The Industrial Revolution transformed societies from agrarian to industrial and urban, as mechanization allowed for more efficient manufacturing. New technologies like the cotton gin and interchangeable parts increased production. Improved transportation like railroads connected areas and further drove industrialization.
The Industrial Revolution transformed societies from agrarian to industrial and urban, as mechanization allowed for more efficient manufacturing. New technologies like the cotton gin and interchangeable parts increased production. Improved transportation like railroads connected areas and further drove industrialization.
The Industrial Revolution transformed societies from agrarian to industrial and urban, as mechanization allowed for more efficient manufacturing. New technologies like the cotton gin and interchangeable parts increased production. Improved transportation like railroads connected areas and further drove industrialization.
The Industrial Revolution transformed societies from agrarian to industrial and urban, as mechanization allowed for more efficient manufacturing. New technologies like the cotton gin and interchangeable parts increased production. Improved transportation like railroads connected areas and further drove industrialization.
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INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
In 1750 most Americans lived on small self-sufficient farms. They produced most of the goods they consumed—not only their food, but also their clothing, candles, fuel, and furniture. A few extra dollars from the sale of their surplus goods sufficed to purchase such items as coffee and tea, which they could not manufacture themselves. Today most Americans live in cities, and almost none produce what they consume. Most farmers grow crops for distant markets, while buying their own food at the local supermarket. In varying degrees this transition from self-sufficiency to a market economy has taken place throughout the world.
At the heart of the change was the Industrial Revolution. It put farmers into factories, linked the world in a global economy, and increased the material wealth of the average person. The Industrial Revolution, while bringing benefits, also created problems. It brought pollution, global warming, and damage to the earth's ozone layer. It created new jobs, but it forced farmers off the land. In many instances the new jobs were less rewarding than farming had been. Assembly line positions replaced a form of labor that had allowed a farm family to see a finished product, rather than merely work on one stage of its production.
The early roots of the Industrial Revolution can be found in English
inventiveness. At the beginning of the 18th century a series of innovations made possible the building of the world's first mechanized factories. In 1733 English inventor John Kay invented the flying shuttle, and in 1764 British inventor James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny. Both inventions were used in textile manufacturing. Scottish inventor James Watt's steam engine, patented in 1769, provided the power to drive machinery, including textile factories and—in the next century—the locomotive.
Although the British tried to keep a monopoly on their marvelous machinery,
other countries soon learned the secrets of industrial manufacture. In New England, textile mills sprung up in places like Lowell, Massachusetts. During the 19th century Americans overtook the British as the industrial leaders. American inventor Eli Whitney's cotton gin made it possible to produce cotton more efficiently, thus helping provide the raw material for the textile industry—and in the process, it reinforced the demand for slaves in the South. Whitney also pioneered the use of interchangeable parts in the manufacture of guns. Formerly, each gun had been manufactured separately with its own unique trigger, firing pan, stock and other parts. Whitney showed that you could manufacture each part separately to exact specifications and then easily replace broken parts.
During the 19th century a transportation revolution accompanied and helped
along the Industrial Revolution. Villages and farms in remote parts of Europe and America were linked to a national and global economy by toll roads, canals, steamships, and railroads. Soon the innovations were taken to Africa and Asia as well. Each new invention created a market for others. Railroads, for example, stimulated the iron industry. Improved iron manufacture facilitated the construction of skyscrapers and automobiles. American automobile manufacturer Henry Ford developed assembly-line production techniques.
The Industrial Revolution began by making old products more quickly and inexpensively—though not always of higher quality. As time passed, it led to entirely new kinds of products, such as washing machines, radios, and television sets. An American philosopher, Henry David Thoreau, asked where it was all leading. Living near Boston in a cabin on the shores of Walden Pond, he surveyed the world in the 1840s and asked whether all of this inventiveness was not merely “an improved means to an unimproved end.” But even Thoreau admitted that there was something exciting about the trains that sped by on the tracks near his cabin.1
1"Industrial Revolution Transforms Daily Life (1700-1950)," Microsoft®
