I like the backgrounder about Sudbury.
Others like Japan found another way to achieve the necessary temp/pressure, but it hardly scaled as it needed to during the industrial revolution.
TBH the "let's avoid smoke" aspect sounds like a retcon, the mythical London smog is a testament of that.
Yes, that’s what the article says:
“ When you look at all the pictures of the factories in the 19th century, those stacks weren’t there to improve air quality, if you can believe it. The increased airflow generated by a stack just created more efficient combustion for the boilers and furnaces. Any benefits to air quality in the cities were secondary. With the advent of diesel and electric motors, we could use forced drafts, reducing the need for a tall stack to increase airflow. That was kind of the decline of the forests of industrial chimneys that marked the landscape in the 19th century. But they’re obviously not all gone, because that secondary benefit of air quality turned into the primary benefit as environmental rules about air pollution became stricter.”
Of course the intent here is exposition and not to allude to something that really happened since the dawn of time. But these casual falsehoods is how ideology is reproduced.
> Maybe not in that exact framework, but basically, (...)
Doesn't exactly require the height of media literacy to grasp I'd say. But maybe GP's comment above does, and I'm just missing their clever wordsmithing skills along with many others apparently.
Am I wrong?
ErrorNoBrain•4h ago