Industrial Revolution and machine power

Summary: The Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe and the United States led to a shift from traditional power sources to machine power, fueled mainly by coal-fired steam engines. It also saw increases in the scale of manufacturing production.

There is no universal agreement about the dates or extent of the Industrial Revolution, although clearly the word revolution is a misnomer, because the Industrial Revolution took place over many decades and occurred at different times in different places. The most common use of the term is to refer specifically to the first phase of European industrialization, starting in Britain in the 1730s and lasting until about 1820. Others limit it to a narrower period from the 1740s to the 1780s and characterize the following decades (until about 1820) as a period of geographical expansion of manufacturing and a consolidation and standardization of technological processes.

Still others recognize a “Second Industrial Revolution” in Germany and the United States from the 1870s until the outbreak of World War I in 1914, when specialization in steel production, along with universal education and new management techniques and systems, propelled these countries into global leadership in industrial production. For former European colonies in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia, industrialization occurred much later, well into the 20th century; thus, in a sense, these countries are still experiencing industrial revolutions of their own.

Historians have pointed to several explanations for why the Industrial Revolution began in Britain: Britain’s place in the global economy in the early 1700s; the availability of natural resources in the British Isles, such as coal and iron ore; an intellectual climate that fostered practical engineering and innovation in machine technology; relatively high wage levels that made it desirable for factory owners to substitute machines for human labor; existing transportation and financial infrastructures suitable for adaptation to the economies of scale enabled by machine-based manufacturing; and a relatively well-educated surplus pool of labor that was available to work in the new factory system.

First, in the early 1700s, Britain was already a major trading power in the world. Raw materials flowed into British ports from its far-flung colonies, including fur, lumber, and cotton from North America; sugar (in the form of molasses) from the West Indies; and cotton from the Indian subcontinent. This global presence helped to create a new merchant class that was looking to invest its profits to generate additional capital. Moreover, Britain’s island location meant that it was relatively isolated from wars on the European continent and the disruptions to industry and trade that such conflicts caused.

Second, Britain had ample raw materials for industrializing and expanding textile manufacture, in the form of wool from sheep and cotton from its colonies overseas. It also produced wrought-iron tools for agriculture and industry, using readily available iron ore, charcoal (a reducing agent made from burning wood), and the power of swiftly running streams to run the hammers and bellows on forges. These resources were located close to densely populated areas, making it efficient to transport them to sites where industrial production could take place.

However, timber began to grow scarce: British forests had been cleared for agriculture, burned for heating and cooking fuel, harvested for the production of charcoal, and cut for lumber for building construction. Thus iron makers turned to coal, which could be burned to produce coke, another reducing agent in the iron-making process. Fortunately, British coal ore was low in phosphorus, which allowed higher-strength iron (and later, steel) to be developed.

Third, practical inventions, such as the spinning jenny, cotton gin, and above all the steam engine, enabled raw materials to be processed more efficiently, and in larger quantities. Continued refinements and improvements of these inventions by a range of British and European scientists, tinkerers, and engineers allowed development of even safer, more fuel-efficient machines.

Fourth, wage levels for workers were high, relative to other countries in Europe. Workers were more likely to have the means to purchase manufactured goods in Britain than elsewhere. This increased the demand for manufactured goods but also provided the impetus for owners of craft industries to seek ways in which machine power could substitute for human labor, thereby reducing production costs and increasing profits.

Fifth, Britain had an existing craft industry system in which linkages between producers of raw materials, intermediate manufactured products (such as yarn in textiles), and finished goods were well developed. These producers were also connected through a comprehensive barge/canal transportation network, making it convenient and cost-effective to move goods to local markets and to port cities for export. Thus, the British were well positioned to seek greater efficiency in using those new machines and types of production to make greater-value goods that could be sold both domestically and on international markets.

Last, improvements in agricultural technology and knowledge of farming led to greater efficiency in production of food and fiber crops, freeing rural workers for other kinds of work. This led to mass migrations to the new industrial cities, where wage labor (payment by the piece or by the hour) was the norm. Cities like Manchester and Birmingham experienced enormous population growth as rural inhabitants streamed into these new manufacturing centers seeking work. This population was relatively well educated and receptive to the disciplines of the factory system, where production was governed by the clock rather than the rhythms of the day and seasons.

Though the Industrial Revolution was beneficial for much of society, it was not without drawbacks. Prior to the industrial revolution, it was commonplace for married couples and their children to work together on a farm or in a shop. As factory work grew in prevalance, many workers shifted from family-based employment to travelling to industrial hubs. This significantly changed family dynamics, reducing the time that families spent together. Additionally, while many women and children were also expected to work long hours in factories, they were payed substantially less than their adult male counterparts.

