Hi everyone, welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal. Today's guest is Joel Mokir,

Professor of Economics and History at Northwestern. His new book, A Culture of Growth,

The Origins of the Modern Economy, is about what really drove the Industrial Revolution.

It was a period not unlike today where we took quantum leaps forward, to quote the author,

in tech, from taming

electricity to making cheaper steel, refining iron cheaply, improving the quality of food,

automating fiberlooms, pumping water out of coal mines, preventing smallpox, and even bleaching

underwear. In short, one of the most significant ages of tech and economic progress.

In this interview, we cover everything from the public virtual sphere of ideas that drove

this knowledge at the time and internet analogies today.

We also touch briefly on how to focus on big problems like climate change to how do we measure

growth.

But we began the conversation with the then revolutionary idea of a steam engine.

The first steam engine is introduced in England in 1712 by a man called Thomas Newcomen.

And the principles on which that engine was built were not known a century earlier.

Because these are called atmospheric engines.

And the idea that the earth is surrounded by an atmosphere, which sounds kind of commonplace to us, actually was not realized until the 17th century

by one of Galileo's more famous students, a man called Torricelli. And while you have the concept of an

atmosphere, then the notion of creating a vacuum

and having the pressure of the atmosphere push a piston down in a cylinder in which you have

created a vacuum, that idea can then follow.

But in order to do that, you also have to realize that a vacuum is possible.

...