ShmoopTube

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Small domestic changes are always connected to bigger cultural changes. [Map of the world]

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It's like that old saying…"if you fart in Calcutta, there's going to be a tornado in Kansas."

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…Isn't that a saying? Well it should be. [Tornado going round Kansas on the map]

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Anyway, in the ancient world, new building materials, combined with a huge amount of

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new wealth, meant that people had new thoughts about what a home could be. [Stacks of 100 dollar bills]

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Basically, the idea of a dream home got a lot dreamier. [Man lying on his back dreaming]

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Maybe a home could be more than a place for families to keep warm at night. [Woman asleep in bed]

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Maybe it could be a communal structure where people lived, ate, and slept. [Pictures of people in their homes]

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And guess what?

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Sometimes dreams do come true.

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Homes got more rooms, and each room had its own purpose. [Floor plan of a house]

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No more eating where we slept. [Man falls over]

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And not a moment too soon…those puddles of yak milk weren’t making for good sleeping companions.

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People started hoarding possessions and material goods like hamsters hoard carrots. [People holding bags of stuff]

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What?

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Hamsters are invested in ocular health.

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And different parts of the house started to be designated for different people… [Man and woman sticking post-it notes on the floor plan claiming parts of the house]

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Like servants or masters, men or women, children or adults….you get the picture.

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C'mon, it's not like men and women could hang out together.

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Gross.

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Cooties.

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Now, not everybody in the ancient world lived in multi-room splendor. [Ancient ruins]

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Both Romans and Greeks, for example, owned huge amounts of slaves. [Roman with 3 slaves]

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And there’s no way that slaves lived in villas with their own bathhouses. [Dirty looking slave by a bath]

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But hey, that's another cultural change, isn't it?

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Housing started to be a strong dividing line between the poor and the wealthy, with rich

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guys getting the ancient equivalent of the penthouse. [Rich people living above the poor]

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Now, onto the Medieval age, which unsurprisingly was a sluggish pit of non-invention. [Slug crawls across the front gate of some houses]

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Everybody was too busy dying of the plague. [People drop dead]

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Boring.

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But in the industrial age, an explosion of new materials hit the scene. [An explosion on a factory]

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Let's go over the biggies.

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First, brickmaking became standardized and industrial. [Man stood next to pile of bricks]

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That meant there were machines to mold the clay into exactly the same sizes and shapes, [Bricks land on top of a man waiting for them to come out the mold]

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and ginormous kilns that could bake thousands of bricks at once. [Bricks continue to cover the man on the floor]

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Then we've got glass.

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Unless you live in an underground bunker, your house probably has windows. [Man with foil on his head climbs into an underground bunker]

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But for most of human history, glass was mega hard to make.

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This made it mega expensive.

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Like "selling body parts to afford it" expensive. [Man missing an arm looking out a window]

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Glassmaking involved finding chunks of quartz, melting them over a super hot fire, and slowly

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forming it into the desired shape. [Glassmaker working over a kiln]

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And, P.S., glass is fragile.

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So yeah, definitely not an easy task. [The glass that is being worked on smashes]

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But in the 1840s, some dudes figured out how to melt a lot of glass at once and toss it

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onto a big iron slab.

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Then they used a giant iron roller to smoosh it out and make it perfectly even. [Worker pushes iron roller over molten glass]

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And tahdah!

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An easy, quicker way to make glass.

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And yes, "smoosh" is a technical term.

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They had big, clear pieces of glass, called plate glass. [Skyscrapers with all glass structures]

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It was perfect for windows, or giant show-off-y buildings made entirely of glass.

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But neither bricks nor glass alone are going to build a skyscraper.

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For the massively tall and heavy buildings that we think of as modern, we needed an entirely [Picture of a modern city]

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new kind of building material: steel. [Steel rods]

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Steel, remember, is very pure, very strong iron, and until the 20th century, it was very, [Man reading a book on how to make steel]

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very difficult to make.

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Back in the day, nobody was saying to themselves…

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"Hey, let's build a huge building out of this stuff. [Two men in front of house covered in diamonds]

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And then, what the hey, we'll make one out of diamonds!"

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Because past humans weren't crazy.

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In the 1850s, the Bessemer process was invented. [Bessemer furnace]

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Basically, the Bessemer process involved firing a whole bunch of air into the molten iron,

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which encouraged oxidation and got rid of carbon.

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With a little more equipment, people could manufacture high-quality steel almost as easily as iron. [Steel rods]

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Steel could support massive amounts of weight after it was shaped into the appropriate shape, [Man hammering molten steel]

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that turned out to be I-beams.

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Those are basically beams shaped like I’s.

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…the letter I.

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Why on earth would it be shaped like an eye-ball… [Man is confused as molten steel looks like an eye ball]

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