Fascinating podcast put out by BBC World. I assume it's only going to run for, ahem, 50 episodes, but so far they've all been awesome.
Just finished the episode about light bulbs. Who knew that back when burning wood was the only way to make artificial light it used to cost 500,000 times more per unit of light than it does now. It's so cheap today that most don't even think about the cost of it. It's remarkable to think that my mother was so adamant that we turn out the lights when we left a room. And this was after the invention of lightbulbs. Lighting was already historically cheap at that point, costing roughly $.015 in 2017 dollars for an hour of electricity with a 100 watt incandescant bulb. Today, thanks to CFLs and LEDs that are way more efficient and longer lasting, the cost is a fraction of what it was just 40 years ago when I was a kid.