Less flashy but as important were the astonishing improvements in public health – reduced child mortality, smallpox vaccinations, chlorinated water. These are the result of interlinked developments high and low: the invention of the lavatory linked to sewers may have saved a billion lives since the 1860s. The doubling of human life expectancy in one century and the reduction of child mortality by a factor of ten are triumphs with no downside – except our own voracious success as a species, our population rising from a billion people in 1800 to eight billion in 2025. The industrial revolution
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