Newt's World

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Episode 1023: Greatest American Inventions — The Moving Assembly Line

August 04, 2026

Henry Ford didn't invent the automobile—he invented a way to make it affordable. Newt examines how Ford's 1913 moving assembly line cut Model T production time from 12.5 hours to 93 minutes, and how Ford's controversial $5-a-day wage turned his own workers into customers, helping create the American middle class. But this episode doesn't shy away from complexity: the same system that built American prosperity was also dehumanizing for many workers, and Ford himself was a deeply flawed f...

Episode 1022: Greatest American Inventions — The Personal Computer

August 03, 2026

For thirty years, a computer was something only governments and corporations could own—an entire room of machinery. Newt tells how that changed in 1975, when a $439 kit computer on the cover of Popular Electronics inspired a Harvard student named Bill Gates and an HP engineer named Steve Wozniak to imagine something radical: a computer anyone could own. From Microsoft's garage-built software to Apple's Apple II to IBM's industry-legitimizing PC, this episode traces how outsiders—n...

Episode 1021: Greatest American Inventions — The Internet

August 02, 2026

On the night of October 29, 1969, a UCLA student typed two letters into a Stanford-bound terminal before the system crashed—and the internet was born. Newt traces ARPANET's Cold War origins as a decentralized network built to survive nuclear attack, through Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn's TCP/IP protocol, to Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web. He argues the internet's true significance lies in a policy choice: the U.S. government built it, then let it go, handing an open network to the world rat...