Park (Chelan), 285 Robert Karl Cellars (Spokane), 351 Roche Harbor (San Juan Island), 166 Rock climbing Leavenworth area, 296 Methow Valley, 280 Rockport, 275 Rockport State Park, 275 Roosevelt, Lake, 356 Roozengaarde Flowers & Bulbs (La Conner), 186 Roslyn, 301 Roslyn Museum, 301 Ross Lake National Recreation Area, 276 Ross Lake Overlook, 276 Rotary Fountain (Spokane), 348–349 Rothschild House (Port Townsend), 226 Rowing, Seattle, 129 R Place Bar & Grill (Seattle), 147 Ruby Beach, 248 Russell Creek Winery (Walla Walla), 339 RVs, 35 Ryan Patrick Vineyards (Leavenworth), 293 S Safeco Field (Seattle), 130 Safety, 37 Sailing.

Open: The Story of Human Progress by Johan Norberg

Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-globalists, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, carbon tax, citizen journalism, classic study, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, green new deal, humanitarian revolution, illegal immigration, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Lao Tzu, liberal capitalism, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, negative emissions, Network effects, open borders, open economy, Pax Mongolica, place-making, profit motive, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, spice trade, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, ultimatum game, universal basic income, World Values Survey, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

By the mid-eighteenth century, control had in effect broken down, while the much stronger guilds in southern Europe remained in control for another century. In Austria, Hungary and Portugal compulsory business organizations weren’t abolished until the 1870s and 1880s. There were protests from those who faced competition in Britain as well. Especially in the west of England, wool workers violently attacked jennies, flying shuttles and gig mills, but the result was that they destroyed their own industrial base and chased the industry out to Yorkshire. And parliament consistently refused to legislate against creative destruction. A resolution by the Justices of the Peace in Preston reflects the attitude of the authorities: ‘if a total stop were put by the legislature to their erection in Britain [to the new machines], it would only tend to their establishment in foreign countries, to the detriment of the trade in Britain’.37 It is easy to overemphasize the break with the past that the Glorious Revolution represented.

…

London, Penguin Books, 2011, p. 111. 33 This was in itself enough to lift the country, thought Adam Smith almost a century later: ‘That security which the laws of Great Britain give to every man that he shall enjoy the fruits of his own labour, is alone sufficient to make any country flourish’, Smith, 1981, p. 540. 34 Landes, 1999, p. 222. 35 Mokyr, 2011, p. 410. 36 Goldstone, 2009, p. 129. 37 Mokyr, 2005, p. 268. Many Luddite riots were not really anti-machine, but just a way to destroy something valuable as a negotiating tactic. The famous story that the inventor of the flying shuttle, John Kay, had to flee to France because of angry workers is apocryphal. He fled because of financial difficulties. 38 Pincus, 2009, p. 485. 39 G. H. Smith, The System of Liberty: Themes in the History of Classica Liberalism. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p. 193. 40 Mokyr, 2011, p. 397f. 41 Smith, 1981, p. 898. 42 A.

An Empire of Wealth: Rise of American Economy Power 1607-2000 by John Steele Gordon

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, clean water, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial independence, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Ida Tarbell, imperial preference, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, margin call, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, postindustrial economy, price mechanism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, vertical integration, Yom Kippur War

It required as much as twenty days for a woman (those who spun thread were almost always women—it’s the origin of the word spinster) to spin a pound of cotton into thread. This spinning was done at home under the putting-out system. An entrepreneur would give workers the necessary materials and then pay them by the piece for completed work. It took, on average, four spinners to supply one loom. But John Kay’s invention of the flying shuttle in 1733 upset the balance because it made weaving much faster. Either more spinners or a faster way of doing the spinning was needed. In 1764 James Hargreaves introduced the spinning jenny, which could spin eight threads at a time, and five years later James Arkwright improved on it with the water frame, so called because it was powered by a waterwheel.

…

., 370, 380 election of 1896, 269–71 electricity, 296, 301–9 communications and, 154–55 cost of, 304–5, 306 credit and, 308–9 metering of, 306–7 Second New Deal and, 345–46 steam turbine and, 305–6 street lighting and, 302–3 U.S. economy and, 307–8 see also telegraph Elizabeth I, queen of England, 153 Embargo Act, 94–95, 96 Emergency Banking Relief Act, 333–34 Emergency Railroad Transportation Act, 335 Employment Act, 378 England, see Great Britain English Civil War, 30 environmental movement, 172–73 Equal Opportunity Act, 382 Erie Canal, 93, 103–10, 141, 147, 208–9, 308 financing of, 106–7 New York City and, 109–10 route of, 104–5 Erie Railway, 157, 208–9, 212–16, 230–31, 235, 236 Ethan Frome (Wharton), 93 Evans, Oliver, 93–94, 140, 146 Evarts, William Maxwell, 221 Farm Credit Act, 335 Federal Bank Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), 337–38, 398 Federal Emergency Relief Act, 334 Federalist Papers, The, 72 Federal Open Market Committee, 337 Federal Reserve Act, 326, 337 Federal Reserve System, 280–81, 295, 301, 311, 312–13, 319–20, 323, 326, 337–38, 339, 346, 383, 384, 396, 397 Federal Securities Act, 335 Federal Society of Journeyman Cordwainers, 249 Federal Water Pollution Act, 389 feudal system, 11 “fiat money,” 46–47, 195 Field, Cyrus, 156 Field, David Dudley, 221 Field Code of Civil Procedure, 221 Fisher, Irving, 314 Fisk, Jim, 213–16, 225 Fitch, John, 134 Fitch, John A., 242 Flagler, Henry, 255, 257, 258 Florida, 86, 224 Flushing Remonstrance, 38 Flying Cloud, 183 flying shuttle, 88 Forbes 400 list, 260, 417–18 Ford, Henry, 297–98, 309, 310, 345 Ford Motor Company, 297–99, 309–10, 354, 386 Fowler, William Worthington, 214 franc, French, 401, 405 France, 8, 9, 10, 49, 53, 54–55, 60, 63, 66, 94, 95, 97, 117, 154, 290–91, 293, 294, 311, 323, 349, 362, 405 Franklin, Benjamin, 46, 71, 159, 301 antislavery movement and, 51–52 Franklin National Bank, 367 Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria, 286 Fraser’s Magazine, 208 French and Indian War, 54, 56 Frick, Henry Clay, 246–48, 253–54, 261 Fulton, Robert, 134–38, 140 Gallatin, Albert, 116, 119 Garfield, James A., 219, 265 Garner, John Nance, 325 gaslight, 167, 304 Gates, Bill, 256, 260, 417–18 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), 378 General Electric, 302, 304, 305 General Motors, 289, 309–10, 370, 386 General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, The (Keynes), 325, 379 Georgia, 82–83, 85–86 Georgia Journal, 145 Germany, 311, 322, 363, 375, 376, 377, 403 in World War I, 286–89, 293–94 in World War II, 349–50, 352, 353, 362 Giannini, A.

Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World by Joshua B. Freeman

anti-communist, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, corporate raider, cotton gin, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, joint-stock company, knowledge worker, mass immigration, means of production, mittelstand, Naomi Klein, new economy, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

However, it cost more to produce cotton yarn in Britain than in India and the quality was lower, too fragile to use as warp. And there was not enough of it; it took at least three spinners along with a few ancillary workers to keep one weaver (generally male) in yarn, meaning weavers often had to go beyond their own household for supplies, a problem exacerbated by the introduction of the flying shuttle in the 1730s, which greatly increased weaving productivity.16 Conditions were ripe for a radical change. Expanding fustian, hosiery, and cotton textile production ensured inventors and investors a payoff if they could increase the output, improve the quality, and lower the cost of cotton yarn.

…

See company housing and villages factory tourism, xii, 4, 20–22, 43, 69–70, 85, 135–36, 144–45, 151–52, 156, 159, 217, 310 Fair Labor Association, 271 Fairbairn, William, 17, 53 Fairfield shipyard (Baltimore, Maryland), 232 Fallows, James, 305 Female Labor Reform Associations, 67–68 FIAT, 136–37, 247, 314, 362n Figes, Orlando, 184 Filene, Edward, 119, 146–47, 182 filmmaking, 86, 136, 148, 159–61, 214, 216–17 fires and fire danger, 15, 17, 52, 76–77, 349n Firestone, 161, 164, 235–36 Fischer, Louis, 216 Fisher, Charles T., 155 Fisher Body, 137, 144, 155, 164–65 Fitch, John, 82, 95, 103, 109 Fitton, R. S., 15 Fitzpatrick, John, 114 Flagg, Edmund, 83 Flannery, Vaughn, 151–52 flax industry, 4–6, 15 Flextronics, 292 Flint, Michigan, 143–44, 164–66, 237, 314, 320 Flivver King, The (Sinclair), 147 flying shuttles, 6 Fontana, California, 232 footwear industry, 133, 273–74, 288–90, 289, 291–95, 298, 307, 309, 318 forced labor, 24–25, 203. See also slavery Ford, Edsel, 137, 153, 155–57, 159, 366n Ford, Henry, 118–19, 122, 124, 131, 138–41, 143, 147, 157, 159, 168, 174, 180, 186–87, 190–91, 319, 366n.

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, food miles, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Large Hadron Collider, Mark Zuckerberg, Medieval Warm Period, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, packet switching, patent troll, Pax Mongolica, Peter Thiel, phenotype, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, spice trade, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, working poor, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

The Sforzas lured engineers to Milan; Louis XI enticed Italian silk makers to set up in Lyon; Johann Gutenberg moved from Mainz to Strasbourg in search of investors; Gustavus Adolphus started the Swedish iron industry by bringing in a Walloon named Louis de Geer; John Kay, English inventor of the flying shuttle, was paid 2,500 livres a year by the French authorities to tour Normandy demonstrating his machine. In one especially bizarre case of industrial poaching in the early 1700s, Augustus the Strong of Saxony got a monopoly on the manufacture of porcelain by the cunning ploy of imprisoning a passing charlatan who claimed to be able to make gold – lest any other state get him.

…

As the twentieth-century economist Colin Clark put it, ‘Leisure has a real value even to very poor people.’ So, stuck between booming demand and stalling supply, the putters-out and their suppliers were ripe customers for any kind of productivity-enhancing invention, and with such an incentive, the inventors soon obliged. John Kay’s flying shuttle, James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny, Richard Arkwright’s water frame, Samuel Crompton’s mule – these were all just milestones on a continuous road of incrementally improving productivity. The jenny worked up to twenty times as fast as a spinning wheel and produced a more consistent yarn, but it was still operated entirely by human muscle power.

How We Got Here: A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and Markets by Andy Kessler

Albert Einstein, Andy Kessler, animal electricity, automated trading system, bank run, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Bretton Woods, British Empire, buttonwood tree, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Corn Laws, cotton gin, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Fairchild Semiconductor, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, GPS: selective availability, Grace Hopper, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Multics, packet switching, pneumatic tube, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, proprietary trading, railway mania, RAND corporation, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, systems thinking, three-martini lunch, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, UUNET, Wayback Machine, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Then you would move a sword to tighten the weft, and move the sword towards the other end of the warp to send the shuttle through the new shed. Got it? Makes steam engines sound simple. 30 HOW WE GOT HERE But looms are actually very simple but extremely labor intensive. A weaver must pay careful attention. In 1733, John Kay patented a wonderful device called the flying shuttle. The loom had a long box known as a shuttle race attached to it. With a set of cords rigged above the loom, a weaver could send the shuttle back and forth with ease, and with one hand, so with his other hand, he could control the thread or drink some tea. Foot pedals moved the warp up and down to create the shed.

A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy by Joel Mokyr

Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, business cycle, classic study, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Copley Medal, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, Deng Xiaoping, Edmond Halley, Edward Jenner, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, flying shuttle, framing effect, germ theory of disease, Haber-Bosch Process, Herbert Marcuse, hindsight bias, income inequality, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land tenure, law of one price, Menlo Park, moveable type in China, new economy, phenotype, price stability, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, the market place, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, ultimatum game, World Values Survey, Wunderkammern

As is often pointed out, the Industrial Revolution did not begin properly until seven or eight decades after the publication of Principia, though the traditional timing schedule tends to slight a substantial number of important technological breakthroughs that date before 1750, including coke smelting, crucible steelmaking, the early steam engines, and the flying shuttle. It is true that some of Newton’s followers were able to demonstrate his principles using mechanical devices. But, as Cardwell (1972) and others have noted, the dispute between the Newton measure of force (momentum, or mass times acceleration) and the Huygens-Leibniz notion of vis-viva (kinetic energy, or mass times velocity squared) was not altogether in Newton’s favor, as the vis-viva concept was more useful to engineers interested in mechanical work, duty, and efficiency (Henry, 2008, p. 113).

