Roman Mars

speaker

157 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 3 Jul

Roman Mars’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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In Our Time · The Global Story - The soft power superpower, with Roman Mars · 3 Jul 2026 podcast

Yeah. matched

So the problem was, is that... matched

A screw is a very simple device. matched

In fact, it's one of the simple machines that have existed for millennia. matched

And the threading of the screw, where you're trying to fasten two hard things together, it has to be at a certain angle so that it fits together. matched

But there's a problem that was developing, which was as the world was industrializing, as the United States was industrializing. matched

certain people were noticing that if we just had greater efficiency and more interchangeable parts, that we could excel in our manufacturing. matched

And one of those people was the Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, who was a standards fanatic. matched

Hoover became famous for being a logistics guy who saved a lot of Belgium from starving, actually, during World War I. I saw it from its beginnings in 1914 all the way down through the long years, which have not yet ended. matched

And later he became Secretary of Commerce in the United States. matched

Much later than that, he became president that presided over the Great Depression and became one of history's kind of villains because of it. matched

He just was a man who believed in systems. matched

He was a classic bureaucrat before that term got tainted by someone who didn't get things done. matched

He was like a professional who believed that if we just had the proper systems in place, the proper thought about how to build a system of manufacturing, that everyone would prosper through it. matched

And so he made it his mission in the 1920s to standardize matched

Well, what ends up happening is you have to sort of custom do everything at a certain point. matched

So like if you have 11 paving stone sizes instead of 65 paving stone sizes, when something breaks or something needs to be replaced, now you can go to a shelf and sort of get them. matched

And having interchangeable parts does so much for you to increase the efficiency of any system. matched

And also it's sort of like, matched

You know, the United States, you know, we think of them as one body, but the different states had lots of different standards of things. matched

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