ms of wealth and health - a recipe for economic, political and social instability. 14 http://www.makingthemodernworld.org.uk/stories/the_age_of_the_mass/ 15 http://www.makingthemodernworld.org.uk/stories/defiant_modernism/04.ST.02/ http://www.makingthemodernworld.org.uk/stories/defiant_modernism/04.ST.02/ 17 http://www.makingthemodernworld.org.uk/stories/the_age_of_ambivalence/02.ST.06/ Making Telecoms Work 12.10 Inferences and Implications A number of general inferences can be drawn from this particular slice of technology history. The social and economic benefits of technology and engineering innovation are generally not evenly distributed geographically or demographically nor are the direct and indirect costs. The direct costs are those associated with initial deployment and maintenance costs thereafter. The indirect costs are the social and economic costs that can be both short term, the loss of cotton spinning jobs in India being one example, or long term. Only now, 150 years later are we becoming aware of the full environmental cost of the industrial revolution. By the end of the nineteenth century, Britain had become the world's most advanced connected economy based on a postal system, the telegraph, the railway, including the London Underground, a canal system, a steam-driven water system, the world's largest network of sewers, an underground hydraulic system, gas, electricity and a large merchant navy, a form of mobile connectivity. This was infrastructure investment on a scale never seen before or since, built on the profits of the British Empire. Today, we still post letters in Victorian post boxes, travel on Victorian railways and the underground network, navigate and ship goods on Victorian canals, drink water delivered through Victorian pipes and flush effluent away through now leaky Victorian sewers. The water-based hydraulic system was retired in 1977 and the curtains of the London Palladium are now opened and closed using electric rather than water power. A number of specific inferences can be dr