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Sprat himself summarized many of the beliefs that Merton and others identify as “Puritan,” although he himself was a (non-Puritan) Anglican cleric. 9 The Industrial Revolution is supposed to have started in 1760 or so, but in fact the first half of the eighteenth century saw major technological advances in the introduction of new mining techniques (including of course Newcomen pumps), the use of coke in smelting, the flying shuttle, smallpox inoculation, and the crucible technique in steelmaking—among others. 10 Thomas Sprat, in his History of the Royal Society (1667, p. 403), noted that “[Natural] Philosophy is now admitted into our exchange, our Church, our Palaces, our Court [and] has begun to keep the best company … and become the Employment of the Rich and the Great.” 11 The project of reforming the obviously defective Julian calendar was one of the great successes of sixteenth-century mathematics and observational astronomy, but some non-Catholic nations, such as Britain, were reluctant to adopt the Gregorian Calendar because of its patently papal origin (Britain switched to the Gregorian calendar in 1752, more than a century and a half after its introduction in 1582).

Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership by Andro Linklater

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, business cycle, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, electricity market, facts on the ground, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, light touch regulation, market clearing, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mortgage debt, Northern Rock, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, ultimatum game, wage slave, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor

The Marquis de Condorcet, a friend of Thomas Jefferson and a progressive thinker steeped in Locke’s writing, declared roundly “there is no connection between ownership of an invention and that of a field which can only be cultivated by one person.” A patent was a social arrangement created by society for its own good, and thus, “It is not a true right, it’s a privilege.” Once an invention was approved by the Académie des Sciences as beneficial to society, as in the case of the flying shuttle invented by the Englishman John Kaye, a cash prize and a limited monopoly or privilège exclusif would be awarded in exchange for training others to manufacture it. This system of state-sponsored innovation was clear cut and successful. In 1747, the French paid Kaye for his invention and awarded him a salary to teach its use to Normandy woollen weavers, while allowing him to retain for a short time a monopoly on its construction.

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Richard Arkwright, who in 1775 built and patented a water-powered frame for carding cotton and spinning it into long, tough thread, spent an estimated £2,200 in four years in unsuccessful attempts to defend his patent. Despite winning some cases, John Kaye found that every woollen manufacturer who pirated his patented flying shuttle had banded together to fight his claims for compensation, until the expense forced him to give up. Even James Watt, the canniest of patent holders, worried constantly about whether the risk of allowing competitors to build variants of his improved steam engine, outweighed the danger, if he went to court, of the judge removing his numerous patents altogether because of their inadequate specifications.

Humans Are Underrated: What High Achievers Know That Brilliant Machines Never Will by Geoff Colvin

Ada Lovelace, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Black Swan, call centre, capital asset pricing model, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, deskilling, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, flying shuttle, Freestyle chess, future of work, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Hans Moravec, industrial cluster, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, job automation, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, Narrative Science, new economy, rising living standards, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

After the royal slap down, the queen denied his patent, the hosiers’ guild campaigned against him, and he was forced to move to France, where he died in poverty. Some 150 years later, in the early dawn of the Industrial Revolution, an Englishman named John Kay revolutionized weaving by inventing the flying shuttle, which doubled productivity—surely a boon for weavers, who could now make twice as much cloth. Yet weavers campaigned against him, manufacturers conspired to violate his patents, and he was forced to move to France, where he died in poverty just like William Lee. Dying destitute in France seemed to be an occupational hazard for innovators.

Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces that Shape Behavior by Jonah Berger

Apollo 11, assortative mating, barriers to entry, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, double helix, driverless car, fixed-gear, flying shuttle, Google Glasses, job satisfaction, messenger bag, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, PalmPilot, Ronald Reagan, six sigma, spinning jenny, The Wisdom of Crowds, twin studies, white flight, Yogi Berra

Families spun their own cotton and flax and wove them together to make their own textiles. Given the difficulty of forming metal parts, any machines that did exist often used wooden components. Work was manual, hard, and often laborious. With the development of machine tools, the steam engine, and other technologies a slow, steady shift occurred. The flying shuttle, spinning jenny, and other tools allowed weaving to move out of the home and into larger, more dedicated factories. The cotton gin shrank a year’s worth of work into a week. Entrepreneurs began to nurture inventors to create new and more powerful machines. With these technological changes came a new social class.

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, digital rights, discovery of DNA, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, flying shuttle, friendly AI, gender pay gap, global village, Grace Hopper, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, housing crisis, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microdosing, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, OpenAI, operation paperclip, packet switching, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Plato's cave, public intellectual, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, spinning jenny, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

* * * Ultimately – and Ada was right about this – the uniting link between the operations of matter and abstract mental processes is to reimagine – completely – what we call ‘real’. This reimagined ‘real’ will soon be what we call the world. A Loom with a View The brain is an enchanted loom where millions of flying shuttles weave dissolving patterns. Charles Sherrington, neurophysiologist and Nobel laureate, 1940 To understand the new journeys and destinations opening up to the human race, via emerging and developing AI, it’s helpful to think about how we arrived where we are now. The huge decisive changes in our world are the changes that began with industrialisation.

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel

air freight, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cotton gin, COVID-19, David Graeber, decarbonisation, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairphone, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, meta-analysis, microbiome, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, passive income, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Rupert Read, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, universal basic income

Two Rise of the Juggernaut Capitalism can no more be ‘persuaded’ to limit growth than a human being can be ‘persuaded’ to stop breathing. Murray Bookchin I still remember when I first learned about the history of capitalism in school. It was a happy story that started with the invention of the steam engine in the eighteenth century and worked its way through a parade of technological innovations, from the flying shuttle all the way up to the personal computer. I remember marvelling at the glossy pictures in the textbook. As this story would have it, economic growth is like a fountain of money that springs forth from technology itself. It’s a wonderful tale, and it leaves us with the hopeful impression that with the right technology, we should be able to get growth more or less out of thin air.

