All Subject Expand Expand
Language Teaching and Learning
Language Teaching Theory and Methods
Criminology and Criminal Justice
Interdisciplinary Studies Museums, Libraries, and Information Sciences Regional and Area Studies
The Industrial Revolution increased the overall amount of wealth and distributed it more widely than had been the case in earlier centuries, helping to enlarge the middle class. However, the replacement of the domestic system of industrial production, in which independent craftspersons worked in or near their homes, with the factory system and mass production consigned large numbers of people, including women and children, to long hours of tedious and often dangerous work at subsistence wages. Their miserable conditions gave rise to the trade union movement in the mid-19th century. Learn more about trade unions. Important inventors of the Industrial Revolution included James Watt, who greatly improved the steam engine; Richard Trevithick and George Stephenson, who pioneered the steam locomotive; Robert Fulton, who designed the first commercially successful paddle steamer; Michael Faraday, who demonstrated the first electric generator and electric motor; Joseph Wilson Swan and Thomas Alva Edison, who each independently invented the light bulb; Samuel Morse, who designed a system of electric telegraphy and invented Morse Code; Alexander Graham Bell, who is credited with inventing the telephone; and Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz, who constructed the first motorcycle and motorcar, respectively, powered by high-speed internal-combustion engines of their own design. Read more about the history of technology. Industrial Revolution, in modern history, the process of change from an agrarian and handicraft economy to one dominated by industry and machine manufacturing. These technological changes introduced novel ways of working and living and fundamentally transformed society. This process began in Britain in the 18th century and from there spread to other parts of the world. Although used earlier by French writers, the term Industrial Revolution was first popularized by the English economic historian Arnold Toynbee (1852–83) to describe Britain’s economic development from 1760 to 1840. Since Toynbee’s time the term has been more broadly applied as a process of economic transformation than as a period of time in a particular setting. This explains why some areas, such as China and India, did not begin their first industrial revolutions until the 20th century, while others, such as the United States and western Europe, began undergoing “second” industrial revolutions by the late 19th century. A brief treatment of the Industrial Revolution follows. For full treatment of the Industrial Revolution as it occurred in Europe, see Europe, history of: The Industrial Revolution. The main features involved in the Industrial Revolution were technological, socioeconomic, and cultural. The technological changes included the following: (1) the use of new basic materials, chiefly iron and steel, (2) the use of new energy sources, including both fuels and motive power, such as coal, the steam engine, electricity, petroleum, and the internal-combustion engine, (3) the invention of new machines, such as the spinning jenny and the power loom that permitted increased production with a smaller expenditure of human energy, (4) a new organization of work known as the factory system, which entailed increased division of labour and specialization of function, (5) important developments in transportation and communication, including the steam locomotive, steamship, automobile, airplane, telegraph, and radio, and (6) the increasing application of science to industry. These technological changes made possible a tremendously increased use of natural resources and the mass production of manufactured goods. There were also many new developments in nonindustrial spheres, including the following: (1) agricultural improvements that made possible the provision of food for a larger nonagricultural population, (2) economic changes that resulted in a wider distribution of wealth, the decline of land as a source of wealth in the face of rising industrial production, and increased international trade, (3) political changes reflecting the shift in economic power, as well as new state policies corresponding to the needs of an industrialized society, (4) sweeping social changes, including the growth of cities, the development of working-class movements, and the emergence of new patterns of authority, and (5) cultural transformations of a broad order. Workers acquired new and distinctive skills, and their relation to their tasks shifted; instead of being craftsmen working with hand tools, they became machine operators, subject to factory discipline. Finally, there was a psychological change: confidence in the ability to use resources and to master nature was heightened.
