Chapter Content
Okay, so, like, let's talk about business, right? And how things get better. It's kind of crazy to think about how much stuff that we just take for granted used to be totally unexplained. You know, like, for centuries, things like lightning or even just, like, a dead frog twitching when you put metal on it... people just thought it was magic or something. Seriously!
But then, you know, science happened, and, like, slowly but surely, people started figuring out that all these weird things were actually different ways of seeing electricity. So, who "discovered" electricity? Well, like, everyone kind of did, right? You had Benjamin Franklin with his kite, Alessandro Volta making batteries, Hans Oersted showing how electricity and magnetism are related, Michael Faraday talking about magnetic fields, and James Clerk Maxwell putting it all together in a theory. It's not one person; it's, like, a whole team effort over time. It's all collective knowledge, you know?
And that knowledge, like, leads to cool stuff. Franklin's kite led to lightning rods. Some mathematician, Carl Gauss, thought you could use electricity to talk to each other! Wild, right? Then you have Samuel Morse, the portrait painter, who, like, talked Congress into building a telegraph. Then comes Alexander Graham Bell, trying to help deaf people by studying speech vibrations. Boom! Telephone.
And it just keeps going! Western Union gets all jealous of Bell and hires Thomas Edison to improve the telephone. Edison patents the phonograph and starts making lightbulbs. There's even Nikola Tesla, an immigrant dude who had this whole thing about alternating current versus Edison's direct current. Eventually, Tesla wins out! And that, like, defined the modern world! Seriously, Elon Musk even named his car company after him.
It's hard to imagine what the world would be like without electricity. You know, like, no internet, no lights, just messengers and hard work. Pretty crazy, right?
So, let's switch gears and talk about flying, okay? People have been dreaming about flying forever, you know, like Icarus with his wax wings. People used to think you just needed to flap your arms really hard, like a bird. Then they start to understand flight, like with Robert Hooke, who realized you need some forward motion. But until the steam engine, everything ran on people, animals, or, like, wind power!
Then James Watt comes along and improves the steam engine, making it super efficient. But it wasn't just Watt; it was also Matthew Boulton and William Murdoch. It was teamwork. The steam engine, like, kickstarted the Industrial Revolution.
People started putting these engines on boats, then on wheels! Richard Trevithick made an engine on wheels, then George Stephenson made the Stockton and Darlington Railway. And then BAM! Passenger trains! A line connecting two cities opened for passenger traffic, and boom, less than half a century later, railroads connected the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the United States. Steamships start crossing the Atlantic. Eventually, people started thinking about flying. And then the internal combustion engine comes along, and the Wright brothers make the first airplane.
So, again, it’s a bunch of collective knowledge and people building on each other's ideas. The Boeing 737 and 747 come along, then Airbus. These planes are super complicated, you know? No one person knows how to build one. They’re made all over Europe, and it’s like, this super complex network, just to get one plane in the air!
And that brings us to the ‘learning curve.’ Basically, the more you do something, the better you get at it. It's called the experience curve, where each time you double production, the cost goes down, like 15 percent for airplanes! That's from everyone working together and learning.
So you go from the Wright brothers' plane to a jumbo jet flying halfway around the world without a pilot, in principle. It’s all about trust, cooperation, and sharing information. And flying anywhere needs another complex network involving booking systems, ground handling, airline consortia, and international air traffic control.
Finally, there's the wisdom of crowds. Like, Aristotle talked about it! Basically, like, the idea is that a big group of people can be smarter than one expert. Like, at a county fair, people guessed the weight of an ox, and the average guess was, like, really close. It's not that everyone's an expert, but, like, putting all the information together makes the whole thing better. It all helps to make things better at business.