Factually! with Adam Conover - How Engineering Created Your World with Roma Agrawal

Episode Date: October 25, 2023

We tend to think of "technology" as screens and apps, but it really means everything from the plumbing in our homes to the nails that hold our walls together. The field of engineering literally builds the world around us, but the fascinating history behind these foundational elements is easy to overlook. In this episode, Roma Agrawal, structural engineer and author of Nuts and Bolts, joins Adam to discuss how engineering shapes not just our buildings, but the way we live our lives. Find Roma's book at factuallypod.com/booksSUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAboutHeadgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgumSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show again. You know, whatever room you are sitting in right now, I want to blow your mind because you're not just surrounded by walls and furniture and whatever appliances you picked up at Home Depot. You are surrounded by history. Okay, I know that sounds a little dramatic, but it is literally true, okay? All that stuff around you is built layer after layer from human invention, discovery, and ingenuity stretching back thousands of years. You know, we tend to think of technology today in terms of

screens and chips and apps that let you swipe right on a picture of a guy holding a fish because you do not want to date him. But that is just the bias of our present moment. Technology really means the nails that hold your walls together, the plumbing that fills your thirsty, thirsty toilet, the wild range of gizmos that miraculously combine to make a fucking dishwasher. That is all technology too. How we make the things that have power and give us power over the world is an important chunk in the edifice of human knowledge. See, on this show,

we've actually done you a little bit of a disservice so far because we've covered everything from biology to philosophy to history, but we've avoided engineering as a field of human knowledge. And engineering is a very special field because it's the one that's dedicated to solving practical physical problems. It involves math and physics, but many of its earliest inventions were made without those theoretical tools.

It's a genuine field of human inquiry as important as any other, and it's one that we are living inside of and on and around every damn day. So this week, we're going to talk about it. How did engineering emerge? What were the basic discoveries that built the world we live in today? And what is the story of their development?

Well, today we have an incredible guest to answer these questions for us. But first, I want to remind you that if you want to support this show, you can do so on Patreon. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of this podcast, ad-free, and a bunch of other goodies as well. And just to remind you, I'm a touring stand-up comedian. If you want to come see me in a city near you, head to adamconover.net for tickets and tour dates. Now, let's get to today's guest.

Roma Agrawal is a structural engineer and author based in London. You know that huge tower that dominates London's skyline called the Shard? Well, she helped build it. And her recent book is called Nuts and Bolts, Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World in a Big Way. I absolutely flipped out over this interview. She blew my mind with so many revelations about engineering and the role it plays in our lives.

I hope you love this interview with Roma Agrawal. Roma, thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you for having me. It's exciting, kind of across the world, across many time zones. I know we're talking to you from London, but through the miracle of engineering, we actually have a very vast connection here. We're able to communicate and record this podcast in a way that was impossible just a couple of years ago. You yourself are an engineer. Just tell me a little bit about the work you do and what you've been working on the last few years with this book. engineer before, our job is basically to make things stand up. So if you see the buildings and bridges outside your window or the stuff you travel on and they're standing up, it's because someone like me did some good maths and physics and made sure that there's enough material in

there to resist all the forces that attack it. So that's what I did for about 14 years and I loved it. And then I started doing a lot more speaking and writing and going out there and basically trying to excite people about engineering and show them how inspiring and fun it is. And I ended up quitting my job as a structural engineer to just to go around and tell people about engineering instead. To be an engineering communicator. Exactly. So hence my latest book, which is called Nuts and Bolts. And I find your approach really fascinating because, look, I come from a family of science communicators. My sister is a journalist working in physics. My entire family has that background. Science communication was always important to us. And I was sort of brought up with a liberal arts background, looking at science next to art and philosophy and all of these fields and having them be in dialogue with each other. Something that I

think was often left out of that, though, was engineering. Engineering to me is often that's, oh, that's just the, you know, the nerds with the protractors and they're figuring out how to make stuff stand up. And there's not a lot, there's not a lot to talk about. Right. And especially, I think in, in the very, very modern day engineering, as I often hear it is connected with computer engineering, which is connected with the tech industry, which, you know, a lot of us have a little bit of a complicated view of right now. And so, but when I engage with your work, what it reminds me is that, oh, hold on a second. Holy shit. Engineering is part of the edifice of human knowledge.

This is, it is us learning more about the world and putting that knowledge into practice in a really physical way. I don't know. Do you have that connection with it? I mean, it's everywhere. It's a part of the fabric that we live in. And one of the, that we live in. And one of the interesting observations, so first of all, it really irritates my husband that whenever we go on holiday to some cool place in Europe, so like we go to Rome, and then we come back with photographs of archers and bricks,

and there's no pictures of him. And he's always very disappointed by this. But I have to say, archers and bricks are far more interesting than my husband. Don't tell him I said that. But I have to say, Arches and Bricks are far more interesting than my husband. Don't tell him I said that. Really, really nagging your husband really hard right at the gate of the podcast. Okay, man, don't listen to this dude. Love you, Manny.

