First Industrial Revolution
A Watt steam engine in Madrid. The development of the steam engine propelled the Industrial Revolution in Britain. The steam engine was created to pump water from coal mines, enabling them to be deepened beyond groundwater levels.
The Industrial Revolution was the major shift of technological, socioeconomic and cultural conditions in the late 18th and early 19th century that began in Britain and spread throughout the world. During that time, an economy based on manual labour was replaced by one dominated by industry and the manufacture of machinery. It began with the mechanisation of the textile industries and the development of iron-making techniques, and trade expansion was enabled by the introduction of canals, improved roads and then railways. The introduction of steam power (fuelled primarily by coal) and powered machinery (mainly in textile manufacturing) underpinned the dramatic increases in production capacity. The development of all-metal machine tools in the first two decades of the 19th century facilitated the manufacture of more production machines for manufacturing in other industries.
The period of time covered by the Industrial Revolution varies with different historians. Eric Hobsbawm held that it 'broke out' in the 1780s and was not fully felt until the 1830s or 1840s, while T.S. Ashton held that it occurred roughly between 1760 and 1830 (in effect the reigns of George III, The Regency, and George IV). The effects spread throughout Western Europe and North America during the 19th century, eventually affecting most of the world. The impact of this change on society was enormous and is often compared to the Neolithic revolution, when various human subgroups embraced agriculture and in the process, forswore the nomadic lifestyle. The first Industrial Revolution merged into the Second Industrial Revolution around 1850, when technological and economic progress gained momentum with the development of steam-powered ships, railways, and later in the nineteenth century with the internal combustion engine and electrical power generation. At the turn of the century, innovator Henry Ford, father of the assembly line, stated, "There is but one rule for the industrialist, and that is: Make the highest quality goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible."
It has been argued that GDP per capita was much more stable and progressed at a much slower rate until the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of the modern capitalist economy, and that it has since increased rapidly in capitalist countries.
The idea and the name
The term 'Industrial Revolution' applied to technological change was common in the 1830s. Louis-Auguste Blanqui in 1837 spoke of la révolution industrielle. Friedrich Engels in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 spoke of "an industrial revolution, a revolution which at the same time changed the whole of civil society".
The radical nature of the process had been noted before that, in his book Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society Raymond Williams states in the entry for Industry: The idea of a new social order based on major industrial change was clear in Southey and Owen, between 1811 and 1818, and was implicit as early as Blake in the early 1790s and Wordsworth at the turn of the century. Credit for popularising the term may be given to Arnold Toynbee, whose lectures given in 1881 gave a detailed account of the process.
Causes
The causes of the Industrial Revolution were complex and remain a topic for debate, with some historians seeing the Revolution as an outgrowth of social and institutional changes brought by the end of feudalism in Britain after the English Civil War in the 17th century. As national border controls became more effective, the spread of disease was lessened, therefore preventing the epidemics common in previous times. The percentage of children who lived past infancy rose significantly, leading to a larger workforce. The Enclosure movement and the British Agricultural Revolution made food production more efficient and less labour-intensive, encouraging the surplus population who could no longer find employment in agriculture into cottage industry, for example weaving, and in the longer term into the cities and the newly-developed factories. The colonial expansion of the 17th century with the accompanying development of international trade, creation of financial markets and accumulation of capital are also cited as factors, as is the scientific revolution of the 17th century.
Technological innovation protected by patents (by the Statute of Monopolies 1623) was, of course, at the heart of it and the key enabling technology was the invention and improvement of the steam engine. The presence of a large domestic market should also be considered an important driver of the Industrial Revolution, particularly explaining why it occurred in Britain. In other nations, such as France, markets were split up by local regions, which often imposed tolls and tariffs on goods traded amongst them.
Causes for occurrence in Europe
One question of active interest to historians is why the Industrial Revolution started in 18th century Europe and not other times like in Ancient Greece, which already had developed a primitive steam engine, and other parts of the world in the 18th century, particularly China and India. Numerous factors have been suggested, including ecology, government, and culture. Benjamin Elman argues that China was in a high level equilibrium trap in which the non-industrial methods were efficient enough to prevent use of industrial methods with high costs of capital. Kenneth Pomeranz, in the Great Divergence, argues that Europe and China were remarkably similar in 1700, and that the crucial differences which created the Industrial Revolution in Europe were sources of coal near manufacturing centres, and raw materials such as food and wood from the New World, which allowed Europe to expand economically in a way that China could not.