The Weightless World: Strategies for Managing the Digital Economy by Diane Coyle

Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business cycle, clean water, company town, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, dematerialisation, Diane Coyle, Edward Glaeser, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial deregulation, flying shuttle, full employment, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the sewing machine, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, lump of labour, Mahbub ul Haq, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, McJob, Meghnad Desai, microcredit, moral panic, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, night-watchman state, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, pension reform, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, spinning jenny, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, Tragedy of the Commons, two tier labour market, very high income, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, working-age population

The troops prevented that march from reaching the bigger industrial centres of Rochdale and Manchester, where it might have inflamed a serious insurrection. According to some estimates investment in the Manchester cotton mills had reached £20 million as early as 1816. The owners of capital had a lot at stake. The Lancashire inventors of the mule, Samuel Crompton, the spinning jenny, Richard Hargreaves, and the flying shuttle, John Kay, found themselves under personal attack. Kay had to flee the mob, Crompton was burnt out of his home. Jeremy Rifkin has launched no physical assaults on today’s equivalents of the cotton barons, men such as Microsoft’s Bill Gates, but he makes it clear that he thinks computers are to blame for depriving people of work.

World Economy Since the Wars: A Personal View by John Kenneth Galbraith

business cycle, central bank independence, classic study, flying shuttle, full employment, income inequality, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, low interest rates, means of production, planned obsolescence, price discrimination, price stability, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, War on Poverty

Most important, in all the earlier stages of development there was no close and predictable correlation between the supply of educated men and the nature of their training and the rate of technological innovation. Inventions were more often the result of brilliant flashes of insight than the product of long prepared training and development. The Industrial Revolution in England was ushered in by the invention of the flying shuttle by John Kay, the spinning jenny by James Hargreaves, the spinning frame by (presumptively) Richard Arkwright and, of course, by James Watt's steam engine. These represented vast improvements in the capital which was being put to industrial use. But only in the case of Watt could the innovation be related to previous education and preparation.

Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, Alfred Russel Wallace, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Book of Ingenious Devices, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, colonial exploitation, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Drosophila, Edward Thorp, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, game design, global village, Great Leap Forward, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, HyperCard, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, mass immigration, megacity, Minecraft, moral panic, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, Necker cube, New Urbanism, Oculus Rift, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pets.com, placebo effect, pneumatic tube, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, SimCity, spice trade, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, talking drums, the built environment, The Great Good Place, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, working poor, Wunderkammern

Ironically, the fears that ladies’ fashion trends would undermine the British economy turned out to have it exactly backward. The immense value of the cotton trade had already set a generation of British inventors off in search of mechanical tools that could mass-produce cotton fabrics: beginning with John Kay’s flying shuttle, patented in 1733, followed several decades later by Richard Arkwright’s spinning (or water) frame, then Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, not to mention the endless refinements to the steam engine rolled out during the 1700s, many of which were originally designed to enhance textile production. (Steam engines would eventually power a wide range of industrial production and transportation, but their initial application was dominated by mining and textiles.)

I'm a stranger here myself: notes on returning to America after twenty years away by Bill Bryson

flying shuttle, illegal immigration, millennium bug, National Debt Clock, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, telemarketer

Only saddlers could reliably provide the requisite durability, which is why so much early upholstered furniture was covered in leather. Fabric upholsterers also had the problem that many preindustrial fabrics could be produced only in widths of about twenty inches, creating a need for seams in awkward places. Only after the invention of the flying shuttle by John Kay in 1733 did it become possible to produce fabrics in widths of three feet or so. Improvements in textile and printing technologies transformed decorative possibilities beyond furniture as well. This was the age that saw the widespread introduction of carpets, wallpapers, and bright fabrics.

The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity by Byron Reese

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, basic income, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cognitive bias, computer age, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, dark matter, DeepMind, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, estate planning, financial independence, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, full employment, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Hargreaves, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, lateral thinking, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Lou Jepsen, Moravec's paradox, Nick Bostrom, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, OpenAI, pattern recognition, profit motive, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Timothy McVeigh, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

In England, participants in the Swing Riots resisted automatic threshing machines by smashing them. Boatmen destroyed the first attempts at a steam engine, which they felt would put them out of work. So overwhelming was the protest against ribbon looms in Germany that they were ordered burned by the government. When the fly shuttle was invented to make weaving easier, its creator, John Kay, was attacked by a crowd. James Hargreaves, who created another breakthrough in textiles called the spinning jenny, saw his creation burned by yet another mob in England. John Heathcoat, who created technology to make the creation of lace more efficient, saw his entire factory and its equipment torched in broad daylight.

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines by Thomas H. Davenport, Julia Kirby

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Amazon Robotics, Andy Kessler, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon-based life, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, commoditize, conceptual framework, content marketing, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, financial engineering, fixed income, flying shuttle, follow your passion, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, game design, general-purpose programming language, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Hans Lippershey, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial robot, information retrieval, intermodal, Internet of things, inventory management, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, lifelogging, longitudinal study, loss aversion, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter Thiel, precariat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, speech recognition, spinning jenny, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, tech worker, TED Talk, the long tail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

In fact, we can easily trace three eras of automation, based on the types of work they have brought machines forth to challenge. First, machines relieved humans of work that was manually exhausting and mentally enervating. This was the story of the late industrial revolution, which, having pulled all those workers off farms and into factories, proceeded to make most of them unnecessary with contraptions like the flying shuttle, the spinning jenny, and the power loom. And it’s a process that continues around the world. Consider Foxconn, the Chinese manufacturing subcontractor to global electronics brands like Apple. Starting in 2011, it started putting robots on the lines to perform welding, polishing, and such tasks—ten thousand of them that first year.

The Price of Everything: And the Hidden Logic of Value by Eduardo Porter

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, British Empire, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Credit Default Swap, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, flying shuttle, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, new economy, New Urbanism, peer-to-peer, pension reform, Peter Singer: altruism, pets.com, placebo effect, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, ultimatum game, unpaid internship, urban planning, Veblen good, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

He made his predictions just as England and the rest of Europe were embarking upon a sustained period of unprecedented economic growth that would spread around the globe and drastically improve humanity’s wellbeing over the following two centuries. THE REVOLUTION IN productivity in Lancashire’s cotton industry started as early as the 1730s, with a series of new inventions to spin yarn, such as John Kay’s “flying shuttle,” and continued through the 1770s with inventions such as Samuel Crompton’s “spinning mule.” The yarn revolution was followed by a weaving breakthrough. By the late 1700s Britain was starting to transform from a mostly rural nation into an industrial power, exporting textiles and metals. Then the spread of the steam engine in the nineteenth century led the Industrial Revolution to its apogee.

