References:

# An Introduction to the Industrial History of England, 1920, http://books.google.com/books?

vid=OCLC00224415&id=WiQEAAAAMAAJ&pg=RA1

# Online edition Ashton, Thomas S. (1948), online edition The Industrial Revolution (1760-1830),
Oxford University Press, http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=77198082

# Clark, Gregory (2007), A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World, Princeton
University Press

# Dunham, Arthur Louis (1955), online edition The Industrial Revolution in France, 1815-1848,
New York: Exposition Press, http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=14880719 online edition

# Kisch, Herbert (1989), online edition From Domestic Manufacture to Industrial Revolution The
Case of the Rhineland Textile Districts, Oxford University Press, http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?
a=o&d=78932320

# McLaughlin Green, Constance (1939), online edition Holyoke, Massachusetts: A Case History of
the Industrial Revolution in America, Yale University Press, http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?
a=o&d=8893044

# Industrial Revolution and the Standard of Living by Clark Nardinelli

# Industrial Revolution and the Standard of Living: The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics,
Library of Economics and Liberty

# "BBC Plague in Tudor and Stuart Britain". bbc.co.uk.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/voices/voices_salisbury.shtml. Retrieved on 2008-11-03.

# Encyclopdia Britannica (2008) "Building construction: the reintroduction of modern concrete"

# The Columbia Encyclopedia, 2008

# Was the Industrial Revolution Necessary?, London & New York: Routledge

# BBC History Home Page: Industrial Revolution

# Karl Marx: Communist as Religious Eschatologist

#A history of world civilization: James Edgar Swan

Introduction:
The Industrial Revolution was a period in the late 18th and early 19th centuries when major
changes in agriculture, manufacturing, mining, and transportation had a profound effect on the
socioeconomic and cultural conditions in Britain. The changes subsequently spread throughout
Europe, North America, and eventually the world. The onset of the Industrial Revolution marked a
major turning point in human society; almost every aspect of daily life was eventually influenced in
some way. Starting in the latter part of the 18th century there began a transition in parts of Great
Britain's previously manual labour and draft animalbased economy towards machine-based
manufacturing. It started with the mechanization of the textile industries, the development of iron-
making techniques and the increased use of refined coal. Trade expansion was enabled by the
introduction of canals, improved roads and railways. The introduction of steam power fuelled
primarily by coal, wider utilization of water wheels 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 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.
Conclusion:
Industrial Revolution, widespread replacement of manual labor by machines that began in Britain
in the 18th century and is still continuing in some parts of the world. The Industrial Revolution was
the result of many fundamental, interrelated changes that transformed agricultural economies into
industrial ones. The most immediate changes were in the nature of production: what was produced,
as well as where and how. Goods that had traditionally been made in the home or in small workshops
began to be manufactured in the factory. Productivity and technical efficiency grew dramatically, in
part through the systematic application of scientific and practical knowledge to the manufacturing
process. Efficiency was also enhanced when large groups of business enterprises were located within
a limited area. The Industrial Revolution led to the growth of cities as people moved from rural areas
into urban communities in search of work.

The changes brought by the Industrial Revolution overturned not only traditional economies, but also
whole societies. Economic changes caused far-reaching social changes, including the movement of
people to cities, the availability of a greater variety of material goods, and new ways of doing
business. The Industrial Revolution was the first step in modern economic growth and development.
Economic development was combined with superior military technology to make the nations of
Europe and their cultural offshoots, such as the United States, the most powerful in the world in the
18th and 19th centuries.

The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain during the last half of the 18th century and spread
through regions of Europe and to the United States during the following century. In the 20th century
industrialization on a wide scale extended to parts of Asia and the Pacific Rim. Today mechanized
production and modern economic growth continue to spread to new areas of the world, and much of
humankind has yet to experience the changes typical of the Industrial Revolution.

The Industrial Revolution is called a revolution because it changed society both significantly and
rapidly. Over the course of human history, there has been only one other group of changes as
significant as the Industrial Revolution. This is what anthropologists call the Neolithic Revolution,
which took place in the later part of the Stone Age. In the Neolithic Revolution, people moved from
social systems based on hunting and gathering to much more complex communities that depended on
agriculture and the domestication of animals. This led to the rise of permanent settlements and,
eventually, urban civilizations. The Industrial Revolution brought a shift from the agricultural
societies created during the Neolithic Revolution to modern industrial societies.
Sociological perspective:
The most far-reaching, influential transformation of human culture since the advent of agriculture
eight or ten thousand years ago, was the industrial revolution of eighteenth century Europe. The
consequences of this revolution would change irrevocably human labor, consumption, family
structure, social structure, and even the very soul and thoughts of the individual. This revolution
involved more than technology; to be sure, there had been industrial "revolutions" throughout
European history and non-European history. In Europe, for instance, the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries saw an explosion of technological knowledge and a consequent change in production and
labor. However, the industrial revolution was more than technologyimpressive as this technology
was. What drove the industrial revolution were profound social changes, as Europe moved from a
primarily agricultural and rural economy to a capitalist and urban economy, from a household,
family-based economy to an industry-based economy. This required rethinking social obligations and
the structure of the family; the abandonment of the family economy, for instance, was the most
dramatic change to the structure of the family that Europe had ever undergoneand we're still
struggling with these changes.

In 1750, the European economy was overwhelmingly an agricultural economy. The land was
owned largely by wealthy and frequently aristocratic landowners; they leased the land to tenant
farmers who paid for the land in real goods that they grew or produced. Most non-agricultural goods
were produced by individual families that specialized in one set of skills: wagon-wheel manufacture,
for instance. Most capitalist activity focused on mercantile activity rather than production; there was,
however, a growing manufacturing industry growing up around the logic of mercantilism.

The European economy, though, had become a global economy. In our efforts to try to explain why
the Industrial Revolution took place, the globalization of the European economy is a compelling
explanation. European trade and manufacture stretched to every continent except Antarctica; this vast
increase in the market for European goods in part drove the conversion to an industrial,
manufacturing economy. Why other nations didn't initially join this revolution is in part explained by
the monopolistic control that the Europeans exerted over the global economy. World trade was about
making Europeans wealthy, not about enriching the colonies or non-Western countries.

