Industrial revolutions (page 1)
The Singer sewing machine (image from Wikipedia) brought lots of pride to 19th century women.
1. A word about time
The hardest thing to predict is how fast an invention will go around the world. Some of it goes fast: the sewing machines went everywhere pretty fast, and they changed the fate of women in many countries by providing them with some income. Some inventions have been spreading incredibly slowly. When I was a tour guide around 2000, and I spoke to visitors, I discovered that most of them had lived with or known somebody who had an outhouse. There are regions of the US where plumbing was faster, like New York but places where it has been slow to come, for instance North Carolina.
Many people assume that as soon as it is available, an invention is spread all over, but it is not true. For instance, my parents, both profs in Belgium with a good salary, did not consider buying a TV before 1969, and when they did, they bought one that was maybe 10 inches across. It was not exceptional. The Brussels Universal Exhibition in 1958 had an American crew showing a color TV that attracted huge crowds: nobody had seen that before. So the date of invention does not tell you much, specially about the lives and times of 18th and 19th century people.
2. A few inventions
Start with the steam engine. There is a pretty history of Watt here but if you are interested in the beginnings of the railroads and steam engines, buy the book written by Andrew Carnegie James Watt (b. 1736) it may not be the most detailed and accurate, but it certainly is the most enthusiastic.Of course you would like to read some entertaining books about trains (I never read a scientific one, so I cannot help with that).
I did like:
1) Nothing Like It In the World : The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 by Stephen E. Ambrose
2) Last Train to Paradise by Les Standiford,the story of the train to the Florida keys.
3) Being born in Belgium, I cannot resist giving you a little known fact about railroad in Europe.
Fun to read also:
4) Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
5) The 8:55 to Baghdad: From London to Iraq on the Trail of Agatha Christie and the Orient Express by Andrew Eames
The railroad brought a lot of benefits and one great inconvenience: epidemics like cholera did spread much faster and to larger areas. I remember reading a paper (probably in Scientific American or Nature) showing a map of recorded cases of cholera and railroads in the 19th century: the correlation was obvious. Cholera onset is one to five days, so if you walk, you may die after five days, but you are still not far: the contagion is contained. With a train, it changes everything. Plus, dissemination of feces by railroad trains did not help.
That makes me think that maybe you would like to read Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which is recommended by Oprah. The author is a Nobel winner, so that is another recommendation. Personally, I hate the book: there is nothing in it that makes you feel good and nobody to love, but do not mind me: look for style and symbolism.
Now that you know that cholera can spread quickly because people travel fast before being diagnosed, read this!
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