PRESENTED BY DICK LEVERETTE

The Industrial Revolution, the years in which steam powered machines began to enhance the production of goods, and which it is generally agreed is the event that marks the beginnings of technological change that resulted in modern society, got underway in England in 1720, the hottest summer in living memory.

prior to the Industrial Revolution: Up until that singular period of history, human life and well-being was mostly controlled by nature, and the number of people alive at any given time -- aside from wars and disease -- was largely in the hands of the weather. In periods of good weather, crops were bountiful, people were healthier and more babies were born and survived. In cycles of bad weather, famine devastated populations and fewer babies were born or survived; there would be fewer to work the land, less crops to support the few who did not farm. If, in good times, the population grew too large to be supported by the land in use, more land was cleared and more crops planted. This, in general, was how it had always been. Most people lived directly off the land in one fashion or another. Even in 1720 England, as it was gaining its ascendancy as the world’’s most formidable naval power and the richest nation on the globe, with its far-flung colonies and trade monopolies, of the estimated 5.5 million population of that country at the time, fully 4.75 million were rural farmers, working the land in various agricultural pursuits. And even with the rapidly accumulating wealth of the mercantile class, England was still fundamentally an agricultural society, with its entire economy geared to food production by traditional manual and draft animal methods.

In spite of what we would consider primitive farming methods of the time, however, a great many improvements had been made in farming, and food production was such that, even with the foul weather that had predominated for the previous 200 years, the British enjoyed a diet in some ways superior to our own, today. These improvements, not germane to the subject at hand and too numerous and arcane to go into in any case, nevertheless contributed to the Industrial Revolution by ensuring that the rapidly growing population had enough to eat, and further innovations were constantly being developed.

The summer of 1720 marked the end of what is now called the mini ice age, a 200-year period of miserable, cold weather worldwide, and ushered in a 30-year