Another reason given for the Industrial Revolution is the substantial increase in the population of
Europe; this is such an old chestnut of historians that we don't question it. Population growth,
however, is a mysterious affair to explain; it most often occurs when standards of production rise. So
whether the Industrial Revolution was started off by a rise in population, or whether the Industrial
Revolution started a rise in population is hard to guess. It's clear, though, that the transition to an
industrial, manufacturing economy required more people to labor at this manufacture. While the
logic of a national economy founded centrally on the family economy and family production is more
or less a subsistence economymost production is oriented around keeping the family alive, the
logic of a manufacturing economy is a surplus economy. In a manufacturing economy, a person's
productive labor needs to produce more than they need to keep life going. This surplus production is
what produces profits for the owners of the manufacture. This surplus economy not only makes
population growth possible, it makes it desirable.
Capitalism:

The advent of the Age of Enlightenment provided an intellectual framework which welcomed the
practical application of the growing body of scientific knowledgea factor evidenced in the
systematic development of the steam engine, guided by scientific analysis, and the development of
the political and sociological analyses, culminating in Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. One of
the main arguments for capitalism, presented for example in the book The Improving State of the
World, is that industrialisation increases wealth for all, as evidenced by raised life expectancy,
reduced working hours, and no work for children and the elderly.

Marxism:

Marxism is essentially a reaction to the Industrial Revolution.[59] According to Karl Marx,

industrialisation polarised society into the bourgeoisie (those who own the means of production, the
factories and the land) and the much larger proletariat (the working class who actually perform the
labour necessary to extract something valuable from the means of production). He saw the
industrialisation process as the logical dialectical progression of feudal economic modes, necessary
for the full development of capitalism, which he saw as in itself a necessary precursor to the
development of socialism and eventually communism.

Romanticism:

During the Industrial Revolution an intellectual and artistic hostility towards the new
industrialisation developed. This was known as the Romantic movement. Its major exponents in
English included the artist and poet William Blake and poets William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, John Keats, Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. The movement stressed the importance of
"nature" in art and language, in contrast to "monstrous" machines and factories; the "Dark satanic
mills" of Blake's poem "And did those feet in ancient time". Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein
reflected concerns that scientific progress might be two-edged.
Rational thinking:
Why did industrial revolution happen in Europe? Why not China?

During the Greek age, the metaphysical quest was one of a general philosophical interest in reason
and knowledge as basic categories. Based on actual observations, the Greek thinkers asked basic
questions about the nature of the universe without predisposing any idea of some supernatural
creation. What concerned them was the order of nature itself without any supernatural assumptions.
The Greek approach was epistemological of orientation; the focus was rational and abstract, while at
the same time based on empirical observations. They wanted to understand the very nature of
knowing. The spirit of this agenda is reflected in Thales famous maxim, Know thyself. The key to
the Greek scientific method was to look for general principles induced from nature itself yet on the
same time understanding such principles as a part of logos, that is, the architecture of reason itself.
As Frederick Klemm has argued, the great cultural achievement of ancient Greece was undoubtedly
the development of a scientific sense. The Greek was in fact the first Man of theory. The condition
for intellectual discussion in classic Greece was basically secularist, while higher knowledge in
Babylonia and Egypt was in the hands of priests and entangled in religious dogma, rational thinking
in Greece became a lay movement and was devoted to reason alone.

In the Middle Ages, the condition of the pursue of knowledge in Europe had changed because of the
dominant role of the Christian Church as a monitor of higher education and research. In this way, the
cognitive orientation of the inhabitants of the early Middle Ages was forced to manifest their talent
through the selective mechanisms of the Church institution. However, the kind of intellectual
discourse, which became possible under the auspices of the Church, was not as unfavourable for the
study of Greek philosophy as it might appear at the first glance. After all Christianity was Hellenized
Judaism and in this way already under the influence of Greek culture. Early Christian clerics and
thinkers were strongly influence by Platonism, including a figure like Clement of Alexandria, who
argued for a synthesis of Greek philosophy and Christianity. Already in Clement of Alexandria, we
will find an attempt to turn the legitimation of Christianity from an apologetic method into a kind of
pseudo-scientific theology. The influence of Greek philosophy is also very marked in the writing of
Augustine, who originally had started as a neo-Platonist and whose Christian discourse is under very
clear influence from neo-Platonism. More importantly, as we shall discuss in greater detail, Greek
philosophy loomed large within the Christian church after it had become the official church of the
dying Roman Empire and Greek texts (or texts reporting on Greek ideas) were persistently read by
Clerics during the Middle Ages. Indeed this trend only intensified as more texts by Aristotle, Plato
and some of the other Greek thinkers became reintroduced into the intellectual environment of the
Middle Ages. Although Aristotle is read in Europe by the Ninth century, we have to arrive at the 12th
century before Europe got a solid grip of the ideas of Aristotle, which caused a cognitive uproar
among Church intellectuals. In this way, the Christian era never amounted to a real break with an
intellectual interest in the Greek tradition but functioned as a channel by which Greek philosophy re-
entered into the center of European intellectual life after the meagre years of the Roman period. In
this way, the Greek metaphysical quest with its focus on reason and logic re-merged in Europe
during the dominant years of the Christian church and was always a central player in Church history.