I mean, she hates you, man. I don't know what to tell you. She loves, okay, please go on. I think it says something about how much I love Bricks, maybe at the point that's how things rank number one bricks number two husband exactly exactly let's get our priorities straight um but the things that we're going to look at when we're on holiday at these you know like these ancient ruins is engineering it's the building stuff it's the you know the fabric the way people lived at that point in time. And actually our understanding of history, of how they lived, what kind of people they

were, what kind of systems they had. So much of that comes from their engineering that survived. And so absolutely, engineering is way more than nerds with protectors, I think, as you described us so generously. Nerds is such a pejorative and that isn't even really encompassing what I meant. There's often a perceived sort of like bloodlessness or a lack of soul to engineering. You know, that it's just, hey, we're just building shit. You know what I mean? We don't need to talk about it. It's not, there's nothing interesting to, you know, you go, I think a lot of people,

when they go to Italy, they go look at paintings and they look at art and they look at architecture, right? But the, but the specific, the engineering specifically is not something that people generally, people aren't generally doing what you do traveling around the world just to see the engineering. People aren't generally doing what you do, traveling around the world just to see the engineering. But you do remind me that that is what defined so many early civilizations, was the engineering advancements that they came up with. And that is often what we still have of them.

That is what is still, we have their canals or their monuments or their, you know, like Stonehenge, right? When people go look at Stonehenge, they're going and looking at a work of engineering, right? That's exactly right. And one of the things I love doing is understanding all these different ancient civilizations around the world and the incredible things that they built. So in fact, in my first book, which is called Built, I investigate water because obviously, you know, humans can't do very well without water. So we need to get fresh water to us and we need to be able to take away dirty water sewage away from us. That was a pretty make or break situation for the civilizations that succeeded versus that didn't. I looked at these amazing tunnels that exist in places like Iraq and Iran and so on in the Middle East, where they used to dig these really Space Station, which is, I think, one of the biggest and greatest human achievements. And everything in between is all engineering. to move water from place to place that made civilization possible or specific civilizations possible in a very real way.

Because until you can channel where water goes, you're at the mercy of going wherever it is. And literally every, I mean, this is true of every engineering advancement you talk about in your book, but all of human society rests on that advancement and us continuing to know how to do that. Yes. And so often if you're not very familiar with engineering, if it feels like this really big, huge topic that is quite intimidating, it's a bit of a black box, you don't really understand what an engineer does, it's too much. And then we kind of disengage from it. And so what I wanted to do with this new book, Nuts and Bolts, was to go down to the nuts

and bolts of our engineering, to really kind of delve into, take away all the complexity, look at the simplest pieces of engineering, the seemingly simplest pieces of engineering that I could find, which I think are the fundamental building blocks of everything else that's complex around us. And so I said, hold on. So I've got this nail here. So if you're on audio, it's like this quite, quite a long iron nail, which is at least the length of my palm. And I'm saying that I think the nail is a really fundamental piece of engineering. and I'm saying that I think the nail is a really fundamental piece of engineering. And if I ask a room full of people to put their hands up, say,

do you think the nail is really interesting? I think one or two might do that. But then once I'm done with them, the whole room is putting their hands up. And it's because I would be able to say to you that this nail that I'm holding in my hand was involved in creating the wheel. Something like the nail had to hold the first wheels together. I would tell you that Americans in 16th and 17th centuries used to burn their houses down to collect nails because they were a really precious commodity. I would tell you that the ancient Egyptians made them out of bronze, but that the Romans made them out of iron that they imported from India. I've got endless stories that I can tell you about the nail. It involves enslavement. It involves Thomas Jefferson and the 400 enslaved men and boys that he had making nails when his plantations weren't yielding

enough crops. So there's just so much history in a little thing like the nail. And that's what I'm really passionate about sharing. Well, okay. I mean, let's jump into it. I'm like, that was, you know how to get me excited about a topic. I mean, I think we often have this view when we think about, oh, what are the simple machines, the earliest machines? Everyone can sort of picture like the comic strip version of like a caveman with a wheel made up, you know, from a far side comic or something. And, you know, it's sort of, we take it as a given.

But when you think about like what it took to actually invent these things, it almost seems paradoxical because the nail seems so simple and yet it must have been invented at some point. So like, what was the, was this really a big innovation and how did it come to pass? Sure. So I think the nail is probably one of the most interesting innovations that humans ever came up with. And the reason I say that is because before nails, the stuff that we used to make was one thing that we shaped or molded. So we might take a piece of stone and then flint it to create a sharp point to create a tool. Or we might tie it with rope to create a spear,

but then that rope would degrade and kind of disintegrate. So that's not a really robust and useful connection. We might dig a cave into a kind of soft rock. We might put mud together. But to actually put two objects together robustly was once a revolutionary idea. It's something we just take so for granted now, but it was once revolutionary. And if you think then about the complexity of the engineering, the technology, the stuff that we could make following this idea of putting two things together, it's just like an exponential increase. And yeah, thank you, Neil, for letting us get there. For just being able to combine two things at all into a new thing, rather than subtract mass away from something or to shape something.

Now we are accreting things, we're combining them. What would have been one of the very first things made with a nail? a nail? The story of the nail is also the story of metals. If you think about the materials that early humans, our ancestors, were using, a lot of wood, clay, rocks, stuff like that couldn't really be fashioned into a nail. The fundamental of a nail being it has a nice sharp point, which allows you to whack it into a material. And that sharp point allows it to drive in. So you needed metal, but a lot of the metal from the earliest times, which were gold and silver, were too soft. And so it was only when copper and bronze came along that the ancient Egyptians, in

fact, were very proficient at using. They went, hang on a minute, it looks like we can create some really cool little tools with this material. And I mean, it's always very difficult with such ancient technology to exactly pinpoint where the technology came from, who invented it. But for argument's sake, let's say the Egyptians did a number of thousands of years ago. let's say the Egyptians did a number of thousands of years ago, they were putting together chariots, their boats, their ships. They were using rivets, which is a cousin of the nail, to create their vessels. So it was a very interesting use of that early technology. And in some ways,

what I find really fascinating is that we use it for many of the same things today. It was the, they were using it to create the built environment really for the, for the first time in many ways. They were. And, you know, if I, if I come back to the Romans again, which again, were a couple of thousand years after the Egyptians, the Romans were really famous for building these incredible structures. And the structures that they built out of timber in particular were held together with nails. And the Romans were one of the most prolific producers of nails in the ancient world. But you said they had to wait until they had copper and bronze. These are like, it must've taken other,

other advancements in order to just secure those metals in the first place. Like I'm, I'm, my mind goes in a circular way where I'm like, okay, in order to get the copper and bronze and, and fashion them into nails, you must've needed a lot of tools.

