was the industrial revolution worth it essay

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Descriptive Essay: The Industrial Revolution and its Effects

The Industrial Revolution was a time of great age throughout the world. It represented major change from 1760 to the period 1820-1840. The movement originated in Great Britain and affected everything from industrial manufacturing processes to the daily life of the average citizen. I will discuss the Industrial Revolution and the effects it had on the world as a whole.

The primary industry of the time was the textiles industry. It had the most employees, output value, and invested capital. It was the first to take on new modern production methods. The transition to machine power drastically increased productivity and efficiency. This extended to iron production and chemical production.

It started in Great Britain and soon expanded into Western Europe and to the United States. The actual effects of the revolution on different sections of society differed. They manifested themselves at different times. The ‘trickle down’ effect whereby the benefits of the revolution helped the lower classes didn’t happen until towards the 1830s and 1840s. Initially, machines like the Watt Steam Engine and the Spinning Jenny only benefited the rich industrialists.

The effects on the general population, when they did come, were major. Prior to the revolution, most cotton spinning was done with a wheel in the home. These advances allowed families to increase their productivity and output. It gave them more disposable income and enabled them to facilitate the growth of a larger consumer goods market. The lower classes were able to spend. For the first time in history, the masses had a sustained growth in living standards.

Social historians noted the change in where people lived. Industrialists wanted more workers and the new technology largely confined itself to large factories in the cities. Thousands of people who lived in the countryside migrated to the cities permanently. It led to the growth of cities across the world, including London, Manchester, and Boston. The permanent shift from rural living to city living has endured to the present day.

Trade between nations increased as they often had massive surpluses of consumer goods they couldn’t sell in the domestic market. The rate of trade increased and made nations like Great Britain and the United States richer than ever before. Naturally, this translated to military power and the ability to sustain worldwide trade networks and colonies.

On the other hand, the Industrial Revolution and migration led to the mass exploitation of workers and slums. To counter this, workers formed trade unions. They fought back against employers to win rights for themselves and their families. The formation of trade unions and the collective unity of workers across industries are still existent today. It was the first time workers could make demands of their employers. It enfranchised them and gave them rights to upset the status quo and force employers to view their workers as human beings like them.

Overall, the Industrial Revolution was one of the single biggest events in human history. It launched the modern age and drove industrial technology forward at a faster rate than ever before. Even contemporary economics experts failed to predict the extent of the revolution and its effects on world history. It shows why the Industrial Revolution played such a vital role in the building of the United States of today.

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Aerospace and Defense

Was the Industrial Revolution Really Worth it?

Study reveals lingering psychological effects of 19th century coal-based industry.

Of course the Industrial Revolution was a good thing!

If it weren’t, why bother having two more, with a fourth industrial revolution on the way?

Well, that’s the trouble with human beings: we have difficulty appreciating problems that extend beyond the scale of a single generation. Climate change is the most obvious example, but there are plenty of others: the Dust Bowl, the Great Pacific garbage patch, every major financial crisis, etc.

Now, psychologists from the University of Cambridge have identified another long-term impact of the (first) Industrial Revolution. According to a study of almost 400,000 personality tests, people living in the former industrial heartlands of England and Wales are more disposed toward anxiety, depression and impulsivity, as well as being more likely to struggle with planning and self-motivation. Generations after the Industrial Revolution’s peak in the UK and well after the decline of its deep coal mining, these populations retain a “psychological adversity.”

“Regional patterns of personality and well-being may have their roots in major societal changes underway decades or centuries earlier, and the Industrial Revolution is arguably one of the most influential and formative epochs in modern history,” said co-author Jason Rentfrow.

Rentfrow and his colleagues argue that the damaging cognitive legacy of coal is “reinforced and amplified” by the more obvious economic consequences of high unemployment we see today. Presumably, the researchers controlled for the psychological effects of high unemployment in areas without a history of intensive, coal-based industrialization. The UK findings, published in the  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , are supported by a North American “robustness check,” with less detailed data from US demographics suggesting the same patterns of post-industrial personality traits.

“Those who live in a post-industrial landscape still do so in the shadow of coal, internally as well as externally,” said Rentfrow. “This study is one of the first to show that the Industrial Revolution has a hidden psychological heritage, one that is imprinted on today’s psychological make-up of the regions of England and Wales.”

The Big Personality Test

I’m sure there are a fair number of readers rolling their eyes at this point.

A population suffering from “psychological adversity” as the result of events that occurred over a century before they were born? As if the replication crisis wasn’t enough reason to be suspicious of psychology research. Still, it’s hard to argue with the methodology at work here.

An international team of psychologists, including researchers from the Queensland University of Technology , University of Texas , University of Cambridge and the Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University , used data collected from 381,916 people across England and Wales during 2009-2011 as part of the BBC Lab’s online Big Personality Test .

The team analysed test scores by looking at the “big five” personality traits: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness. The results were further dissected by characteristics such as altruism, self-discipline and anxiety.

The data was also broken down by region and county, and compared with several other large-scale datasets including coalfield maps and a male occupation census of the early 19th century, collated through parish baptism records, where the father listed his job.

The researchers controlled for a range of other possible influences, including competing economic factors in the 19 th century and earlier, as well as modern considerations of education, wealth and even climate. Nevertheless, their research still showed significant personality differences for those currently occupying areas where large numbers of men had been employed in coal-based industries from 1813 to 1820.