Generally, one shall keep in mind that the dogmatic messianistic element in Christianity was always
in conflict with the Germanic tradition, where intellectual tolerance remained a fundamental
component. There is no messianism in the original Germanic pagan mythology. Germanic tribes
might slaughter each other for gold and greed but it was not based on any messianistic intolerance or
religious dogmas and their conflicts could therefore find a pragmatic and rational solution in the
course of history, that is, in the wake of societal differentiation and civic maturization. The adherents
of original Germanic belief-system was very individualistic in their approach; people shared certain
mythologies but there was no dogma or regulative Priesthood, people shopped around in the
mythologies after their own inclination and interest. Also, pagan myths and thinking remained
persistently a component of the intellectual environment of the Middle Ages, such as in the legends
of The Nordic Sagas, Nibelungenleid, Beowulf and King Arthur, these elements and their folklore
were never efficiently repressed by the Christian Church. For at very long time the real Christians in
Europe were segments among the elite, while the broader masses were still pagans. Indeed, far into
the Middle Age the great majority of the European population was pagans and the so-called
Christianization of Europe was for a long time nothing but a propaganda term. Yale scholar Ramsay
MacMullen has in a compelling study with the title Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to the
Eight Century analyzed how tremendous difficult it was for the Christian faith to convert the people
of Europe to the new faith, how stubborn the resistance to Christianity was and that the Church had
to assimilate many pagan habits in order to prevail. Indeed, how many of the so-called converted
would have been able to give any coherent explanation of the idea of Christianity? For a long time
Christianity simply meant what the local pagans made it up to be. Indeed, the persistent role of
pagan elements in European history is one of the least studied and generally a highly underrated
element of European history. In this regard, of course, we shall not forget that the Lord of the Ring as
a fiction actually builds on various tales and historical archetypes from the European pagan tradition.
Indeed, the popularity of the Lord of the Ring and Wagners operas reveals how popular pagan
archetypes and ideals still are and how it bounce with deeper layer of the substratum of the European
collective consciousness. The popularity of Harry Potter is also striking, since it with good reasons
has been called neo-paganism. Or look at the video-game entertainment industry, the popularity of
games with pagan themes is overwhelming. How many are playing video-games about the Christian
church; no one so far as I have been able to discover. Indeed, the messianistic ideology imposed on
Europe has really no response among young people today but provide them with a pagan legend and
they will sit glued to their computer-screens. But paganism is supposed to be death, we are told.
About paganism one is reminded of Mark Twains famous saying: The rumours of my death are
slightly exaggerated. Indeed, for quite a while, early Christianity was hunted by conflicting
theologian fractions and particularly arianism was widespread and remained a threat to the orthodox
version of the Catholic Church. For example, Theodoric the Great (454-526 AD) was of arian faith as
was so many other of the Germanic kings; if history had just been all little different it could most
likely have been Ariuss (250-336 AD) version of Christianity that had prevailed. Hence, the entrance
of the Christian church in Europe was for a long time quite a shaky and uncertain enterprise; there
was very little self-evident about it. Most likely this messianistic Middle Eastern cult, which not
even was accepted in its homeland could only get a chance to enter the European scene because of
the chaos, turmoil and spiritual bewilderness there characterized Rome in the final period of its
collapse. Christianity only chance was Romes collapse, which was a mental collapse, long before
Rome was sacked by the Cisalpine Gauls in 378 AD and by the Goths in 410 AD. As Europe grew
strong again, the influence of the Church steadily declined until its weakness as an agency for
European intellectual development became iconoclastically obvious during the Renaissance.

[By: Hudson, Pat. The Industrial Revolution, Oxford University Press US. ISBN 0-7131-6531-6]

Causes & effects of industrial revolution:

 The term Industrial Revolution applied to technological change was common in the 1830s. Louis-
Auguste Blanqui in 1837 spoke of la rvolution 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." 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:

Regional GDP per capita changed very little for most of human history before the Industrial Revolution. (The
empty areas mean no data, not very low levels. There is data for the years 1, 1000, 1500, 1600, 1700, 1820,
1900, and 2003)

The causes of the Industrial Revolution were complicated and remain a topic for debate, with some
historians believing the Revolution was 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, thereby preventing the epidemics
common in previous times.[11] 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, forcing 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.[12] 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.

Until the 1980s, it was universally believed by academic historians that technological innovation was
the heart of the Industrial Revolution and the key enabling technology was the invention and
improvement of the steam engine.[13] However, recent research into the Marketing Era has challenged
the traditional, supply-oriented interpretation of the Industrial Revolution.[14]
Lewis Mumford has proposed that the Industrial Revolution had its origins in the early Middle Ages,
much earlier than most estimates. [15] He explains that the model for standardised mass production
was the printing press and that "the archetypal model for the industrial era was the clock". He also
cites the monastic emphasis on order and time-keeping, as well as the fact that medieval cities had at
their centre a church with bell ringing at regular intervals as being necessary precursors to a greater
synchronisation necessary for later, more physical, manifestations such as 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.[16]

Governments' grant of limited monopolies to inventors under a developing patent system (the Statute
of Monopolies 1623) is considered an influential factor. The effects of patents, both good and ill, on
the development of industrialisation are clearly illustrated in the history of the steam engine, the key
enabling technology. In return for publicly revealing the workings of an invention, the patent system
rewarded inventors such as James Watt by allowing them to monopolise the production of the first
steam engines, thereby rewarding inventors and increasing the pace of technological development.
However monopolies bring with them their own inefficiencies which may counterbalance, or even
overbalance, the beneficial effects of publicising ingenuity and rewarding inventors.[17] Watt's
monopoly may have prevented other inventors, such as Richard Trevithick, William Murdoch or
Jonathan Hornblower, from introducing improved steam engines, thereby retarding the industrial
revolution by up to 20 years.[18]

Causes for occurrence in Europe:

One question of active interest to historians is why the industrial revolution occurred in Europe and
not in other parts of the world in the 18th century, particularly China, India, and the Middle East, or
at other times like in Classical Antiquity[19] or the Middle Ages.[20] Numerous factors have been
suggested, including ecology, government, and culture.[21] However, most historians contest the
assertion that Europe and China were roughly equal because modern estimates of per capita income
on 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[22]) 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.

Some historians such as David Landes[23] and Max Weber 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, and Greek thought. Conversely, Chinese society was
founded on men like Confucius, Mencius, Han Feizi (Legalism), Lao Tzu (Taoism), and Buddha
(Buddhism). Whereas the Europeans believed that that the universe was governed by rational and
eternal laws, the East, believed that the universe was in constant flux and, for Buddhists and Taoists,
not capable of being rationally understood.

Regarding India, the Marxist historian Rajani Palme Dutt said: "The capital to finance the Industrial
Revolution in India instead went into financing the Industrial Revolution in England."[24] In contrast
to China, India was split up into many competing kingdoms, 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 by totalitarian monarchs prior to the British take over.
Causes for occurrence in Britain:

As the Industrial Revolution developed British manufactured output surged ahead of other economies

The debate about the start of the Industrial Revolution also concerns the massive lead that Great
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
between Africa and the Caribbean helped fuel industrial investment. It has been pointed out,
however, that slave trade and West Indian plantations provided only 5% of the British national
income during the years of the Industrial Revolution.[25]

Alternatively, the greater liberalisation of trade from a large merchant base may have allowed Britain
to produce and use 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[26]). 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
positionan 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. Also, the damp, mild weather conditions of the North West of England provided ideal
conditions for the spinning of cotton, providing a natural starting point for the birth of the textiles
industry.
The stable political situation in Britain from around 1688, and British society's greater receptiveness
to change (compared with other European countries) can also be said to be factors favouring the
Industrial Revolution. In large part due to the Enclosure movement, the peasantry was destroyed as
significant source of resistance to industrialisation, and the landed upper classes developed
commercial interests that made them pioneers in removing obstacles to the growth of capitalism.[27]
(This point is also made in Hilaire Belloc's The Servile State.)

