Play!

Gabriellebirchak/ October 27, 2020/ Early Modern History, Late Modern History, Modern History

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

As some of you heard in my last pod­cast, I have been lis­ten­ing to a fan­tas­tic pod­cast called The Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tions host­ed by Dave Bro­ker. Every month, Dave puts out a thought-pro­vok­ing and infor­ma­tive long-form pod­cast full of col­or­ful detail about how we, as a pri­mate species, have evolved to cre­ate a world filled with inven­tions, tech­nolo­gies, and var­i­ous forms of mass trans­porta­tion, all while endur­ing soci­etal and eco­nom­ic changes. The pod­cast Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tions is a fan­tas­tic reminder that we are a resilient species. You can find the Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tions on your pod­cast app and at IndustrialRevolutionsPod.com. This month, Dave’s pod­cast, called Spring­time of the Peo­ples, address­es the end of the first indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion. So, give it a lis­ten! I think you will like it!

As many of you know, the indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion brought about the mass pro­duc­tion of food, iron tools, tin and cast iron prod­ucts, and tex­tiles like cot­ton, linen, wool. Many of the prod­ucts that were once part of the cot­tage indus­try had become prod­ucts cre­at­ed in mass quan­ti­ties. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, like the small book­stores that had to con­tend with Ama­zon, all the small cot­tage busi­ness­es had closed up as mass pro­duc­tion in the fac­to­ries took hold dur­ing the indus­tri­al revolution.

Before the indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion, 80% of peo­ple who lived on large parcels of land and farms began migrat­ing into the urban areas. As a result, 80% of those who were once farm­ers had become city-dwellers. Since the cot­tage indus­try was no longer rel­e­vant, peo­ple were going to work in the fac­to­ries. They need­ed to make an income.

Since fac­to­ry work became a pri­ma­ry form of income, this also meant that women and chil­dren also worked in the fac­to­ries. Thus, child labor became a promi­nent issue in the indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion. The irony in this is that some of the fac­to­ries that the chil­dren toiled in were mass-pro­duc­ing tin toys. 

Child labor laws came into exis­tence in 1839, start­ing with the first child labor laws in Prus­sia. It was unfor­tu­nate that so many chil­dren were either over­worked or, worse yet, work­ing in dan­ger­ous con­di­tions where they would lose their limbs as well as their lives.

Accord­ing to Ency­clo­pe­dia Bri­tan­ni­ca, many of these work­ers did not even under­stand the broad scope of their roles in the fac­to­ries, nor did they know what they were mak­ing. Dur­ing the cot­tage indus­try age, peo­ple who made the prod­ucts used the prod­ucts. How­ev­er, because of the fac­to­ries’ mea­ger wages, the fac­to­ries’ toys were pos­ses­sions of the rich and wealthy and were even adver­tised as such.

Though some of these tin toys were indeed cre­at­ed as ear­ly as the 13th cen­tu­ry, the indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion mass-pro­duced them. Machines could stamp out tin pat­terns into objects like minia­ture guns, minia­ture can­nons, fry­ing pans with met­al fish, and stools. Toy com­pa­nies start­ed emerg­ing begin­ning in Ger­many. By 1880, Ger­many had five toy fac­to­ries. By the end of World War I, the Unit­ed States had about 50 toy manufacturers.

Over time, these fac­to­ries start­ed mass-pro­duc­ing cast iron toys. Fac­to­ry work­ers cre­at­ed these cast iron toys cre­at­ing a mold of the toy and then fill­ing the mold with molten iron. Once the iron cooled down, the work­er would bolt the parts togeth­er. Then, the toys would be hand-paint­ed. Hand-paint­ing was part of the process until about 1875, when the lith­o­graph­ic process began paint­ing the toys in mass quantities.

There is some­thing to be said about how play­ing with toys inspires curios­i­ty and dis­cov­ery. Some of the toys of our indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion are still pop­u­lar toys today. These toys have, in some way, con­tributed to the devel­op­ment of science.

