The Industrial Revolution (1 jan 1780 ano – 1 jan 1830 ano)

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The Industrial Revolution was a boom in inventions and technical changes that started around 1780 in Great Britain and soon spread to continental Europe and the United States, while non-European nations began to industrialize after 1860. Industrialization significantly impacted work and daily life, and its profound influence is possibly only comparable with the Neolithic development of agriculture. The Industrial Revolution began a period of sustained economic and demographic growth that granted a higher standard of living for citizens.

The Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment fostered a new worldview that embraced progress and research, a worldview that laid the foundations for the revolution. Britain had a widespread intellectual culture, as well as abundant coal deposits, high wages, a relatively peaceful and centralized government, well-developed financial systems, an innovative culture, highly skilled craftsmen, and a strong position in empire and global trade. They successfully produced a surplus of woolen cloth, built a strong mercantilist colonial empire with their position in Latin America and in the transatlantic slave trade, and expanded trade with India and China. An increase in agricultural efficiency allowed the British to produce more food with a smaller workforce. They were second only to the Dutch in productivity and enjoyed a period of bountiful crops and low food prices. Thanks to the drop in prices, citizens were better able to buy manufactured goods and afford education. Britain also had rich natural resources and a well-developed infrastructure, and a canal-building boom enhanced the movement of iron and coal. They had strong incentives to develop technologies to use coal to increase productivity due to the abundance of the resource and their high wages. Parliament also taxed aggressively and adopted heavy tariffs on imported goods to protect its industries.

The introduction of machine power in factories in Britain was the first breakthrough that was responsible for a higher production of goods and a reduction of the labor costs of manufacturing. The putting-out system that spread across Europe resulted in an imbalance in textile production as spinners were often in search of thread to keep up with weavers, and pressure for new systems grew due to international competition.

James Hargreaves’ cotton-spinning jenny, a simple, inexpensive, hand-powered carriage with spindles that produced a fine thread that allowed women to out-work men; barber-turned-manufacturer Richard Arkwright’s (possibly pirated) water frame, which required as many as a thousand workers to produce a coarse thread along beside rivers; Samuel Crompton’s mule, which combined the best of the two; and the American Eli Whitney’s cotton gin vastly increased productivity. These methods were too expensive for the rest of Europe where wages were low and investment capital was scarce, but it allowed the British to compete successfully in international methods. Many people became weavers, whose attempts to keep up with spinners made them among the highest-earning workers in England. Edmund Cartwright eventually invented a power loom that began to replace handlooms around the 1820s.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, people relied on wood for energy. The iron industry used wood along with iron to create pig iron. As wood became scarce in Britain, they turned to coal, which they had been using for heat. The process of producing more coal was bothersome, and they began to favor steam power. Thomas Savery and Thomas Newcomen invented the first primitive steam engines around the turn of the 18th century.

In 1763, a Scottish craftsman named James Watt noticed that the Newcomen engine’s waste of energy could be mitigated by adding a separate condenser. A partnership with Matthew Boulton, a wealthy industrialist, granted Watt adequate capital and skills in salesmanship. He found mechanics who could install his engines, and by the late 1780s, the steam engine was a practical success. This was one of the most fundamental advances in technology during the Industrial Revolution and helped the cotton-spinning and iron industries.

Coke, a smokeless and hot-burning fuel produced by heating coal to rid it of water and other impurities, was adapted to smelt pig iron and greatly increased its production. Henry Cort developed the coke-fired puddling furnace (which involved “cooking” molten pig iron and raking off globs of refined iron for further processing) and steam-powered rolling mills, which created a boom in iron production. Iron thus became the cheap, basic, indispensable building block of the British economy.

After more supportive railways were developed in the early 1800s, experimentation with steam engines on rails began. Richard Trevithick built the first steam locomotive. George Stephenson’s Rocket could go down the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the first modern railroad, at 35 miles per hour without a load. More railroads were built after commercial success, and other countries followed suit.

Railroads reduced the cost and uncertainty of shipping freight over land. Since it lowered transportation costs, markets became larger and encouraged larger factories with more sophisticated machinery, which could make goods more cheaply and subjected cottage workers and urban artisans to severe competitive pressures. The growth of railroads created a growth of a class of urban workers as the demand for unskilled labor increased. The steam engine also transformed water travel, as steamships brought speed, reliability, and efficiency to water commerce.

By 1860, Britain produced 20% of the world’s output of industrial goods (compared to only 2% in 1750. It produced ⅔ of the world’s coal and over half of all iron and cotton cloth. They held the Great Exhibition in their Crystal Palace that showed off their industry and inventions and was attended by around 6 million people. Both the GNP and population grew. Population growth allowed a more mobile workforce, but some contemporaries feared the implications. Thomas Malthus wrote Essay on the Principle of Population and concluded that the only way to ward off famine, disease, etc. was men and women marrying later in life. David Ricardo’s iron law of wages proposed that over time, wages would always sink to subsistence level because of population growth. They were eventually proved wrong when the latter half of the 1800s saw even more improvement in productivity, but their worries persisted in their time.

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