History: Fact or Fiction? Get hooked on history as this quiz sorts out the past. Find out who really invented movable type, who Winston Churchill called "Mum," and when the first sonic boom was heard. The biggest story of our lives & times is this: We're living through the first years of a massive economic revolution. I’ve stepped onto the Forbes platform to try and coherently assemble the narrative of this revolution. I'm doing it because I believe that anyone who is responsible for anything important (your company, the non-profit on whose board you sit, your personal finances, your career, your children's future – little things like that) needs to have a gut level understanding of where we’re headed economically, and what the ride might be like along the way. An economic narrative – a fundamental storyline that helps tie together and make coherent a series of otherwise ephemeral financial/technological/political/sociological events and reports and trends and analyses – is potentially very helpful for most of us as we wade into this 21st century global economic slugfest. It matters a lot right now because my strong belief is that we’ve begun a journey into just the third massive economic revolution in human history. And if we define a revolution as the rapid and thorough displacement of a regime or system by a new and very different regime or system, then to quote Joe Biden, “This is a big f-ing deal.” The first Revolution The world’s first economic revolution was the Agricultural Revolution, also known as the Neolithic Revolution, and took a laggardly 7500 years or so to do its thorough replacing. It’s when we made the switch from being hunter-gatherers to being farmers, moving us from pre-history to civilization. As our ancestors developed a sense of place and permanence, they discovered that all the previous systems and approaches governing life were inadequate for their new reality. No one needs laws if there is no property; no one needs mathematics if there is no trade. And so that revolution saw the creation of astounding new technologies and practices and knowledge: laws and writing and systems of exchange, just to name a few. That’s pretty much the way the world stayed for the next 6500 years or so: Life based on agriculture and animal husbandry with a little bit of commerce gluing it together. Until the Industrial Revolution kicked off in England in the mid 1700s, when some clever, clever textile men created carding machines and water frames and then the very first factory. The second Revolution The idea was radical: That one’s living would be earned by leaving one’s land or back-room workshop, and that instead of cottage industry or farming, one would go to the machine and be paid to work on it and with it as a factor of production. And it was powerful, too. The original historian of the Industrial Revolution, Arnold Toynbee, essentially said that England was, by 1870, almost unrecognizable compared to the England of a century before. Cities grew rapidly and brought new forms of organization and societal structure. The Industrial Revolution had thoroughly and completely displaced a few millennia of agricultural civilization in the British Isles, and the rest of the world would begin to follow quickly behind. Succeeding for a simple reason Both of the first two economic revolutions started and succeeded for the same simple reason: They represented more powerful and efficient ways for helping human beings get the goods and services they needed to live and thrive than did the previous regime. The same inexorable engine is now powering this third Economic Revolution. The onrushing information ubiquity, with its increasingly complete and universal access to all of mankind’s collected knowledge, as well as the ability to connect with any and every other human being on the planet via the smartphone in our pockets, has kicked off an equally profound and decisive dynamic of utter change. It is altering fundamental laws of economics (many of which are based on concepts of limited or unavailable information) and will likely have significant impacts on what organizations look like, what a “job” is or isn’t, how markets function, how we choose to govern ourselves, and much, much more. When it’s “over” in twenty or thirty or forty years (it seems to me the revolutionary cycles are getting shorter and shorter), I suspect that our society will be as “unrecognizable” from today’s as Toynbee’s Victorian England had become from a century prior. For better…or worse? Will it be better? I think it will be. I think agricultural society was more advanced and humane than were our cave-dwelling forebears, and I think industrial society has made huge leaps in human comfort and human rights over what preceded it. Will it be an easy transition? Hell no. And I think that’s why life has begun to feel so disjointed and different and bifurcated and uncertain. As my friend Clay Shirky says, in a revolution, the old order gets destroyed long before the new order emerges. That's going to be very stressful economically (at the very least), and quite possibly much worse. But this Economic Revolution also brings more opportunity and more wealth creation capacity than anything any living human being has ever experienced. Ever. No less than world-dominating empires have arisen during previous periods of economic revolution – the United States being one case in point. That makes this a very high-beta time to be alive. The outcomes will not be evenly distributed, and the path and relative success of people and ideologies and nations is anything but certain. So this revolutionary narrative is a case I’ll be making and reinforcing in the coming months and years. It’s the storyline to which I’ll be referring and to which I’ll tie as many examples, in as many important areas of our life and society, as I can find and get into writing. Stars to steer your ship by No one can produce a GPS system for the economic future. But if this economic narrative we’re talking about is grounded in common sense and observable facts, and if it actually connects some otherwise random-seeming dots and starts to show some durability and accuracy as the future continually unfolds, it can at least help provide a few stars to steer your tall ship by. I look forward to sailing with you -- follow me on Twitter and Google+ for navigational updates. |