Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution is named as one link in a thought experiment that expands the making of an apple pie into an account of the conditions required to create an entire world. Its place in the list connects the pie’s possible endurance across generations to a history extending far beyond ingredients and cooking.

Place in the Chain of Creation

Carl Sagan’s argument begins with the premise that making an apple pie from scratch means beginning before the world existed. The account moves from the Big Bang and cosmic development through Earth, evolution, fire, water, soil, seeds, and the agricultural and human labor needed for butter, wheat, sugar, and apples. The Industrial Revolution enters near the end of this expanding sequence, after the natural and social prerequisites for baking have been assembled.

Connection to Inheritance

The text associates the Industrial Revolution with the possibility of making a pie that can last for generations. It appears alongside the printing press and, more tentatively, a poem: not as a historical episode explained in its own right, but as part of the broad inheritance of human development that extends a simple food into something transmissible over time. The reference gives the pie an unusually expansive scale: its apparent simplicity depends on a world built through successive natural, cultural, and technological conditions.