Neuroticism was an average of 33 percent higher in these areas compared with the rest of the UK, indicating increased emotional instability, susceptibility to feelings of worry or anger, and a higher risk of depression and substance abuse. These same areas scored 31 percent higher than the national average for tendencies toward both anxiety and depression.

In addition, conscientiousness—which manifests as orderly and goal-oriented behaviors, including financial prudence—was 26 percent lower on average. Life satisfaction, metrics for which were included on the BBC Lab questionnaire, was an average of 29 percent lower.

The Price of Industrialization

Although the researchers admit that many factors are no doubt involved in this apparent correlation between personality traits and historic industrialization, they suggest that two of the most likely factors are migration and socialization. The story goes like this:

Those who migrated into industrial areas in the 19 th century were hoping to escape the poverty of rural depression, so they were already experiencing higher levels of psychological adversity. The people who migrated out of the industrial areas later on were most likely those with higher degrees of optimism and psychological resilience. The result is a concentration of “negative” personality traits—like neuroticism—in industrial areas.

Furthermore, this migratory effect could have been exacerbated by the socialization of repetitive, dangerous and exhausting labor from childhood onward, combined with overcrowding and poor sanitation.

Taken together, these migration and socialization hypotheses would account for both nature—the migratory proposal is essentially a watered-down version of genetic drift—and nurture, though the researchers would likely disagree with this characterization.

In any case, the researchers argue that their findings could be useful to policymakers looking at public health interventions.

“The decline of coal in areas dependent on such industries has caused persistent economic hardship – most prominently high unemployment. This is only likely to have contributed to the baseline of psychological adversity the Industrial Revolution imprinted on some populations,” said co-author Michael Stuetzer from Baden-Württemberg Cooperative State University. “These regional personality levels may have a long history, reaching back to the foundations of our industrial world, so it seems safe to assume they will continue to shape the well-being, health, and economic trajectories of these regions.”

The researchers also noted that, while they focused on the negative psychological imprint of coal, future research could examine possible long-term positive effects in these regions born of the same adversity—such as the solidarity and civic engagement witnessed in the labor movement.

So, was the Industrial Revolution really worth it? Environmental and psychological damage notwithstanding, living in an industrialized world is a pretty sweet deal. They key question—and one the researchers don’t seem to consider—is whether the effects of all three industrial revolutions have been similarly deleterious.

One might reasonably expect a kind of remediating effect as technological advancement makes industrial workers’ lives better: the choice between working in a factory now or a hundred years ago is a no-brainer. Unlike the first industrial revolution, perhaps the upcoming Industry 4.0 will alleviate—rather than exacerbate—the economic and psychological consequences of unemployment in the manufacturing sector today.

What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Ian is a senior editor at engineering.com, covering additive manufacturing and 3D printing, artificial intelligence, and advanced manufacturing. Ian holds bachelors and masters degrees in philosophy from McMaster University and spent six years pursuing a doctoral degree at York University before withdrawing in good standing.

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The industrial revolution: past and future.

May 1, 2004

Article Highlights

Industrial revolutions spark unprecedented population and production growth

Global growth rates and income inequality temporary

Poverty reduced best when poor nations discover productive potential

We live in a world of staggering and unprecedented income inequality. Production per person in the wealthiest economy, the United States, is something like 15 times production per person in the poorest economies of Africa and South Asia. Since the end of the European colonial age, in the 1950s and ’60s, the economies of South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong have been transformed from among the very poorest in the world to middle-income societies with a living standard about one-third of America’s or higher. In other economies, many of them no worse off in 1960 than these East Asian “miracle” economies were, large fractions of the population still live in feudal sectors with incomes only slightly above subsistence levels. How are we to interpret these successes and failures?

Economists, today, are divided on many aspects of this question, but I think that if we look at the right evidence, organized in the right way, we can get very close to a coherent and reliable view of the changes in the wealth of nations that have occurred in the last two centuries and those that are likely to occur in this one. The Asian miracles are only one chapter in the larger story of the world economy since World War II, and that story in turn is only one chapter in the history of the industrial revolution. I will set out what I see as the main facts of the economic history of the recent past, with a minimum of theoretical interpretation, and try to see what they suggest about the future of the world economy. I do not think we can understand the contemporary world without understanding the events that have given rise to it.

I will begin and end with numbers, starting with an attempt to give a quantitative picture of the world economy in the postwar period, of the growth of population and production since 1950. Next, I will turn to the economic history of the world up to about 1750 or 1800, in other words, the economic history known to Adam Smith, David Ricardo and the other thinkers who have helped us form our vision of how the world works. Third, I will sketch what I see as the main features of the initial phase of the industrial revolution, the years from 1800 to the end of the colonial age in 1950. Following these historical reviews, I will outline a theoretical structure roughly consistent with the facts. If I succeed in doing this well, it may be possible to conclude with some useful generalizations and some assessments of the world’s future economic prospects.

The world economy in the postwar period

Today, most economies enjoy sustained growth in average real incomes as a matter of course. Living standards in all economies in the world 300 years ago were more or less equal to one another and more or less constant over time. Following common practice, I use the term industrial revolution to refer to this change in the human condition, although the modifier industrial is slightly outmoded, and I do not intend to single out iron and steel or other heavy industry, or even manufacturing in general, as being of special importance. By a country’s average real income, I mean simply its gross domestic product (GDP) in constant dollars divided by its population. Although I will touch on other aspects of society, my focus will be on economic success, as measured by population and production.