However, modern estimates of per capita income in Western Europe in the late 18th century are of roughly 1,500 dollars in purchasing power parity (and Britain had a per capita income of nearly 2,000 dollars ) whereas China, by comparison, had only 450 dollars. Also, the average interest rate was about 5% in Britain and over 30% in China, which illustrates how capital was much more abundant in Britain; capital that was available for investment. Some historians credit the different belief systems in China and Europe with dictating where the revolution occurred. The religion and beliefs of Europe were largely products of Judaeo-Christianity, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Conversely, Chinese society was founded on men like Confucius, Mencius, Han Feizi (Legalism), Lao Tzu (Taoism), and Buddha (Buddhism). The key difference between these belief systems was that those from Europe focused on the individual, while Chinese beliefs centred around relationships between people. The family unit was more important than the individual for the large majority of Chinese history, and this may have played a role in why the Industrial Revolution took much longer to occur in China. There was the additional difference as to whether people looked backwards to a reputedly glorious past for answers to their questions or looked hopefully to the future. Furthermore, Western European peoples had experienced the Renaissance and Reformation; other parts of the world had not had a similar intellectual breakout, a condition that holds true even into the 21st century.
In India, the noted historian Rajni Palme Dutt has been quoted as saying, "The capital to finance the Industrial Revolution in India instead went into financing the Industrial Revolution in England." In direct contrast to China, India was split up into many different kingdoms all fighting for supremacy, with the three major ones being the Marathas, Sikhs and the Mughals. In addition, the economy was highly dependent on two sectors—agriculture of subsistence and cotton, and technical innovation was non-existent. The vast amounts of wealth were stored away in palace treasuries, and as such, were easily moved to Britain.
Causes for occurrence in Britain
Coalbrookdale at night, 1801 :
Artist: Philipp Jakob Loutherbourg the Younger
The debate about the start of the Industrial Revolution also concerns the massive lead that Britain had over other countries. Some have stressed the importance of natural or financial resources that Britain received from its many overseas colonies or that profits from the British slave trade ( Atlantic slave trade ) between Africa and the Caribbean helped fuel industrial investment. It has been pointed out however that slavery provided only 5% of the British national income during the years of the Industrial Revolution. Alternatively, the greater liberalisation of trade from a large merchant base may have allowed Britain to produce and utilise emerging scientific and technological developments more effectively than countries with stronger monarchies, particularly China and Russia. Britain emerged from the Napoleonic Wars as the only European nation not ravaged by financial plunder and economic collapse, and possessing the only merchant fleet of any useful size (European merchant fleets having been destroyed during the war by the Royal Navy). Britain's extensive exporting cottage industries also ensured markets were already available for many early forms of manufactured goods. The conflict resulted in most British warfare being conducted overseas, reducing the devastating effects of territorial conquest that affected much of Europe. This was further aided by Britain's geographical position— an island separated from the rest of mainland Europe.
Another theory is that Britain was able to succeed in the Industrial Revolution due to the availability of key resources it possessed. It had a dense population for its small geographical size. Enclosure of common land and the related Agricultural Revolution made a supply of this labour readily available. There was also a local coincidence of natural resources in the North of England, the English Midlands, South Wales and the Scottish Lowlands. Local supplies of coal, iron, lead, copper, tin, limestone and water power, resulted in excellent conditions for the development and expansion of industry. The stable political situation in Britain from around 1688, and British society's greater receptiveness to change (when compared with other European countries) can also be said to be factors favouring the Industrial Revolution.
Protestant work ethic
Another theory is that the British advance was due to the presence of an entrepreneurial class which believed in progress, technology and hard work. The existence of this class is often linked to the Protestant work ethic (see Max Weber) and the particular status of dissenting Protestant sects, such as the Quakers, Baptists and Presbyterians that had flourished with the English Civil War. Reinforcement of confidence in the rule of law, which followed establishment of the prototype of constitutional monarchy in Britain in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and the emergence of a stable financial market there based on the management of the national debt by the Bank of England, contributed to the capacity for, and interest in, private financial investment in industrial ventures.
Dissenters found themselves barred or discouraged from almost all public offices, as well as education at England's only two Universities at the time, Oxford and Cambridge (although dissenters were still free to study at Scotland's four universities). When the restoration of the monarchy took place and membership in the official Anglican church became mandatory due to the Test Act, they thereupon became active in banking, manufacturing and education. The Unitarians, in particular, were very involved in education, by running Dissenting Academies, where, in contrast to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge and schools such as Eton and Harrow, much attention was given to mathematics and the sciences—areas of scholarship vital to the development of manufacturing technologies.
