Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution is a period of rapid economic growth in Britain from about 1750 to 1850, characterized by the growth of factories, railroads, coal mining and business enterprises using the new technologies.

An "industrial revolution" (uncapitalised) is the transition from an agrarian economy – where the majority of the population is geared towards subsistence – to an industrial economy with a greater focus on manufacturing. The Industrial Revolution (capitalised) is the name applied to the transition in Britain when the combination of mercantile activity supported by energetic inventors and entrepreneurs harnessed the natural resources of coal, iron and water power to create a manufacturing industry that was dominant in the world. The British Industrial Revolution was closely followed by industrial revolutions in continental Europe, and in the newly fledged United States, with the United States and Germany being the major players in the Second Industrial Revolution after 1850.

Historiography

English historian Arnold Toynbee introduced the concept in 1884 into English after the French political writer Louis Blanqui used it in 1837. Historians debate the dating of the Industrial Revolution. T.S. Ashton places it roughly between 1760 and 1830. Eric Hobsbawm (1988) emphasizes the effects were not fully felt until the 1830s or 1840s according.

In the 20th century historians (such as Charles Beard) looking for the social forces they thought controlled history, emphasized industrialization and urbanization. These were forces unleashed by the industrial revolution. By the mid 20th century attention was turning to the broader concept of "modernization," which included industrialization, urbanization, and psychological changes and changes in values. By the late 20th century historians largely stopped looking for deep explanatory forces, and stressed instead complexity and interrelationships.

Goldstone (2002) argues that many premodern and non-Western economies show spurts or efflorescences of economic growth, including sustained increases in both population and living standards, in urbanization, and in underlying technological change. Medieval Europe, Golden Age Holland, and Qing China, among other cases, show such remarkable efflorescences of impressive economic growth.Yet these did not lead to modern industrialized societies. The distinctive feature of Western economies since 1800 has not been growth per se, but growth based on a specific set of elements: engines to extract motive power from fossil fuels, to a degree hitherto rarely appreciated by historians; the application of empirical science to understanding both nature and practical problems of production; and the marriage of empirically oriented science to a national culture of educated craftsmen and entrepreneurs broadly educated in basic principles of mechanics and experimental approaches to knowledge. This combination developed from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries only in Britain, and was unlikely to have developed anywhere else in world history.

Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy(2000) asks one of the classic questions of history: Why did sustained industrial growth begin in northwest Europe, despite surprising similarities between advanced areas of Europe and East Asia? Specifically he compares Britain and China in depth.

Principal components

The measures of productivity over the period show major transitions in the manufacture of textiles; the consumption of coal; and the production of iron goods. Coupled with these are the movement of the population from rural to urban environments; and the rapid development and use of turnpikes, canals, railways, steamships and the telegraph. Above all it was the invention by entrepreneurs of the factory as a complex social-economic system that combined financing, engineering, raw materials, transportation and supervised workers as they made a profitable product whose sale in turned fed the expansion of the system.

Steam engine

The coal-fueled steam engine was a decisive factor in the Industrial Revolution, providing cheap, controllable power vastly superior to power from oxen, horses, and competitive with water mills. The first cost-effective steam engine appeared after James Watt, repairing a Newcomen steam engine, noted that 80% of its energy was lost by the alternate heating and cooling of the cylinder. In 1769 Watt patented a separate condenser, which made it possible to keep the cylinder hot, an air pump to exhaust the cylinder after each stroke, and a cylinder head to force the piston down by steam instead of atmospheric pressure. Many other inventors in the next 100 years perfected elements of the steam engine. Their challenge in maximizing the power output was to use high temperatures and very high steam pressures, without having the engine explode. Their success meant that the cost of energy fell steadily. Entrepreneurs found uses for stationary engines in turning the machines in a factory or the pumps at a mine, while mobile engines were put into locomotives and ships (where they turned paddles or, later, propellers). The use of water power was growing too, so that in 1830 steam mills and water mills were about equal (at 165,000 horsepower each); by 1879 Britain obtained 2.1 million horsepower from steam engines, and 230,000 from water.

Textiles

For centuries the spinning of yarn and the weaving of cloth had remained a manual operation. In England, for example, women and children, working at home, combed cotton with wire brushes and spun it by hand; the father then wove the cotton on a hand loom. Output was expensive and consumed locally. Most of Britain's cloth was home-made from wool in the West Country, Yorkshire and Lancashire. 1702 a critical turning point occurred when Thomas Cotchett and George Sorocold built a silk mill powered by a waterwheel at Derby. Their mill was probably Britain's first factory, for it was a single establishment with complex machinery, a source of power and accommodation for workers.