What were those tools made of? If not pieces of wood nailed together. I mean, it's a very good point. And, and I guess they wouldn't I mean, it's a very good point. And I guess they wouldn't have been. It's a great question. So I think we're going back to then the stone tools, right? Like the most kind of basic tools that we had

in order to then mine and find the metals and then kind of take it from there. But yeah, it's a very good point. So when you say that we are using it for the same things today, how do you mean? So if you think about ships today, or if you think about our cars, or even our wheels that are allowing us

to transport ourselves, everything has to be held together with some sort of either nail or cousin of the nail. So cousins of the nails might include the screw, or it might include the rivet, for example. And so I love this idea that this piece of technology, which is thousands of years old, is first of all, not only being used for similar things as it was when it was first invented, but also a whole plethora of other stuff. And people often ask me, do I think that something will replace the nail? And I don't think it will because, you know, like I say,

we've been using it for thousands of years and I feel like that will continue. Yeah. I mean, it's a, it is a, it's very simple, but it's very powerful. Like how could it be improved upon unless you, you know, need to fasten two pieces of material that cannot be nailed together, in which case you would use a screw or some other thing. Right. But it's it is what it is. It continues to be as effective. Yes, absolutely. So I've actually got so I showed you the nail and then I've got a little screw. So the screw is kind of the nail, but with a thread wrapping around it,

which is quite sharp. And what's really good about the screw is that it actually clamps the materials together because of this helical thread. We then get onto the rivet and the rivet looks like a little dome shaped thing on a cylindrical shaft. And the hot rivets, which have been used to build so much of 18th and 19th century infrastructure in the West particularly, is heated up and then the other end is whacked. And then that kind of clamps sheets of metal together. Putting sheets of metal together is an example of something a nail can't do. And then I get finally to the nut and the bolt, which is kind of a combination between the screw and the rivet, much, much safer to install.

And I'm holding up a nut and bolt, which I think is a six millimeter diameter bolt. And we used a lot of bolts like this, I would say maybe from 12 millimeter thick, so double the diameter on the shard, which is the tallest building in Western Europe. It was a project that I was involved in. And it kind of blows my mind that our biggest skyscrapers, even if you think of the ones in Manhattan or in LA, are held together by this piece of technology that fits in the palm of my hand. And I think it's really fun to kind of explore what's the smallest and most basic thing that I can get to in this very kind of big, complex piece of engineering. Right. So what you just described are a series of fasteners.

Is that a good group name for these? That's a great, great name. Good. a good group name for these. And that's a great, great name. Good. So yeah, you described a series of fasteners that are all evolutions of the nail to some respect, but we are literally using them

to build massive skyscrapers now, but it's fundamentally the same technology and the same idea as what the Egyptians were using. I'm curious about, you said this incredible anecdote, which I'd love to hear more about, about people burning their houses down in order to extract the nails because the nails were so valuable. I imagine that's because, and if Thomas Jefferson is using enslaved people to build them, to make them, I assume they were time consuming to make an expensive, but now,

you know, I can go to the hardware store. I can pick up nails for God knows how little, uh, 0.001 cents, whatever it is, you know, if you buy them in bulk. So what, like, uh, what, what difference has that caused? You know, the, the fact that now this thing that was enormously valuable is so enormously cheap. Um, yeah. So, I mean, what it means is that it's made that technology available to everyone, right? So like democratizes a piece of technology when it gets really cheap. And that was thanks to industrialization. Now, I mean, obviously industrialization has done incredible things and it's also created a lot of fallout that we're dealing with. Yeah.

You know, fossil fuels, carbon. Pretty much every good thing and bad thing in the world was caused by the industrial revolution, as I've covered many times throughout my work. So I'm very familiar with a lot of the bad stuff. I've talked about a lot of it. So maybe, well, let's leave that bit there. But pre-industrialization, I actually went and forged a nail by hand myself in a forge in like north of London, which has been running continuously since the 1850s or 60s. And it's really hard work. I mean, I'm not some big bodybuilder or anything, but I work out. And honestly, after I made one nail,

my arm was trembling, like my biceps hurt for three days later. It's really hard work. How do you do it? It took me ages to make one nail. How do you do it? You start with a rod of steel. It would have been iron or copper or bronze back in the day. Heat it up. Get it up to a temperature where it's soft enough that you can place it onto an anvil and then you whack it. You whack it it in one place, in one direction to flatten it, and then you turn it by 90 degrees and try and flatten it again. So actually the nails you're producing, if you cut through them, would be a square or a rectangle. So they've got four corners to them. And then you try and basically taper it down to as sharp a point as possible. So it

requires cycles of heating, whacking, heating, whacking, cutting, heating. It's like a multi-step process, very physical. So not only was the process of creating the nail time-intensive and labor-intensive, but the materials that were used to make them were also expensive. So steel was not very forthcoming until the 19th century and iron and so on were expensive to extract and transport around. So now I'm going to bring you to colonialism. Okay. And you're thinking, how do engineering and colonialism relate to each other? But so the British colonialists who were still ruling over the US

said, we're not sending our nails, which are precious commodities to any of our colonies, screw them. And there's a pretty good pun in that. Nail them. Nailed it. We're doing great.

