Thursday, May 15, 2014

Victims Of The Past

By JIm Kirwan
5-14-14

WANT ~ ABUNDANCE

We’ve actually upended the natural cornucopia of life by design:
Turning the natural abundance and prosperity
Of everyday life
into a commercial wasteland of global
starvation, thirst and death.

We’ve been living this way since the Robber Barrons ruled the new world with fists of iron, banks of greed and brazen slavery. That was at the end of the Nineteenth Century which continued over into the beginning of the star-crossed Twentieth Century.
Between the Civil War and 1900, steam and electricity replaced human muscle, iron replaced wood, and steel replaced iron (before the Bessemer process, iron was hardened into steel at the rate of 3 to 5 tons a day; now the same amount could be processed in 15 minutes). Machines could now drive steel tools. Oil could lubricate machines and light homes, streets, factories. People and goods could move by railroad, propelled by steam along steel rails; by 1900 there were 193,000 miles of railroad. The telephone, the typewriter, and the adding machine speeded up the work of business.
Machines changed farming. Before the Civil War it took 61 hours of labor to produce an acre of wheat. By 1900, it took 3 hours, 19 minutes. Manufactured ice enabled the transport of food over long distances, and the industry of meatpacking was born.
Steam drove textile mill spindles; it drove sewing machines. It came from coal. Pneumatic drills now drilled deeper into the earth for coal. In 1860, 14 million tons of coal were mined; by 1884 it was 100 million tons. More coal meant more steel, because coal furnaces converted iron into steel; by 1880 a million tons of steel were being produced; by 1910, 25 million tons. By now electricity was beginning to replace steam. Electrical wire needed copper, of which 30,000 tons were produced in 1880; 500,000 tons by 1910.

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