Empire of Cotton: A Global History by Sven Beckert

agricultural Revolution, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, company town, Corn Laws, cotton gin, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, European colonialism, flying shuttle, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, imperial preference, industrial cluster, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, race to the bottom, restrictive zoning, scientific management, Silicon Valley, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, vertical integration, women in the workforce, work culture

What British cotton capitalists needed was a dynamic combination of new technologies to lower costs, the further growth of elastic markets that already had begun to expand on the tails of British expansion, and a supportive state with the ability not just to protect global empire but to transform society in Britain itself.10 Since labor costs were the primary obstacle to grasping the new tantalizing opportunities, British merchants, inventors, and budding manufacturers—practical men all—focused on methods to increase the productivity of their high-cost labor. In the process, they effected the most momentous technological change in the history of cotton. Their first noteworthy innovation came in 1733 with John Kay’s invention of the flying shuttle. This small wooden tool in the shape of the hull of a ship allowed weavers to attach the weft thread and then propel it to “fly” from one side of the loom to the other through the warp threads. The shuttle doubled the productivity of weavers. At first it spread only slowly, but its spread was unstoppable: After 1745, despite resistance from weavers who feared for their livelihoods, it was widely adopted.11 This tiny piece of wood propelled in novel ways prompted a cascade of further innovations that would gradually but permanently change cotton manufacturing.

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So effective was this wave of resistance, and so relatively limited the inexperienced state’s ability and willingness to protect its modernizing entrepreneurs, that some capitalists concluded that the path of least resistance was to limit the employment of new machines and instead focus on the production, however labor-intensive, of high-quality goods. The fear of popular uprising became a guiding star in the universe of French entrepreneurs.31 Such resistance also characterized the industrialization process in England. Already in the 1740s there had been riots against Kay’s flying shuttle, in 1753 there were attacks on “cotton reel” machines; in 1768–69 workers in Lancashire rioted against the introduction of the spinning jenny, and in 1779 Lancashire workers smashed various kinds of machinery. But machine breaking only became truly prevalent in the 1810s, a moment when the state was able and willing to use massive force to repress it.

The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History by Kassia St Clair

Apollo 11, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, butterfly effect, Dmitri Mendeleev, Elon Musk, flying shuttle, Francisco Pizarro, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, gravity well, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Neil Armstrong, North Ronaldsay sheep, out of africa, Rana Plaza, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, spinning jenny, synthetic biology, TED Talk, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Virgin Galactic, Works Progress Administration

Key to their eventual success was a steady stream of technological innovations that made spinning and weaving faster, more efficient and, crucially, cheaper, finally allowing them to compete with and eventually supersede Indian-made cotton textiles. An early example of such innovation was the flying shuttle, invented in 1733 by John Kay. This was a small, aerodynamic piece of wood that could be quickly propelled from one side of the loom – through the serried ranks of the warp – to the other, dragging the weft threads with it as it went. This increased the speed of weavers so dramatically, that afterwards it took four spinners to supply just one weaver.

The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions by Jason Hickel

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Attenborough, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, degrowth, dematerialisation, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, European colonialism, falling living standards, financial deregulation, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, Howard Zinn, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, James Watt: steam engine, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land value tax, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, Mahatma Gandhi, Money creation, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration

How did a small number of countries in Western Europe become so much richer and more powerful than the rest of the world? The usual answer to these questions is the one we all learned in school. A series of technological innovations in Britain jump-started the Industrial Revolution that spread through Europe and the United States. The invention of the flying shuttle in 1733 made textile weaving much more efficient, and James Watt’s steam engine in 1781 made it possible to build large and powerful machines. Britain’s coal fields, which were usefully proximate to the large cities, provided cheap and abundant energy, and because the landscape was relatively flat it was easy to transport both coal and manufactured goods around the country via canals.

Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization by Vaclav Smil

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, additive manufacturing, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Boeing 747, British Empire, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, energy transition, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, global pandemic, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, megacity, megastructure, microplastics / micro fibres, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, purchasing power parity, recommendation engine, rolodex, X Prize

Vertical looms had been used since antiquity, and many traditional societies in Asia and America used portable body-tensioned looms. In either case weavers could produce cloth only as wide as their arm span and wider cloth required the cooperation of two weavers. This changed in 1733 with John Kay's invention of a flying shuttle that could be sent by flicks of the wrist from one end of the loom to another; the most important innovation allowing cheaper, mass-scale production of cloth came in 1785 with Edmund Cartwright's power loom (initially powered by steam). A no less important innovation was the response to imports of Indian printed cotton fabrics (calico, produced in Calicut since the eleventh century) to Europe.

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, altcoin, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon tax, Columbian Exchange, computer age, Corn Laws, cosmological constant, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, Donald Davies, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Eben Moglen, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, endogenous growth, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fail fast, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, George Santayana, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, hydraulic fracturing, imperial preference, income per capita, indoor plumbing, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, land reform, Lao Tzu, long peace, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Necker cube, obamacare, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, twin studies, uber lyft, women in the workforce

The discovery of the structure of DNA depended heavily on X-ray crystallography of biological molecules, a technique developed in the wool industry to try to improve textiles. And so on, through case after case. The mechanisation of the textile industry was at the very heart of the Industrial Revolution, with its jennies, frames, mules, flying shuttles and mills going down in history as milestones in the industrialisation of Lancashire and Yorkshire, leading to Britain’s sudden enrichment and power. Yet nowhere among the journeymen and entrepreneurs who drove these changes can you find even a hint of science. Much the same is true of mobile telephony in the late twentieth century.

Black Box Thinking: Why Most People Never Learn From Their Mistakes--But Some Do by Matthew Syed

Abraham Wald, Airbus A320, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, Atul Gawande, Black Swan, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, crew resource management, deliberate practice, double helix, epigenetics, fail fast, fear of failure, flying shuttle, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, hindsight bias, Isaac Newton, iterative process, James Dyson, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, luminiferous ether, mandatory minimum, meta-analysis, minimum viable product, publication bias, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, seminal paper, Shai Danziger, Silicon Valley, six sigma, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, US Airways Flight 1549, Wall-E, Yom Kippur War

But there is a problem with the linear model: in most areas of human development, it severely underestimates the role of bottom-up testing and learning of the kind adopted by the Unilever biologists. In his book The Economic Laws of Scientific Research, Terence Kealey, a practicing scientist, debunks the conventional narrative surrounding the Industrial Revolution: In 1733, John Kay invented the flying shuttle, which mechanized weaving, and in 1770 James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny, which as its name implies, mechanized spinning. These major developments in textile technology, as well as those of Wyatt and Paul (spinning frame, 1758), Arkwright (water frame, 1769), presaged the Industrial Revolution, yet they owed nothing to science; they were empirical developments based on the trial, error and experimentation of skilled craftsmen who were trying to improve the productivity, and so the profits, of their factories.5 Note the final sentence: these world-changing machines were developed, like Unilever’s nozzle, through trial and error.

