For two thousand years, the argument about mills was never really about the machine.

Tonight: who was allowed to grind corn. Rome made milling a trade nobody could leave, where a son was enrolled at birth and the man who married your daughter was enrolled by the wedding. England made every tenant bring their grain to one mill and hand over one measure in sixteen, forever. And when a country dean built himself a windmill in 1191, his abbot had it pulled down before nightfall, for a reason he said out loud: the townsfolk would go there, and they were free men, and he could not stop them.

Also: the first watermill anybody wrote about, which was a poem telling enslaved women they could go back to sleep. The mill in the Shetlands with no miller, fed by a pebble on a string. Belisarius feeding a besieged Rome off two boats roped under a bridge. Two thousand eels a year as rent. Lord Bacon trying to work out how a windmill turns, using paper sails and a pair of bellows, and getting it wrong at length. And a miller in Sussex who lost his wind to a new prison and simply jacked his mill thirty feet into the air.

Nothing happens quickly and nobody is in danger. It runs for about four hours, and you are not expected to reach the end.

Sources are two engineering histories of the period, both public domain: Richard Bennett and John Elton, History of Corn Milling, volume II (1899); and Alfred R. Wolff, The Windmill as a Prime Mover (1885).

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00:00 Introduction

00:44 A Poem About Sleep

07:13 The Simplest Thing That Works

12:57 Black Oak Under the Clay

19:39 The Mill With No Miller

26:39 Still Turning

32:27 Twelve Mills On One River

39:40 The Machine That Waited

46:42 The Law Is The Only Evidence

54:12 All The Mills On One Hill

1:00:27 One Hundred Lashes

1:07:07 The Trade You Could Not Leave

1:17:05 Committed To The Mills For Life

1:24:26 Every Door Tried

1:32:32 By The Bond Of Origin

1:41:35 The Ass On The Tribunal

1:49:33 The Mill Belisarius Built

1:55:05 Mills That Were Not Tied To Anything

2:02:47 Sixty Yards Of Boat

2:11:06 The Abbot Who Heard Water

2:19:34 The Mill With Loopholes

2:26:42 Nine Quarters A Day

2:35:32 Four Hundred Years Of Grinding By Hand

2:41:55 Not An Ox Nor A Cow Nor A Pig

2:51:07 Two Thousand Eels

3:00:37 A Thing With No Inventor

3:12:51 The Benefit Of The Wind

3:19:24 The Sixteenth Vessel

3:26:43 Paper Sails And A Pair Of Bellows

3:37:40 The Cube Of The Wind

3:48:46 Who Owns The Wind

Before anyone could make it, ice was a crop. It was harvested.

Tonight: the men who cut ice off frozen lakes in January so somebody could have a cold drink in July. How a lake freezes from the top down, and why the whole trade depended on water doing something strange in its last few degrees. Marking a field into a grid with a horse and never cutting all the way through. Breaking off a raft of a thousand blocks at once, and a man standing on a bridge splitting them apart with a chisel as they float underneath him.

Also: the ice house with a foot of sawdust on top, raked level once a day all summer by somebody. The wagon with springs built heavy because the meltwater rusts them from below. The iceman who knew the inside measurements of four hundred iceboxes belonging to other people. And the machines that ended all of it, described in 1893 by a man who could already see them coming.

Nothing happens quickly and nobody is in danger. It runs for about three hours, and you are not expected to reach the end.

Sources are three trade books of the period, all public domain: Theron Hiles, The Ice Crop (1893); Ice Delivery (1922); and The Accounting System of an Ice Company (1911).

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00:00 Introduction

00:49 Before the Trade

05:24 Why the Lake Freezes on Top

10:08 The Ice Gets in Its Own Way

13:30 Snow

17:27 The Dump and the Thaw

21:27 Fourteen Inches

25:49 Who Owns a Frozen River

30:57 Laying Out the Field

35:30 The Channel

39:28 Barring Off

43:43 Keeping the Channel Open

47:42 The Jackman

51:41 One Man to Dress the Saws

56:24 Filling the House

1:00:20 Closing It Up

1:03:54 Where to Put It

1:07:51 The Wall

1:12:17 Opening the House

1:16:26 Getting It Away

1:19:15 The Refrigerator Car

1:23:27 A Dozen Fish in a Slab

1:27:32 A Corner of a Barn

1:31:30 Cold Without Ice

1:34:36 The Route Belongs to the Driver

1:40:25 Fourteen Rules

1:46:02 The Card in the Window

1:50:57 Ready to Serve

1:55:23 The Wagon at the Door

1:59:59 All the Hay They Want

2:04:24 The Show Window That Moves

2:08:02 Six Points

2:12:51 Five Per Cent

2:18:17 One Man Stated a Fact

2:23:25 Four Girls and Two Boys

2:28:13 The Saw Kerf

2:32:35 The Barn Ledger

2:36:05 The Truck

2:40:13 The Back of the Book

2:45:16 What It Was All For

2:49:41 The Men Who Made Cold

2:53:51 Borrowing the Heat

2:58:51 The Last of the Crop

Everything that had to happen before a blank sheet could exist.

Tonight: where paper actually comes from. Rags sorted by hand in a dusty room, grass shipped from North Africa in four-hundredweight bales, and whole forests stacked on frozen rivers to wait for the thaw. The men who lifted each sheet out of a vat by hand and landed within one or two grains of themselves every time. The machine that replaced them, invented by a Frenchman, carried to England by his brother-in-law, paid for by two London stationers who were ruined by it, and named after them anyway.

Also: why old newspaper goes brown and old books don't. Why a paper mill kept a plant running whose only job was getting its chemicals back. What a "doctor" is, what a vomiting boiler is, and why the drying cylinders on a paper machine each get slightly smaller than the last.

Nothing happens quickly and nobody is in danger. It runs for about three and three quarter hours, and you are not expected to reach the end.

Sources are two trade manuals from the period: R. W. Sindall's The Manufacture of Paper (1908) and Alexander Watt's The Art of Papermaking.

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00:00 Introduction

00:47 Before Paper

06:56 The Rag Sorting House

11:54 Dust and the Digester

15:51 Black Liquor

19:44 What Beating Is

23:50 The Hollander

27:15 The Greasy Stuff

31:43 The Vatman

36:30 One or Two Grains

40:23 The Loft

45:45 The Marks in the Paper

49:36 Esparto

54:19 The Trade-Off

58:55 Straw

1:05:30 Waiting for the Ice

1:10:27 The Grindstone

1:15:59 Why Newspaper Goes Yellow

1:21:07 The Chipper and the Vessel

1:26:17 Burning Sulphur

1:30:54 The Blow

1:36:02 Kraft

1:40:43 The Machine and the Men Who Lost It

1:47:20 The Wire

1:51:06 The Second Tilt

1:55:40 The Save-All

1:59:26 The Dandy-Roll

2:04:18 The Wire Side

2:10:02 The Cylinders Get Smaller

2:14:36 One Cylinder

2:19:28 Beating Them Separately

2:24:47 What the Thirty-Seven Hours Measured

2:29:05 Even the White Ones

2:34:35 Names That Stopped Meaning Anything

2:40:58 Boards

2:47:05 Parchment

2:52:50 What Paper Was Asked To Do

2:58:08 Two Hundred and Fifty Tons

3:03:57 The Order of Durability

3:09:44 Seventy Per Cent Air

3:15:27 The Shine

3:19:48 The Coating

3:25:25 Fourteen Days

3:30:40 The Acid That Is Never Used Up

3:36:34 The Postmark

3:40:54 The Sheet