The Industrial Revolution
Huge Developments in Manufacture, Leading to Urbanisation
The Industrial Revolution changed the world. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries conditions conspired to create a time of great progress in production. In Britain, a period of peace had allowed the growth of population and wealth, but now the Napoleonic Wars led to a lack of manpower and the need for greater production of cloth for uniforms and metal for arms. A way had be to found of producing these things more efficiently. Meanwhile, cheap cotton was available from the New World, where slave labour kept prices down, and the dominance of Europe as a producer of textiles was being challenged by colonies such as India. A new system of production had to be found.
The Textile Industry
The developments in manufacture initially came mainly from Britain but soon spread to Western Europe, America and eventually other parts of the world. It was the textile industry where the leaps forward were most noticeable, although other industries soon came to benefit from them, too. Previously, textile production had been done in people's homes. Children and the elderly would 'card' the wool, preparing it for spinning, then women would spin it into thread using a spinning wheel, and then it would be taken to the local weaver to weave into cloth.
A number of inventions completely changed this system. The Spinning Jenny (1764) removed the need for spinning wheels, producing thread much faster than a person; the Power Loom (1785) did away with cottage industry weavers, making it possible to produce textiles such as silk, wool and cotton on an industrial scale; and Richard Arkwright's water frame (1775), run by water wheels, provided a bountiful and free source of power to run his spinning machines. Children were still required in the new system, but instead of cleaning wool in their own homes they were required to clean the fluff out of the
machines and to crawl in amongst the dangerous moving parts to repair threads which had broken.
The Metal Manufacturing Industry
In the metal industry, leaps forward were also taking place. The Darby family discovered a way to produce iron which was far less brittle by using a blast furnace which reduced the impurities in the metal. The new metal was so strong that bridges could be built out of it, as the Darbys proved in the 1770s with the bridge which gives the town of Ironbridge in Coalbrookdale its name. Soon, new minerals were added to iron to strengthen it, resulting in steel, a metal which would make possible the skyscrapers of the great cities of America.
The Impact of the Industrial Revolution
Some historians like to call the Industrial Revolution an industrial evolution because many of the developments took a long time to reach their full potential, but it is hard to imagine now the scale of the changes that took place in Britain and other centres of industry at that time, completely changing the face of the country and the lives of a large proportion of the population. New transport systems were needed for all the factory goods, leading to the spread of the railways and canals. Josiah Wedgwood sponsored the production of canals in the Midlands for the transportation of his pottery, to the extent that Birmingham has more canals than Venice!
People were needed to man the factories so whole families decamped to the slums of the new cities, depopulating the countryside. Meanwhile, new methods of production in agriculture had made food production industrial as well. More and more people found that small-scale farming and weaving was no longer viable and they had no choice but to move to the growing factory cities, creating the landscape and working patterns we know today.
Source: C A Bayley The Birth of the Modern World
More: Science in the Industrial Revolution