Historians sometimes consider this social factor to be extremely important, along with the nature of the national economies involved. While members of these sects were excluded from certain circles of the government, they were considered fellow Protestants, to a limited extent, by many in the middle class, such as traditional financiers or other businessmen. Given this relative tolerance and the supply of capital, the natural outlet for the more enterprising members of these sects would be to seek new opportunities in the technologies created in the wake of the Scientific revolution of the 17th century.
Lunar Society
The work ethic argument has, on the whole, tended to neglect the fact that several inventors and entrepreneurs were rational free thinkers or "Philosophers" typical of a specific class of British intellectuals in the late 18th century, and were by no means normal church goers or members of religious sects. Examples of these free thinkers were the Lunar Society of Birmingham which flourished from 1765 to 1809. Its members were exceptional in that they were among the very few who were conscious that an industrial revolution was then taking place in Britain. They actively worked as a group to encourage it, not least by investing in it and conducting scientific experiments which led to innovative products such as the invention of commercial gas lighting and turning the steam engine into the powerplant of the Industrial era.
Innovations
The invention of the steam engine was the most important innovation of the Industrial Revolution. James Watt, later to be a member of the Lunar Society, developed the idea of using steam to power machines into a practicality thus enabling rapid development of efficient semi-automated factories on a previously unimaginable scale. This was applied to all aspects of industry and engineering. Earlier improvements in iron smelting and metal working based on the use of coke rather than charcoal allowed Watt and others before him to exploit the possibilities of using steam as a form of power. Earlier in the 18th century, the textile industry had harnessed water power to drive improved spinning machines and looms. These textile mills became the model for the organisation of human labour in factories, epitomised by Cottonopolis the name given to the vast collection of mills, factories and administration offices based in Manchester.
Besides the innovation of machinery in factories, the assembly line greatly improved efficiency too. With a series of men trained to do a single task on a product, then having it moved along to the next worker, the number of finished goods also rose significantly.
Transmission of innovation
Knowledge of new innovation was spread by several means. Workers who were trained in the technique might move to another employer, or might be poached. A common method was for someone to make a study tour, gathering information where he could. During the whole of the Industrial Revolution and for the century before, all European countries and America engaged in study-touring; some nations, like Sweden and France, even trained civil servants or technicians to undertake it as a matter of state policy. In other countries, notably Britain and America, this practice was carried out by individual manufacturers anxious to improve their own methods. Study tours were common then, as now, as was the keeping of travel diaries. Records made by industrialists and technicians of the period are an incomparable source of information about their methods.
Another means for the spread of innovation was by the network of informal philosophical societies like the Lunar Society of Birmingham, in which members met to discuss science and often its application to manufacturing. Some of these societies published volumes of proceedings and transactions, and the London-based Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce or, more commonly, Society of Arts published an illustrated volume of new inventions, as well as papers about them in its annual Transactions. There were publications describing technology. Encyclopedias such as Harris's Lexicon technicum (1704) and Dr Abraham Rees's Cyclopaedia (1802-1819) contain much of value. Rees's Cyclopaedia contains an enormous amount of information about the science and technology of the first half of the Industrial Revolution, very well illustrated by fine engravings. Foreign printed sources such as the Descriptions des Arts et Métiers and Diderot's Encyclopédie explained foreign methods with fine engraved plates. Periodical publications about manufacturing and technology began to appear in the last decade of the 18th century, and a number regularly included notice of the latest patents. Foreign periodicals, such as the Annales des Mines, published accounts of travels made by French engineers who observed British methods on study tours.
Industry (Mining)
Coal mining in Britain, particularly in South Wales started early. Before the steam engine, pits were often shallow bell pits following a seam of coal along the surface and being abandoned as the coal was extracted. In other cases, if the geology was favourable, the coal was mined by means of an adit driven into the side of a hill. Shaft mining was done in some areas, but the limiting factor was the problem of removing water. It could be done by hauling buckets of water up the shaft or to a sough, a tunnel driven into a hill to drain a mine. In either case, the water had to be discharged into a stream or ditch at level where it could flow away by gravity. The introduction of the steam engine greatly facilitated the removal of water and enabled shafts to be made deeper, enabling more mineral to be extracted. These were developments that had begun before the Industrial Revolution, but the adoption of James Watt's more efficient steam engine with its separate condenser from the 1770s reduced the fuel costs of engines, making mines more profitable particularly in areas (such as Cornwall), where coal does not occur.
Metallurgy
The major change in the metal industries during the era of the Industrial Revolution was the replacement of organic fuels based on wood with fossil fuel based on coal. Much of this happened somewhat before the Industrial Revolution, based on innovations by Sir Clement Clerke and others from 1678, using coal reverberatory furnaces known as cupolas. These were operated by the flames, which contained carbon monoxide, playing on the ore and reducing the oxide to metal. This has the advantage that impurities (such as sulfur) in the coal do not migrate into the metal. This technology was applied to lead from 1678 and to copper from 1687.