Inviting Disaster by James R. Chiles

air gap, Airbus A320, airline deregulation, Alignment Problem, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, crew resource management, cuban missile crisis, Exxon Valdez, flying shuttle, Gene Kranz, Maui Hawaii, megaproject, Milgram experiment, Neil Armstrong, North Sea oil, Piper Alpha, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Ted Sorensen, time dilation

And the slow and ambiguous response of the ballast controls made managing them very difficult once the rig left the familiar boundaries of civilized machine behavior. The next chapter explores the problem of machines whose critical workings were even more deeply hidden from the operators. 2: BLIND SPOT BAFFLED AND BEWILDERED INSIDE THE MASSIVE SYSTEM On January 8, 1989, a British Midlands 737 was flying shuttle service from London to Belfast. The captain and copilot heard a bang at twenty-nine thousand feet and felt the airframe shaking at a high frequency. These occurrences, in combination with the smell of overheated metal in the fresh air gathered by the engines’ compressor stage, made the captain and copilot suspect an engine problem.

Investment: A History by Norton Reamer, Jesse Downing

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, backtesting, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, book value, break the buck, Brownian motion, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, equity premium, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial innovation, fixed income, flying shuttle, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Henri Poincaré, Henry Singleton, high net worth, impact investing, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the telegraph, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, means of production, Menlo Park, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical arbitrage, survivorship bias, tail risk, technology bubble, Teledyne, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, underbanked, Vanguard fund, working poor, yield curve

For instance, Johannes Gutenberg’s revolutionary printing press of the fifteenth century clearly facilitated the diffusion of knowledge that made the Industrial Revolution—and its necessary technological innovations and inventions—possible in the first place. Among the other facilitating technologies of the Industrial Revolution was James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny, a spinning frame with multiple spindles that vastly increased production volume in the textile industry. Combined with the flying shuttle, the spinning jenny took the textile industry into the next competitive era. James Watt’s late eighteenth-century steam engine changed most industries using mechanical power, especially transportation and agriculture, quite significantly. The previous costs of producing this mechanical power, no matter the application, were generally higher than the costs of heating water to steam, and thus enormous cost savings were realized and industrial and transportation projects became more feasible.

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil

Ada Lovelace, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, backpropagation, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, Danny Hillis, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Everything should be made as simple as possible, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, fudge factor, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, information retrieval, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jacquard loom, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Norbert Wiener, optical character recognition, ought to be enough for anybody, pattern recognition, phenotype, punch-card reader, quantum entanglement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Whole Earth Review, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K

This colonization spawned the emergence of a merchant class, a worldwide banking system, and early forms of intellectual property protection, including the patent. On May 26, 1733, the English Patent Office issued a patent to John Kay for his “New Engine for Opening and Dressing Wool.” This was good news, for he had plans to manufacture his “flying shuttle” and market it to the burgeoning English textile industry. Kay’s invention was a quick success, but he spent all of his profits on litigation, attempting in vain to enforce his patent. He died in poverty, never realizing that his innovation in the weaving of cloth represented the launching of the Industrial Revolution.

Good Money: Birmingham Button Makers, the Royal Mint, and the Beginnings of Modern Coinage, 1775-1821 by George Anthony Selgin

British Empire, correlation coefficient, flying shuttle, George Gilder, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, large denomination, lone genius, profit motive, RAND corporation, school choice, seigniorage, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen

That the Soho Mint was no exception is evident from a number of its commissions, including the halfpennies it struck for Lancaster coin collector Daniel Eccleston in 1794. Besides being "exceptionally massive and fine" (Bell 1963,82), Eccleston's tokens, which showed his bust on their obverse and a ship moored behind a plow and flying shuttle on their reverse, had unusually broad, legend-bearing raised rims that were to be incorporated into Boulton's first regal coins. 23 Fancier still than Eccleston's coins were the ones Soho made for Captain George Chapman's Penryn Volunteers, the last specimens of which were delivered just before Soho turned its attention to striking decidedly less ornate regal coins.

Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems by Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo

3D printing, accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, company town, congestion pricing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, fear of failure, financial innovation, flying shuttle, gentrification, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, high net worth, immigration reform, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, loss aversion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, middle-income trap, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, Paul Samuelson, place-making, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart meter, social graph, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, universal basic income, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K

Those were Hard Times indeed. We know that eventually there was a turnaround in the UK. Even as some workers lost their jobs, the labor-saving innovations raised profitability of other inputs, and hence the demand for workers producing them. Improvements in weaving technology, like John Kay’s flying shuttle, for example, increased demand for yarn, creating jobs for people to produce yarn. And the burgeoning wealth of those profiting from these innovations increased demand for new products and services in a range of sectors (more solicitors, accountants, engineers, bespoke tailors, gardeners, etc.), which created more jobs.

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Apollo 11, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, bond market vigilante , Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, Corn Laws, cotton gin, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, driverless car, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global value chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydroponic farming, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Jon Ronson, Kenneth Arrow, Kula ring, labour market flexibility, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Blériot, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, M-Pesa, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Murano, Venice glass, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, popular capitalism, popular electronics, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, TaskRabbit, techlash, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, Veblen good, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, world market for maybe five computers, Yom Kippur War, you are the product, zero-sum game

There were many technological advances in mankind’s history before 1500, from control of fire through the wheel to the iron plough, the compass, and even eyeglasses. What has been unprecedented about the modern era has been the sheer number of innovations and the speed with which they have been spread. In part, this has been down to the self-reinforcing nature of these changes. For example, invention of the “flying shuttle” improved the productivity of weavers. That created the demand for more raw material in the form of spun thread. Sure enough, the spinning jenny, the water frame and the mechanical mule all emerged in the 1760s and 1770s, massively improving the productivity of spinners. As the efficiency of textile production improved, the price of finished goods fell and this increased demand for the product.

