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lives were changing dramatically it's a beginning of the automobile age.

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seriously they were wearing scarves they were on vocal rest they were drinking [cars resting]

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bizarre herbal tea concoctions yet all very dramatic things. anyway not only

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were cars easier to purchase but roads were also improving by leaps and bounds.

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before we knew it we were caught up in a car craze. and this shouldn't be very

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surprising after all humans have addictive personalities when it comes to

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technology. Raleigh salivating over the next big

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thing. and back then that was the car. so what did cars do that was such a big

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deal? well for one thing they changed where we lived and how we lived. before

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the age of cheap personal transportation most people lived near where they work.

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if people had fancy business jobs in the city well they pretty much had to live [man walks donkey through a shopping street]

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in the city. it was that or a long hike to work and businessmen didn't want to

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ignore their shoes. if people lived in the country their job options were

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pretty much well farming or farming or farming. people didn't commute to work

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except a few folks who were starting to use electric trolleys or short line

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trains, but if they had a car they can live 15 miles outside of town and still

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have all the job opportunities of living in the city.

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and it turned out that people liked the idea of moving out of town. they wanted a

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whole home and yard to themselves rather than a cramped apartment where the

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kitchen doubled as a bathroom. yeah bonus of having home finally having a place to

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put those garden gnomes. well Levittown New York became the first official [man surrounded by junk]

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suburb in 1947. it was a series of nearly identical homes built in neat rows and

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they were sold to upper middle-class white folk who worked in the city. yep it

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was the birth of the burbs. the automobile boom also made other

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industries boom too. take oil and rubber companies for instance for car robbers

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neither would be what they are today without the automobile. and what do cars

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need to run? well gasoline. yeah the oil and automobile industries were totally

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BFFs forever. and mention electric cars all right well.

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as cars got more popular more average Joe consumers needed gas and oil so the

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oil industry exploded. not literally. that would be terrifying. but the figurative

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explosion made some people very very rich like john d rockefeller the man [oil well pulls up money out of the ground]

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behind Standard Oil and one of the richest guys ever. seriously it was like

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money spewed from those oil wells. cars also made the rubber industry huge

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because of the need for tires. just imagine trying to drive a car without

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rubber wheels. what else would wheels be made of wood?

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and they last maybe a day tops steel like riding inside of a rock tumbler. no

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rubber wheels absorb shock and we're the only way to go. here's a funny thing

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about rubber, it grows on trees no seriously it does. the British

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transplanted rubber trees from South America to plantations in South Asia and [truck hauls trees]

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West Africa. the plantations were pretty awful like chopping off the hands of

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workers and causing genocide kind of awful. luckily in 1931 someone invented

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synthetic rubber made from petroleum products. though the torture factory

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rubber plantations more or less disappeared and in slightly happier

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things cars also helped create the fast-food industry, national campgrounds

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and a new kind of an American identity. so the next time we eat a big mac while

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camping we have cars to thank. so if we're eating a Big Mac while camping and

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we may have somehow missed the point there. [family in front of tent]

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