The industrial revolution was every bit a marketing revolution, because there was no point producing things in abundance if you couldn't create corresponding demand — and entrepreneurs like Watt and Boulton proved it by inventing the horsepower as a marketing unit and pricing steam engines as 'hardware as a service' in 1775.

1:44>> I think you had a good example of that with uh Have you ever heard Sean the story of how horsepower kind of came to be? >> No. >> Can can tell that story? >> So one of my one of my great contentions is that when we look at great entrepreneurs or great inventors, Jobs, you know, if you say Edison, Ford, Watt, Boulton, they tend to be written

2:07up as historians as inventors. And my argument is that an invention isn't an innovation until it changes behavior. I think it's Stewart Butterfield of Slack who said something very similar. You know, the only real measure of the effect of you're having on innovation is the extent to which you change behavior. And you can invent anything you like, but if you can't get anybody to adopt it, it's an invention, but it's not an

2:32innovation. And Watt was selling steam engines to mine owners. And the purpose of the steam engine was to replace the horses they used to walk round and round in circles draining the mine so that miners could go in and effectively mine coal, slate, coal, whatever without drowning. What he realized is that you could you as an engineer, you could talk around, you know, the calorific capacity of the

2:57boiler or the length of the piston stroke or whatever, and these people didn't want to know. So, Watt and Boulton amongst themselves said, "Well, what do these people really want to know before they're prepared to buy a steam engine?" They said, "They want to know how many horses they no longer need to feed if they buy a steam engine. How many horses can I get rid of if I buy the steam

3:18engine?" So, Watt went out and invented a unit we still use today, which is called the horsepower. And the reason it's not named after a famous scientist like the ohm or the Newton or the coulomb or the Watt for that matter or Celsius or anything of that kind is because it's a marketing unit. It was invented for marketing purposes because he could then go and say, "If you buy a 25 horsepower steam

3:39engine, you can actually get rid of 75 horses." Cuz I think the horses worked in shifts, so it does the work of 25 horses, but it does it 24 hours a day, so you can now get rid of of 75 horses. And these people would go scribble scribble scribble scribble scribble cost of horses cost of feeding horses cost of looking after horses and you know on the

3:59back of an envelope they could then go well I'll have two of those. By the way we went even further than that. I mean the industrial revolution was a marketing revolution every bit as much as it was an industrial revolution because there was no point in being able to produce things in abundance if you couldn't create corresponding demand. So you know one of the things about the

4:1818th and 19th century in England was it was an absolutely pioneering period in terms of how people marketed things. And that included the steam engine where Watt and Boulton would go to a mine owner now let me get this right some people were already using Newcomen engines which were less efficient steam engines than the Watt engine. And Watt and Boulton would go along to the people who were already using these