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.[28] The existence of this class is often linked to the
Protestant work ethic (see Max Weber) and the particular status of the Baptists and the dissenting
Protestant sects, such as the Quakers 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 (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
sciencesareas 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.

Innovations:
The only surviving example of a Spinning Mule built by the inventor Samuel Crompton

The commencement of the Industrial Revolution is closely linked to a small number of innovations,
[29]
made in the second half of the 18th century:

Textiles Cotton spinning using Richard Arkwright's water frame, James Hargreaves's Spinning Jenny,
and Samuel Crompton's Spinning Mule (a combination of the Spinning Jenny and the Water Frame).
This was patented in 1769 and so came out of patent in 1783. The end of the patent was rapidly
followed by the erection of many cotton mills. Similar technology was subsequently applied to
spinning worsted yarn for various textiles and flax for linen.
Steam power The improved steam engine invented by James Watt was initially mainly used for
pumping out mines, but from the 1780s was applied to power machines. This enabled rapid
development of efficient semi-automated factories on a previously unimaginable scale in places
where waterpower was not available.

Iron founding In the Iron industry, coke was finally applied to all stages of iron smelting, replacing
charcoal. This had been achieved much earlier for lead and copper as well as for producing pig iron in
a blast furnace, but the second stage in the production of bar iron depended on the use of potting
and stamping (for which a patent expired in 1786) or puddling (patented by Henry Cort in 1783 and
1784).

These represent three 'leading sectors', in which there were key innovations, which allowed the
economic take off by which the Industrial Revolution is usually defined. This is not to belittle many
other inventions, particularly in the textile industry. Without some earlier ones, such as spinning
jenny and flying shuttle in the textile industry and the smelting of pig iron with coke, these
achievements might have been impossible. Later inventions such as the power loom and Richard
Trevithick's high pressure steam engine were also important in the growing industrialisation of
Britain. The application of steam engines to powering cotton mills and ironworks enabled these to be
built in places that were most convenient because other resources were available, rather than where
there was water to power a watermill.

In the textile sector, such mills became the model for the organisation of human labour in factories,
epitomised by Cottonopolis, the name given to the vast collection of cotton mills, factories and
administration offices based in Manchester. The assembly line system greatly improved efficiency,
both in this and other industries. 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.

Also important was the 1756 rediscovery of concrete (based on hydraulic lime mortar) by the British
engineer John Smeaton, which had been lost for 13 centuries.[30]
Transfer of knowledge:

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.

A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery (ca. 1766)

Informal philosophical societies spread scientific advances

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 'natural philosophy' (i.e.
science) and often its application to manufacturing. The Lunar Society flourished from 1765 to 1809,
and it has been said of them, "They were, if you like, the revolutionary committee of that most far
reaching of all the eighteenth century revolutions, the Industrial Revolution".[31] Other such societies
published volumes of proceedings and transactions. For example, the London-based Royal 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. Encyclopaedias such as Harris's Lexicon Technicum
(1704) and Dr Abraham Rees's Cyclopaedia (1802-1819) contain much of value. 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 Mtiers and Diderot's Encyclopdie 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 many 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.

Technological developments in Britain

Textile manufacture:

Model of the spinning jenny in a museum in Wuppertal, Germany. The spinning jenny was one of the
innovations that started the revolution

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
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.

Lewis Paul patented the Roller Spinning machine and the flyer-and-bobbin system for drawing wool
to a more even thickness, developed with the help of John Wyatt in Birmingham. Paul and Wyatt
opened a mill in Birmingham which used their new rolling machine powered by a donkey. In 1743, a
factory was opened in Northampton with fifty spindles on each of five of Paul and Wyatt's machines.
This operated until about 1764. A similar mill was built by Daniel Bourn in Leominster, but this
burnt down. Both Lewis Paul and Daniel Bourn patented carding machines in 1748. Using two sets
of rollers that travelled at different speeds, it was later used in the first cotton spinning mill. Lewis's
invention was later developed and improved by Richard Arkwright in his water frame and Samuel
Crompton in his spinning mule.

Other inventors increased the efficiency of the individual steps of spinning (carding, twisting and
spinning, and rolling) so that the supply of yarn increased greatly, which fed a weaving industry that
was advancing with improvements to shuttles and the loom or 'frame'. The output of an individual
labourer increased dramatically, with the effect that the new machines were seen as a threat to
employment, and early innovators were attacked and their inventions destroyed.

To capitalise 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 powerfirst horse power and
then water powerwhich made cotton manufacture a mechanised industry. Before long steam power
was applied to drive textile machinery.
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 sulphur) in the coal do not migrate into the metal. This technology
was applied to lead from 1678 and to copper from 1687. 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 Abraham Darby, who made great strides using coke to fuel his blast furnaces
at Coalbrookdale in 1709. However, the coke pig iron he made was used mostly for the production of
cast iron goods such as pots and kettles. He had the advantage over his rivals in that his pots, cast by
his patented process, were thinner and cheaper than theirs. 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 then, coke pig iron was cheaper than charcoal pig iron.

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 charcoal sources.

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.

Since iron was becoming cheaper and more plentiful, it also became a major structural material
following the building of the innovative The Iron Bridge in 1778 by Abraham Darby III.

The Iron Bridge, Shropshire, England

An improvement was 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.

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, which were abandoned as the coal
was extracted. In other cases, if the geology was favourable, the coal was mined by means of an adit
or drift mine 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 a 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 coal to be extracted. These were developments that had begun before the Industrial
Revolution, but the adoption of James Watt's more efficient steam engine from the 1770s reduced the
fuel costs of engines, making mines more profitable. Coal mining was very dangerous owing to the
presence of firedamp in many coal seams. Some degree of safety was provided by the safety lamp
which was invented in 1816 by Sir Humphrey Davy and independently by George Stephenson.
However, the lamps proved a false dawn because they became unsafe very quickly and provided a
weak light. Firedamp explosions continued, often setting off coal dust explosions, so casualties grew
during the entire nineteenth century. Conditions of work were very poor, with a high casualty rate
from rock falls.