---

BUILDING BLOCKS

The mass pro­duc­tion of build­ing blocks was one of the first meth­ods of intro­duc­ing engi­neer­ing and archi­tec­ture to young chil­dren. Maria and Richard Edge­worth first men­tioned build­ing blocks in their book called Prac­ti­cal Edu­ca­tion, pub­lished in 1798. Orig­i­nal­ly called “ratio­nal toys,” these build­ing blocks helped teach chil­dren about physics and spa­tial rela­tion­ships. Even today, build­ing blocks are foun­da­tion­al to children’s edu­ca­tion and men­tal devel­op­ment, as these build­ing blocks have now evolved into our cher­ished Lin­coln Logs, Tin­ker Toys, K’Nex, and Legos. Today these “ratio­nal toys” have evolved. Today was have toys like Goldieblox, which seeks to devel­op prob­lem-solv­ing skills and con­fi­dence in young girls as they employ ear­ly engi­neer­ing tal­ents and learn about the excit­ing world of physics. I love Goldieblox!

PROPELLER TOYS

Pro­peller toys were also mass-pro­duced dur­ing the indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion. Among these pro­peller toys were the Gee Haw Wham­my Did­dle. This toy con­sists of two wood­en sticks. One stick has a set of notch­es along its side. At the end of the stick is a pro­peller. The oth­er stick is scraped up and down across the notch­es on the pro­peller stick. This action caus­es the pro­peller to rotate. Unbe­liev­ably, there are Gee Haw Wham­my Did­dle com­pe­ti­tions held every year to beat the pre­vi­ous world record of how many times a per­son can make the pro­peller reverse direc­tion with­in a cer­tain amount of time.

Pro­peller toys have most def­i­nite­ly served to inspire the cre­ation of the air­plane. One day around 1880, Bish­op Mil­ton Wright brought home a small toy heli­copter. It was made of wood and had two rub­ber bands that were used to turn a pro­peller. He had sev­en chil­dren, includ­ing two boys who were also best friends: Wilbur and Orville. They played with that toy heli­copter until it broke. So they decid­ed to make their own pro­peller toy, which was a suc­cess. So, they decid­ed to make more of them, which they sold to their friends for a prof­it. This pro­peller toy fueled their curios­i­ty and inno­va­tion. Thus, as they grew old­er, Wilbur and Orville Wright used that pro­peller toy as inspi­ra­tion to cre­ate the first airplane.

Today, the air­plane and heli­copter have evolved into RC fly­ing air­planes and heli­copters, as well as drones. In 1973, Abra­ham Karem built the very first drone dur­ing the Yom Kip­pur War in Israel. Drones, unfor­tu­nate­ly, have been used for war­fare, at times killing inno­cent vic­tims. How­ev­er, dur­ing the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic, drones also deliv­er med­ical sup­plies and PPE to med­ical facilities.

and now for a really stupid toy…

The pro­peller toy has also had some hor­ri­ble evo­lu­tions, like the Swing Wing. Next to the Click­er Clack­er, the Swing Wing was prob­a­bly one of the dumb­est toys I have ever seen from the 1960s. The Swing Wing was like a hula-hoop for the head. It was a hat in the shape of a bowl with a tas­sel on top. To get it to work, you would have to strap it on your head and jolt your body around to get the long, col­or­ful tas­sel to whip around the head. The “toy” was even­tu­al­ly recalled because kids were get­ting neck and spine injuries. The com­mer­cial for this toy is hilar­i­ous, prob­a­bly because they couldn’t go with their first choice of, “Janey, what would you like for Christ­mas this year?” “Gee, Mom, I’ve always want­ed a spinal injury. I’m gonna ask San­ta for a Swing Wing!” Swing Wing!

WHIRLIGIGS

The whirligig has come so far from being the mass-pro­duced spin­ning toy of the indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion. The whirligig is a toy that spins and whirls. Though the whirligig had been around since 400 BC, the toy evolved into var­i­ous func­tions. The but­ton whirligig is a but­ton that has a string thread­ed through the holes. When it is whipped around in cir­cles with the string pulled taught, it makes a whirling sound as it spins. The fric­tion whirligig is much like the Gee Haw Wham­my Did­dle. The wind-dri­ven whirligigs are like the roost­er weath­er vanes seen on top of hous­es or the plas­tic, pin­wheel flow­ers found in gardens.