Our knowledge of production and living standards at various places and times has grown enormously in the past few decades. The most recent empirical contribution, one of the very first importance, is the Penn World Table project conducted by Robert Summers and Alan Heston. 1 This readily available, conveniently organized data set contains population and production data on every country in the world from about 1950 or 1960 (depending on the country) to the present. The availability of this marvelous body of data has given the recent revival of mathematical growth theory an explicitly empirical character that is quite different from the more purely theoretical investigations of the 1960s. It has also stimulated a more universal, ambitious style of theorizing aimed at providing a unified account of the behavior of rich and poor societies alike.

As a result of the Penn project, we now have a reliable picture of production in the entire world, both rich and poor countries. Let us review the main features of this picture, beginning with population estimates. Over the 40-year period from 1960 through 2000, world population grew from about 3 billion to 6.1 billion, or at an annual rate of 1.7 percent. These numbers are often cited with alarm, and obviously the number of people in the world cannot possibly grow at 2 percent per year forever. But many exponents of what a friend of mine calls the “economics of gloom” go beyond this truism to suggest that population growth is outstripping available resources, that the human race is blindly multiplying itself toward poverty and starvation. This is simply nonsense.

There is, to be sure, much poverty and starvation in the world, but nothing could be further from the truth than the idea that poverty is increasing. Over the same period during which population has grown from 3 billion to 6.1 billion, total world production has grown much faster than population, from $6.5 trillion in 1960 to $31 trillion in 2000. (All the dollar magnitudes I cite, from the Penn World Table or any other source, will be in units of 1985 U.S. dollars.) That is, world production was nearly multiplied by five over this 40-year period, growing at an annual rate of 4 percent. Production per person—real income—thus grew at 2.3 percent per year, which is to say that the living standard of the average world citizen more than doubled. Please understand: I am not quoting figures for the advanced economies or for a handful of economic miracles. I am not excluding Africa or the communist countries. These are numbers for the world as a whole. The entire human race is getting rich, at historically unprecedented rates. The economic miracles of East Asia are, of course, atypical in their magnitudes, but economic growth is not the exception in the world today: It is the rule.

Average figures like these mask diversity, of course. Figure 1 shows one way to use the information in the Penn World Table to summarize the distribution of the levels and growth rates of population and per capita incomes in the postwar world. It contains two bar graphs of per capita incomes, one for 1960 and the other for 1990 (not 2000). The horizontal axis is GDP per capita, in thousands of dollars. The vertical axis is population. The height of each bar is proportional to the number of people in the world with average incomes in the indicated range, based on the assumption (though, of course, it is false) that everyone in a country has that country’s average income. The figure shows that the number of people (not just the fraction) in countries with mean incomes below $1,100 has declined between 1960 and 1990. The entire world income distribution has shifted to the right, without much change in the degree of income inequality, since 1960. At the end of the period, as at the beginning, the degree of inequality is enormous. The poorest countries in 1990 have per capita incomes of around $1,000 per year compared to the U.S. average of $18,000: a factor of 18. This degree of inequality between the richest and poorest societies is without precedent in human history, as is the growth in population and living standards in the postwar period.

A great deal of recent empirical work focuses on the question of whether per capita incomes are converging to a common (growing) level, or possibly diverging. From Figure 1 it is evident that this is a fairly subtle question. In any case, it seems obvious that we are not going to learn much about the economic future of the world by simple statistical extrapolation of events from 1960 to 1990, however it is carried out. Extrapolating the 2 percent population growth rate backward from 1960, one would conclude that Adam and Eve were expelled from the garden in about the year 1000. Extrapolating the 2.2 rate of per capita income growth backward, one would infer that people in 1800 subsisted on less than $100 per year. Extrapolating forward leads to predictions that the earth’s water supply (or supply of anything else) will be exhausted in a finite period. Such exercises make it clear that the years since 1960 are part of a period of transition, but from what to what? Let us turn to history for half the answer to this question.

Comparison to earlier centuries

The striking thing about postwar economic growth is how recent such growth is. I have said that total world production has been growing at over 4 percent since 1960. Compare this to annual growth rates of 2.4 percent for the first 60 years of the 20th century, of 1 percent for the entire 19th century, of one-third of 1 percent for the 18th century. 2 For these years, the growth in both population and production was far lower than in modern times. Moreover, it is fairly clear that up to 1800 or maybe 1750, no society had experienced sustained growth in per capita income. (Eighteenth century population growth also averaged one-third of 1 percent, the same as production growth.) That is, up to about two centuries ago, per capita incomes in all societies were stagnated at around $400 to $800 per year. But how do we know this? After all, the Penn World Tables don’t cover the Roman Empire or the Han Dynasty. But there are many other sources of information.

In the front hall of my apartment in Chicago there is a painting of an agricultural scene, a gift from a Korean student of mine. In the painting, a farmer is plowing his field behind an ox. Fruit trees are flowering, and mountains rise in the background. The scene is peaceful, inspiring nostalgia for the old days (though I do not know when the painting was done or what time period it depicts). There is also much information for an economist in this picture. It is not difficult to estimate the income of this farmer, for we know about how much land one farmer and his ox can care for, about how much can be grown on this land, how much fruit the little orchard will yield and how much the production would be worth in 1985 U.S. dollar prices. This farmer’s income is about $2,000 per year. Moreover, we know that up until recent decades, almost all of the Korean workforce (well over 90 percent) was engaged in traditional agriculture, so this figure of $2,000 ($500 per capita) for the farmer, his wife and his two children must be pretty close to the per capita income for the country as a whole. True, we do not have sophisticated national income and product accounts for Korea 100 years ago, but we don’t need them to arrive at fairly good estimates of living standards that prevailed back then. Traditional agricultural societies are very like one another, all over the world, and the standard of living they yield is not hard to estimate reliably.

