You probably know some of the signs of industrialization
in the nineteenth century:
Trains connected cities, symbolizing progress.
But they also brought about the destruction
of rural lands, divisions between social classes,
and rapid urbanization.
Clocks, meanwhile, became technologies of
standardization: They created a universal
time, as opposed to a local “sun time.”
But clocks were also technologies of control,
ushering in new relationships between owners
and workers, and governors and the governed.
Not that life was great before clocks... feudalism was also really unpleasant.
And factories appeared, creating new goods,
new classes of owners and laborers, and new
environmental problems.
And communications technologies, starting
with the telegraph, made the world smaller.
Like the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial
Revolution is a trope—one about changes
to technical systems that began in England
in the late 1700s.
Some historians call this the First Industrial
Revolution, and the changes that happened
in the United States a century later, the
Second Industrial Revolution.
No matter what you call it, a revolution started
with coal, iron, and textiles in the 1700s.
By 1800, industrialization was still pretty
limited, even in England.
But by 1900, industrialization had transformed
the world.
[Intro Music Plays]
So, what allowed the Industrial Revolution
to take off in England?
One reason was social stability.
A period of peace followed the unification
of England and Scotland.
And both enjoyed a strong rule of law and
a free market.
Another reason was a population boom.
Industrialization required a large pool of
labor to staff the new factories.
The population grew thanks in part to what
some historians call the British Agricultural
Revolution or the Second Agricultural Revolution—the
first being the invention of farming itself.
From the mid-1700s to the mid-1800s, farms
changed rapidly, growing larger as common
land became enclosed.
And farmers started using an improved crop
rotation plan to get more of out of their
land—big ups to my dudes, turnips and clover!
Yields went up, resulting in fewer farmers
being needed—and, eventually, more people
looking for work in towns.
But technologically speaking, the Industrial
Revolution happened thanks to coal.
Burning coal produced the high temperature
necessary to smelt iron.
Coal burned more efficiently than charcoal.
And unlike charcoal, the coal supply wasn’t
limited by the size of a region’s forests.
So coal became the source of heat for the
steam engine.
The steam engine is a reminder that a revolutionary
technology often isn’t one new invention,
but a process of improving existing ones.
Two earlier scientists came up with ideas
for steam engines powered by … gunpowder.
One was Dutch natural philosopher Christiaan
Huygens, who’s
famous for many things, including the pendulum
clock.
The other was Dutch–Swiss mathematician
Daniel Bernoulli, famous
for his work in fluid dynamics.
But neither of these gunpowder engines really
took off.
Though they may have *explosion sound* in that way.
ThoughtBubble, show us how the steam engine
became a reality:
In 1698, English engineer Thomas Savery
patented the first workable steam pump,
which he called the “Miner’s Friend, or
an Engine th Raise Water by Fire.”
It was made to pull water up out of coal mines,
so you can see that industrialization was
linked to the quest for fossil fuels from
the very beginning.
This “miner’s friend” worked by boiling
steam and then cooling it to create a partial
vacuum, which then drew the water out of the
mine.
It had no moving parts, but it also broke
down a lot and was super dangerous.
So historians usually give the props for the
first steam engine to English preacher and
engineer Thomas Newcomen, whose “atmospheric
engine” was economically practical.
Note, this was in 1712, well before the Industrial
Revolution!
Newcomen’s engine was not very efficient—but
it didn’t have to be.
It ran on coal, but it was used at coal mines,
so they had plenty of coal.
His engine worked by using a boiler to heat
the air inside a cylinder.
A valve then sprayed cold water into the cylinder,
creating steam and a partial vacuum, which
pulled a piston down through the cylinder.
Then the process repeated,  heat the cylinder, condense steam,
this moved the piston up and down, which
also moved an attached beam, which pumped
water up from the mine.
Savery’s engines didn’t go away when Newcomen’s
design hit the market, by the way, because
Newcomen’s engines had to be pretty big.
Smaller operations were happy with Savery’s
version.
This overlap of older, less efficient and
newer, more efficient models would continue…
and still does today.
But in 1781, Scottish chemist and engineer
James Watt improved the work of Newcomen.
Watt added a new chamber called a separate
condenser where the steam could be collected
without affecting the heat of the cylinder.
This made Newcomen’s design more cost-effective
and doubled its efficiency by reducing wasted
energy.
Later, Watt tweaked his design again so that
it could generate rotary motion, which made
it way more useful than a mere water pump.
Watt then teamed up with a Birmingham manufacturer,
Matthew Boulton, to produce his engine on
a large scale.
Thanks ThoughtBubble.
The steam engine became the workhorse of the
Industrial Revolution.
In a matter of decades, steam-powered machines
such as trains reshaped much of England.
But steam wasn’t the only new technē around.
If the seventeenth century was the century
of science, and the eighteenth was the century
of philosophy, then the nineteenth century
was the century of engineering.
One critical development in engineering was
precision manufacturing.
For the first time, tool systems like lathes
and milling machines worked with high precision.
Precision manufacturing enabled the production
of interchangeable parts at scale.
The concept of interchangeable parts actually
originated in the United States, and was called
the American system of manufacturing.
We did something
This system arose shortly after Watt’s engine,
at sites such as the Springfield Armory in
Massachusetts, because the US government wanted
to be able to quickly repair muskets on the
field during war.
