In the novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, the year dating system is replaced to indicate that what’s important in their society is Fordism. The novel takes place in the year AF 632, which is what would be called 2540 A.D. in our dating system. It’s dated by how long after the introduction of the Model T it is.
Ruth Belville was known to have been a difficult child, petulant teenager and atrociously poorly-tempered adult.
Hence the phrase " Greenwich Mean Time ".
You. In your room, now. You have no idea how disappointed we are with your actions here.
The Royal Navy went a lot further than that towards industrializing block manufacture. The Portsmouth Block Mill employed steam-powered machines to automatically make blocks for the navy. It was revolutionary.
There was iron smithing in Africa going way back. I’m not sure how far back, but somewhere I read that they discovered how to cast iron before the Europeans did. IIRC, Europeans started casting iron some time in the 14th century.
Sure but we’re talking about industrial revolution scale steel works with day/night if not 3-shift 24-hour operation. I’m not saying there aren’t steel mill in tropical climates (either in the past or today) but they seem to be more productive and/or prolific in temperate climates.
I think once you have a large iron furnace, the outside temperature doesn’t really matter. Anywhere near there, the temperature of the steelworks itself is going to be the dominant effect.
I can’t find it now, but there was an interesting study done about marriage patterns in England in the 19th century. The introduction of the train and especially the bicycle allowed people to routinely travel further for social events than when they had to walk, and as a result marrying someone from your hometown became less common. Since people from the same town were often related, marriages between closely related people decreased.
Improving public health?
Not to mention the urbanization that accompanied industrialization and job opportunities meant people were more mobile, often moved far from their traditional family home. More mixing.
There was a joke (with a knowing wink) that “grandad had a bicycle” - not necessarily referring to marriage.
And the potential of automobiles to provide both mobility and privacy was obvious from the beginning.
I would suggest that was more a side effect of suburb development in the post-war era. Before everyone was easily mobile, every urban neighbourhood would be like a small town - the gossipy hoursewives would share and snippets of data or observations about anyone in the neigbourhood, and the guys at the bar were just as bad. They would know your marital status and family size, your schedule, what direction or which train you took to work, Bob from down the block would mention he saw you walking near that big office tower, kids whould repeat what your kids said at school, etc.
With the automobile and suburbs, you could hop in your car and never talk to neighbours, they were unlikely to see you 20 miles away in the big city unless you had a public-facing job, etc. you shopped at a mall, possibly miles away. Then came tall apartments with undergound parking and even more privacy.
Not to mention, I think it was Heinlein discussing science fiction once - he mentioned that it was easy to predict the automobile - what would make SF interesting, was predicting the resulting social changes, and one example he gave was teenagers using the privacy of a parked automobile to turn it into a bedroom.
My wife related the anecdote that when she was a teenager her parents flatly forbade her to date boys who owned their own cars.