One of the most sig­nif­i­cant advance­ments with the whirligig is its cur­rent use as a cen­trifuge. A cen­trifuge is a machine with an inter­nal cylin­der that spins. Inside of the cylin­der are tubes that hold liq­uids. When the cylin­der rotates rapid­ly, the cen­trifu­gal force caus­es the liq­uid sam­ples to sep­a­rate into lay­ers based on their den­si­ty. It is often used in the med­ical indus­try to ana­lyze blood and deter­mine the health of an individual.

Manu Prakash is a sci­en­tist and Pro­fes­sor of Bio­engi­neer­ing at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty. His inven­tions and ideas have saved mil­lions of lives. One of these inven­tions is the Paperfuge cre­at­ed by him and his team. In 2013 when Prakash and his stu­dents were trav­el­ing through Ugan­da, they had vis­it­ed a clin­ic where they were using a med­ical cen­trifuge to hold the door open. The cen­trifuge was being used as a doorstop because the clin­ic did not have the elec­tric­i­ty required to use it. Its use as a doorstop was unfor­tu­nate because physi­cians at the clin­ic had no way of deter­min­ing malar­ia in their patients. In a cen­trifuge, when blood is put into a tube and sep­a­rat­ed based on den­si­ty, plas­ma in the blood floats to the top while the malar­ia par­a­sites sit in the mid­dle of the tube.

Because of the doorstop obser­va­tion, Prakash and his team began to design a cen­trifuge that did not need any pow­er. They tried dif­fer­ent things to see how fast non-elec­tri­cal items could spin in rev­o­lu­tions per minute. They tried tops, sal­ad spin­ners, and oth­er things. Then, in 2016, Saad Bham­la, a post­doc­tor­al researcher from the Indi­an Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy Madras who was work­ing with Prakash, brought a but­ton and some string to the lab. He made a but­ton whirligig and spun it in front of a cam­era to dis­cov­er that it could spin up to 15,000 rev­o­lu­tions per minute. After sev­er­al designs and exper­i­men­ta­tion, they even­tu­al­ly came up with a Paperfuge that could spin 125,000 rev­o­lu­tions per minute, which was almost as fast as a cen­trifuge, which was 150,000 rev­o­lu­tions per minute

The Paperfuge is just like the whirligig. Blood is put into a lit­tle tube and then attached to the paper disc. When the string expands and con­tracts, the paper disc spins rapid­ly, sep­a­rat­ing the blood into dif­fer­ent den­si­ties. As a result, physi­cians trav­el­ing around the world now have a cen­trifuge that requires absolute­ly no electricity.

Play!

The edu­ca­tion of our chil­dren is going to con­tribute to the well-being of our future. And this edu­ca­tion is gen­er­a­tional. How­ev­er, the cre­ation of toys and the art of play have, in so many ways, con­tributed to the incred­i­ble advance­ments and devel­op­ments in sci­ence. All too often, we do not take the time to play, which is unfor­tu­nate, because it is through play­ing and toy­ing around with sim­ple objects that we become curi­ous and expe­ri­ence our most extra­or­di­nary moments of discovery.

As we move into the fourth indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion, we are enter­ing an age that will have its dis­ad­van­tages as well as its advan­tages. Some describe our next indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion as the “cyber-phys­i­cal sys­tems” where­in tech­nol­o­gy can be embed­ded into our bod­ies. We will have genome-edit­ing, break­throughs in machine learn­ing, and new mate­ri­als. How­ev­er, as we enter into this fourth indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion, it is essen­tial that we take time to chal­lenge our curiosi­ties, give our brains time to find dis­cov­er­ies, and, most impor­tant­ly, play. Play is not just for chil­dren; it is for adults too. Our brains deserve it. Sci­ence deserves it. Our future deserves it!

Until next time, carpe diem!