Other, more systematic, information is also available. For poor societies—all societies before about 1800—we can reliably estimate income per capita using the idea that average living standards of most historical societies must have been very near the estimated per capita production figures of the poorest contemporary societies. Incomes in, say, ancient China cannot have been much lower than incomes in 1960 China and still sustained stable or growing populations. And if incomes in any part of the world in any time period had been much larger than the levels of the poor countries of today—a factor of two, say—we would have heard about it. If such enormous percentage differences had ever existed, they would have made some kind of appearance in the available accounts of the historically curious, from Herodotus to Marco Polo to Adam Smith.

How then did these traditional societies support the vast accomplishments of the ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome, of China and India? Obviously, not everyone in these societies was living on $600 per year. The answer lies in the role and wealth of landowners, who receive about 30 percent to 40 percent of agricultural income. A nation of 10 million people with a per capita production of $600 per year has a total income of $6 billion. Thirty percent of $6 billion is $1.8 billion. In the hands of a small elite, this kind of money can support a fairly lavish lifestyle or build impressive temples or subsidize many artists and intellectuals. As we know from many historical examples, traditional agricultural society can support an impressive civilization. What it cannot do is generate improvement in the living standards of masses of people. The Korean farmer plowing his field in the painting in my hallway could be in any century in the last 1,000 years. Nothing in the picture would need to be changed to register the passage of the centuries.

If the living standard in traditional economies was low, it was at least fairly equally low across various societies. Even at the beginning of the age of European colonialism, the dominance of Europe was military, not economic. When the conquistadors of Spain took control of the societies of the Incas and the Aztecs, it was not a confrontation between a rich society and a poor one. In the 16th century, living standards in Europe and the Americas were about the same. Indeed, Spanish observers of the time marveled at the variety and quality of goods that were offered for sale in the markets of Mexico. Smith, Ricardo and their contemporaries argued about differences in living standards, and perhaps their discussions can be taken to refer to income differences as large as a factor of two. But nothing remotely like the income differences of our current world, differences on the order of a factor of 25, existed in 1800 or at any earlier time. Such inequality is a product of the industrial revolution.

The beginnings of the industrial revolution

Traditional society was characterized by stable per capita income. Our own world is one of accelerating income growth. The course of the industrial revolution, our term for the transition from stable to accelerating growth, is illustrated in Figure 2, which plots total world population and production from the year 1000 up to the present. I use a logarithmic scale rather than natural units, so that a constant rate of growth would imply a straight line. One can see from the figure that the growth rates of both population and production are increasing over time. The vertical scale is millions of persons (for population) and billions of 1985 U.S. dollars (for production). The difference between the two curves is about constant up until 1800, reflecting the assumption that production per person was roughly constant prior to that date. Then in the 19th century, growth in both series accelerates dramatically, and production growth accelerates more. By 1900 the two curves cross, at which time world income per capita was $1,000 per year. The growth and indeed the acceleration of both population and production continue to the present.

Of course, the industrial revolution did not affect all parts of the world uniformly, nor is it doing so today. Figure 3, based on per capita income data estimated as I have discussed, is one way of illustrating the origins and the diffusion of the industrial revolution. To construct the figure, the countries (or regions) of the world were organized into five groups, ordered by their current per capita income levels. Group I—basically, the English-speaking countries—are those in which per capita incomes first exhibited sustained growth. Group II is Japan, isolated only because I want to highlight its remarkable economic history. Group III consists of northwest Europe, the countries that began sustained growth somewhat later than Group I. Group IV is the rest of Europe, together with European-dominated economies in Latin America. Group V contains the rest of Asia and Africa.

As shown in Figure 3, per capita incomes were approximately constant, over space and time, over the period 1750–1800, at a level of something like $600 to $700. Here and below, the modifier “approximately” must be taken to mean plus or minus $200. Following the reasoning I have advanced above, $600 is taken as an estimate of living standards in all societies prior to 1750, so there would be no interest in extending Figure 3 to the left. The numbers at the right of Figure 3 indicate the 1990 populations, in millions of people, for the five groups of countries. About two-thirds of the world’s people live in Group V, which contains all of Africa and Asia except Japan.

Reading Figure 3 from left to right, we can see the emergence over the last two centuries of the inequality displayed in Figure 1. By 1850 there was something like a factor of two difference between the English-speaking countries and the poor countries of Africa and Asia. By 1900, a difference of perhaps a factor of six had emerged. At that time, the rest of Europe was still far behind England and America, and Japanese incomes were scarcely distinguishable from incomes in the rest of Asia. In the first half of the 20th century, the inequality present in 1900 was simply magnified. The English-speaking countries gained relative to northern Europe, which in turn gained on the rest of Europe and Asia. Notice, too, that per capita income in what I have called Group V, the African and Asian countries, remained constant at around $600 up to 1950. The entire colonial era was a period of stagnation in the living standards of masses of people. European imperialism brought advances in technology to much of the colonized world, and these advances led to increases in production that could, as in British India, be impressive. But the outcome of colonial economic growth was larger populations, not higher living standards.

