The Second Phase of the Industrial Revolution: 1850–1940

The practices of using engines as substitutes for animal and human muscle power and of using machines
to produce goods took on a different character after about 1850. Sometimes called the second Industrial
Revolution (or the second phase of the Industrial Revolution), this new phase differed from the original
in several ways, and marked an important shift in the progress of the revolution.

With the rapid spread of the Industrial Revolution from Great Britain to the United States and Europe
came a wave of inventions, some of which were new, many of which simply improved upon existing
machines. Advances in science, particularly in chemistry, led to widespread changes, especially in
agriculture and medicine. Petroleum became an important source of energy, leading to a new class of
mobile machines (notably automobiles and trucks). Electricity was developed into a new means of
delivering energy, leading to the introduction of small motors as well as superior lighting for both
factories and houses. A new process of stringing together several inventions to create complex systems
revolutionized manufacturing, transportation, and communications, and helped to create new business
enterprises that were much larger than anything that had come before.

Taken together, these changes accelerated the impact of the Industrial Revolution on society throughout
Europe and North America. Whereas everyday life for most people had changed relatively little from
1700 to 1800, it changed profoundly from 1800 to 1900 and beyond.

From farm to table

The third key part of modern agricultural revolution centered around food processing and preservation
techniques (such as canning and refrigeration) that allowed farm goods to be delivered to urban
customers far away. These developments owed a great deal both to the application of technology and to
the organizational changes associated with the Industrial Revolution. Thus the story of food in the
nineteenth century is the story of how the techniques of industrialization gave rise to companies that
package and preserve food and deliver it to grocery stores.
In the era before the Industrial Revolution, the majority of Americans lived in the countryside. Their food
came from the farm they lived on, or perhaps from a farm next door. People ate fresh fruit in the
summer or early autumn. In the winter or spring, they ate preserves, fruit that had been cooked and
stored in jars. Eggs came fresh from the farm's hen. But people living in crowded cities do not keep
chickens or raise their own fruit. In order to provide them with food, methods were developed in the
1800s to ship food from the countryside to cities, and to keep it from rotting on the way.

Food preservation, like many other developments during the second phase of the Industrial Revolution,
was the result of many discoveries and inventions rather than one big leap forward. Food preservation
was critical to the growth of the United States; combined with efficient transportation over long
distances (via railroad), it enabled the United States to support a large population of urban industrial
workers.

Canning food, that is, sealing cooked food inside a glass bottle or metal can, protecting it from
contaminants in the atmosphere, was developed in 1795 by a French chef, Nicholas-François Appert (c.
1750–1841). Appert was competing for a twelve-thousand-franc prize offered by the French Emperor
Napoléon Bonaparte (Napoleón I; 1769–1821), who was searching for a way to preserve food to feed his
army. Appert demonstrated a method of putting food (such as fruit) in glass containers, cooking it by
putting the jars in boiling water, and then sealing the containers.

A few years later, Peter Durand of Britain demonstrated a similar technique, substituting iron cans coated
with tin for Appert's glass bottles. Durand's solution was not ideal, however. Solder (pronounced SOD-er;
a metal used to make the cans) resulted in lead poisoning if too much canned food was eaten over a
short time. Durand's cans also raised another problem: the production of the cans themselves. Initially, a
craftsman could produce perhaps sixty cans per day; later, machines were developed that produced
hundreds of cans per minute.

Nonetheless, the canning principle had been established and its use spread. Canned food was widely
used to supply armies during the American Civil War (1861–65).

Food Preservation

There are five basic ways to prevent food from decaying:

Freezing: Humans have long known that freezing meat, and other food, slows or prevents the chemical
process of decay. Archaeologists have uncovered evidence that as long as 10,000 years ago, cave-
dwelling humans put slaughtered animals in the coldest part of their caves to preserve the meat by
freezing.

Heating: Cooking food (raising its temperature to a certain level) kills many bacteria (microscopic
organisms) that might make it unsafe to eat. For cooked food to remain edible, it must be sealed in glass
jars or metal cans to keep it away from airborne organisms that might contaminate it.