Steam power:

The development of the stationary steam engine was an essential early element of the Industrial
Revolution; however, for most of the period of the Industrial Revolution, the majority of industries
still relied on wind and water power as well as horse and man-power for driving small machines.

The first real attempt at industrial use of steam power was due to Thomas Savery in 1698. He
constructed and patented in London a low-lift combined vacuum and pressure water pump, that
generated about one horsepower (hp) and was used as in numerous water works and tried in a few
mines (hence its "brand name", The miner's Friend), but it was not a success since it was limited in
pumping height and prone to boiler explosions.
Newcomen's steam powered atmospheric engine was the first practical engine. Subsequent steam engines
were to power the Industrial Revolution

The first safe and successful steam power plant was introduced by Thomas Newcomen before 1712.
Newcomen apparently conceived the Newcomen steam engine quite independently of Savery, but as
the latter had taken out a very wide-ranging patent, Newcomen and his associates were obliged to
come to an arrangement with him, marketing the engine until 1733 under a joint patent.[32][33]
Newcomen's engine appears to have been based on Papin's experiments carried out 30 years earlier,
and employed a piston and cylinder, one end of which was open to the atmosphere above the piston.
Steam just above atmospheric pressure (all that the boiler could stand) was introduced into the lower
half of the cylinder beneath the piston during the gravity-induced upstroke; the steam was then
condensed by a jet of cold water injected into the steam space to produce a partial vacuum; the
pressure differential between the atmosphere and the vacuum on either side of the piston displaced it
downwards into the cylinder, raising the opposite end of a rocking beam to which was attached a
gang of gravity-actuated reciprocating force pumps housed in the mineshaft. The engine's downward
power stroke raised the pump, priming it and preparing the pumping stroke. At first the phases were
controlled by hand, but within ten years an escapement mechanism had been devised worked by of a
vertical plug tree suspended from the rocking beam which rendered the engine self-acting.

A number of Newcomen engines were successfully put to use in Britain for draining hitherto
unworkable deep mines, with the engine on the surface; these were large machines, requiring a lot of
capital to build, and produced about 5 hp (3.7 kW). They were extremely inefficient by modern
standards, but when located where coal was cheap at pit heads, opened up a great expansion in coal
mining by allowing mines to go deeper. Despite their disadvantages, Newcomen engines were
reliable and easy to maintain and continued to be used in the coalfields until the early decades of the
nineteenth century. By 1729, when Newcomen died, his engines had spread (first) to Hungary in
1722 ,Germany, Austria, and Sweden. A total of 110 are known to have been built by 1733 when the
joint patent expired, of which 14 were abroad. In the 1770s, the engineer John Smeaton built some
very large examples and introduced a number of improvements. A total of 1,454 engines had been
built by 1800.[34]

James Watt

had constructed 496 engines, with 164 driving reciprocating pumps, 24 serving blast furnaces, and
308 powering mill machinery; most of the engines generated from 5 to 10 hp (7.5 kW).
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 A fundamental change in working principles
was brought about by James Watt. With the close collaboration Matthew Boulton, he had succeeded
by 1778 in perfecting his steam engine, which incorporated a series of radical improvements, notably
the closing off of the upper part of the cylinder thereby making the low pressure steam drive the top
of the piston instead of the atmosphere, use of a steam jacket and the celebrated separate steam
condenser chamber. All this meant that a more constant temperature could be maintained in the
cylinder and that engine efficiency no longer varied according to atmospheric conditions. These
improvements increased engine efficiency by a factor of about five, saving 75% on coal costs.

Nor could the atmospheric engine be easily adapted to drive a rotating wheel, although Wasborough
and Pickard did succeed in doing so towards 1780. However by 1783 the more economical Watt
steam engine had been fully developed into a double-acting rotative type, which meant that it could
be used to directly drive the rotary machinery of a factory or mill. Both of Watt's basic engine types
were commercially very successful, and by 1800, the firm Boulton & Wattto 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, built as an integral
part of a stone or brick engine-house, but soon various patterns of self-contained portative engines
(readily removable, but not on wheels) were developed, such as the table engine. Towards the turn of
the 19th century, the Cornish engineer Richard Trevithick, and the American, Oliver Evans began to
construct higher pressure non-condensing steam engines, exhausting against the atmosphere. This
allowed an engine and boiler to be combined into a single unit compact enough to be used on mobile
road and rail locomotives and steam boats.

In the early 19th century after the expiration of Watt's patent, the steam engine underwent many
improvements by a host of inventors and engineers.

Chemicals:

The Thames Tunnel (opened 1843)

Cement was used in the world's first underwater tunnel

The large scale production of chemicals was an important development during the Industrial
Revolution. The first of these was the production of sulphuric acid by the lead chamber process
invented by the Englishman John Roebuck (James Watt's 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 making
a small amount each time, he was able to make around 100 pounds (50 kg) in each of the chambers,
at least a tenfold increase.

The production of an alkali on a large scale became an important goal as well, and Nicolas Leblanc
succeeded in 1791 in introducing a method for the production of sodium carbonate. The Leblanc
process was a reaction of sulphuric acid with sodium chloride to give sodium sulphate and
hydrochloric acid. The sodium sulphate was heated with limestone (calcium carbonate) and coal to
give a mixture of sodium carbonate and calcium sulphide. Adding water separated the soluble
sodium carbonate from the calcium sulphide. The process produced a large amount of pollution (the
hydrochloric acid was initially vented to the air, and calcium sulphide was a useless waste product).
Nonetheless, this synthetic soda ash proved economical compared to that from burning certain plants
(barilla) or from kelp, which were the previously dominant sources of soda ash,[35] and also to potash
(potassium carbonate) derived from hardwood ashes.

These two chemicals were very important because they enabled the introduction of a host of other
inventions, replacing many small-scale operations with more cost-effective and controllable
processes. Sodium carbonate had many uses in the glass, textile, soap, and paper industries. Early
uses for sulphuric acid included pickling (removing rust) iron and steel, and for bleaching 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, revolutionised
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.