Geographical Dimensions

From their beginnings in Britain, the innovations of the Industrial Revolution, particularly steam-powered engines and machine-based manufacture, spread first to northwestern Europe: along the Rhine-Ruhr Valley in northwestern Germany, and to Belgium, the Netherlands, and France. Subsequently, these innovations were taken up in the northeastern area of the United States, central Germany, northern Italy, and the industrial heartland of southern Poland and the Czech Republic. Somewhat later, the Russian Empire began to industrialize in the Moscow region, in the Volga River area, and later in the Ural Mountains and Siberia (where natural resources, especially energy sources such as oil, coal, and natural gas, were plentiful). In all these areas, as in Britain, densely populated areas, access to raw materials, and existing communication and transportation networks made larger-scale manufacturing not only possible but also profitable.

The Industrial Revolution was accompanied by social, economic, and political changes as well. For example, after the overthrow of the monarchy during the French Revolution and the subsequent Napoleonic Wars, the French government emphasized universal primary education, the establishment of a national language, the teaching of mechanical skills in schools, and the professionalization of science. These factors enabled the rise of a workforce well suited to work in factories and an engineering profession that continued to innovate in mechanical engineering and the emerging field of electrical technology.

Development of Technology

Thomas Newcomen, a British engineer and businessman, invented the first commercially used steam engine around 1710. This device heated a cylinder of water that had a piston at the top. As the water in the cylinder turned to steam, it expanded, pushing the piston upward. The piston was connected to a rocker arm (like a seesaw) that could move up and down, allowing materials to be lifted mechanically. Such a device was highly desirable in mines, where periodic flooding limited access to new, deeper beds of ore. The rocker arm governed a pump that moved water out of the mine shafts to the surface.

Although hundreds of Newcomen steam engines were built, they were inefficient, because fuel was needed to reheat the water in the cylinder after it had cooled and condensed. By the 1760s, the Scottish inventor James Watt had refined the basic steam engine principle by condensing steam in a separate cylinder, allowing the main cylinder to maintain its high temperature. This machine could produce more power with the same input of heating. Watt patented his device in 1769.

The next step was to develop a more useful mechanical device using a camshaft to produce rotary motion rather than piston (seesaw) motion, and Watt patented a machine to do that in 1781. In the decades that followed, many other inventors and tinkerers contributed useful refinements to the original steam engine concept: indicator gauges, safety valves, platforms allowing the engines to be portable, and ultimately more compact and lighter-weight steam engines that could be used in ships and railroad engines.

Parallel with the development and refinement of the steam engine came machines that would automate the process of producing textiles, one of Britain’s largest craft industries. The production of cloth involved multiple steps, including washing, dying, spinning yarn, and weaving the yarn into fabric. An Englishman, John Kay, patented the flying shuttle in 1733; his device had wheels, allowing the shuttle to pass easily across the loom and speeding up the weaving process. This put pressure on yarn makers to keep up, and around 1750, James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny, which allowed spinners to produce multiple spindles of yarn simultaneously.

Using these and other technologies, by 1789 the first steam-driven cotton textile factory had been established, in Manchester, England. Cotton fibers were strong and particularly amenable to being worked with machines. This was a good fit with the resources of Britain, whose cotton came from North America and India. In 1790, a British textile mechanic named Samuel Slater smuggled the British technology out of England by memorizing the design of the machines, and he helped to establish the first American textile mills, in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. By 1800, the steam engine was being used in textile manufacture in Germany, and by about 1810 in France.

In the United States, Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin to separate cotton seeds from the boll fibers by mechanical means. It is generally believed that others, working in Europe, probably invented similar machines at about the same time. Whitney’s true innovation, however, was in what is called the “American system” of manufacture, in which specialized machines that did only one task were produced, rather than more generalized machines that could be configured to do multiple kinds of tasks. Moreover, these specialized machines were designed to have standardized parts, allowing adequate parts inventories and efficient repair and replacement of parts. This approach eventually led to the development of the assembly-line system introduced by Henry Ford in the period known as the Second Industrial Revolution.

The development of steam-powered, machine-based technology in Europe and the United States thus can be viewed as a network in which incremental improvements responded to bottlenecks of workflow within a geographically dispersed production system, each bottleneck spurring new innovations and improvements in machines for the manufacturing process.

