Fire part II: The ignition of progress
The use of heat in the refining of crude oil represents one of the greatest single revolutions in the history of the human application of energy
‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.’
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 1852
In part I, we saw how the civilisational significance of transforming fire into a technology t…
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