Eventually, the American system allowed unskilled
workers to make large quantities of guns quickly.
Together, precision manufacturing and interchangeable
parts allowed for people to replace only part
of a machine, not make a whole new one.
This lead to a machine revolution that changed
every stage of manufacturing in the textile,
iron, printing, papermaking, and other industries.
So the combination of all of these developments—bigger
farms, plentiful coal, miners to dig it up,
steam engines, trains to move materials, and
precision machines—led to many new technologies.
For example, the first iron-hulled gunboat,
the Nemesis, was built in 1839 for the British
East India Company.
Some iron warships called “dreadnoughts,”
and paddle-powered “steamers” were built
in the mid-1800s.
But steamships didn’t become common until
the 1870s.
Communication was also transformed for many
people by the development of telegraphy, or
sending messages over long distances using
electrical signals.
Synthetic chemicals also appeared in the mid-1800s.
William Henry Perkin developed the first synthetic
dye, a shade of purple known as mauveine,
in 1856.
And the mid-1800s also saw the rise of machines
in agriculture, both for plowing fields and
harvesting crops.
Then, of course, in the 1880s, inventors introduced
electrical light to a murky, gas-lighted world—but
we’ll have a separate episode on all that.
Cool new gizmos aside, the enormous wealth
concentrated in cities, and their dense populations,
led to a whole new scale of construction of
old technologies, like bridges.
Around 1800, the Port of London decided it
needed another bridge across the River Thames.
Lots of folks submitted proposals, including
the famous engineer Thomas Telford, who designed
a single cast-iron arch with a span of six
hundred feet.v
Cast-iron bridges were a brand new thing, so there
were no technē, or experience-based standards
for determining if any given design would
actually work.
Likewise, there was no epistēmē, or theoretical
science, relevant to this scale.
Universities didn’t even have engineering
professors yet!
So Parliament created two committees to solve
the bridge problem, one consisting of mathematicians
and natural scientists, and the other of practicing
builders.
The upshot: neither group could figure out
how to scientifically determine if a given
bridge design would work, just by looking
at the plan!
Instead, some really good silliness ensued.
The Astronomer Royal suggested that the bridge
be needed to be painted white, so its strength wouldn’t
be affected by the sun.
Meanwhile, the Pavilion Professor of Geometry
was able to calculate the length of the proposed
bridge down to one ten-millionth of an inch,
and its weight to one thousandth of an ounce.
But he couldn’t determine if it would actually
be stable.
So what I’m getting at is, the Industrial
Revolution was sometimes not very revolutionary-looking.
Now, what were the social effects of the Industrial
Revolution?
Before the early nineteenth century, most
finished goods were made in small batches
in the so-called cottage system, where craftspeople,
including women, worked at home.
But, by 1800, the capital generated by cottage industries became the foundation for factories.
And factories offered lots of advantages
over a rural cottage—namely, production
could be mechanized and centralized, to make
things more quickly for less money.
And the introduction of interchangeable parts
meant that, instead of one skilled craftsman
making one musket, several people could work
on different parts of it.
So, crafts went from being unique to being
mass-produced.
And if production changed, you know that labor
was bound to change, too.
As industrialization took off, labor went
from being seasonally based to being based
on clock time.
Factory work started early in the morning
and stopped late at night.
Laborers worked in shifts and were fined if
they didn’t keep pace.
And as a result of all these changes in the
labor force, the whole idea of class also changed.
Before the Industrial Revolution, your lot
in life was determined by birth.
But industrialization led to a new view of
society where classes were tied not to nobility
but to money.
Which raised the possibility of class mobility.
In fact, the Industrial Revolution produced a whole new middle class of non-noble property owners.
The middle class became both the chief producer
and consumer of factory products.
And most of the early factory owners were
middle-class entrepreneurs.
The working classes on the other hand often worked in crowded, unsanitary facilities.
Poor draining of sewage gave rise to a host
of new hygienic problems, especially outbreaks
of typhus and cholera.
In the 1800s, epidemics of cholera killed
at least 140,000 people in Britain, mostly the poor.
And the urban poor weren’t the only people
affected by the industrial revolution.
The burning of so much coal, so quickly left
behind a literal mark in the earth’s geohistory.
Today, many earth scientists agree that we
are actually living in a new geological epoch
due to human alterations of the earth.
Earth scientists have proposed a name for
the new epoch—the Anthropocene,
the “age of man.”
We’ll come back to this, too.
So the Industrial Revolution is indeed a trope—a
useful, if reductive, shorthand for this period
in history.
But it’s hard to argue with the fact that,
in many ways, for at least some people, it
was truly revolutionary.
Industrialization increased the standard of
living for many and led to sustained economic
growth.
But it also led to environmental degradation,
harsh working conditions, and the Anthropocene
itself.
But before we move on from the early 1800s,
there’s one more scientific revolution we’ll
want to to explore.
Next time—we’ll travel around the world
twice with the first modern biologists: Chuck
Darwin and Al Wallace.
Only the fittest will survive!
Crash Course History of Science is filmed
in the Dr. Cheryl C. Kinney studio in Missoula,
Montana and it’s made with the help of all
this nice people and our animation team is
Thought Cafe.
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