In the period since 1950, the pattern of world growth has begun to change character, as well as to accelerate dramatically. What was at first thought to be the postwar recovery of continental Europe and of Japan turned out to be the European and Japanese miracles, taking these countries far beyond their prewar living standards to levels comparable to the United States. (There are some miracles in my Group IV, too— Italy and Spain—that are not seen on the figure because they are averaged in with Latin America and the communist world.) The second major change in the postwar world is the beginning of per capita income growth in Africa and Asia, entirely a post-colonial phenomenon. The industrial revolution has begun to diffuse to the non-European world, and this, of course, is the main reason that postwar growth rates for the world as a whole have attained such unprecedented levels.

Figure 4 provides a rough description of the demographic transitions since 1750 that have occurred and are still occurring. The figure exhibits five plotted curves, one for each country group. Each curve connects 10 points, corresponding to the time periods beginning in 1750 and ending in 1990, as indicated at the bottom of Figure 3. (Note that the periods are not of equal length.) Each point plots the group’s average rate of population growth for that period against its per capita income at the beginning of the period. The per capita GDP figures in 1750 can just be read off Figure 3, from which it is clear that they are about $600 for all five groups. Population growth rates in 1750 average about 0.4 percent and are well below 1 percent for all five groups. For each group, one can see a nearly vertical increase in population growth rates with little increase in GDP per capita, corresponding to the onset of industrialization. This, of course, is precisely the response to technological advance that Malthus and Ricardo told us to expect. Then, in groups I to IV a maximum is reached, and as incomes continue to rise, population growth rates decline. In group V—most of Asia and Africa—the curve has only leveled off, but does anyone doubt that these regions will follow the path that the rest of the world has already worn?

Theoretical responses

I have brought the story of the industrial revolution up to the present. Where are we going from here? For this, we need a theory of growth, a system of equations that makes economic sense and that fits the facts I have just reviewed. There is a tremendous amount of very promising research now occurring in economics, trying to construct such a system, and in a few years we will be able to run these equations into the future and see how it will look. Now, though, I think it is accurate to say that we have not one but two theories of production: one consistent with the main features of the world economy prior to the industrial revolution and another roughly consistent with the behavior of the advanced economies today. What we need is an understanding of the transition.

One of these successful theories is the product of Smith, Ricardo, Malthus and the other classical economists. The world they undertook to explain was the world on the eve of the industrial revolution, and it could not have occurred to them that economic theory should seek to explain sustained, exponential growth in living standards. Their theory is consistent with the following stylized view of economic history up to around 1800. Labor and resources combine to produce goods—largely food, in poor societies—that sustain life and reproduction. Over time, providence and human ingenuity make it possible for given amounts of labor and resources to produce more goods than they could before. The resulting increases in production per person stimulate fertility and increases in population, up to the point where the original standard of living is restored. Such dynamics, operating over the centuries, account for the gradually accelerating increase in the human population and the distribution of that population over the regions of the earth in a way that is consistent with the approximate constancy of living standards everywhere. The model predicts that the living standards of working people are maintained at a roughly constant, “subsistence” level, but with realistic shares of income going to landowners, the theory is consistent as well with high civilization based on large concentrations of wealth.

This classical theory is not inconsistent with the enormous improvements in knowledge relevant to productivity that occurred long before the 18th century, improvements that supported huge population increases and vast wealth for owners of land and other resources. Increases in knowledge over the centuries also stimulated a large-scale accumulation of productive capital: shipbuilding, road and harbor construction, draining of swamps, and breeding and raising of animal herds for food and power. Capital accumulation, too, played a role in supporting ever larger populations. Yet under the Malthusian theory of fertility, neither new knowledge nor the capital accumulation it makes profitable is enough to induce the sustained growth in living standards of masses of people that modern economists take as the defining characteristic of the industrial revolution.

The modern theory of sustained income growth, stemming from the work of Robert Solow in the 1950s, was designed to fit the behavior of the economies that had passed through the demographic transition. 3 This theory deals with the problem posed by Malthusian fertility by simply ignoring the economics of the problem and assuming a fixed rate of population growth. In such a context, the accumulation of physical capital is not, in itself, sufficient to account for sustained income growth. With a fixed rate of labor force growth, the law of diminishing returns puts a limit on the income increase that capital accumulation can generate. To account for sustained growth, the modern theory needs to postulate continuous improvements in technology or in knowledge or in human capital (I think these are all just different terms for the same thing) as an “engine of growth.” Since such a postulate is consistent with the evidence we have from the modern (and the ancient) world, this does not seem to be a liability of the theory.

The modern theory, based on fixed fertility, and the classical theory, based on fertility that increases with increases in income, are obviously not mutually consistent. Nor can we simply say that the modern theory fits the modern world and the classical theory the ancient world, because we can see traditional societies exhibiting Malthusian behavior in the world today. Increases since 1960 in total production in Africa, for example, have been almost entirely absorbed by increases in population, with negligible increases in income per capita. Understanding the progress of the industrial revolution as it continues today necessarily entails understanding why it is that Malthusian dynamics have ceased to hold in much of the contemporary world. Country after country has gone through a demographic transition, involving increases in the rate of population growth followed by decreases, as income continues to rise. Some of the wealthiest countries—Japan and parts of Europe—are just about maintaining their populations at current levels. People in these wealthy economies are better able to afford large families than people in poor economies, yet they choose not to do so.