In 1824 Joseph Aspdin, a British brick layer turned builder, patented a chemical process for making
portland cement which was an important advance in the building trades. This process involves
sintering a mixture of clay and limestone to about 1400 C, then grinding it into a fine powder which
is then mixed with water, sand and gravel to produce concrete. Portland cement was used by the
famous English engineer Marc Isambard Brunel several years later when constructing the Thames
Tunnel.[36] Cement was used on a large scale in the construction of the London sewerage system a
generation later.

Machine tools:

The Industrial Revolution could not have developed without machine tools, for they enabled
manufacturing machines to be made. They have their origins in the tools developed in the 18th
century by makers of clocks and watches and scientific instrument makers to enable them to batch-
produce small mechanisms. The mechanical parts of early textile machines were sometimes called
'clock work' because of the metal spindles and gears they incorporated. The manufacture of textile
machines drew craftsmen from these trades and is the origin of the modern engineering industry.

Machines were built by various craftsmencarpenters made wooden framings, and smiths and
turners made metal parts. A good example of how machine tools changed manufacturing took place
in Birmingham, England, in 1830. The invention of a new machine by Joseph Gillott, William
Mitchell and James Stephen Perry allowed mass manufacture of robust, cheap steel pen nibs; the
process had been laborious and expensive. Because of the difficulty of manipulating metal and the
lack of machine tools, the use of metal was kept to a minimum. Wood framing had the disadvantage
of changing dimensions with temperature and humidity, and the various joints tended to rack (work
loose) over time. As the Industrial Revolution progressed, machines with metal frames became more
common, but they required machine tools to make them economically. Before the advent of machine
tools, metal was worked manually using the basic hand tools of hammers, files, scrapers, saws and
chisels. Small metal parts were readily made by this means, but for large machine parts, production
was very laborious and costly.

A lathe from 1911, a machine tool able to make other machines

Apart from workshop lathes used by craftsmen, the first large machine tool was the cylinder boring
machine used for boring the large-diameter cylinders on early steam engines. The planing machine,
the slotting machine and the shaping machine were developed in the first decades of the 19th
century. Although the milling machine was invented at this time, it was not developed as a serious
workshop tool until during the Second Industrial Revolution.

Military production had a hand in the development of machine tools. Henry Maudslay, who trained a
school of machine tool makers early in the 19th century, was employed at the Royal Arsenal,
Woolwich, as a young man where he would have seen the large horse-driven wooden machines for
cannon boring made and worked by the Verbruggans. He later worked for Joseph Bramah on the
production of metal locks, and soon after he began working on his own. He was engaged to build the
machinery for making ships' pulley blocks for the Royal Navy in the Portsmouth Block Mills. These
were all metal and were the first machines for mass production and making components with a
degree of interchangeability. The lessons Maudslay learned about the need for stability and precision
he adapted to the development of machine tools, and in his workshops he trained a generation of men
to build on his work, such as Richard Roberts, Joseph Clement and Joseph Whitworth.

James Fox of Derby had a healthy export trade in machine tools for the first third of the century, as
did Matthew Murray of Leeds. Roberts was a maker of high-quality machine tools and a pioneer of
the use of jigs and gauges for precision workshop measurement.
History of industrial revolution:
 Humanity's twin revolutions:

Human society has passed through two huge and lasting changes which deserve the name
revolution. The first, the Neolithic Revolution, begins in 8000 BC and continues through
thousands of years. Its effect is to settle people on the land. It makes peasant agriculture the
standard everyday activity of the human species.

The second, the Industrial Revolution, gathers pace in the 18th century and is still developing
today. It moves people from the countryside into rapidly expanding towns. It turns labour into a
disciplined and mainly indoor activity, with an increasing distinction between owners, employers
and managers on one side and workers on the other.

Elements characteristic of industrial society can be seen in isolated examples long before the
18th century. In 1378 the workers in Florence's cloth trade win temporary advantages through
standing together in what would now be called industrial action. A knitting machine invented in
England in 1589 is so far ahead of its time that it can play a profitable role in factories two and
three centuries later. And the development of cloth mills in the late Middle Ages foreshadows the
search for new sources of power in the Industrial Revolution.

Nevertheless there is one place and one time - England in the 18th century - in which these
threads coalesce into a process of undeniable change.

Industrialization brings preliminary evils of exploitation, pollution and urban squalor, together
with longer-term benefits in a general rise of living standards.

There are certain clear reasons why this process occurs first in 18th-century Britain. But once the
pattern is established, and cheap manufactured goods begin to prevail in world markets, other
regions become eager to follow suit when their own circumstances make it possible to do so. Just
as the habit of settling and farming gradually permeated all regions of the world, so now - and
much more rapidly - does an international tendency to crowd into cities and produce cheap
manufactured goods.
Britain's industrial advantages: 18th century AD:

The conditions enabling Britain to pioneer the Industrial Revolution during the 18th century can
be divided into two categories, natural and political.

On the natural side the country has in abundance three important commodities - water, iron and
coal. Water in Britain's numerous hilly districts provides the power to drive mills in the early
stages of industrializaton; the rivers, amplified from 1761 by a developing network of canals,
facilitate inland transport in an age where roads are only rough tracks; and the sea, never far from
any part of Britain, makes transport of heavy goods easy between coastal cities.

The ability to make effective use of Britain's iron ore is greatly enhanced by technical advances
in the early 18th century, associated particularly with the Darby family. And the abundant
supplies of coal become of crucial importance in the second half of the century when steam
power is successively applied to every branch of industry thanks to the efforts of Watt and
Boulton.

On the political front, the contribution of entrepreneurs such as Abraham Darby and Matthew
 Bridgewater Canal: AD 1759-1761:

In 1759 a young self-taught engineer, James Brindley, is invited to visit the duke of Bridgewater. The
duke is interested in improving the market for the coal from a local mine which he owns. He believes
his coal will find customers if he can get it more cheaply into Manchester. He wants Brindley to
build him a canal with a series of locks to get barges down to the river Irwell, about three miles from
the mine.

Brindley proposes a much bolder scheme, declared by some to be impossible but accepted by the
duke. He will construct a more level canal, with less need for time-wasting locks. He will carry it on
an aqudeuct over the Irwell on a straight line to the heart of Manchester, ten miles away.