The Americans have a lot of houses built from timber. I'm surprisingly, that's a great natural material for you folks. And when they want to move and build a house somewhere else, they're thinking, well, if I need to buy new nails, I'm going to be spending a huge amount of money. This house is actually probably worth less than the nails themselves. So they would burn the house down. And then from the smoldering ashes of their old homes, they would collect all the nails up, kind of sling it in a bag over their shoulder, and then go off and create their next home. And what's so brilliant about this anecdote is that it became so widespread that the state of

Virginia actually passed a law that banned people from burning their own houses down. And the state promised people, they promised homeowners that they would get someone to come and value the nails that they were leaving behind and give them some cash instead. That's incredible. It's almost like a very early sort of home subsidy where like, don't bring your house down. We will, we will just, we'll just give you some money for nails. You don't need to be destroying everything. It also reminds me of, you know, so much of what you're describing sounds like a very simple, you know, video game with a crafting mechanic, you know, where, okay, you get stone tools and then you can extract iron and then you can, you know, make an alloy and then you can have iron

tools, et cetera. And what you just described sounds like the part in a video game where you're like, okay, I don't need this structure anymore. I'm going to dismantle building and get my, get my resources back and go move it somewhere else. Uh, but in real life, it's, it's kind of crazy to know that that's how it actually worked way back when. It did. It did. And then a couple of other quick anecdotes about the nails. So kind of 18th, 19th century UK in England, there was a big nail making business, which was owned by a man who died. He left it to his wife and his wife was called Eliza Tinsley. And she became one of the very, very, very few, if not the only women involved in the nail making

world. She expanded her business. She was known as a humane employer. And when she died, the business was much larger than when she had been handed it, um, handed it to her by her husband and they call her the widow. Um, you know, again, interpret that as you might. Um, and you, and they actually, I mean, it's been acquired by a few different businesses, but you can still buy packets of nails that say Eliza Tinsley on them. So love that, Love the involvement of women and children that used to make nails in the UK. Yeah, that's so cool. It is very cool. And then maybe just to touch quickly on the Thomas Jefferson story, he had the plantation at Monticello and the soil had become infertile. It was not yielding enough crops. And so what he did was basically forced the

400 men and boys that he'd enslaved to make nails. And they were producing between 8,000 and 10,000 nails a day between them that were being sold to then fund the Monticello plantation for Jefferson. And the foundry he opened was just seven years before he became president. And this is such a, you know, this connects back to what we so often say about the history of slavery in this country that, you know, the work of enslaved people literally built the structures that, you know, our founding fathers lived in, that many people still live in today that like not just oh those people worked here like those like they made the nails that are in the walls of the building that you walk into or of the you know state house of your state or whatever it is um i mean this is incredible this is really making the point that you know you're talking about an engineering advancement, but you're connecting it to history, to race, to gender, to science, to all of these different areas of human knowledge and inquiry and experience.

It's so very cool what you're doing. And I have a million more questions for you about it, but we got to take a really quick break right here. We'll be right back with more Roma Agrawal. Okay, we're back with roma agrawal talking about engineering in all of its forms and how it interacts with human society we just spent a good half hour talking about the nail which is one of the i believe seven objects or seven engineering advancements in your book um i want to talk about at least one more. Can we get into the lens? Because lenses are very important to me. Uh, unlike nails, I wear them on

my face and they allow me to see you right now. So it's like a pretty, it's a pretty important one to me. Um, it is. And yeah, I really think we should focus on the nail for a little bit. On the lens, you mean? On the lens. That was an incredible pun and you messed it up, but I'm leaving it in the podcast. I'm so sorry. Maybe for the best. We're going to have to hammer into the nail. We're going to have to focus on the lens. Okay. That sounds good. Let's focus on the lens. The lens is also a very personal one to me. So yes, I wear glasses too. I've just taken them off because they're reflecting into my video. And

even though they have an anti-reflective coating, that was invented by a woman called Catherine Blodgett a few decades ago. But yeah, the lens is a very, very, very personal one to me. And I'm always interested in how I can write in a very engaging and very personal way. And I think the lens is one of my most personal chapters because I start that chapter off as a letter to my daughter. And the premise of my letter to my daughter is that she would not exist had it not been for the lens because my daughter is an IVF baby. And so having been through all the sort of infertility treatments, which unfortunately is a very common occurrence all over the world now, my egg and my husband's sperm were injected so the sperm was injected

into the egg using a tiny tiny glass needle and obviously a very powerful microscope that allows you to see these single tiny cells so you know had it not been for the microscope obviously which contains a number of lenses um that procedure would never have been able, would not have been possible. And my daughter wouldn't exist today. I'm sorry. This is my ignorance a little bit. I didn't realize in IVF, they are literally injecting one cell into another cell. Is that the case? That's not always the case. So if we're going kind of being specific, this is called ICSI. That's a procedure. Please don't ask me what that stands for because it's a big biology term, which I can't say.

