What Was the Industrial Revolution?

What Was the Industrial Revolution?

One day in 1830, two groups of train passengers gathered in Baltimore, Maryland, to witness an unusual race.

One group climbed into a train car on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad rail line. On a track right next to it, several people climbed into another car. Those train cars were not at all like they are today. Train cars in the early nineteenth century were not enclosed spaces with comfortable seats and nice windows to look out of. They were more like wagons. They often moved coal from place to place. And they were pulled by horses!

That’s what made this race so different. The first train car was to be pulled by a horse, as usual. But the second train car—-well, this was something new. It was to be pulled by a machine: a steam locomotive. The locomotive was designed and built by the American inventor Peter Cooper. It was fueled by coal.

Cooper’s machine was not very big. It was only thirteen feet long and weighed about ten thousand pounds. Compare that to a modern locomotive, which often is about seventy-six feet long and weighs more than four hundred thousand pounds. Cooper’s machine was so small that it soon was nicknamed the Tom Thumb, after the boy in a seventeenth-century fairy tale who was the size of a thumb.

The two tracks on the Baltimore and Ohio line were side by side for about thirteen miles to Ellicott’s Mills, Maryland. That’s how far the race would be. The horse started off at a trot and took the lead. But Cooper furiously fed the furnace of the Tom Thumb shovelfuls of coal, and the machine picked up speed. (The coal burned to create steam, which powered the engine.) The Tom Thumb passed the horse and soon was moving at almost fifteen miles per hour. No horse could keep up with that while pulling a train car filled with people.

It looked like the Tom Thumb was sure to win. The locomotive pulled farther and farther away from the horse-drawn train. Suddenly a belt on the Tom Thumb broke loose from a pulley! The locomotive slowed to a stop. The horse trotted past.

Because of the mechanical trouble, the horse won the race that day in Maryland. Still, it was obvious that it was just a matter of time until steam-powered locomotives took the place of horses.

Indeed, when this race took place, the age of machines had already begun. This was a time known as the Industrial Revolution, the period when machine power began to replace human, and animal, power throughout much of the world. It was a time of great change that affected people’s way of life. During the Industrial Revolution, products were mass-produced for the first time. Factories were built. Cities grew. People began working at jobs that had never existed before.

The Industrial Revolution made just about everything in modern life possible. Without it, there would be no automobiles or airplanes. No electricity or electronics. No telegraph or telephones. No computers or the internet. No cell phones or social media.

Historians all agree that the success of the Industrial Revolution came at a cost.

Because of the Industrial Revolution, weapons are now deadlier. Cities are much more crowded. And the environment has suffered greatly.

Historians also agree that the Industrial Revolution began near the middle of the eighteenth century. After that, they don’t agree on much. Some believe that it lasted through the early 1900s. Some believe the Industrial Revolution went on for about a hundred years or so, paused for a while, then picked up again in the early twentieth century. Others believe that there have been several industrial revolutions. (They say we are in the Fourth Industrial Revolution right now.) And still others believe that the Industrial Revolution never really ended. They say the “revolution” really has just been one long “evolution.”

Everyone agrees, though, that the Industrial Revolution changed the world forever.

Chapter 1
Before the Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain in the mid-1700s. But its roots go back even farther than that.

Before then, people in Britain mostly stayed close to home. More than three out of every four workers farmed the land. Others worked in small workshops, making items such as shoes, furniture, and especially, clothing. Most of the food that people ate they grew themselves. The things they used they made themselves. If not, they were grown or made by someone close by in their own community.

But Britain’s population was increasing rapidly in the eighteenth century. In 1700, about 6.5 million people lived in England, Wales, and Scotland. That figure grew to 7.9 million in 1750. By 1800, it was almost 11 million! Those people had to be fed and clothed. Old ways of doing things needed to be improved to meet new needs.

Why Did the Industrial Revolution Start in Britain?

“Britain” is a shorter name for Great Britain, an island off the coast of continental Europe. It includes the countries of England, Scotland, and Wales.

England stood as the most powerful nation on earth at the start of the Industrial Revolution. One big reason for this was its dominance of the seas. Because of Great Britain’s geography, England featured many ports, which helped it maintain a vast navy of strong and fast ships. That navy helped it to conquer faraway lands and form the massive British Empire, with colonies around the globe. In the colonies, people in foreign countries lived under British rule, which offered them some of the security and stability of the British government. But it also forced them to live in obedience to outside rule, sometimes in very harsh conditions. And their natural resources and raw materials—-which included anything from their crops to their gold—-now belonged to their British colonizers. These raw materials, such as cotton from India, helped make England the world’s richest country.

Those geographical and wealth advantages helped Britain take the lead in launching the Industrial Revolution.

One way to feed the growing population was to use better farming methods. Helpful tools such as steel plows and hoes were stronger and lasted longer than the older wooden ones. New methods of rotating crops kept the soil rich, yielding more vegetables. New ideas about breeding livestock led to better and more plentiful meat. Such improvements contributed to the cycle of population growth. The more and healthier food that people ate, the longer they lived. And the longer they lived, the more the population grew.

More people and more food meant that ways of cooking were changing, too. Coal had been around for thousands of years, of course. But until the sixteenth century, wood was cheaper and easier for British people to use for cooking and heating. Wood didn’t burn as hot or last as long as coal. But coal emitted harmful fumes, and British houses were not built in a way that those fumes could safely escape. However, with the population growing so rapidly, demand for wood became greater than its supply by the seventeenth century. Wood became harder to come by and more costly. People needed an alternative—and England had a lot of coal.

By the start of the 1700s, coal had become Britain’s primary fuel source. The faster and more efficiently that coal could be taken from the ground, the better and cheaper it would be for the people of Britain. Many scientists and engineers experimented with improved methods of mining coal. The most famous of these was a primitive steam engine designed by Thomas Newcomen in 1712. His machine burned coal to heat water. The resulting steam provided the energy to move a large piston up and down. Cold water cooled the piston, then the process started all over again. This helped pump water out of mines and speed up the process for extracting coal. But the machine was also bulky and tall—-more than thirty feet high—-and wasted a lot of energy.

In addition, getting coal out of the ground was just half the battle. Coal was only found in specific areas and still had to be transported to the people who needed it. Britain’s port cities were well equipped for shipping. Many of its inland rivers were large enough for boats to use, too. And where it was not practical to use the sea or rivers, canals were built to move the coal by waterways. Overland, wagons or rail cars pulled by horses transported coal.

Clothing the increasing population was also a challenge. The many people who made their own clothes often worked in cottage industries. Literally, these were people who made clothes by hand, at home in their cottages. But this was a slow process. Only one person at a time could operate a spinning wheel, which turned wool or cotton into yarn wrapped around a spindle (a revolving rod used to twist the yarn or thread). A loom, which weaved that yarn into cloth, required two people seated next to each other to operate it.

British inventor John Kay figured there must be a better way. In 1733, Kay invented the flying shuttle. This pulley system allowed one weaver to do the work previously done by two, and to do it faster. Then a big breakthrough came in 1764 when James Hargreaves, a weaver who lived near the town of Blackburn, England, designed the spinning jenny.

The idea for the spinning jenny came to Hargreaves when a spinning wheel tipped over. He noticed that the wheel kept on spinning, turning the spindle, even though it was upright. Why not put several spindles upright and close together? he wondered. He built a crude machine, and it worked! The new machine enabled a single spinner to produce yarn by working eight spools of thread at once.