Reverberatory Furnace
It was also applied to iron foundry work in the 1690s, but in this case the reverberatory furnace was known as an air furnace. The foundry cupola is a different (and later) innovation. This was followed by the first Abraham Darby, who made great strides using coke to fuel his blast furnaces at Coalbrookdale (1709). However, the coke pig iron he made was largely only used for the production of cast iron goods such as pots and kettles. In this, he had an advantage over his rivals in that his pots, cast by his patented process, were thinner and hence cheaper than those of his rivals. Coke pig iron was hardly used to produce bar iron in forges until the mid 1750s when his son Abraham Darby II built Horsehay and Ketley furnaces (not far from Coalbrookdale). By this time, coke pig iron was cheaper than charcoal pig iron. Throughout this period, bar iron for smiths to forge into consumer goods was still made in finery forges, as it long had been. However, new processes were adopted in the ensuing years. The first is referred to today as potting and stamping, but this was superseded by Henry Cort's puddling process. From 1785, perhaps because the improved version of potting and stamping was about to come out of patent, a great expansion in the output of the British iron industry began. The new processes did not depend on the use of charcoal at all, and were therefore not limited by the speed at which trees grow. Up to that time, British iron manufacturers had used considerable amounts of imported iron to supplement native supplies. This came principally from Sweden from the mid 17th century and later also from Russia from the end of the 1720s. However, from 1785, imports decreased because of the new iron making technology, and Britain became an exporter of bar iron as well as manufactured wrought iron consumer goods. Cheaper and more plentiful iron also allowed it to become became a major structural material following the building of the innovative Iron Bridge in 1778 by Abraham Darby III.
An improvement was also made in the production of steel, which was an expensive commodity and used only where iron would not do, such as for the cutting edge of tools and for springs. Benjamin Huntsman developed his crucible steel technique in the 1740s. The raw material for this was blister steel, made by the cementation process. The supply of cheaper iron and steel aided the development of boilers and steam engines, and eventually railways. Improvements in machine tools allowed better working of iron and steel and further boosted the industrial growth of Britain.
Chemicals
The large scale production of chemicals was an important development during the Industrial Revolution. The first of these was the production of sulfuric acid by the lead chamber process invented by the Englishman John Roebuck (James Watts first partner) in 1746. He was able to greatly increase the scale of the manufacture by replacing the relatively expensive glass vessels formerly used with larger, less expensive chambers made of riveted sheets of lead. Instead of a few pounds at a time, he was able to make a hundred pounds or so at a time in each of the chambers.
The production of an alkali on a large scale became an important goal as well, and a Frenchman, Nicolas Leblanc, succeeded in 1791 in introducing a method for the production of sodium carbonate. The Leblanc process was done by reacting sulfuric acid to sodium chloride to give sodium sulfate and hydrochloric acid. The sodium sulfate was heated with limestone (calcium carbonate) and coal to give a mixture of sodium carbonate and calcium sulfide. Addition of it to water separated the soluble sodium carbonate from the calcium sulfide. The process produced a large amount of pollution (the hydrochloric acid was initially vented to the air, and calcium sulfide was a useless waste product) but proved economical over the previous method of deriving it from wood ashes, barilla, or kelp. These two chemicals were very important in that they enabled the introduction of a host of other inventions, replacing many small-scale operations with more cost-effective and controllable processes. Sodium carbonate saw many uses in the glass, textile, soap, and paper industries. Early uses for sulfuric acid included pickling (removing rust) iron and steel, and as a bleach for cloth. The development of bleaching powder (calcium hypochlorite) by Scottish chemist Charles Tennant in about 1800, based on the discoveries of French chemist Claude Louis Berthollet, revolutionized the bleaching processes in the textile industry by dramatically reducing the time required (from months to days) for the traditional process then in use, which required repeated exposure to the sun in bleach fields after soaking the textiles with alkali or sour milk. Tennant's factory at St. Rollox, North Glasgow became the largest chemical plant in the world at that time.
Steam power
Newcomen's atmospheric steam engine
The first successful machine was the atmospheric engine, a low performance steam engine invented by Thomas Newcomen in 1712. Newcomen apparently conceived his machine quite independently of Savery. His engines used a piston and cylinder, and operated with steam just above atmospheric pressure which was used to produce a partial vacuum in the cylinder when condensed by jets of cold water. The vacuum sucked a piston into the cylinder which moved under pressure from the atmosphere. The engine produced a succession of power strokes which could work a pump, but could not drive a rotating wheel. They were successfully put to use for pumping out mines in Britain, with the engine on the surface working a pump at the bottom of the mine by a long connecting rod. These were large machines, requiring a lot of capital to build, but produced about 5 hp. They were inefficient, but when located where coal was cheap at pit heads, they were usefully employed in pumping water from mines. They opened up a great expansion in coal mining by allowing mines to go deeper. Despite being fuel hungry, Newcomen engines continued to be used in the coalfields until the early decades of the nineteenth century as they were reliable and easy to maintain.