But yeah, ICSI is kind of a subset. It's fine. This is an engineering show. Don't worry about it. ICSI is a subset of IVF. So in certain cases, that's what they prefer to do. But even for sort of quote unquote normal IVF, where you're mixing up sperm with eggs, you still need microscopes to be looking at these cells, to be seeing what they're doing, to watch where they fertilize, when the cells get together, when they start splitting and creating an embryo. And then you look at the embryos to understand if they're healthy or not before you actually implant it back into the uterus. Wow. I mean, I that's just incredible. That's like such an incredible thing to be able to to do.

And of course, I knew about it, but just I had never thought until now about the, you know, a what the actual mechanism of action is. But but B, I mean, what an incredible like medical advancement that is all by itself to be able to, to be able to do that in order to bring life into the world. And so the microscope, the lens of the microscope is a lens that was necessary to do this. Absolutely. And I like the origin story of the microscope as well. And I tell a little story about the microscope, in fact, which allowed reproduction to be understood. I don't know how young your listeners are on this podcast, but they range. We've got from eight to 80, I think, is our range. You might want to bleep me a little bit in the following segment, perhaps.

No, not at all. No, the kids who listen to this show can handle it. They're street smart. They want to know the truth. All right. That's people listening to this, to this show in their car with their kids all the time. And I swear up a storm. So go nuts. So there was a Dutch, like a textile draper called Leovon Hook, and he created a tiny little microscope, tiny little glass sphere. And he used to look at his cloth through that microscope. And then he said, oh, actually, I can see some fun stuff with this. And then he started looking at other stuff. So he looked at pond water. He looked at his tongue.

He looked at blood. So he was the first recorded to see red blood cells. He was the first recorded to see bacteria. Really important stuff. And then one day he decided to look at something slightly different, a different bodily excretion, secretion, one of them. And, um, maybe we need to bleep you. People around the world are fans. Okay. Of it's a, it's a worldwide favorite bodily excretion for, for many folks.

And this is what he decided to look at. He was like, Hey, we've all been curious. Let's take a glance. What the hell is this stuff? Now he used to write letters to the Royal society in London, which was like the premier, you know, prestigious, probably stuffy scientific institution in the UK. And this particular letter was quite a sheepish one. And I actually got it translated from Dutch. So he writes in this letter that the learned gentleman of the

Royal Society might find this quite a disgusting or unsavouryory um thing that he's done but he wanted to assure them that the sample he looked at was the remains of conjugal coitus and it was not the result of self-defilement okay oh god that wait that sounds worse to me he was like don't worry there was another person involved in this like i wasn't by myself oh no no okay um but also so go for it go for it so we think he's the first person to see spum and let me just say what a fucking crazy thing to see i mean so you so he's invented a little sphere that he's using to just like look at his cloth. Right. And then he's like starts looking at other stuff.

Must have been mind blowing just to look at the pond water and go, there's there's stuff in here. There's living things. What the fuck? And then you're like, well, let's see what came out of me. Let's look at that. And in it, there's a lot of little there's a lot of little wormy guys squiggling around. I would I would like go to sleep and never wake. I would be like, oh my God, I'm bailing out.

This is too bizarre. Like what, how could you possibly have any kind of reaction to that? I can't even imagine what I would think if I, if that was me. I mean, it's true. And I've thought about exactly that reaction to actually seeing bacteria because when you, when he looked at, so he kind of scrapes his tongue and then looks at the coating on his tongue and then he sees it teeming with bacteria i mean i would have been completely freaked out if i realized that there were all these kind of living things on like in my body so you know absolutely it's pretty mind-blowing

and also then to write a letter about it to to go, guys, I had sex with somebody. I looked at it through a glass sphere. You're never going to find out what you're never going to believe what I saw. How what could your reaction possibly be reading this letter? Like, is this a crazy man writing to us? If I were to receive that letter today, not knowing about the existence of sperm, I'd be like, this man needs to be institutionalized. I think he luckily had enough of a reputation by then that he was actually doing some science. So that probably helped his situation. But totally.

And what also kind of blows my mind is that even after he saw sperm and we then understood that there was an egg, it still took a couple of hundred years before we figured out that you require a sperm and egg to fertilize, to come together in order to create a baby. Really? That was not something that we understood for a long time. Even from the first point that we saw those cells for the first time, it took us hundreds of years. from the first point that we saw those cells for the first time, it took us hundreds of years. I mean, just to be,

I'm just so fascinated by this moment where we're, you know, we've been walking around for millennia covered in little squirmy bacteria, right. With full of cells and no one being aware of this in any way, obviously no, you know, no, no true germ theory of disease,

except maybe some people are very prescient and postulated some stuff way back when, but no one had any proof, right? And then to suddenly be the first person to sort of pierce that veil and see all of that for the first time. I mean, this is like he was the first man to go to space or something like that. It's such an incredible advancement that, again, yeah, came from just this little lens that he that he created. Hundred percent. And what God, the advancements that came from that are like mind boggling. Like the rest of human society came from being able to know what's tiny. You know, I mean, what are some examples that stick out to you?