On 17 July 1761 the first bargeload of coal is pulled along the completed canal. Brindley's aqueduct
(replaced in 1894 by the present swing aqueduct) crosses the Irwell at Barton. The strange sight of a
barge floating in a gutter high up in the air becomes one of the first great tourist attractions of the
Industrial Revolution. The investment in this private canal rapidly pays off. The price of the duke's
coal is halved in the Manchester market.

The Bridgewater canal is the first in Britain to run its entire length independently of any river. It is
the start of the country's inland waterway systerm, for which Brindley himself will construct another
300 miles of canals.

James Watt and the condenser: AD 1764-1769:

In 1764 a model of a Newcomen steam engine is brought for repair to the young James Watt, who is
responsible for looking after the instruments in the physics department of the university of Glasgow.
In restoring it to working order, he is astonished at how much steam it uses and wastes.

The reason, he realizes, is that the machine's single cylinder is required to perform two opposing
functions. It must receive the incoming steam at maximum pressure to force the piston up (for which
it needs to be as hot as possible), and it must then condense the steam to form a vacuum to pull the
cylinder down (for which it needs to be as cool as possible).

The solution occurs to Watt when he is walking near Glasgow one Sunday in May 1765. The two
functions could be separated by providing a chamber, outside the cylinder but connecting with it, in
which a jet of cold water will condense the steam and cause the vacuum.

This chamber is the condenser, for which Watt registers a patent in 1769. The principle has remained
 an essential part of all subsequent steam engines. It is the first of three major improvements which
Watt makes in the basic design of steam-driven machinery. The other two are the double-acting
engine and the governor, developed in the 1780s.

Early in the 1770s Watt goes into business with Matthew Boulton, an entrepreneur with a large
factory at Soho near Birmingham. Boulton has the capacity to manufacture steam engines to Watt's
patented design, and the first two are delivered to customers in 1776.

One of them, installed by Watt himself at John Wilkinson's ironworks at Broseley in Shropshire, is of
special significance. Wilkinson is the only ironmaster in the country capable of producing cylinders
of sufficiently accurate dimensions to deliver the potential benefits of Watt's improved engine.

Hargreaves' jenny and Crompton's mule: AD 1764-1779:

An accident is said to have given a Lancashire spinner, James Hargreaves, the idea for the first
mechanical improvement of the spinning process. In about 1764 he notices an overturned spinning
wheel which continues to turn with the spindle vertical rather than horizontal. This gives him the idea
that several spindles could be worked simultaneously from a wheel in this position.

He develops a version with eight spindles for use by his own family, thus immediately raising their
output eight times. News of this causes jealous local spinners to invade his house and smash his
machines.

Hargreaves moves to Nottingham, where he sets up a small cotton-mill using his invention. It
acquires the name of spinning jenny, traditionally explained as being the name of the daughter who
gave Hargreaves the idea when she knocked over her spinning wheel. He patents his device in 1770.
By the time of his death, in 1778, the latest versions of his machine work eighty spindles each - and
there are said 20,000 jennies in use in the cottages and small factories of Britain.

This is still an entirely hand-operated mechanism. The next essential development is the application
of power. This is solved by Richard Arkwright, who takes out a patent for his machine in 1769.

Arkwright's innovation is in drawing out the cotton by means of rollers before it is twisted into yarn.
He succeeds first with a machine worked by a horse, but two years later - in 1771 - he successfully
applies water power, with the result that his invention becomes known as the water frame. It is in
place just in time for an immense new expansion of the cotton industry after a high tax on pure-
cotton fabrics (aimed at calicoes imported from India) is reduced in 1774.

Arkwright's machines are suitable for spinning the strong yarn required for the warp of the woven
cloth. They are less good at the finer material needed for the weft. Yet conversely, Hargreaves'
 spinning jenny is only suitable for the weft.

The technologies of Arkwright and Hargreaves therefore complement each other for a few years until
the merits of each are combined by Samuel Crompton, a worker in a Lancashire spinning mill. In
doing so he takes the final step in the spinning technology of the early Industrial Revolution.

Crompton observes the tendency of the spinning jenny to break the yarn, and he resolves to improve
this aspect of the process. He does so in a machine which he perfects in 1779.

Crompton's machine combines the principles of Hargreaves' jenny and of Arkwright's

water frame. The name which it acquires - Crompton's mule - is a pun on that fact. As the offspring
of a jenny (a female donkey) and of another creature, the new arrival is clearly a mule.

Crompton's machine is capable of spinning almost every kind of yarn at considerable speed. The
flying shuttle in the 1750s put pressure on the spinners to catch up. Now the mule challenges the
weavers. They respond in 1785 with the first water-driven power loom, invented by Edmund
Cartwright after visiting Arkwright's mills at Cromford. With all this technology in place, the
pressure is now on the suppliers of raw cotton in America.

Ironbridge: AD 1779:

In the space of a few months in 1779 the world's first iron bridge, with a single span of over 100 feet,
is erected for Abraham Darby (the third of that name) over the Severn just downstream from
Coalbrookdale. Work has gone on for some time in building the foundations and casting the huge
curving ribs. But in this new technology little time need be spent in assembling the parts - which
amount, it is proudly announced, to 378 tons 10 cwt. of metal.

The lightness of the structure strikes all observers. An early visitor comments: 'though it seems like
network wrought in iron, it will be uninjured for ages.' It is uninjured still. A great tradition, bringing
marvels such as the Crystal Palace, begins in this industrial valley.

Machine tools, gun barrels and cylinders: AD 1774-1800:

John Wilkinson, an ironmaster in Staffordshire and Shropshire, has been building up a lucrative arms
trade. In 1774 he invents a machine, powered by a water wheel, which can drill with unprecedented
accuracy through the length of a cast-iron cylinder to create the barrel of a cannon. It is a turning
 point in the development of machine tools.

James Watt realizes that Wilkinson's new machine is capable of the precision required for an efficient
steam-engine cylinder. In 1775 Wilkinson delivers to Birmingham the first of the thousands of
cylinders he will bore for the firm of Boulton and Watt. Boulton finds them 'almost without error;
that of 50 inches diameter doth not err the thickness of an old shilling' in any part.

The Boulton and Watt engine delivered to Wilkinson in the following year is intended for a new
purpose. Instead of the usual pumping of water, it is to undertake a more sophisticated role - working
the bellows which pump air into one of Wilkinson's blast furnaces of molten iron.

