Hi, I'm John Green and this is Crash Course European History.
So the rollercoaster of European and world history continued its uneven path after World War II,
yielding the Cold War and the hot wars of decolonization,
but also longer, healthier, and more secure human lives.
Much of these positive changes were driven by tremendous --
really, unprecedented --
advances in human understanding in the fields of biology,
communication, energy creation, space technology, and especially medicine.
Here's just one example of the kinds of dramatic changes in everyday life I'm talking about:
In 1941, a British policeman named Albert Alexander was
dying of a minor scratch that had become
majorly infected with staphylococcus bacteria,
but then Alexander was treated with a new drug called penicillin.
He experienced a remarkable recovery, but there wasn't enough penicillin available
IN THE WORLD to continue his treatment.
So his infection came back, and he died a few months later.
Within just five years of Alexander's death,
there was enough penicillin available to treat not just one individual,
but millions of people every year.
[INTRO MUSIC]
In 1952 during their work in Cambridge University Laboratories,
scientists Francis Crick, an Englishman,
and James Watson, an American,
discovered the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid.
DNA is the material in a cell's chromosomes that carries hereditary information.
Now according to Watson's personal account in The Double Helix from 1968,
they did rely upon -- and steal -- the essential findings of female colleague Rosalind Franklin,
and did other dishonest acts to arrive at the theory for which they won the Nobel Prize.
You can learn more about that in episode 40 of our History of Science series.
But basically, Crick and Watson traced the path of
biological inheritance when they uncovered the structure of DNA.
Their findings showed how the double helix of the DNA molecule splits in cellular reproduction,
becoming the backbone of new cells.
This genetic material, biologists concluded,
provides a chemical pattern for an individual organism's life.
As for how this affected everyday life,
advanced genetics and the new field of molecular biology sparked
a deeper understanding of viruses and bacteria
which fueled the creation of vaccines that would crush diseases like polio,
mumps, measles, and tetanus
But understanding DNA also had lots of other uses,
like scientists used it to alter the makeup of plants
for instance to control for agricultural pests,
and even to bypass natural animal reproduction in a process called cloning:
obtaining the cells of an organism and then using them to create an exact copy in a laboratory.
Another development that vastly affected 20th-century history and beyond:
the birth control pill.
In the 1960s, it slowly became available in Europe
and the United States -- although many countries outlawed it --
but better access to family planning tools reshaped families
and also allowed women more freedom when it came to when to have babies and when to work.
Meanwhile, new techniques also made abortion much safer than it had been when performed by amateurs.
It too was generally outlawed at the time but with varying degrees of safety,
hundreds of thousands of women received abortions nonetheless.
Childbirth also became more medicalized with very few births occurring in hospitals in the 1920s
to more than 90% occurring in clinics by the 1970s.
Births attended by highly trained doctors,
nurses or midwives also improved maternal and child health in those years,
both for home births and hospital ones.
Child mortality in Sweden, for instance, dropped by more than 50%.
Medical science likewise transformed conception in those decades.
In 1978, an English couple gave birth to the first so-called "test tube baby," Louise Brown.
In a process called in vitro fertilization,
her mother's eggs were fertilized with her father's sperm
in a laboratory dish and then implanted in her mother's uterus.
So the revolution in biology didn't just advance well-being, it created a new path to life.
Information technology also advanced, allowing knowledge and culture and political information
to be transmitted globally and nearly instantaneously.
Once-remote villages were linked to urban capitals on the other side of
the world thanks to video cassettes, satellite TV, and telecommunications.
This also meant that local protests could become worldwide media events.
Let's go to the Thought Bubble.
Between the mid-1950s in the mid-1970s,
Europeans rapidly adopted television as an entertainment and communications medium.
In 1954, just 1% of French households had television; by 1974 almost 80% did.
TV viewership may have lagged a bit in the Soviet Union, but only a bit.