Dehydrating: Dehydrating food, or removing the water it contains, has long been used to preserve foods.
One example of a dehydrated food is pasta. Pasta is essentially flour and water that is formed into a
shape, such as a spaghetti noodle, and then dried. Removing the moisture prevents chemical reactions
that result in decay or rotting. When pasta is put into boiling water, the flour is rehydrated to make it
edible.

Fermentation: Fermentation uses chemical reactions brought about by acids to avoid spoilage. These
acids are typically created as a result of chemical reactions between specific microorganisms, such as
bacteria, molds, or yeasts, and basic food materials (such as cow's milk) to create an edible, nutritious
substance that resists decay or spoilage (contamination by poisonous bacteria). Cheese is a common
example of converting a food substance and preserving it by use of fermentation.

Chemicals: Chemical reactions have been used for centuries to preserve food by killing poisonous
bacteria. The oldest and most common chemical used to preserve food is sodium chlo-ride (salt), which
was used throughout the Middle Ages (500 to 1400) to store fish and meat. Some spices contain
chemicals that also kill poisonous bacteria (as well as providing a lively taste to food).

During the nineteenth century, scientists came to understand the theories behind many of these ancient
food preservation techniques and began to apply them on a large scale.

Refrigeration was another nineteenth-century invention that changed the face of food distribution. The
scientific principle of refrigeration—transferring heat from one object to another—was developed by the
French scientist Nicholas Sadi Carnot (1796–1832) in 1824. But it took many years before mechanical
refrigeration replaced the age-old method of using ice to keep certain foods (especially vegetables and
meat) relatively fresh and safe to eat. Well into the twentieth century, ice men delivered chunks of ice to
homes, where it was stored in insulated ice boxes to help preserve food.

Contemporary home refrigerators and air conditioners are the result of a long process of scientific
inquiry and invention. As early as 1805 American inventor Oliver Evans (1755–1819) designed, but never
built, a refrigeration machine. The theory behind Evans's system, and the basic principle of refrigeration
today, is that whenever a liquid changes into a gas it absorbs heat, thereby cooling its environment. In
1842 a physician, John Gorrie (1803–1855), built a machine in Florida to cool hospital rooms following
Evans's basic design.

Although Gorrie did not receive a patent for his system until 1851, refrigerated railroad cars were used to
carry milk products as early as the 1840s. J. B. Sutherland of Detroit, Michigan, received the first patent
for a refrigerated railroad car in 1867. The temperature-controlled cars enabled Chicago, Omaha, and
other midwestern cities to become centers of the emerging meatpacking industry; cattle were raised,
slaughtered, and butchered in the West, and then their meat (instead of live cattle, as was done
previously) was shipped to cities in the East.

For many years, refrigeration was limited to large machines used in factories, especially in the beer
manufacturing industry. By the 1890s increasing water pollution (caused by dumping raw sewage, or
human waste, into streams, lakes, and the ocean, for example) made it difficult to find supplies of
natural ice that did not pose a health risk all by itself. Consequently, in the 1890s mechanical
refrigeration was used to produce ice that was delivered, often daily, to individual homes to keep ice
boxes cold.

Later still, principles of refrigeration were extended to cooling the air for comfort. American Willis Carrier
(1876–1950), having observed that printing on paper worked better in the cooler temperatures of winter
than in the heat of summer, in 1923 devised a method of applying refrigeration to lower the
temperature in factories and public buildings (air conditioning), in large part to enhance human comfort.

Refrigeration was an outstanding example of how principles of science were applied over the period of a
century to advance the notion that human inventions could change some of the fundamental
characteristics of nature, whether it was the natural limitations of muscle power or the temperature of
Earth's atmosphere.

References
Science and Society. Perkins Ice machine
1834, Retrieved July 13,2019 from:
https://www.ssplprints.com/image/9634
6/perkins-ice-machine-1834-the-first-
vapou

"The Second Phase of the Industrial

Revolution: 1850–1940." Industrial
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encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-
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revolution-1850-1940

3rd Industrial REVOLUTION

"Food Preservation." Dictionary of
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https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/
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