Machine productions was the answer; it would be faster, cheaper and more uniform in quality; the machine was needed to made large scale marketing possible. Textile machines were invented and improved in Britain to increase the speed of spinning and weaving. The first key innovation was the fly-shuttle, invented by John Kay in 1733. On the hand loom the operator pulled the shuttle carrying the woof from one side of the warp to the other. Kay used hammers which propelled the shuttle back and forth between the warp threads. In 1764, James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny, which increased productivity per worler by a factor of eight.

In 1761, the Society for the Encouragement of Arts and Manufacturies offered a prize of £50 for a spinning machine that could turn fiber into yarn and replace the hand-operated jersey wheel. Numerous inventors tried their hand; in 1768 Richard Arkwright (1732-92) employed John Kaye, a clockmaker from Warrington, to help build wooden models. In 1769 they invented the waterframe, which passed the carded cotton between successive pairs of rollers, each pair in turn revolving with greater velocity, so that a great number of threads of any degree of fineness and hardness could be drawn. The spun thread was now strong enough to be used as warp. At first he relied on water power, but as the machinery grew more complex he tirned to steam engines for power. Arkwright made a great fortune from his patents. While his role as the main creator of the factory system has been exaggerated, Arkwright was remarkable in his ability to adapt other people's techniques, raise funds from investors, and persevere with his vision of a mechanized textile factory. His Arkwright network of mills across Britain employed over over 5000 workers by 1782. In 1779 Samuel Crompton combined the Hargreaves and Arkwright ideas into the "muslin machine" (or "spinning mule") which could spin yarn for making muslin (until then imported from India). Originally known as the muslin wheel, or hall-in-the-wood wheel, In 1785, Dr. Edmund Cartwright invented the first power loom, which mechanized weaving operations and eventually developed into the modern power loom. In 1794, Eli Whitney, an American, patented the cotton gin, which separated the cotton fibers from the seeds, making short-fiber cotton grown in America the major raw material for the first stage of the inductrial revolution. Between 1781 and 1791 imports of cotton into Britain quadrupled, and kept growing until the supply was cut by war in 1861. In 1811 Britain saw more than 5,000,000 spindles at work, of which 310,500 used the Arkwright principle, 4,600,00 that of Crompton's mule spindle, and 156,000 that of Hargreaves's jenny.

In 1751, Britain exported £46,000 of cotton cloth; by 1800 this had soared to £5.4 million and by 1861 to £46.8 million. The cloth made for cheaper and better quality clothing, and was in demand across Europe and the world.

The United States followed the British lead, using stolen blueprints and illegally immigrating engineers. Samuel Slater (1768-1835) of Rhode Island pulled American cotton-spinning technology by constructing carding, drawing, and roving machinery, and by determining the operating and gearing ratios necessary to use water power. By 1850 the American had built their own industrial revolutions around textiles, and use of abundant water power in new England.

Railways

see Railway History

Coal mining

see Coal Mining: History The fuel problem was severe. Wood was scarce--the forests were gone. Water power required fast-flowing rivers of the sort that were abundant in America but uncommon in Europe. Horses could be used, but the efficient solution was fueling steam engines with coal, of which the island had an abundance. Before 1750 miners worked in shallow digs with few safety devices; floods, cave-ins, and gas explosions were omnipresent threats. Productivity was low. Even before Sir Humphry Davy invented the safety lamp in 1815 ways were found to detect the presence of choke damp, carbon monoxide, and coal dust; ventilation of mines was improved; systems of siphoning and continuous pumping were installed to rid the mines of water; and improved methods were introduced for sinking shafts. An early use of steam engines was to pump water out of the mines; the first locomotives pulled cars of coal out of the shafts. In 1700 2.5 millions tons of coal were mined; in 1800 10 million tons; in 1861 57 million tons.

Iron

see Steel industry, history Iron became the prefrred metal for tools and equipment until displaced by steel after 1860. Britain had iron ores but lacked a process to produce iron in quantity until in 1760 John Smeaton invented a blast furnace that could smelt iron both quickly and cheaply. His invention used an air-blast produced by a fan run by a waterwheel. In 1783 Henry Cort introduced the puddling, or reverberatory furnace, in which the final product was a pasty solid instead of a liquid. It was rolled into balls, squeezed and rolled to eliminate the impurities, or slag. The resulkt was malleable iron in large quantities. The greatest of the early ironmasters, John Wilkinson (1728-1808) invented new machinery to process the iron. In 1779 the first cast-iron bridge was constructed across the Severn; in 1790 the first iron ship was launched.