In a rural area of the USSR,
more than 70% of inhabitants watch television regularly in the late 1970s.
With travel restricted in the Soviet Union, shows about foreign lands were particularly popular.
The average TV viewer tuned in for about 4 and 1/2 hours a day!
The audience for newspapers and theatres declined.
"We devote more hours per year to television than to any other
single artifact," one professor claimed in 1969,
which was true for a long time - but then TikTok.
As with radio, European governments supported television broadcasting with tax dollars,
and that meant they also controlled programming.
They wanted to avoid what they saw as the inferior offerings of American TV.
Instead, they featured drama and ballet and concerts and variety shows and news
and other stuff
that's boring while WE were watching good stuff like Hee Haw.
But at any rate, through those means, the European welfare state gained influence on daily life --
it literally shaped what people saw.
Heads of state could also preempt regular programming.
In the 1960s, French President Charles de Gaulle appeared frequently on television,
rousing patriotism with dramatic gestures during his speeches,
and in time, politicians came to depend on media experts as much as they did on
economic and political experts.
Thanks, Though Bubble.
We did it! We got from TikTok to Hee Haw in a single Thought Bubble!
Let's move on to satellites.
The emergence of communication satellites and video recorders
in the 1960s allowed audiences to enjoy broadcasts
from all over the globe including sports, soap operas, game shows,
and sitcoms dubbed into many languages.
By the early 1990s, video cassette recordings of Liverpool Football Club matches
were even making their way to boarding schools in Alabama,
where a young John Green fell in love for the very first time.
Then there was the computer, which reshaped work in science, defense, and ultimately industry
The Colossus, used by the British in 1943 to crack Nazi military and diplomatic messages,
was the size of a gymnasium
By the 1980s, computing machines were the size of a small carry-on bag.
They also became unbelievably more powerful and less expensive thanks to
tiny silicon chips that could execute millions of operations per second.
In 1981, the French Phone Company invented a network
called the Minitel, which predated the worldwide web.
It allowed people to make reservations online, but also to meet others socially and romantically.
So if you feel weird or uncomfortable for having met your romantic partner on the internet, don't!
We've been doing that since the '80s!
Dramatic change also occurred within the
space race between the United States and the Soviet Union,
which was made possible by computers and rocketry.
The contest began when the Soviets launched the satellite Sputnik in 1957.
The superpowers went on to competitively send up flights that tested humans' ability
to survive the process of space exploration, including weightlessness.
Astronauts walked in space, endured weeks and later months in orbit,
docked with other craft, fixed satellites,
and carried out experiments for the military and private industry
Additionally, a series of unmanned rockets launched weather and television and
intelligence and other communication satellites
into orbit around the Earth.
And then in July 1969, US astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the
moon's surface to the astonishment of millions of television viewers,
and indeed to the astonishment of your Crash Course host today.
We made it to the moon! We are a two-orb species!
It was a "space race," so of course, there was competition.
But space ventures also necessitated global cooperation.
From the 1960s on, US space flights often involved the participation of other countries.
In 1965, an international consortium achieved the first
commercial communication satellite, Intelsat.
But even if global cooperation was increasing, there was still plenty of mutual distrust because
like 50% of satellites were devoted to spying.
The space race also created heroes tops among them cosmonauts Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space,
and Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space.
Leisure activities including toys and games often focused on space.
The film 2001: A Space Odyssey,
inspired by a story by British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke,
portrayed space explorers pondering life's meaning as religious leaders once had.
The same could be said (to a certain extent) of Star Trek,
or Polish author Stanislaw Lem's fantasy novel, Solaris, which also later became a movie,
and also featured space-age individuals searching for life's meaning.
This all gets at something else that was happening in Europe and around the world in the 20th century
that was really important -- a new search for meaning --
especially as long-standing ideas about meaning began to feel less relevant to many.
In 1950 4 out of 5 Britons said they were Christian;
in 2016, just 2 out of 5 did, with a slight majority identifying as having "no religion."
