Great revolutions
Printing, the Renaissance, 1789, steam and electricity: turning points that changed everything.
6 lessons · about 79 min
The steps
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1. Printing press
Movable type existed in East Asia before Gutenberg, yet his press changed Europe. Discover how he combined old technologies into a system for cheap, identical copies, and how that reshaped reading, science, religion and language.
- History
2. Renaissance
How a 'rebirth' of classical learning, born in the wealthy city-states of Italy, changed art, scholarship, printing, exploration and religion across Europe, and why historians still argue about it.
- History
3. French Revolution
How a bankrupt kingdom that could not tax its privileged few ended up abolishing the monarchy, then handing power to a general: the chain of crises of 1789–1799.
- Technology
4. Steam engine
How a boiler, a piston and a cold sink turn heat into work, and why so much of the steam engine's history is a fight against wasted heat, from Newcomen and Watt to modern steam turbines.
- History
5. Industrial Revolution
How did a faster loom end up filling Britain with factories, canals and railways? Follow the chain of shortages and solutions that turned hand work into machine production.
- Technology
6. Electricity
Discover why electricity is really the behaviour of electric charge: how charges push each other through fields, how moving charge makes magnetism, and how that powers circuits, generators and motors.