If these two inconsistent theories are to be reconciled, with each other and with the facts of the demographic transition, a second factor needs to work to decrease fertility as income grows, operating alongside the Malthusian force that works to increase it. Gary Becker proposed long ago that this second factor be identified with the quality of children: As family income rises, spending on children increases, as assumed in Malthusian theory, but these increases can take the form of a greater number of children or of a larger allocation of parental time and other resources to each child. Parents are assumed to value increases both in the quantity of children and in the quality of each child’s life. 4

Of course, both the quality-quantity trade-off in Becker’s sense and the importance of human capital are visible well before the industrial revolution. In any society with established property rights, a class of landowners will be subject to different population dynamics due to the effect their fertility has on inheritances and the quality of lives their children enjoy. Such families can accumulate vast wealth and enjoy living standards far above subsistence. For the histories of what we call civilization, this deviation from a pure Malthusian subsistence model is everything. For the history of living standards of masses of people, however, it is but a minor qualification. Similarly, in any society of any complexity, some individuals can, by virtue of talent and education, formal or informal, acquire skills that yield high income, and as the Bachs and the Mozarts can testify, such exceptions can run in families. For most societies, though, income increases due to what a modern economist calls human capital are exceptional and often derivative, economically, from landowner wealth.

For a landless family in a traditional agricultural economy, the possibilities for affecting the quality of children’s lives are pretty slight. If there is no property to pass on, an additional child does not dilute the inheritance of siblings. Parents could spend time and resources on the child’s education in the attempt to leave a bequest of human capital. All parents do this to some degree, but the incentives to do so obviously depend on the return to human capital offered by the society the parents live in. Where this return is low, adding the quality dimension to the fertility decision may be only a minor twist on Malthusian dynamics. In short, neither the possibility of using inheritable capital to improve the quality of children’s lives nor the possibility of accumulating human capital needs to result in fundamental departures from the predictions of the classical model.

But these additional features do offer the possibility of non-Malthusian dynamics, and the possibility has promise because the process of industrialization seems to involve a dramatic increase in the returns to human capital. People are moving out of traditional agriculture, where the necessary adult skills can be acquired through on-the-job child labor. More and more people are entering occupations different from their parents’ occupations that require skills learned in school as well as those learned at home. New kinds of capital goods require workers with the training to operate and to improve upon them. In such a world a parent can do many things with time and resources that will give a child advantages in a changing economy, and the fewer children a parent has, the more such advantages can be given to each child.

It is a unique feature of human capital that it yields returns that cannot be captured entirely by its “owner.” Bach and Mozart were well paid (though neither as well as he thought he deserved), but both of them provided enormous stimulation and inspiration to others for which they were paid nothing, just as both of them also gained from others. Such external effects , as economists call them, are the subject matter of intellectual and artistic history and should be the main subject of industrial and commercial history as well. These pervasive external effects introduce a kind of feedback into human capital theory: Something that increases the return on human capital will stimulate greater accumulation, in turn stimulating higher returns, stimulating still greater accumulation and so on.

On this general view of economic growth, then, what began in England in the 18th century and continues to diffuse throughout the world today is something like the following. Technological advances occurred that increased the wages of those with the skills needed to make economic use of these advances. These wage effects stimulated others to accumulate skills and stimulated many families to decide against having a large number of unskilled children and in favor of having fewer children, with more time and resources invested in each. The presence of a higher-skilled workforce increased still further the return to acquiring skills, keeping the process going. Wouldn’t such a process bog down due to diminishing returns to skill-intensive goods? Someone has to dig potatoes, after all. It might, and I imagine that many incipient industrial revolutions died prematurely due to such diminishing returns. But international trade undoubtedly helped England attain critical mass by letting English workers specialize in skill-demanding production while potatoes were imported from somewhere else.

Whatever the importance of human capital accumulation in the original industrial revolution, there is no doubt that rapid improvement in skills is characteristic of its diffusion in the modern world economy. Nancy Stokey estimates that the major stimulus of the North American Free Trade Agreement to economic growth in Mexico will be not the inflow of physical capital (though that is considerable), but the increased accumulation of human capital that will be stimulated by the higher rate of return the new physical capital will induce. 5 Post-NAFTA Mexico is increasingly an economy that assigns high rewards to training and technological skills.

Generalizations from experience

Economically, the 60 years since the end of World War II have been an extraordinary period. The growth rates of world population, production and incomes per capita have reached unprecedented heights. As a result of the combination of poor countries with very little income growth and wealthy countries with sustained growth, the degree of income inequality across societies has reached unprecedented levels. None of this can persist. This, I think, is the main lesson of the broader history of the industrial revolution, as viewed by modern growth theory.

I have interpreted this period as the beginning of the phase of the diffusion of the sustained economic growth that characterizes the European industrial revolution to the former colonies of the non-European world. The rapid growth of non-European nations (and some of the poorer European ones) is mainly responsible for the extraordinarily rapid growth of world production in the postwar era. But enough other societies have been largely left out of this process of diffusion that the degree of inequality among nations remained about the same in 1990 as it was in 1960. As those economies that have joined the modern world catch up to the income levels of the wealthiest countries, their growth rates of both population and income will slow down to rates that are close to those that now prevail in Europe. We have seen these events occur in Japan; they will follow in country after country.

At the same time, countries that have been kept out of this process of diffusion by socialist planning or simply by corruption and lawlessness will, one after another, join the industrial revolution and become the miracle economies of the future. The income growth rates in these catch-up economies may be very high, but as fewer and fewer countries remain in this category, the effect on world averages will shrink. If so, then world population growth will attain a peak and begin shrinking toward less than 1 percent, and world production growth will similarly cease to rise and will fall back toward 3 percent. In other words, we will see a world that, economically, looks more and more like the United States.

