Yes I inverted it to burning coal is called the industrial revolution because I think it’s neat way to look at it.
I’m thinking through the history of energy: We burned wood. Then we burned coal. Then we burned oil. Then we burned atoms.
Either of the first two Industrial Revolutions were not named because of the burning of coal in and of itself. Coal burning was part of the widespread and rapid transformation of society. Coal played a part in facilitating previously unthinkable changes in a short time.
The adoption of cars has been more iterative and gradual. In the U.S. there are certain periods important for them such as, depending on how much you think it had an effect, the General Motors streetcar conspiracy. There was also the post WW2 push by Eisenhower to building National highways. But those didn’t radically and quickly change life in the way industrial revolutions did. There was the post-war boom, which if you want to view it through a certain lens, was a kind of revolution for the U.S., in that people found themselves with much more buying power thanks to the U.S. having assumed superpower status.
Similarly nuclear power production has not caused widespread fundamental change in a short period. Nuclear weapons did become a major part of geopolitics, but nuclear power is as far as society is concerned just another way to make electricity.
Yes I inverted it to burning coal is called the industrial revolution because I think it’s neat way to look at it.
I’m not sure what you mean by this. The industrial revolutions were not just about burning coal.
It’s useful to think about things by turning them on their head, aka inverting them. In this case: Burning of coal facilitated the industrial revolution. Yes, yes, yes, I know all the things that it was not caused by the burning of coal, it as not “just about burning coal”, it was not named because of the burning of coal, things were iterative, etc, etc, etc. But it behooves you turn things on their head and think through them in different ways.
In the bigger sense of turning things on their head, we can look at energy sources as we go through history: We burned wood. Then we burned coal. Then we burned oil. Then we burned atoms.
I’m not sure if I entirely follow what you mean by “turning things on their head”. What are you getting at?
I understand the turn of phrase. I don’t quite know what you mean in the application here.
Well, you’ve run into a problem.
What you’re asking in the post isn’t what you’re asking in the comments.
See, the industrial revolution is not, and was not, defined by the burning of coal as an energy source.
While flipping terminology around to stimulate thought is a great thing, it makes the question you asked in the post unanswerable.
There wasn’t a term for when oil started being a fuel source, nor a specific one for automobile use. That’s the answer to your title question: there wasn’t.
That being said, the automotive era would be a decent term for the use of machine powered transportation.
But I think separating fossil fuels into separate eras when they overlap so much is pointless. It’s all fossil fuels, and that’s where I would suggest any term for that would be based, not the specific fuels.
At least in the USA, it is known as the Robber Barron period as the extremely wealthy monopolized everything.
So…we’re still in the Robber Barron era then?
Robber barons were in many ways also tied to coal.
Robber barons are just a more evocative way of framing the period compared to the dry Industrial Revolution term, similar to calling it the Gilded Age, but all the terms are roughly talking about the same time period.
Lol the internet revolution was adapted to the name tech bubble after it burst.
There has been a Second and Third Industrial Revolutions.
It would be the Second one, but it’s not the oil that marks it. It’s electricity.
It would be the Second one, but it’s not the oil that marks it.
… So it would not the be second one.
It happened at the same time, there’s no other name.
Kerosene and whale oil have been around for a bit longer than cars.
