The Industrial Revolution

Overview

The process of industrialisation is a turning point in world history. Historians have attributed industrialisation with a significance similar to that of the settlement of humans in the Neolithic period (Neolithic Revolution), Between 1750/60 and the first decades of the 20th century, industrial capitalist systems developed in large parts of Europe and North America, The Industrial Revolution - and the resulting Industrialisation - is a fundamental economic, technical and social transformation; a process that unfolded and still unfolds differently in different industries, regions and nations.

Periods

1750-1850

1830-1890

1890-1945

Since 1945

The first Industrial Revolution starts in Great Britain

The Industrial Revolution spreads in Western and Central Europe (E.g. Switzerland).

The second Industrial Revolution based on chemicals, electricity and the automotive industry.

Third Industrial Revolution: Use of nuclear power and new materials such as microchips.

1. Cause of the Industrial Revolution or Why was did it start in Great Britain?

1.1 The Agricultural Revolution paves the way

A: After buying up the land of village farmers, wealthy landowners enclosed their land with fences or hedges. The Increase in their landholdings enabled them to cultivate larger flelds. Within these larger fields, called enclosures, landowners experimented with more productive seeding and harvesting methods to boost crop yields. The enclosure movement had two Important results. First, landowners tried new agricultural methods. Second, large landowners forced small farmers to become tenant farmers or to give up farming and move to the cities.

Up to the middle of the 18th century most of the land in England was cultivated in the open field-system. At ploughing time, the poorer farmers put their oxen together to make up a team of six or eight oxen which dragged the heavy wooden plough through the soll. So the villagers worked together.

But the open field-system had a number of drawbacks and more and more landowners adopted the Idea of enclosure,

Hoite lock

«quettes celfeger

woodlend

M: big landowner (Lord of the Manor)

A, B, C etc: small landowners

The picture above shows a village before enclosure and on the left after enclosure.

From the 13th century onwards increasingly land-owners adopted the idea of enclosure.

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B: Jethro Tull was one of the first of these scientific farmers. He saw that the usual way of sowing seed by scattering it across the ground was wasteful.

Many seeds failed to take root. He solved this problem with an invention called the seed drill in about 1701. It allowed farmers to sow seeds in well-spaced rows at specific depths. A larger share of the seeds took root, boosting crop

An English farmer plants his fields in the early 1700s using a seed drill.

C: Crop-rotation

Enclosure was not the only change to take place in farming. In the Middle Ages the three field-system had been introduced. It replaced the simpler two-field system which worked by growing corn in one field and allow. ing the second field to lie fallow, ie. not growing anything in order to restore the goodness to the soil again.

The three field-system was an improvement, but still, every second or third year, one field was fallow land, as cereals like wheat and barley need rich soil.

The growing number of people living in bigger towns weren't able to produce their own food and had to rely on higher output and productivity from the farms. A new crop rotation system promised better results.

Turnips restore nutrients to the soil and provide winter food for animals.

Wheat takes nutrients from the soil.

Barley, needs rich soil.

Clover testores nutrients; cows and sheep grazing produce manure, which fertilizes

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D: Livestock breeders improved their methods too. In the 1700s, for example, Robert Bakewell increased his mutton (sheep meat) output by allowing only his best sheep to breed. Other farmers followed Bakewell's lead. Between 1700 and 1786, the average weight for lambs climbed from 18 to 50 pounds. As food supplies increased and living conditions improved, England's population mushroomed. An increasing population boosted the demand for food and goods such as cioth. As farmers lost their land to large enclosed farms, many became factory workers.

1710 370lbs

1710 28 lbs

1795 800 lbs

Increase in the weight of cattle

1795 60 lbs

Increase in the weight of sheep

Terminology

common land = land owned collectively by a number of persons, or by

one person, but over which other people have certain traditional rights, such as to allow their livestock to graze upon it, to collect wood, or to cut turf for fuel.

Yield = Output / how much you can harvest

fallow land = land that is not in use

crop = plant that can be grown and harvested extensively for profit or

subsistence (e.g. rice, wheat)

1 pound (abbreviated Ibs) = 0.454 kilograms (today)

Useful language

to divide a field up into strips to rotate

to keep cattle / sheep / pig on a crop of

to grow barley / wheat

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Initiated by the growing need for raw materials, the development of steam Dower set off a chain reaction. In order to pump pit water out of mines, steam engines were built near mining sites. Because these steam engines were powered by coal, coal mining became profitable-a mutually beneficial system.