What do history and economic theory have to say about factors that will accelerate this process of catching up? What policies for Pakistan or Nigeria would materially affect the likelihood of an economic miracle? For backward economies, dealing on a day-to-day basis with more advanced economies is the central element in success. No successes have been observed for autarchic, produce-everything-ourselves strategies (though such strategies can possibly work well for a few years: think of Russia in the 1920s or India in the 1950s). Trade has the benefit of letting a smaller country’s industries attain efficient scale, but I think an even more important factor is the need to get up to world standards, to learn to play in the big leagues. The only way learning and technology transfer can take place is for producers to compete seriously internationally. Learning-by-doing is perhaps the most important form of human capital accumulation.

Macroeconomic policy, however, does not appear to be of central importance to growth. Korea, Brazil and Indonesia have all enjoyed rapid growth under inflationary policies (though others—Argentina, Chile and, again, Brazil—have had the opposite experience). Of course, in all these cases, inflation has arisen from monetary expansion to cover fiscal deficits. Certainly, I do not want to endorse inflation—it is an unnecessary waste of resources with no positive side effects—but this seems to be a largely separate issue from growth. It is always a mistake to think of everything as interconnected (though, of course, everything is, in some sense): I think it is more fruitful to break a problem down into manageable pieces and address the pieces one at a time.

Of the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics, the most seductive, and in my opinion the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of distribution. In this very minute, a child is being born to an American family and another child, equally valued by God, is being born to a family in India. The resources of all kinds that will be at the disposal of this new American will be on the order of 15 times the resources available to his Indian brother. This seems to us a terrible wrong, justifying direct corrective action, and perhaps some actions of this kind can and should be taken. But of the vast increase in the well-being of hundreds of millions of people that has occurred in the 200-year course of the industrial revolution to date, virtually none of it can be attributed to the direct redistribution of resources from rich to poor. The potential for improving the lives of poor people by finding different ways of distributing current production is nothing compared to the apparently limitless potential of increasing production.

Recommendations for Further Reading

For a good introduction to the way economists today are using theory to measure the importance of different sources of economic growth, see Stephen L. Parente and Edward C. Prescott, Barriers to Riches (Cambridge: MIT Press), 2000. I’ve used this book in class at Chicago, with good success. My students also enjoyed the more anecdotal treatment in William Easterly, The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics (Cambridge: MIT Press), 2002. [See review in the September 2003 Region .]

Michael Kremer’s 1993 paper “Population Growth and Technological Change: One Million B.C. to 1990,” Quarterly Journal of Economics (107: 681–716) stimulated everyone who thinks about economic growth. So did Lant Pritchett’s “Divergence, Big Time” in the 1997 Journal of Economic Perspectives (11: 3–18) and Jeffrey D. Sachs and Andrew Warner, “Economic Reform and the Process of Global Integration,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity , (1995): 1–118. Though published in professional journals, all of these papers have much to offer the nontechnical reader.

—Robert Lucas

1 A good description is available in: Robert Summers and Alan Heston, “The Penn World Table (Mark 5): An Expanded Set of International Comparisons, 1950–1988.” Quarterly Journal of Economics , 105 (1991): 327–368. The latest versions of the tables are available at pwt.econ.upenn.edu .

2 The sources for these and many other figures cited in this section are given in Chapter 5 of my Lectures on Economic Growth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 2002.

3 Robert M. Solow, “A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth.” Quarterly Journal of Economics , 70 (1956): 65–94.

4 Gary S. Becker, “An Economic Analysis of Fertility.” In Richard Easterlin, ed., Demographic and Economic Change in Developed Countries . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960. See also Robert J. Barro and Gary S. Becker, “Fertility Choice in a Model of Economic Growth.” Econometrica , 57 (1989): 481–501.

5 Nancy L. Stokey. “Free Trade, Factor Returns, and Factor Accumulation.” Journal of Economic Growth , 1 (1996): 421–448.

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Industrial Revolution and Technology

Whether it was mechanical inventions or new ways of doing old things, innovations powered the Industrial Revolution.

Social Studies, World History

Steam Engine Queens Mill

The use of steam-powered machines in cotton production pushed Britain’s economic development from 1750 to 1850. Built more than 100 years ago, this steam engine still powers the Queens Mill textile factory in Burnley, England, United Kingdom.