Social impact

Textile mills frequently came under attack from rioters, or "Luddites" as they became known, who were opposed to the mechanised system which brought unemployment to those involved in hand-spinning. Lancashire mills, particularly, incurred trouble and many were destroyed by fire.

Standard of living

Historians have for a century vigorously debated the impact of the industrial revolution on living standards, wages, and (more recently), the heights and weights of workers.

Bibliography

• Ashton, T. S. The Industrial Revolution, 1760-1830 (1948)online edition
• Berg, Maxine. The Age of Manufactures, 1700-1820. (1994)
• Chandler, Alfred Dupont. The visible hand: the managerial revolution in American business (1977) online at ACLS e-books
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• Crafts, N.F.R., and C. K. Harley. "Output Growth and the Industrial Revolution: A Restatement of the Crafts-Harley View." Economic History Review 1992. 45: 703-730. in JSTOR
• Deane, Phyllis. The First Industrial Revolution (2nd ed 2003)
• Deane, P. and Cole, W. A. British Economic Growth, 1688-1959: Trends and Structure, (2nd ed 1967)
• Hobsbawm, Eric J. The Age of Revolution 1988
• Giedion, S. (Sigfried), Mechanization takes command : a contribution to anonymous history (1948) online at ACLS e-books
• Goldstone, Jack A. "Efflorescences and Economic Growth in World History: Rethinking the 'Rise of the West' and the Industrial Revolution," Journal of World History Vol 13#2 , Fall 2002, pp. 323-389 in Project Muse
• Hudson, Pat. The Industrial Revolution 1992
• Jackson, R. V., "Rates of industrial growth during the Industrial Revolution", Economic History Review, 45, 1992, pp. 1-23. in JSTOR
• Jones, E. L. The European miracle: Environments, economies and geopolitics in the history of Europe and Asia (2nd edition; 1987).
• Landes, David S. The Unbound Prometheus: technological change and industrial development in Western Europe from 1750 to the present 1969 online at ACLS e-books
• Landes, David S. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (1998)
• Mantoux, Paul. The Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century: An Outline of the Beginnings of the Modern Factory System in England (1928, 1961) online edition
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• Nef, John U. The Rise of the British Coal Industry, 2 vols, 1932
• Olson, James S. Encyclopedia of the Industrial Revolution in America (2001)
• Pomeranz, Kenneth. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (2000)
• Rider, Christine, ed. Encyclopedia of the Age of the Industrial Revolution, 1700-1920 2 vol (2007)
• Rosenberg, Nathan, and L. E. Birdzell. How the West Grew Rich: The Economic Transformation of the Industrial World 1986 online edition
• Rostow, W. W. The world economy: history & prospect (1978) online at ACLS e-books
• Singer, Charles Joseph, ed. A history of technology: vol 4: The Industrial Revolution c 1750-c 1860 (1960) ch 4, and vol 5: The Late Nineteenth Centuiry, c 1850- c 1900, ch 3; online at ACLS e-books
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Social history

• Allen, Robert C. Farm to Factory: A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution (2003)
• Checkland, S. G. The Rise of Industrial Society in England, 1815-1885, 1964.
• de Vries, Jan. 1994. "The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution." Journal of Economic History 58.1: 249-270. in JSTOR
• Feinstein, Charles H. "Pessimism Perpetuated: Real Wages and the Standard of Living in Britain during and after the Industrial Revolution." Journal of Economic History 1998. 58.3: 625-658. in JSTOR
• Lindert, Peter H., and Jeffrey G. Williamson. "English Workers' Living Standards during the Industrial Revolution: A New Look," The Economic History Review, New Series, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Feb., 1983), pp. 1-25 in JSTOR
• Smelser, Neil J. Social Change in the Industrial Revolution: An Application of Theory to the British Cotton Industry;; (1959) online edition
• Snooks, Graeme Donald, ed. Was the Industrial Revolution Necessary? 1994. online edition
• Stearns, Peter N. The Industrial Revolution in World History (1998)
• Taylor, A. J. P. (ed.) The Standard of Living in Britain in the Industrial Revolution, 1975,
• Wrigley, E. A. Continuity, Chance, and Change: The Character of the Industrial Revolution in England. 1988.

See also

• Coal Mining: History
• Railway History
• Steel industry, history
• Textile industry, history