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History of Technology 5: Pasteurization 6 Views
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Description:
Pasteurization is a process that kills microbes in food and drink. We'd say sorry to the microbes, but, uh...we really like milk that doesn't kill us.
Transcript
- 00:02
Industrialization is a big deal if this were the oscars industrialization [Industrialization sitting on a chair with a presenter]
- 00:08
would be meryl streep minus the political speeches it gets nominated all the time
- 00:13
for most important historical event ever but now let's turn our attention to one
- 00:18
of history's smaller actors, pasteurization well pasteurization is more like [Little girl standing on stage]
- 00:24
Quvenzhane's Wallis that little girl from beasts of the southern wild
Full Transcript
- 00:29
small not too famous yet but clearly very talented and when we say talented
- 00:35
we mean really good at promoting a human health and growing our dairy industry so [Young girl appears on dairy farm]
- 00:39
yeah just like the Wallis kid... pasteurization is the process of heating
- 00:43
foods like milk to a certain temperature in order to keep most of the bacteria
- 00:47
from leading long and happy lives it sounds simple enough right well not when [Man with a glass of milk]
- 00:53
nobody knows how that bacteria exists well a guy named Louis Pasteur was the
- 00:58
first one to figure it out how? well by using his handy-dandy microscope to
- 01:04
investigate the bacteria living in foods this gave him the brilliant idea to [Louis inspecting bacteria through microscope]
- 01:08
slaughter all those microorganisms by boiling them to death
- 01:13
you know sucked for them but great news for us milk lovers, okay okay
- 01:17
some out there are thinking how is boiling an invention the pasteurization
- 01:22
is the reason our milk comes in nice plastic jugs instead of straight from
- 01:27
our family cow and it's also one of the reasons we aren't all dying of [Boy on death bed]
- 01:31
tuberculosis on a slightly related note people seriously used to believe that
- 01:35
tuberculosis caused vampirism that's one way to drain a cow luckily Louis Pasteur
- 01:40
came along to stop us from putting stakes through the hearts of our family
- 01:44
members it was an incredible one-man show [Man playing guitar]
- 01:47
well many technologies and systems are invented piecemeal over tens or hundreds
- 01:52
of years by lots of people tinkering and experimenting well the textile industry
- 01:57
is a good example it wasn't mechanized by a single person [People working in textile factory]
- 02:00
it took lots of inventions investors and laborers all working together to get it
- 02:04
done well pasteurization was discovered by a single guy named Pasteur who
- 02:09
obviously named the process after himself
- 02:12
of course, Pasteur did get some inspiration from
- 02:14
emperor napoleon the third who was the nephew of the napoleon we all know and [Pasteur sitting on couch and Napoleon III appears through the door]
- 02:19
love the emperor enlisted Pasteur to save France from the diseases found in
- 02:24
some wine so Pasteur obliged he probably
- 02:27
didn't have much of a choice there Pasteur's genius was in figuring out the
- 02:32
exact time and temperature that would annihilate the evil microscopic squiggly
- 02:38
things without changing the taste of the wine which for the french would have [French man takes sip of wine]
- 02:42
been a fate worse than death right well it wasn't too long before
- 02:45
people were using the same process on beer and vinegar it took a few more
- 02:50
years for the process of pasteurization to be applied to milk well why was its [Beer, Milk and Vinegar boiling in pans]
- 02:55
use in milk production so important well back in the day most people who consumed
- 03:01
dairy had a dairy cow somewhere nearby that meant the time between milking the
- 03:06
cow and drinking the milk was really short and bacteria didn't have a chance [Young boy milking a cow]
- 03:10
to take up residence but in the 19th century more people started living in
- 03:15
cities milk had to be shipped from rural areas and shipping in the nineteenth [Horse dragging bottled milk in a cart]
- 03:19
century wasn't exactly speedy or refrigerated so diseases like
- 03:24
tuberculosis had a field day and when tuberculosis has a field day
- 03:29
people die yeah horrible death milk did not do a body good pasteurizing the milk [Milk pasteurizing in glass containers]
- 03:35
made it last longer and conveniently killed tuberculosis so naturally
- 03:40
pasteurization changed the nature of the dairy industry...Farms could be larger and
- 03:44
further away which encouraged a more industrial model of agriculture and of
- 03:50
course Pasteur didn't stop with pasteurization his confirmation of germ
- 03:54
theory allowed him to do valuable work on rabies anthrax and smallpox remind us
- 04:00
to thank him the next time we find ourselves not dying of one of those [Boy thanking and hugging Pasteur]
- 04:04
horrible diseases
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