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practical heat of industry.?° Ever-more efficient use of iron, of steam, of electricity all reflected a virtuous loop of theory and practice, between the lab and the market, the scientist and the businessman. This fusion of the instinct for competition, for constant new innovation, delivered the modern world you and I live in today. “All fixed, fast-frozen relations,” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in 1849 about the speed of this change, “are swept away. All new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid, melts into air.”?” As more people “dared to know’, the big ideas and big thinkers attracted an audience. Arguments started. New ways to record and share the answers appeared too. Locke or Newton or Darwin were as notable for the crowd of debating, curious citizens they attracted as for their ideas. Such contentious discussions were designed to elicit truth, to give individuals that same shocking sense Luther had felt on discovering a powerful idea by himself; but as important was that these debates were recorded - written and then distributed in journals, books and letters. For most of history, after all, knowledge suffered from its own fragility and asymmetry: There was always a chance, maybe even a likelihood, that some important insight would be lost in a plague, strangled as heretical, burnt up in a library fire, or dissolved by some military misfortune. This is why, for instance, we have almost all of Shakespeare and why we are missing so much of Sappho. Widespread knowledge changed this. A solid, inarguable base endured. “If 1 have seen further,” Newton famously wrote, “it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.” Those shoulders for Netwon were enshrined in libraries, scientific journals and the massive sense of what had come before swaddled in the Cambridge walls that surrounded him. In this sense, the preservation and advance of knowledge, the new symmetry, was not only the largest shift of power in history. It was also the best thing that ever happened to the human race. In other ways, of course, it was very nearly the worst. Symmetry had a darker edge. It meant that nations decided the strategic questions of the day by throwing massive, deadly power at one another in unprecedented volume. With each passing year, Europe’s engines of science and industry were grinding out tools of unprecedented destruction. Napoleon’s greatest victories were enabled as much by the industrial strength of French artillery factories as by the liberated masses of the French revolution. When France was unseated by the British Empire, it was manufacturing scale and naval depth that tipped the balance. London's clubby mastery was, in turn, challenged by Germany's efficient, iron-and-blood commercial engines. Size and scale and safety became linked. This sense of the undeniable power of industrial mass was Winston Churchill's only comfort for two nervous, lonely years after 1939 as he paced the hours until what he hoped was America’s entry into The Second World War. “I knew that the United States was in the war, up %6 Museums, scientific congresses: Joel Mokyr, “The Intellectual Origins of Modern Economic Growth”, The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 65, No. 2 (June 2005) p 290 97 “All fixed, fast-frozen relations” Kar] Marx and Freiderich Engels, “The Communist Manifesto,” in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the Communist Manifesto (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1988) 212 70 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018302