Yeah, sure. So so we've talked about tiny stuff. I mean, the huge stuff came into our world as well. So we understood that we could look at planets, we could look at stars, the whole solar system, the galaxy opened up to us and we could start to look at all of these different types of things. Yes. And so, yeah, big, small. And then the one slightly more ordinary one that I love is the camera. So that might not sound like it opened up new worlds to us, but actually when the camera was invented and we started being able to take and record photographs, so we're going backwards about 200 years now, most people had never had the opportunity to travel around the

world. They would never have seen people of different races, perhaps, to the ones that they lived with locally. They wouldn't have seen different types of nature, different animals, plants, food. There's all sorts of stuff that were as mysterious to us as the bacteria on our tongue or the solar system out there. And so photography actually brought huge social change. One of the examples I talk about in my book is the photography during the Vietnam War, for example, where what we thought in the West was actually happening was very different than what was happening on the ground and how the photography actually played a role in the protests that followed in the US. So, you know, I think that's a really interesting one. And I also talk about how it can be used oppressively. So there's a couple of really interesting ones. One is about racism where the early films that recorded the object. So, so say you're taking portraits of

a person, all of those films were calibrated to allow enough light in to expose the film, to create perfect color for white people. And so when black folks were photographed, their skin came out looking really, really flat. There was no kind of three-dimensional nuance to it or anything. not Abraham Lincoln. And he actually used photography. That was one of his ways to bring humanity to black people and part of his abolitionist movement. So, you know, lenses have played a role in the way we understand our world and beyond the world in so many different layers. I'm a person here. I am. Here's, here's an image of me. I'm not just an account you read in a book or a rumor that you heard, um, or you don't have to see me in person because not that many people get an opportunity to here. I, here I am. Uh, and he, he is someone who, you know, when I, when I picture him, I picture that photograph. I picture a photograph of him, uh, in a way that I

don't for, for many other leaders. Um, That's really incredible. I also think that like the lens still has so much power to astonish me still today. Like a couple of years ago, I got into birdwatching and I got myself a modern pair of binoculars. And of course, I bought like a modern, modern pair and I was astonished when I got them where cause look, I've spent my life, you know, on computers mainly right on Photoshop and things like that. And so I thought I knew what it was like to look closer at something, you know, like my, it's always been, Oh, you zoom in. And when you zoom in on something in Photoshop, you don't really get more detail, right? It's like, you're stuck with what you had, but to take, you know, a pair of binoculars and look at something far away and go, oh, I have gained detail.

I'm the same distance from this thing, but all I've done is raise a lens to my face and suddenly I have detail in enormous detail for it. And also it's asymmetrical. Like if you look at someone through a pair of binoculars, they probably don't know you're looking at them. They don't have more detail on you, but you have detail.

It's like spooky and mysterious. And I've experienced this where I'll be out with a friend. I'll be like, look through these binoculars and they'll go, holy shit. Like they'll be blown away. Just like it's, they'll have the same moment of astonishment.

And all they're doing is looking through a lens that is, you know, binoculars themselves are pretty old. The lens itself is much older. It still has that power over us. It's incredible. Yeah, it really does. And one of the other stories that I really loved and enjoyed researching, but was also shocked that I didn't know. So considering that I have a degree in physics and I went to Oxford University, we've all heard of Newton. We know that Newton did tons of stuff with prisms and light and optics and all of this stuff. However, 700 years before Newton, there was an Islamic scientist called Ibn al-Hitam. He is just incredible. I had never heard about him until about two years ago when I was researching this book.

He was the first person to explain how our eyes work. Until now, again, this is one of those things that seems so obvious to us now that light and our eyes are two separate things and light interacts with our eyes and we can see. Whereas, for example, the ancient Greeks thought that our eyes kind of shoot light out or shoot some kind of rays out and allow us to see. So he was like, no, no, I'm going to do some experiments and prove that actually light travels in straight lines. So he said that. He said when two kind of rays of light cross each other, they don't interfere with each other. Got that right. He explained that there's a lens in the eye. He drew a section through the eye. He explained how we see. He created the first pinhole camera. he created the first pinhole camera and more than that he was involved in you know i'm going to throw out some nerd terms there but spherical aberrations um he took he looked at how refraction occurs so how light bends through you know why light bends through a lens he got the reason for why that happens wrong but oh my, the amount of work and advancement

that happened in what we in the West call the dark ages, ironically. What year was this? So this was about a thousand AD. So around that time, which was actually the Islamic golden age of science in the Middle East. And I just think that if you've heard of Newton, you should have heard of Ibn al-Haytham. You probably haven't, you know, even like me, I hadn't. But so again, this is one of these examples, I guess, of the hidden figures that I've tried to highlight throughout my book as well.

I mean, what an incredible set of insights to have all at once. And those are also, I mean, those are the fundamental insights behind like what corrective lenses work and all these other, you know, it sounds like he's thinking about, has some idea of the retina and all of these. I mean, these are things that I associate with much, much later thinkers. It also highlights for me, I can't believe we've been talking about the lens for 20 minutes. I only just now realized, yeah, there's a lens. There are two lenses in my head. It's true. Of all of these pieces of engineering, this is one that evolution separately,

or that we reinvented something that evolution had invented for us. Um, and that we use our version of it to correct the imperfections in the natural version. That is such a cool interaction between human engineering and sort of the basic engineering of life. Um, and I just, I love thinking about it. Are there any other, uh, pieces of engineering in your book that work that way? Or is the lens unique in that respect? So, so the pump is a great one. So the thing that's keeping us alive, um, pumping away in our chest, um, you know, so, so that's, that's a fascinating one, right? And for me, pumps are really about life because the, what pumps do fundamentally, um, are that they move liquids

and gases. Okay. So we might think of pumps as being these really complex pieces of machinery. Our heart is probably one of the most complex pumps there is. But pumps can be as simple as raising a bucket from a well because you've used some kind of force work machine to move a liquid. So pumps have been instrumental, just to bring it full circle from where we started about how important water is to our civilizations. So pumps have played an extraordinarily important role in that. And one of the interesting stories that I relate in my book that is related to the heart is, again, you've just touched on it with the lens.