The owners of the mills and mines of the young Industrial Revolution have many tasks to which a
source of mechanical power, other than the traditional water of a mill race, could be usefully applied.
They await with interest reports of this new type of engine. And the reports are good. By the time
Watt's patent expires, in 1800, more than 500 Boulton and Watt engines have been installed around
the country and abroad.

The increased efficiency of the new engines, compared with the previous Newcomen version,
enables Boulton and Watt to charge by a novel and very profitable method. The machines are
provided and installed free, and customers pay a royalty of one-third of the amount saved on fuel.
One group of merchants interested in the Boulton and Watt machines, the London brewers, have no
previous machine use for comparison. They present Watt with an interesting billing problem which
results in the concept of horsepower.

From 1783 the saving (and the royalty) is even greater, because in that year Watt puts on the market
another major innovation - his double-acting engine.

Richard Arkwright, entrepreneur: AD 1767-1792:

By the 1780s, on the eve of the French Revolution, Britain is a society profoundly changed from a
century earlier. The form of monarchy characterized by the Stuarts, and still practised by the
Bourbon rulers in France, has given way to different structures. There is now political power in
middle-class hands. And new opportunities are available in the developing Industrial Revolution.

There is no more striking example of this flexible society, in which merit can find its own rewards,
than the career of Richard Arkwright. Born the youngest of seven children of a barber and wigmaker,
he dies sixty years later immensely wealthy and a knight of the realm.

Arkwright begins his career travelling the country in his father's trade, buying hair for wigs and
dying it by his own secret process. But soon he becomes interested in spinning. In 1767 he begins to
 construct a spinning machine. In 1769 he patents it and sets up a mill in Nottingham where his
machine is worked by a horse.

Two years later Arkwright takes several steps of great significance. He raises capital to build an
entirely new mill at Cromford, on the river Derwent in Derbyshire. He successfully adapts his
spinning machine, making it work by the much greater power of the river and a mill wheel. And he
builds cottages to house workers in the immediate vicinity.

Arkwright thus creates the factory environment. His industrial workers are a community centred on
the factory - in strong contrast to the traditional working life of peasants, dependent on the fields and
the seasons.

Within the factory, Arkwright's employees specialize in different tasks, each providing his or her own
particular service for the relentlessly demanding machines. Discipline is essential if this system is to
work, for the machines cannot be left untended. But it is no longer the variable discipline of sunrise
and harvest. It is the inflexible and potentially harsh pressure of clock and overseer.

Arkwright's factory system works brilliantly - and in its early small-scale river-based form the
environment of industry has considerable picturesque appeal, as Arkwright's surviving mill at
Cromford still demonstrates.

Arkwright builds cotton mills on suitable rivers elsewhere in the country, as far away as Scotland. By
1782, just fifteen years after his first attempt to build a spinning machine, the great entrepreneur has
a capital of some 200,000 and is employing 5000 workers. And British society welcomes this
rapidly self-made man. In 1786 he receives a knighthood. In the following year he is appointed High
Sheriff of Derbyshire.

Derby's great painter of the period, Joseph Wright, records features of this impressive story. In 1783
he paints a view of Cromford Mill by moonlight, contributing to a growing perception that industry
and its processes provide a romantic subject. In 1789 Wright provides a portrait of the great
industrialist. He sits alone, appearing prosperous but slightly gross, in a room decorated only by a
model of his spinning machine.

In the following year Joseph Wright paints Arkwright's son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren in
three group portraits. They look like the most elegant and refined of aristocrats, to the manner born -
compelling evidence of the new flexibility of English society when William Pitt becomes prime
minister.

Double-acting engine and governor: AD 1782-1787:

Just as James Watt applied a rational approach to improve the efficiency of the steam engine with the
condenser, so now he takes a logical step forward in a modification patented in 1782. His new
improvement is the double-acting engine.

Watt observes that the steam is idle for half of each cycle. During the downward stroke, when the
vacuum is exerting atmospheric force on the piston, the valve between boiler and cylinder is closed.
Watt takes the simple step of diverting the steam during this part of the cycle to the upper part of the
cylinder, where it joins with the atmospheric pressure in forcing the cylinder down - and thus doubles
its effective action.

The most elegant contraption devised by Watt is in use from 1787. It is the governor - the first
example of the type of controlling device required in industrial automation, and a feature of all steam
engines since Watt's time.

Watt's governor consists of two arms, hinged on a central pivot and rotated by the action of the steam
engine. Each arm has a heavy ball at the end. As the speed increases, centrifugal force moves the
balls and the arms outwards. This action narrows the aperture of a valve controlling the flow of
steam to the engine. As the power is slowly cut off, the speed of the engine reduces and the balls
subside nearer to the central column - thus slightly opening the valve again in a permanent process of
adjustment.

Watt's many improvements to the steam engine leave it poised to undertake a whole new range of
tasks. Its new efficiency means that it can become mobile. Each engine can now generate more
power than is required merely to move itself.

By the time of his death in 1819, in quiet retirement near Birmingham, Watt has seen the introduction
of commercially successful steam boats and the dawn of the railway age. In each case the vehicles
are powered by engines of the type which he has developed.

Puddling and rolling: AD 1783-1784:

In successive years Henry Cort, an ironmaster with a mill near Fareham in Hampshire, patents two
processes of lasting significance in the story of metallurgy.

One is the technique which becomes known as puddling, for which Cort patents a machine in 1784.
Cort's innovation is a furnace which shakes the molten iron so that air mingles with it. Oxygen
combines with carbon in the metallic compond, leaving almost pure iron. Unlike the brittle pig iron
(or cast iron), this purer metal is malleable. Capable of being hammered and shaped, it is a much
more useful metal in industrial processes than cast iron.
 In the previous year Cort has also patented a machine for drawing out red-hot lumps of purefied
metal between grooved rollers, turning them into manageable bars without the laborious process of
hammering. His device is the origin of the rolling mills which subsequently become the standard
factories of the steel industry.

Cort's subsequent career exemplifies the risks involved in the entrepreneurial excitements of the
Industrial Revolution. After spending all his own money on his inventions, he raises further capital
from the deputy-paymaster of the navy. It turns out to have been embezzled. Cort is ruined before his
inventions bring him a profit.