By 1729, when Newcomen died, his engines had spread to France, Germany, Austria, Hungary and Sweden. A total of 110 are known to have been built by 1733 when the patent expired of which 14 were abroad. According to Rolt and Allen, p 145, (see below) a grand total of 1454 engines had been built by 1800. Its working was fundamentally unchanged until James Watt succeeded, in 1769, in making his Watt steam engine which incorporated a series of improvements, especially the separate steam condenser chamber. This improved engine efficiency by about a factor of five saving 75% on coal costs. The Watt steam engine's ability to drive rotary machinery also meant it could be used to drive a factory or mill directly. They were commercially very successful and, by 1800, the firm Boulton & Watt had constructed 496 engines, with 164 acting as pumps, 24 serving blast furnaces, and 308 to power mill machinery. Most of the engines generated between 5 to 10 horsepower.
The development of machine tools, such as the lathe, planing and shaping machines powered by these engines, enabled all the metal parts of the engines to be easily and accurately cut and, in turn, made it possible to build larger and more powerful engines. Until about 1800, the most common pattern of steam engine was the beam engine, which was built within a stone or brick engine-house but around that time various patterns of portable (i.e. readily removable engines, but not on wheels) were developed, such as the table engine. Richard Trevithick, a Cornish blacksmith, began to use high pressure steam with improved boilers in 1799. This allowed engines to be compact enough to be used on mobile road and rail locomotives and steam boats. The further development of the steam engine in the early 19th century after the expiration of Watt's patent saw many improvements by a host of inventors and engineers.
Textile manufacture
In the early 18th century, British textile manufacture was based on wool which was processed by individual artisans, doing the spinning and weaving on their own premises. This system is called a cottage industry. Flax and cotton were also used for fine materials, but the processing was difficult because of the pre-processing needed, and thus goods in these materials made only a small proportion of the output. Use of the spinning wheel and hand loom restricted the production capacity of the industry, but a number of incremental advances increased productivity to the extent that manufactured cotton goods became the dominant British export by the early decades of the 19th century. India was displaced as the premier supplier of cotton goods.
Model of the spinning jenny in a museum in Wuppertal, Germany. The spinning jenny was one of the innovations that started the revolution.
Lewis Paul and John Wyatt of Birmingham, patented the Roller Spinning machine and the flyer-and-bobbin system, for drawing Wool to a more even thickness, later Paul and Wyatt opened a mill in Birmingham which used their new rolling machine powered by the humble Donkey. In 1743, a factory was opened in Northampton, fifty spindles turned on five of Paul and Wyatt's machines proving more successful than their first Mill; this operated until 1764. Lewis Paul also invented the hand driven carding machine. Using two sets of rollers that travelled at different speeds this was later to be used in the first Cotton spinning Mill, Lewis's invention was later developed and improved by Richard Arkwright and Samuel Crompton, although this came about under great suspicion after a fire at Daniel Bourn's factory in Leominster which specifically used Paul and Wyatt's spindles. Borne produced a similar patent in the same year. Step by step, other inventors increased the efficiency of the individual steps of spinning ( carding, twisting and spinning, and subsequently rolling) so that the supply of yarn fed a weaving industry that itself was advancing with improvements to shuttles and the loom or 'frame'. The output of an individual labourer increased dramatically, with the effect that these new machines were seen as a threat to employment, and early innovators were attacked and their inventions were destroyed. The inventors often failed to exploit their inventions, and fell on hard times.
To capitalize upon these advances, it took a class of entrepreneurs, of which the most famous is Richard Arkwright. He is credited with a list of inventions, but these were actually developed by people such as Thomas Highs and John Kay; Arkwright nurtured the inventors, patented the ideas, financed the initiatives, and protected the machines. He created the cotton mill which brought the production processes together in a factory, and he developed the use of power – first horse power, then water power and finally steam power – which made cotton manufacture a mechanized industry.
See Also: Ancient History | Prominent Civilisations| Big ERA I | Big ERA II | Time in History | Eurasia| Industrial Revolution II| Scientific Revolution Go To:
Salauddine Mohammed Faruque on July 25,2007, last updated on 12.10.2007