It's like our natural one doesn't work properly. We get a fake one and put it in an artificial one, put it in front of it. We can do that with our heart. So if our heart's not working properly, crack the chest open, stop it, put yourself on the bypass machine. At least that's what we call it here. And that is a pump. That's an artificial heart and lung least that's what we call it here and that is a pump that's an artificial heart and lung system that's keeping us alive while our bits of body can't do it and that's um that's incredible oh my god and now you are connecting uh biology and medicine with engineering where our own uh so so first all, we're creating our own version of the pump, which is, uh, resembles the pump inside of ourselves. We have also engineered,

uh, everything required to like replace it for a limited period of time and to reinforce our internal pump, upgrade it, whatever needs to be done, clean it out. Now you're making me think of medicine as a form of biological engineering in a way. Um, or at least you're, you're like combining those two disciplines. That is so fucking cool. Um, and you know, so, so yes, it is fucking cool. Absolutely. Um, I talk about astronaut suits and the pumps that keep us alive. So the pump is allowing our body to go to an inhospitable environment that we are not designed to survive in and allow us to survive. And then on the opposite end of, I guess, complexity maybe, but again, the intersection

of the human body with medicine and the pump, I talk about the breast pump in my book. And I will ask you, how many engineering books out there do you know that talk about the breast pump? So as a woman, as a mom, I had to put it in there. Yeah. I mean, look, I don't read a lot of engineering books, but I have to, I have to imagine not many. Uh, and, and yet again, that's a very fundamental invention that is, uh, I mean, for, for women around the world, that's a, that's a basic, uh, intervention that like makes life more livable, makes it more possible to, to raise a child. That's really important to people. A hundred percent. And, you know, for me, I love working. I was at home with my child,

which was really difficult for me. I'm waking up in the night all the time. The lack of sleep was really affecting me. And the breast pump basically allowed my husband to be able to feed her for a period of time. And then, you know, we went to formula and so on. But it's, you know, when you think of modern life, like it's, it's all well and good to say, well, we've been giving birth in this particular way for a millennia. We've been breastfeeding our kids for millennia, but modern life isn't like how we lived millennia ago. And I think it's important to use engineering and to use technology to make our lives easier. I mean, that should really be what underpins engineering in the first place.

Yeah. And so let's talk about engineering big picture, because we could talk about these specific pieces of engineering. You talk about springs. So we could do them all day. Magnets, all sorts. Yeah. I want to get to the big picture, you know, because we've talked about how, you know, again, we live in a world built on engineering and that we are dependent on it

to some degree that, you know, if we do not continue to have the ability to move water from place to place, then huge numbers of people will die. It'll become impossible to live certain places. I've done work about how, you know, air conditioning makes it possible to live in certain areas, et cetera. And so when we talk about human knowledge, we often think of it as being a tenuous thing that we could lose it. That's why education is so important.

Libraries are important. Passing the knowledge from one generation out of the next is important. In the case of engineering, it's not just like, hey, we don't want to forget about history, blah, blah, blah. It's like, we need to keep remembering how to build these things

or we're all going to die because we have constructed a world for ourselves that is dependent on them. Is there any danger in that? You know, like it does sometimes when I think about it that way, make me think, oh, have we created a world that's more brittle? When you look at the way that, you know, the supply chain right after COVID got so screwed up because, you know, we had these, all these dependencies and a few broke and then the whole chain collapsed. Is that a concern that

you have when thinking about how engineering interacts with human society? to be that dust-free lab, to be the most sophisticated piece of equipment, to be the spacecraft, to be a huge piece of infrastructure. And that's not necessarily the case because we need to be thinking about engineering making our lives better, sure. But I think the focus from industrialization was making human life better. And that came at the expense of animals, nature, biodiversity, climate, the sea, and so on. And so when I have conversations with engineers now, and I often do this for my podcast, which is called Create the Future, one of the things that I can see across all the different topics that we discuss is the idea of working with nature and not against it. For example, today I was talking to somebody about artificial reefs.

If we want to stop waves from destroying a human city, if we just put a big wall up and that looks like, oh, big, robust engineering, that's actually having a bad impact on the sea and sea creatures. So is there an artificial reef that we can put in that helps the human city and human situation, but also is sensitive to nature. And I think that's really the way we need to be thinking moving forward. And is that something that you think engineering can accomplish? Because so often, you know, our, you know, we've already talked about how the industrial revolution brought many great advancements and a lot of human flourishing and also a lot of destruction, and a lot of human flourishing and also a lot of destruction, a lot of death.

