Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?

It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream.

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Hello, you're listening to the Arts and Ideas podcast.

I'm John Gallowher, and this edition is a part of our series New Thinking,

looking at new research in UK universities.

The Industrial Revolution is alive in the British National Consciousness.

From William Blake's dark, satanic mills, to the chimneys and machines of Danny Boyle's

Olympic opening ceremony, it's a period we often think we know.

But has the smoke and noise of modern memory obscured the realities of a much debated period

we're talking about a few decades at the end of the 1700s and the start of the

1800s. Two historians at the cutting edge of research in this period are Emma Griffin of the

University of East Anglia and William Ashworth from the University of Liverpool. So, what is the

place of the Industrial Revolution in the popular imagination? Historians do argue over exactly what it is,

but there's this definite moment where we stop doing most of our work by hand

or using animals to do it or water wheels, this kind of thing.

And we start to use really big machinery,

and work starts to move into factories,

and work is kind of powered by ultimately the steam engine, which goes much faster and extracts much more work from people.

And that's all around the cotton industry.

So it's all about the moment when cotton really mechanises, and that's the Industrial Revolution.

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