A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World by William J. Bernstein

Admiral Zheng, asset allocation, bank run, Benoit Mandelbrot, British Empire, call centre, clean water, Columbian Exchange, Corn Laws, cotton gin, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, domestication of the camel, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Eratosthenes, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, high-speed rail, ice-free Arctic, imperial preference, income inequality, intermodal, James Hargreaves, John Harrison: Longitude, Khyber Pass, low skilled workers, non-tariff barriers, Paul Samuelson, placebo effect, Port of Oakland, refrigerator car, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, upwardly mobile, working poor, zero-sum game

The wealth of Croesus awaited those who could bridge the gap between cheap raw cotton and the expensive, smooth, light cloth desired by consumers. High demand and high prices for calicoes, combined with the unavailability of Indian cloth, drove innovators to improve the spinning and weaving processes. Improve they did. Just a dozen years after the passage of the act of 1721, John Kay perfected the flying shuttle, which doubled weavers' productivity. This served to increase the demand for thread, whose spinning was more difficult to mechanize. In 1738, Lewis Paul and John Wyatt patented the first mechanical spinning machine, but no commercially feasible device became available until the mid-1760s, when such machines were invented by James Hargreaves, Richard Arkwright, and Samuel Crompton.

The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation by Edward Glaeser, David Cutler

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, defund the police, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of penicillin, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, future of work, Future Shock, gentrification, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global village, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial cluster, James Hargreaves, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, job automation, jobless men, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge worker, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, place-making, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Richard Florida, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Socratic dialogue, spinning jenny, superstar cities, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech baron, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, union organizing, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

The combinations of private and public action that reduced the risk of illness from mass production and distribution in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries provide examples of how to lower the risks that cities face today. During the early Industrial Revolution, mechanical innovations like the flying shuttle, the water frame, and the spinning jenny revolutionized the manufacturing of fabric for clothing, one of humanity’s most basic needs. Those innovations meant a switch from labor to capital-intensive production and from weaving at home to working in large factories. The machines were expensive, and they became more efficient as industrial establishments grew larger.

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

The urban fabric of modern Hong Kong was knit following the end of China’s civil war in 1949, which sent two million refugees streaming across its border with little more than the shirts on their backs— appropriate, considering Shanghai’s fleeing capitalists underwrote its first textile factories. Textiles are the bottom rung of industrial economies. Britain’s woolen mills were the first to be mechanized in the eighteenth century by the flying shuttle and spinning jenny, and the first to be copied on cut-rate American looms. Hong Kong followed in their foot-steps until Deng’s Reform and Opening in 1978, when its reservoir of cheap labor was undercut by the bottomless one pooling in Shenzhen. The Delta was built with Hong Kong’s jobs and Hong Kong’s dollars.

Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Air France Flight 447, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-fragile, banking crisis, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, business cycle, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, commoditize, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discrete time, double entry bookkeeping, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, fail fast, financial engineering, financial independence, Flash crash, flying shuttle, Gary Taubes, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, Helicobacter pylori, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, high net worth, hygiene hypothesis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, informal economy, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, Jane Jacobs, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Mark Spitznagel, meta-analysis, microbiome, money market fund, moral hazard, mouse model, Myron Scholes, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, principal–agent problem, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, selection bias, Silicon Valley, six sigma, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, tail risk, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, Yogi Berra, Zipf's Law

Kealey presents a convincing—very convincing—argument that the steam engine emerged from preexisting technology and was created by uneducated, often isolated men who applied practical common sense and intuition to address the mechanical problems that beset them, and whose solutions would yield obvious economic reward. Now, second, consider textile technologies. Again, the main technologies that led to the jump into the modern world owe, according to Kealey, nothing to science. “In 1733,” he writes, “John Kay invented the flying shuttle, which mechanized weaving, and in 1770 James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny, which as its name implies, mechanized spinning. These major developments in textile technology, as well as those of Wyatt and Paul (spinning frame, 1758), Arkwright (water frame, 1769), presaged the Industrial Revolution, yet they owed nothing to science; they were empirical developments based on the trial, error, and experimentation of skilled craftsmen who were trying to improve the productivity, and so the profits, of their factories.”

An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by J. Bradford Delong

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, ASML, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, ending welfare as we know it, endogenous growth, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial repression, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, German hyperinflation, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, industrial research laboratory, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, It's morning again in America, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, occupational segregation, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Pearl River Delta, Phillips curve, plutocrats, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, Stanislav Petrov, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Suez canal 1869, surveillance capitalism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, TSMC, union organizing, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, Yom Kippur War

We feel that that process could have worked out differently, but we have no good way to conceptualize how that might have happened, or what the plausible range of different outcomes is. As the historian Anton Howes has pointed out, nearly any weaver for five thousand years before 1773 could have made his or her life much easier by inventing the flying shuttle. None did until John Kay, who had no deep knowledge and used no advanced materials, just, as Howes marveled, “two wooden boxes on either side to catch the shuttle… [and] a string, with a little handle called a picker.” Thus, he added, “Kay’s innovation was extraordinary in its simplicity.” By comparison, the research lab and the corporation were complex, and could have perhaps escaped humanity’s conceptual grasp.10 The labs and corporations needed accelerants if they were to spread and transform the world.

When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Rise of the Middle Kingdom by Martin Jacques

Admiral Zheng, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, classic study, credit crunch, Dava Sobel, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income per capita, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, land tenure, lateral thinking, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, Meghnad Desai, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, one-China policy, open economy, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, price stability, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

Even in technology, there appears to have been little to choose between Europe and China, and in some fields, like irrigation, textile weaving and dyeing, medicine and porcelain manufacture, the Europeans were behind. China had long used textile machines that differed in only one key detail from the spinning jenny and the flying shuttle which were to power Britain’s textile-led Industrial Revolution. China had long been familiar with the steam engine and had developed various versions of it; compared with James Watt’s subsequent invention, the piston needed to turn the wheel rather than the other way round.6 What is certainly true, however, is that once Britain embarked on its Industrial Revolution, investment in capital- and energy-intensive processes rapidly raised productivity levels and created a virtuous circle of technology, innovation and growth that was able to draw on an ever-growing body of science in which Britain enjoyed a significant lead over China.7 For China, in contrast, its ‘industrious revolution’ did not prove the prelude to an industrial revolution.