So to what will we turn to worship?
Mehh, perhaps nuclear power.
I mean, it's extremely powerful, a little bit terrifying, quite mysterious
(at least to those of us who didn't get great science educations).
So yes, nations were also seeking out new sources of power, literally,
including nuclear power.
The USSR built the world's first civilian nuclear power station in the town of Obninsk in 1954;
Britain and the United States soon followed suit.
During the 1960s and 70s, civilian use of nuclear power multiplied a hundredfold --
not to mention expanding military use and nuclear-powered submarines and aircraft carriers.
Because of the vast costs and complex procedures involved in
building supplying running and safeguarding nuclear reactors,
governments provided substantial aid or even financed nuclear power plants entirely.
The USSR sponsored plants throughout the Soviet bloc as part of the drive to modernize,
but it wasn't alone.
Western nations also funded nuclear power.
These changes were so revolutionary that for ordinary people,
the idea of work became different.
European and Western countries started to become post-industrial,
that is emphasizing jobs in services like health care,
research, education...while keeping a presence in industrial work.
Work on average became less physically onerous
while demanding a different range of technical and emotional skills.
As parts of the economy became more interconnected, skills in
complex analysis became more important than ever into the 21st century.
And this is one of many places where history can be very
important to you in your professional life.
As our curriculum consultant, Kathy, pointed out to me recently,
the question isn't just how to build a bridge, it's where to build a bridge.
Where to build a bridge is partly a historical question,
as are other extremely complex questions, like:
should we get into this war?
So, please study history because I need you to make smart choices about that stuff.
Another important development in the second half
of the 20th century was increased cross-border economic cooperation.
In Europe, for instance, a consortium of European firms created the Airbus,
a suite of passenger jets as a result of cooperation among governments,
businesses, and scientists.
Increasingly, European workers were themselves
also crossing national borders as work, life, and living conditions
became cleaner, less dangerous.
And often employees,
whether they were flight attendants or telephone-based customer service reps,
cared for the psychological well-being of their customers, which was another big change.
By 1969, there were more service-sector employees than manufacturing workers:
48.8% versus 41.1% in Sweden.
Growth in educational facilities was also crucial to all aspects of post-war science and technology,
which demanded an increasingly well-trained workforce.
Between 1950 and 1969, the number of university students in West Germany rose by about 250%.
In Sweden, 580%!
Great Britain established technical universities to encourage practical research.
While France created schools to develop future experts in administration,
the Soviet scientific establishment expanded.
Across Europe, courses in information technology and systems analysis and overall management
developed the skills essential to post-industrial work.
And all this meant big life changes for young people and their families --
more women worked to support the costs of economically dependent children,
who now stayed in school a decade or more longer than they had a century before.
And so overall, the average life was longer and healthier and better educated.
But it's important to note that those changes were not equally experienced by all.
In 1820, when the English poet John Keats first coughed up blood,
he told a friend, "That drop of blood is my death warrant."
And it was, he died of tuberculosis a year later at the age of 25.
By 1950, tuberculosis was no longer a death warrant,
and by 1990 it seemed (at least to many wealthy people in Western Europe)
like a disease of the past.
But even in 2015, there were over 300,000 new cases of tuberculosis annually in Europe,
and over 30,000 European deaths from tuberculosis.
When looking at the history of medicine or science or technology,
we often focus on what we discover is possible.
We focus on changes in what humans can do, but what we can do,
like for instance, cure tuberculosis and many other diseases in nearly 100% of cases,
is not always what we actually do.
Thanks for watching. I'll see you next time.
Thanks for watching Crash Course, which is filmed here in the Jaden Smith Studios in Indianapolis.
And thanks to everyone at patreon.com/crashcourse for making it possible.
We have many other Crash Courses including Crash
Courses about the History of Science if you're into this kind of stuff.
Thanks again for watching and as they say in my hometown, don't forget to be awesome.