How did the invention of the steam engine impact today's society socially?

Answer 1

There were three impacts of the invention of the steam engine on society.

1. The development of the steam engine allowed machines to perform work that men and animals could not. Steam engines powered factory equipment, provided the motive power for railroads and ships, powered pumps in mines, ran machines of every kind.

2. The additional workers in the factories and mills required new ways of processing documents; the carbon black extracted from soot and ash was developed into carbon paper, which provided a way of writing something once and getting several copies of a document.

3. Throughout history, people were born, grew up, married, had children and died all within a few dozen miles. Look into any family tree, and you're going to find "tangles"; people married their relatives, because after a few hundred years, everybody in the town is related to you. Second, third and fourth cousin marriage was common, and genetic flaws could be passed down to the children. The development of the steamship and the steam locomotive allowed people to move away; to move into town and meet somebody whose genealogy isn't entangled with your own. There's a term called "hybrid vigor"; if you breed animals from distant strains, the results are more likely to be healthy. We humans are animals, and we've been participating in the most enormous plan of "hybrid vigor" to improve humans.

Let me give you an example. The stereotypical view of Japanese people from 150 years ago were short, small people. They Japanese had, for the most part, lived in their villages for time immemorial, and everybody was related to EVERYBODY else, several times over. In the late 1800's, planters in Hawaii began to recruit Japanese laborers to come to Hawaii and work in the pineapple and sugar cane fields. And small people came from all over Japan. In Hawaii, they met small Japanese women, but from distant villages. They married and had children; and these children grew much taller and more vigorous than their parents. Part of it was a better and more diverse diet, but some of it was hybrid vigor. Their children - the "Nisei", entirely of Japanese ancestry - married and had children of their own, who were taller and healthier than their parents or grandparents.

James Burke makes this argument more eloquently in his book "The Day The Universe Changed", linked below.