Causes and Effects of the Industrial Revolution Reading
The Industrial Revolution marked a period of development in the latter half of the 18th century that transformed largely rural, agrestal societies in Europe and America into industrialized, urban ones.
Goods that had once been painstakingly crafted past hand started to be produced in mass quantities past machines in factories, thank you to the introduction of new machines and techniques in textiles, iron making and other industries.
Fueled by the game-irresolute use of steam power, the Industrial Revolution began in Britain and spread to the balance of the world, including the Usa, past the 1830s and '40s. Modern historians oft refer to this period as the Outset Industrial Revolution, to gear up it apart from a 2d menstruum of industrialization that took place from the belatedly 19th to early 20th centuries and saw rapid advances in the steel, electric and automobile industries.
England: Birthplace of the Industrial Revolution
Thanks in part to its damp climate, ideal for raising sheep, Britain had a long history of producing textiles like wool, linen and cotton. But prior to the Industrial Revolution, the British textile business was a true "cottage industry," with the work performed in small workshops or fifty-fifty homes by individual spinners, weavers and dyers.
Starting in the mid-18th century, innovations like the flying shuttle, the spinning jenny, the water frame and the power loom made weaving fabric and spinning yarn and thread much easier. Producing cloth became faster and required less time and far less human labor.
More than efficient, mechanized production meant Britain's new textile factories could come across the growing need for cloth both at domicile and abroad, where the nation's many overseas colonies provided a convict market place for its goods. In addition to textiles, the British fe manufacture also adopted new innovations.
Primary among the new techniques was the smelting of iron ore with coke (a fabric made by heating coal) instead of the traditional charcoal. This method was both cheaper and produced college-quality material, enabling Britain's iron and steel production to expand in response to demand created by the Napoleonic Wars (1803-xv) and the afterwards growth of the railroad industry.
Bear on of Steam Ability
An icon of the Industrial Revolution broke onto the scene in the early 1700s, when Thomas Newcomen designed the paradigm for the commencement modern steam engine. Called the "atmospheric steam engine," Newcomen's invention was originally applied to power the machines used to pump water out of mine shafts.
In the 1760s, Scottish engineer James Watt began tinkering with 1 of Newcomen's models, adding a divide water condenser that made it far more efficient. Watt later collaborated with Matthew Boulton to invent a steam engine with a rotary motion, a key innovation that would allow steam power to spread across British industries, including flour, paper, and cotton mills, iron works, distilleries, waterworks and canals.
Just as steam engines needed coal, steam power allowed miners to go deeper and extract more of this relatively cheap energy source. The need for coal skyrocketed throughout the Industrial Revolution and across, as it would be needed to run not just the factories used to produce manufactured goods, but as well the railroads and steamships used for transporting them.
Transportation During the Industrial Revolution
Britain'south route network, which had been relatively primitive prior to industrialization, soon saw substantial improvements, and more than 2,000 miles of canals were in apply across Uk by 1815.
In the early 1800s, Richard Trevithick debuted a steam-powered locomotive, and in 1830 like locomotives started transporting freight (and passengers) between the industrial hubs of Manchester and Liverpool. By that time, steam-powered boats and ships were already in wide use, conveying goods along Britain's rivers and canals as well equally across the Atlantic.
Communication and Banking in the Industrial Revolution
The latter part of the Industrial Revolution also saw key advances in communication methods, as people increasingly saw the need to communicate efficiently over long distances. In 1837, British inventors William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone patented the offset commercial telegraphy arrangement, even as Samuel Morse and other inventors worked on their own versions in the United States. Cooke and Wheatstone's system would be used for railroad signalling, equally the speed of the new trains had created a demand for more sophisticated means of communication.
Banks and industrial financiers rose to new prominent during the menses, as well as a factory system dependent on owners and managers. A stock exchange was established in London in the 1770s; the New York Stock Exchange was founded in the early 1790s.
In 1776, Scottish social philosopher Adam Smith (1723-1790), who is regarded as the founder of modern economic science, published The Wealth of Nations. In it, Smith promoted an economic system based on gratis enterprise, the private ownership of means of production, and lack of government interference.
Working Conditions
Though many people in Britain had begun moving to the cities from rural areas before the Industrial Revolution, this process accelerated dramatically with industrialization, as the rise of large factories turned smaller towns into major cities over the span of decades. This rapid urbanization brought significant challenges, as overcrowded cities suffered from pollution, inadequate sanitation and a lack of clean drinking h2o.
Meanwhile, even as industrialization increased economic output overall and improved the standard of living for the middle and upper classes, poor and working course people connected to struggle. The mechanization of labor created by technological innovation had made working in factories increasingly ho-hum (and sometimes dangerous), and many workers were forced to work long hours for pitifully low wages. Such dramatic changes fueled opposition to industrialization, including the "Luddites," known for their tearing resistance to changes in U.k.'s textile industry.
In the decades to come, outrage over substandard working and living conditions would fuel the germination of labor unions, as well equally the passage of new child labor laws and public wellness regulations in both Britain and the Usa, all aimed at improving life for working class and poor citizens who had been negatively impacted by industrialization.
READ More: How the Industrial Revolution Gave Ascension to Violent 'Luddites'
The Industrial Revolution in the United States
The showtime of industrialization in the United States is usually pegged to the opening of a textile mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1793 by the recent English immigrant Samuel Slater. Slater had worked at i of the mills opened by Richard Arkwright (inventor of the water frame) mills, and despite laws prohibiting the emigration of cloth workers, he brought Arkwright'due south designs across the Atlantic. He subsequently built several other cotton wool mills in New England, and became known as the "Father of the American Industrial Revolution."
The U.s.a. followed its own path to industrialization, spurred by innovations "borrowed" from United kingdom as well every bit by homegrown inventors like Eli Whitney. Whitney's 1793 invention of the cotton gin revolutionized the nation's cotton industry (and strengthened the hold of slavery over the cotton wool-producing South).
READ More: How Slavery Became the Economic Engine of the Southward
Past the end of the 19th century, with the so-called 2d Industrial Revolution underway, the United States would besides transition from a largely agrarian gild to an increasingly urbanized one, with all the attendant problems. By the mid-19th century, industrialization was well-established throughout the western part of Europe and America's northeastern region. By the early 20th century, the U.S. had become the world'due south leading industrial nation.
Historians continue to debate many aspects of industrialization, including its exact timeline, why it began in Uk equally opposed to other parts of the world and the thought that it was actually more of a gradual evolution than a revolution. The positives and negatives of the Industrial Revolution are complex. On one hand, unsafe working conditions were rife and pollution from coal and gas are legacies we nonetheless struggle with today. On the other, the move to cities and inventions that made clothing, advice and transportation more than affordable and accessible to the masses changed the course of world history. Regardless of these questions, the Industrial Revolution had a transformative economic, social and cultural impact, and played an integral office in laying the foundations for modern society.
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Photo Galleries
Lewis Hine's Photographs Betrayal Child Labor
Industrial Inventions
Sources
Robert C. Allen, The Industrial Revolution: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007
Claire Hopley, "A History of the British Cotton Industry." British Heritage Travel, July 29, 2006
William Rosen, The Most Powerful Thought in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. New York: Random House, 2010
Gavin Weightman, The Industrial Revolutionaries: The Making of the Mod Earth, 1776-1914 . New York: Grove Press, 2007
Matthew White, "Georgian U.k.: The Industrial Revolution." British Library, October 14, 2009
Source: https://www.history.com/topics/industrial-revolution/industrial-revolution
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