Steam power became the energy source for many machines and vehicles, making it cheaper and easier to produce commodities in large amounts. This in turn increased the demand for raw materials used to build more machines that can produce even more commodities. This interdependency accelerated during the Industrial Revolution.

Steam could also propel boats: An American inventor named Robert Fulton ordered a steam engine from Boulton and Watt. He built a steamboat called the Clermont, which made its first successful trip in 1807. The Clermont later ferried passengers up and down New York's Hudson River. In England, water transportation improved with the creation of a network of canals, or human-made waterways.

By the mid-1800s, 4,250 miles of inland channels slashed the cost of transporting both raw materials and finished goods.

2.3 The railway age begins

In 1804, an English engineer named Richard Trevithick won a bet of seve thousand dollars. He did this by hauling ten tons of iron over nearly ten mi of track in a steam-driven locomotive. Other British engineers soon built i proved versions of Trevithick's locomotive. One of these early railroad en neers was George Stephenson. In 1825, the railroad opened using four lo motives that Stephenson had designed and built and in 1830 the Liverp Manchester Railway opened served by the Rocket, a locomotive designed Stephenson and his son. The locomotive hauled a 13-ton load at an unhea of speed - more than 24miles per hour.

British roads improved too, thanks largely to the efforts of John McAdar Scottish engineer. Working in the early 1800s, McAdam equipped gamma layer of large stones for drainage. On top, he placed a care smoothed layer of crushed rock. Even in rainy weather, heavy wagons c travel over the new "macadam" roads without sinking in mud. Private in tors formed companies that built roads and then operated them for p People called the new roads turnpikes because travellers had to stop at gates (turnstiles or turnpikes) to pay tolls before traveling farther.

2. Inventions spur Industrialisation

2.1 Changes in the textile industry

In an explosion of creativity, inventions now revolutionized industry. Britain's textile industry clothed the world in wool, linen, and cotton. This industry was the first to be transformed. Cloth merchants boosted their profits by speeding up the process by which spinners and weavers made cloth.

By 1800, several major inventions had modernized the cotton industry. One invention led to another. In 1733, a machinist named John Kay made a shuttle that sped back and forth on wheels. This flying shuttle doubled the work a weaver could do in a day. Because spinners could not keep up with these speedy weavers, a cash prize attracted contestants to produce a better spinning machine. Around 1764, a textile worker named James Hargreaves invented a spinning wheel, which allowed one spinner to work eight threads at a time.

At first, textile workers operated the flying shuttle and the spinning jenny by hand. Then, Richard Arkwright invented the water frame in 1769. This machine used the waterpower from rapid streams to drive spinning wheels. In 1779, Samuel Crompton combined features of the spinning jenny and the water frame to produce the spinning mule. The spinning mule made thread that was stronger, finer, and more consistent than earlier spinning machines.

The water frame, the spinning mule, and the power loom were bulky and expensive machines. They took the work of spinning and weaving out of the house. Wealthy textile merchants set up the machines in large buildings called factories. Factories needed waterpower, so the first ones were built near rivers and streams.

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2.2 Power source and steam engine

Progress in the textile industry spurred other industrial improvements. The first such development, the steam engine, stemmed from the search for a cheap, convenient source of power.

Before the steam engine, if you wanted to generate useful motion-to grind wheat, to saw logs, to pump water-you had to rely on natural forces. You could harness wind or water with mills. Or you could use muscle power-from domesticated animals, or your own. But all these sources of energy, by them-selves, have serious limitations. Wind and water are not portable: you have to go where they are, and their energy cannot be used elsewhere. Wind, es-pecially, is unreliable: the wind blows when it wants to, and you can't turn it on or off. And all of them are limited: you can't make the river stronger, or design a more efficient horse.

The significance of the steam engine is that it was a way to turn heat into motion. With this ingenious device, one could now use fuel instead of wind, water or muscle power.

Fuel can be transported, so engines can operate anywhere. Fuel can be burned at any time and can be started and stopped at will. If you need more energy, you can use more fuel-as much as you can afford. And through mechanical innovations, we can improve the efficiency and the power of engines.

So the steam engine solved all of the problems with natural forces at once.

As early as 1705, coal miners were using steam-powered pumps, such as the Newcome atmospheric engine by Thomas Newcome, to remove water from deep mine shafts. However, this early model of a steam engine gobbled great quantities of fuel, making it expensive to run.

James Watt, a mathematical instrument maker at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, thought about the problem for two years. In 1765, Watt figured out a way to make the steam engine work faster and more efficiently while burning less fuel and over several improvements the famous steam engine

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