And, you know, our let's put it this way, the more power that humans have to impose our will on the environment around us, the more we tend to destroy as much as we build. You know, on a past episode of this podcast, we talked about how every road that we build that makes it easier to go from one place to another is also a wall for the wildlife that can no longer travel across that what is a barrier to them. And so I love what you're saying, but I'm like, is it, is there any concern that, that these two things are diametrically opposed at all? I don't think they are. I think that there are amazing engineers, thinkers, designers, architects, scientists, people out there who are thinking

along these lines. They are in some of the greatest institutions around the world. They have great impact. So I'm kind of cautiously optimistic, I guess. The thing that is the challenge is converting these ideas into practice on a big scale. That's really the challenge that we have. The thinking is there. The possibilities are there. The question is, how do we actually implement this stuff? A lot of that comes down to policy, to government, to what your priorities are, to different governments around the world working together because, you know, we have one atmosphere, you know, we have the sea, you know, these are not artificially divided by lines as much as we might behave as if those are true. And so that's, I think, is the more challenging bit is that how

do we actually take these incredible ideas, these incredible pieces of engineering, and then apply them in a way that can really kind of make that positive difference? Yes. You know, this is a distinction I've drawn on this show before, where we talk about technology in terms of the physical technology that we can employ in the world or our ability to build things. And we don't talk often enough about our social technology or our social engineering, our ability as a society to gather the political will. And, you know, if you, if you invent a wonderful new artificial reef, right, that'll be a home to marine life and also prevent, you know, storm surge from a hurricane or whatever. And you put out your paper and you say,

I've come up with this wonderful new technique. It'll work. Well, then what we need is the social engineering and technology to actually do it. And that is often what it seems like it's lacking, do it. And that is often what it seems like it's lacking our ability to, as a society to, you know, our, our democratic technology, our, our media technology, uh, in terms of, uh, how we interact with each other and what we can make happen. Yes. And, um, we could probably spend hours discussing that. Well, do you have any like particular examples of, uh, of, examples of a piece of engineering that you think could help us address climate change or any of these problems that is sort of an example of what you're talking about? It's a tricky one because I think a lot of the stuff that's coming out is starting to show impact. Again, the challenge then becomes,

how do we expand this? I've had really interesting conversations about materials, and I find this really fascinating because concrete has been around for a few thousand years. The Romans were using it prolifically 2,000 years ago. It probably existed a bit before then. Concrete is one of the most carbon intensive materials that we use. And it's used ubiquitously around the world. So the top most used substance on the planet is water. The second most used substance on the planet is concrete. Wow. And it's carbon intensive, right? So there are a lot of scientists and engineers that are working really hard to figure out how to make concrete more sustainable, more green, less carbon intensive

in terms of what's going into it, the way it's created, the way it hardens, the way it then comes to the end of its life. And so I'm kind of optimistic that we will start finding ways to make concrete more sustainable. People are looking at using living organisms in concrete. We're looking at using the waste from other industries. or using rubber tires or, you know, so I think there's real promise in the material science world that will allow us to change the stuff that we build with, which I think is really important. And that harkens me back to the beginning of our conversation where you were talking about the new possibilities that we gained once we were able to use copper and bronze, right? That a large scale shift like that could be a real game changer in terms of human civilization overall. If you look at if we could replace or improve our second most often used material, which has causing so many ill effects, that would be that would be huge to bring us out.

You know, what do you hope that people take away with them with this sort of fuller picture of engineering? You've given us – I mean, honestly, this has been such a mind-expanding conversation for me. I've really freaked out at a lot of the new perspectives you've given me. I'm going to be thinking about them for a while. But what do you hope when people are walking around the world and thinking about these things, you know, how do you hope they see the world a little bit differently? I mean, you kind of said it, right? Like I've made you think about some things that you're going to take away with you today. And hopefully that means you'll be a little bit more

curious about the world around you. You might think about, oh, what material is that made of? And where did that come from? And what's the history of that? And does that have connections to colonialism or to racism or gender politics or, you know, X, Y, Z? And I want to demystify engineering a little bit for everyone. I think engineering has become this very complicated thing that only really clever people understand or do. And I want to say that nothing's further from the truth. And the way I'm trying to do that with this particular book is to say, let's start small. Our smartphones are really complicated. There's a huge amount of technology in them. Just think about the camera in your smartphone

that's taking a photograph. Just think about the screw that's holding a piece of it together. You know, just think about the wire or whatever. Just take a little bit of components. I think that demystifies it. It makes it more accessible. And then once you're kind of excited and happy about that, then ramp it up and investigate more.

That's awesome. I mean, look, Roma, I love talking to you. You are so cool. The book is called Nuts and Bolts. People can get it at our special bookshop at factuallypod.com slash books. If you do, you'll be supporting not just the show, but your local bookstore as well. Roma, where else can people find your work? Yep. So I am on social media, mainly on Instagram, and my handle is Roma the Engineer, and my website is Roma the Engineer as well. So you can contact me there. You can read about my other books, my other work. I've got

various videos on YouTube as well. So yeah, start from my website, Roma the Engineer dot com. Roma, thank you so much for being here. It's been such a delight. It's been fantastic and is probably the first podcast that I dropped an F-bomb. So there you go. Ah, yes, we got you. All right. Don't listen to this kids or your kids. Anyway, the rest of the kids can listen to it. Thank you so much. Well, my God, thank you once again to Roma Agrawal for coming on the show. If you want to check out her book, you can get it at factuallypod.com slash books. And if you want to support this show, once again, you can do so on factuallypod.com slash books. And if you want to support this show,

once again, you can do so on Patreon. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of this podcast ad free, 15 bucks a month. And I will read your name on this very show and put it in the credits of my video monologues. I want to thank Blamo, wonderful podcast named Blamo that's supporting us. Celine Drago, Michael Frasco, and Alex Sull. Thank you so much for your recent support of the show. I also want to thank our producers, Tony Wilson and Sam Rodman, everybody here at HeadGum for helping make this show possible. Oh, you can find me online at adamconover.net.

My tickets and tour dates are there as well. Please come see me. I do a meet and greet after every single show, and I would love to meet you in person. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll see you next time on Factually. I don't know anything. That was a HeadGum Podcast.