Eat Drink and Be Merry

Streaming video - 1978

This episode begins with plastic and plastic credit cards and traces backwards to the dukes of Burgundy, the first to develop and utilize the concept of credit. One of the many things credit was used for at this time was the purchase of better armor for the army. Burke explains how this eventually leads to the growth in the size of armies, which in turn presented a problem in the form of feeding increasingly large quantities of soldiers. This led to the innovation of bottled and canned food, which in turn leads to the invention of air conditioning and refridgeration, eventually leading to similar technology being used to store the rocket fuel that put the first man on the moon.