Changes in Transportation

Innovations in manufacturing were accompanied by changes in transportation technologies and networks. In 1800, Richard Trevithick developed a small, portable steam engine that was suited for use in boats and railroads. Separately, in 1802, William Symington adapted the steam engine for use in a tugboat. In the next decade, steam engines were placed in locomotives to pull freight on iron tracks; this system was used at first to haul coal out of mines before the overland system was developed. Iron wheels running on iron tracks produced less friction than iron or wooden wheels running on roadbeds, and as a result less energy was needed to move goods from place to place.

Despite refinements to the steam engine, it remained a relatively inefficient and rigid means for producing power, and its use began to decline after the 1880s. From the mid-19th century on (in the period known as the Second Industrial Revolution), inventors and engineers sought more efficient ways to power machines. In 1859, the first prototype of the internal combustion engine was developed in Belgium. By the 1870s, several modern forms of the internal combustion engine had been developed, using gasoline or diesel. The internal combustion engine offered several benefits for manufacturing: It required less labor to operate; it could run at different speeds; and it could easily stop and start.

The German inventor Karl Benz adapted the technology of the internal combustion engine for automobiles and patented it in 1889. Ford adopted this technology (earlier automobiles had run on coal gas or electric power or a combination), and by 1910 the United States was the largest producer of gasoline-powered automobiles in the world, using the mass-production system to build automobiles quickly and inexpensively.

Sources of Energy

Before the Industrial Revolution, mills (for example, textile mills and sawmills) could be run with hydropower, using the energy of water running downstream in order to power belts, shafts, and other mechanical devices. However, these systems were vulnerable to extreme changes in water levels such as droughts and floods. As discussed above, wood as a fuel was in short supply by the early 18th century, and interest turned to coal as a fuel source.

One of the benefits of coal was that it had several by-products that were useful in industry, including coal gas and coal tar. Both were by-products of the process of making coke from coal. Coal gas was widely used in the 18th and 19th centuries for lighting, cooking, and heating. The development and availability of coal gas permitted widespread outdoor lighting; by 1820, most major European city streets were lit with coal gas. This form of technology lasted about 50 years, giving rise to the term the Gaslight Era. Coal gas was also widely used in interior lighting, both in homes and in factories. The use of artificial lighting in addition to daylight in factories allowed factories to be larger and their hours of production to be extended.

Coal tar, another by-product, was a useful raw material that spurred the advance of the industrial chemical sector, which developed organic chemicals such as paints, synthetic dyes, photographic materials, and medicines.

Although petroleum was known (it seeped naturally out of the ground), there was little commercial use of it until 1853, when Samuel Kier used it to make kerosene, a cheap substitute for whale oil, which was used, along with coal gas, for interior lighting. In 1859, Edwin Drake drilled the first oil well in Pennsylvania, and in 1863 the first oil pipeline was constructed, also in Pennsylvania.

Electrical power, a secondary energy source produced from water flows or from the burning of fossil fuels, came into wide commercial and industrial use in the Second Industrial Revolution, although the properties of electricity had been known for more than a century.

Second Industrial Revolution

While the first phase of the Industrial Revolution had centered on greater automation of textile production, automating steel production was the basis of the Second Industrial Revolution. Steel is made from iron by blowing a stream of air through molten iron to pull off the impurities of the iron. Steel had previously been made only in small quantities because it was such an energy-intensive process. The English inventor Henry Bessemer invented a furnace that would allow steel to be produced much more inexpensively; he patented his furnace (called the Bessemer converter) in 1855. In the 1850s, the German engineer Karl Siemens developed the open-hearth furnace, which recovered the waste heat of the furnace to preheat the gases used for the next round of iron. In this process, even larger quantities of steel could be produced, allowing steel to become competitive in price with iron. By 1914, Germany was the European leader in steel, producing as much in that year as England, France, Italy, and Russia combined.

The availability of inexpensive steel fundamentally changed the urban landscape, making possible large-span bridges and skyscrapers. Steel was also used to increase the scale of other manufacturing processes, since larger generators, turbines, and other machines could be constructed that were much lighter in weight than their cast-iron counterparts.

Beginning about 1870, the United States began to dominate global industrial production through the development of the so-called American system, in which specialized, single-purpose machines made products with standardized, interchangeable parts. (The American government supported this system, in particular in its requirements and specifications for weapons.) Ford pioneered the assembly-line system, in which the product itself, not the workers or the machines, moved along a conveyor belt, and this technique was subsequently used widely in American manufacturing. (European countries did not adopt assembly-line production techniques until after World War I.) The American system allowed for efficiency in machinery, efficiency in use of labor, and levels of productivity that ultimately led to the worldwide domination of American manufacturing in the early 20th century.

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