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James Burke's video "Credit Where It's Due" does a great job of illustrating the social causes and effects leading up to the Industrial Revolution, but that is all it does. In fact, while watching this video, I had to frequently remind myself that this was part of a course called "History of Science," and not "History of English Society." Where's the science? Well, I now realize that there simply wasn't any, or at least not very much in 18th century England. These people were simply too busy making money, having babies, building houses, or devising new strategies for making more money. They did not have time for science. They did however, have plenty of time for inventing all of the wonderful new technologies that would provide them with such material abundance, give the Industrial Revolution its name, and later inspire and enable a science, the likes of which had never been seen before. Yet despite the obvious importance and impact of this technology, Burke gives it very little time in his video. I believe he could have conveyed a much better understanding of the Industrial Revolution had he spent less time on man, and more time on machine. Of course, as Burke explains, social issues, rather than scientific or technological issues, were at the core of the Industrial Revolution.
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