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Brownian motion, California gold rush, Cepheid variable, clean water, Copley Medal, cosmological constant, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Attenborough, double helix, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Gregor Mendel, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Helicobacter pylori, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, out of africa, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, supervolcano, Thomas Malthus, Wilhelm Olbers

Only saddlers could reliably provide the requisite durability, which is why so much early upholstered furniture was covered in leather. Fabric upholsterers also had the problem that many preindustrial fabrics could be produced only in widths of about twenty inches, creating a need for seams in awkward places. Only after the invention of the flying shuttle by John Kay in 1733 did it become possible to produce fabrics in widths of three feet or so. Improvements in textile and printing technologies transformed decorative possibilities beyond furniture as well. This was the age that saw the widespread introduction of carpets, wallpapers, and bright fabrics.

Ellul, Jacques-The Technological Society-Vintage Books (1964) by Unknown

Bretton Woods, conceptual framework, do-ocracy, double entry bookkeeping, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Mars Society, means of production, Norbert Wiener, price mechanism, profit motive, rising living standards, road to serfdom, spinning jenny, technological determinism, Thorstein Veblen, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto

Now we must consider the historical, necessary linking up of all the different techniques. This analysis will complete my discussion of these two characteristics. Machine technique appeared after 1750. The technical state of mind was first manifested in the application of the principles of science. We already know how this necessity arose ( it is emphasized in all textbooks). The flying shuttle of 1733 made a greater pro- 111) THE CHARACTEROLOCY OF TECHNIQUE duction of yarn necessary. But production was impossible without a suitable machine. The response to this dilemma was the invention of the spinning jenny by James Hargreaves. But then yarn was product*! in much greater quantities than could possibly be used by the weavers.

Empire of Guns by Priya Satia

banking crisis, British Empire, business intelligence, Corn Laws, cotton gin, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, hiring and firing, independent contractor, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Khyber Pass, Lewis Mumford, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, rent-seeking, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, technological determinism, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, zero-sum game

The American war paid “rich dividends” to textile manufacturers in Yorkshire, Lancashire, and the West Country. War eased transformation in the cotton industry, too, quite apart from the Wyatt and Paul spinning machine. High employment rates during the Seven Years’ War dampened resentment of the introduction of the flying shuttle, which transformed weaving. The spinning jenny followed as output increased during the war. Farming benefited, too. The Navy Victualling Office was one of the nation’s largest purchasers of agricultural produce, structuring and integrating markets significantly with its bulk-goods transport system.

The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty by Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, AltaVista, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, Berlin Wall, British Empire, California gold rush, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, export processing zone, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kula ring, labor-force participation, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, openstreetmap, out of africa, PageRank, pattern recognition, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Skype, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, the market place, transcontinental railway, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks

In the course of a few decades, technology and the organization of production were transformed in a number of key industries. Leading the way were textiles, where a series of innovative breakthroughs in spinning, such as the water frame, the spinning jenny, and the mule revolutionized productivity. Similar innovations occurred in weaving, with the introduction of the flying shuttle and various types of power looms. Equally transformative were the novel forms of inanimate power starting with Thomas Newcomen’s atmospheric engine and then James Watt’s steam engine. The steam engine not only made mining much more productive by enabling the pumping of water out of mines, but also changed transportation and metallurgy.

Escape From Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity by Walter Scheidel

agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, conceptual framework, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, disruptive innovation, Easter island, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flying shuttle, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, means of production, Multics, Network effects, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer lending, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, secular stagnation, South China Sea, spinning jenny, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, vertical integration, zero-sum game

This prompted a search among domestic manufacturers for ways of producing more and cheaper cotton cloth that was suitable for printing. In response, a series of innovations greatly increased productivity in spinning and weaving, first by raising output per worker and then, crucially, by introducing water-powered machinery. Between the 1730s and the 1770s, the flying shuttle and the spinning jenny were followed by the water frame and the spinning mule, which was perfected into a fully automated device in the 1820s. But it was earlier with Samuel Crompton’s invention of the mule that the Lancashire muslin industry took off from the 1780s onward.115 Interstate competition and interventionism also affected the British coal industry.

Truth, Lies, and O-Rings: Inside the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster by Allan J McDonald, James R. Hansen

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, flying shuttle, Neil Armstrong, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, transcontinental railway

There are dozens of such problems which have been uncovered on the SRBs and the main engines and which none of the experts involved truly understand. Many of these have been glossed over simply because we were able to come up with a theoretical explanation which no one could disprove. We are flying shuttles based on the flawed management philosophy that if no one can prove the hardware will fail then we launch. And, we vote. It is understood that Lucas expects his board to vote for launch. In the twenty-five Center level flight readiness reviews that I have participated, never has there been a single negative vote from a Marshall board member or a Marshall contractor that we are not ready.

This Sceptred Isle by Christopher Lee

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, failed state, financial independence, flying shuttle, glass ceiling, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Northern Rock, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, urban decay

The moral crusade of the decade was reflected by Charles Wesley who had been preaching and writing what became a collection of 7,000 hymns, and his elder brother, John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, began his open-air evangelical crusade and would eventually preach 40,000 sermons. Small factories were being built and textile-makers were leading what one day would be known as the Industrial Revolution. John Kay invented his flying shuttle for weavers but reaped few rewards. There was still famine in Ireland; witchcraft in England was no longer a crime; and Handel finished his Messiah. At the time of the passing of the Gin Act, William Pitt was mourning the passing of a powerful ally, the Prince of Wales, in 1751. The man who would have been King on George II’s death would probably have guaranteed Pitt’s future.

Andrew Carnegie by David Nasaw

banking crisis, book value, British Empire, Burning Man, business climate, business cycle, business logic, California gold rush, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crony capitalism, David Brooks, death from overwork, delayed gratification, financial independence, flying shuttle, full employment, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, invention of the steam engine, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, land tenure, Louis Pasteur, Monroe Doctrine, price stability, railway mania, Republic of Letters, strikebreaker, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, work culture , Works Progress Administration

Every weaver in town could recite the recent history of the trade: how James Blake, feigning idiocy, had crawled under a damask loom in Edinburgh to learn the secrets of its construction, memorized what he saw there, and returned to Dunfermline to build his own; how John Wilson of Bridge Street had introduced the flying shuttle, which made it possible for one man to work a loom by himself without need of helpers to position the shuttle; how in 1825 Alexander Robertson and Messrs R. and J. Kerr had imported the Jacquard machine, invented by Monsieur Jacquard, a weaver of Lyons. Before the invention of the Jacquard machine, the linen weavers had had to laboriously refit their looms for each new design.