Bessemer’s cheap steel and Maxwell’s electromagnetism triggered the Second Industrial Revolution’s acceleration.

Evidence

Once the Iron Age got going, around the ninth century BC, three different and remarkable eras emerged in quick succession, within no more than seven centuries in total: the geometric period, the classical era and the Hellenistic civilisation. … From the glacial speeds of the Bronze Age, humanity had been propelled to the breathless developments of the Iron Age. But for a long time, iron and steel remained too difficult to produce, too expensive. Even after the Industrial Revolution, the first steamships were mostly wooden, with steel providing only the essential components (boiler, chimney, joints). Enter another one of my father’s great heroes, Henry Bessemer, who invented a technique for producing large quantities of steel cheaply by blowing air through molten pig iron to burn off the impurities. It was then, according to Dad, that history accelerated to speeds with which we are familiar today. Coupled with the taming of electromagnetism, which we owe to another Victorian, James Maxwell, Bessemer’s technique gave us the Second Industrial Revolution – the period of rapid technological innovation from 1870 onwards, as distinct from the arrival of the factories earlier that century in the First Industrial Revolution – its wonders and horrors wrapped tightly together. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 46

Categorization

• XREF: The Second Industrial Revolution as an acceleration-by-technology framing echoes the book’s core thesis that each transformative technology (now cloud capital) speeds up historical change — a lens the reader can apply across the later chapters. — connects to: Cheap steel and electromagnetism together ignited the Second Industrial Revolution from 1870 — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 46
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 46