About this episode Dive into the untold history of industrial gases, an industry that quietly evolved from obscurity to become an indispensable backbone of modern civilization. Each week, we uncover the pivotal moments and unseen innovations that transformed these invisible elements into the silent architects of everything from healthcare to manufacturing. Discover how seemingly mundane substances are, in fact, the powerful, unacknowledged forces that truly run our world.
0:00 what if the most valuable thing you could sell someone was nothing or at least a very specific kind of nothing pulled right out of the air0:13 a very specific kind of nothing i like that it sounds like a riddle it feels like one last week we talked about lubricants the hidden liquids that keep the world's machines from grinding to a halt but this week it's about the invisible gases that are just as crucial it's the story of how we learn to bottle the0:37 sky okay so you're not talking about like filling party balloons with helium this sounds bigger much bigger we're talking about oxygen nitrogen argon the stuff that makes up nearly all the air you're breathing right now around the turn of the twentieth century engineers like carl von linde in germany figured out how to get air so cold i1:04 mean hundreds of degrees below zero that it turns into a liquid you can liquefy air the whole thing the whole thing and here's the magic each gas in that liquid air boils off at a slightly different temperature so you can separate them you can distill air just like you distill whiskey suddenly have a stream of almost pure1:29 oxygen another of pure nitrogen and so on you have industrial gas and what's the first thing they do with it what's the killer out for pure air welding and cutting steel an oxy acetylene torch could cut through a thick plate of steel like butter before that you needed giant mechanical shears it completely changed shipbuilding skyscraper construction everything1:58 you could suddenly build bigger faster and with more complex shapes the skeleton of the modern world is welded together with industrial oxygen i always just thought of that as a torch i never thought about where the oxygen in the tank actually came from you just assume it's there exactly and that's just the start that nitrogen they separated2:24 turns out it's incredibly inert it doesn't react with much so if you flush out a bag of potato chips and fill it with nitrogen instead of regular air the chips don't go stale wait that's why the bag is so puffy it's not air it's pure nitrogen it's pure nitrogen it's also used to flash freeze food preserving its2:47 texture perfectly and argon the really inert one creates the perfect sterile atmosphere you need to weld high-tech alloys or crucially to grow the silicon crystals for computer chips every single microchip on earth was born in an argon bubble wow so it's not just heavy industry it's in our food it's in our computers it's everywhere it's the ultimate3:17 invisible utility these gas companies linde air liquid air products they operate like a power company they'll build a massive air separation plant right next to a steel mill or a semiconductor fab and just run a pipeline over the factory buys gas by the cubic foot just like you buy electricity by the kilowatt hour so it's a product3:40 that's also an infrastructure that feels familiar it's like the pallets or shipping containers we've talked about the thing that enables everything else but nobody ever sees the thing itself precisely and the scale is just staggering a big steel mill can consume the oxygen from a volume of air the size of a football stadium every single day and4:03 that's just one plant that's that's a lot of nothing but it's also a point of failure isn't it if a hospital's medical oxygen is piped in what happens if the plant down the road has a problem that is the terrifying question at the heart of it the supply chain is so efficient so just in time that there's4:29 very little slack we saw this during the pandemic with medical oxygen shortages the system is built for incredible efficiency not necessarily for resilience it's this hidden dependency we've all accepted without realizing it it's the assumption that the sky will always be there to be bottled right we've turned the atmosphere itself into a raw material we mine the4:57 air for the parts we need use them to build our entire world and then exhale completely oblivious it's the quietest industrial revolution of all
