50 Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy—The Plow, Barbed Wire, and Google Search
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 28 May 2025
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, Tim Harford, author of the bestselling book 50 Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy, shares the stories of three inventions that changed the way we live today—this time: barbed wire, the plow, and Google Search.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an IHeart podcast. |
| 0:04.5 | Adventure should never come with a pause button. |
| 0:07.1 | Remember Movie Pass? |
| 0:08.4 | All the movies you wanted for just nine bucks? |
| 0:11.1 | I'm Bridget Todd, host of There Are No Girls on the Internet. |
| 0:13.9 | And this season, I'm digging into the tech stories we weren't told. |
| 0:17.4 | Starting with Stacey Spikes, the black founder of movie pass who got pushed out of the company |
| 0:21.6 | he built. |
| 0:22.8 | Everybody's trying to knock you down and it's not going to work and no one's going to like it. |
| 0:27.3 | And then boom, it's everywhere. |
| 0:29.3 | And that was that moment. |
| 0:30.7 | Listen to there are no girls on the internet on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. |
| 0:34.7 | You're your podcast. |
| 0:50.6 | This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. |
| 0:52.9 | To search for the Our American Stories podcast, |
| 0:55.5 | go to the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, |
| 0:59.1 | or wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 1:01.7 | Our next storyteller is an economist |
| 1:03.3 | and best-selling author of 50 things that shaped the modern economy. |
| 1:08.9 | Here is Tim Harford to tell the story about three of those, starting with |
| 1:14.0 | the plow. It's a wonderful example of how technology has profound effects on society. |
| 1:23.0 | We think about technologies as solving problems. So with the plow, what's the problem? I want to grow |
... |
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