Photograph by Ashley Cooper

It has been said that the Industrial Revolution was the most profound revolution in human history, because of its sweeping impact on people’s daily lives. The term “industrial revolution” is a succinct catchphrase to describe a historical period, starting in 18th-century Great Britain, where the pace of change appeared to speed up. This acceleration in the processes of technical innovation brought about an array of new tools and machines. It also involved more subtle practical improvements in various fields affecting labor, production, and resource use. The word “technology” (which derives from the Greek word techne , meaning art or craft) encompasses both of these dimensions of innovation. The technological revolution, and that sense of ever-quickening change, began much earlier than the 18th century and has continued all the way to the present day. Perhaps what was most unique about the Industrial Revolution was its merger of technology with industry. Key inventions and innovations served to shape virtually every existing sector of human activity along industrial lines, while also creating many new industries. The following are some key examples of the forces driving change. Agriculture Western European farming methods had been improving gradually over the centuries. Several factors came together in 18th-century Britain to bring about a substantial increase in agricultural productivity. These included new types of equipment, such as the seed drill developed by Jethro Tull around 1701. Progress was also made in crop rotation and land use, soil health, development of new crop varieties, and animal husbandry . The result was a sustained increase in yields, capable of feeding a rapidly growing population with improved nutrition. The combination of factors also brought about a shift toward large-scale commercial farming, a trend that continued into the 19th century and later. Poorer peasants had a harder time making ends meet through traditional subsistence farming. The enclosure movement, which converted common-use pasture land into private property, contributed to this trend toward market-oriented agriculture. A great many rural workers and families were forced by circumstance to migrate to the cities to become industrial laborers. Energy Deforestation in England had led to a shortage of wood for lumber and fuel starting in the 16th century. The country’s transition to coal as a principal energy source was more or less complete by the end of the 17th century. The mining and distribution of coal set in motion some of the dynamics that led to Britain’s industrialization. The coal-fired steam engine was in many respects the decisive technology of the Industrial Revolution. Steam power was first applied to pump water out of coal mines. For centuries, windmills had been employed in the Netherlands for the roughly similar operation of draining low-lying flood plains. Wind was, and is, a readily available and renewable energy source, but its irregularity was considered a drawback. Water power was a more popular energy source for grinding grain and other types of mill work in most of preindustrial Europe. By the last quarter of the 18th century, however, thanks to the work of the Scottish engineer James Watt and his business partner Matthew Boulton, steam engines achieved a high level of efficiency and versatility in their design. They swiftly became the standard power supply for British, and, later, European industry. The steam engine turned the wheels of mechanized factory production. Its emergence freed manufacturers from the need to locate their factories on or near sources of water power. Large enterprises began to concentrate in rapidly growing industrial cities. Metallurgy In this time-honored craft, Britain’s wood shortage necessitated a switch from wood charcoal to coke, a coal product, in the smelting process. The substitute fuel eventually proved highly beneficial for iron production. Experimentation led to some other advances in metallurgical methods during the 18th century. For example, a certain type of furnace that separated the coal and kept it from contaminating the metal, and a process of “puddling” or stirring the molten iron, both made it possible to produce larger amounts of wrought iron. Wrought iron is more malleable than cast iron and therefore more suitable for fabricating machinery and other heavy industrial applications. Textiles The production of fabrics, especially cotton, was fundamental to Britain’s economic development between 1750 and 1850. Those are the years historians commonly use to bracket the Industrial Revolution. In this period, the organization of cotton production shifted from a small-scale cottage industry, in which rural families performed spinning and weaving tasks in their homes, to a large, mechanized, factory-based industry. The boom in productivity began with a few technical devices, including the spinning jenny, spinning mule, and power loom. First human, then water, and finally steam power were applied to operate power looms, carding machines, and other specialized equipment. Another well-known innovation was the cotton gin, invented in the United States in 1793. This device spurred an increase in cotton cultivation and export from U.S. slave states, a key British supplier. Chemicals This industry arose partly in response to the demand for improved bleaching solutions for cotton and other manufactured textiles. Other chemical research was motivated by the quest for artificial dyes, explosives, solvents , fertilizers, and medicines, including pharmaceuticals. In the second half of the 19th century, Germany became the world’s leader in industrial chemistry. Transportation Concurrent with the increased output of agricultural produce and manufactured goods arose the need for more efficient means of delivering these products to market. The first efforts toward this end in Europe involved constructing improved overland roads. Canals were dug in both Europe and North America to create maritime corridors between existing waterways. Steam engines were recognized as useful in locomotion, resulting in the emergence of the steamboat in the early 19th century. High-pressure steam engines also powered railroad locomotives, which operated in Britain after 1825. Railways spread rapidly across Europe and North America, extending to Asia in the latter half of the 19th century. Railroads became one of the world’s leading industries as they expanded the frontiers of industrial society.

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Home — Essay Samples — History — History of the United States — Industrial Revolution

Essays on Industrial Revolution

Industrial revolution essay topics and outline examples, essay title 1: the industrial revolution: catalyst for economic transformation and social change.

Thesis Statement: This essay explores the Industrial Revolution as a pivotal period in history, analyzing its role as a catalyst for economic transformation, technological innovation, and significant societal changes in labor, urbanization, and living conditions.

• Introduction
• The Emergence of Industrialization: Transition from Agrarian to Industrial Society
• Technological Advancements: Inventions and Their Impact on Production
• Factory System and Labor: The Changing Nature of Work
• Urbanization and Its Consequences: The Growth of Industrial Cities
• Social Reforms and Challenges: Responses to Inequities and Labor Conditions
• Legacy of the Industrial Revolution: Long-Term Effects on Modern Society

Essay Title 2: The Dark Side of Progress: Environmental Consequences and Labor Exploitation during the Industrial Revolution

Thesis Statement: This essay critically examines the Industrial Revolution, shedding light on its environmental consequences, the exploitation of laborers, and the ethical dilemmas that arose as a result of rapid industrialization.

• Environmental Impact: Pollution, Deforestation, and Resource Depletion
• Factory Conditions and Child Labor: The Human Cost of Industrialization
• Ethical Considerations: Debates on Economic Gain vs. Social Welfare
• Worker Movements and Labor Reforms: Struggles for Workers' Rights
• The Industrial Revolution and Globalization: Impact Beyond Borders
• Reevaluating Progress: Lessons for Sustainable Development

Essay Title 3: The Industrial Revolution and Its Influence on Modern Economic Systems and Technological Advancements

Thesis Statement: This essay analyzes the profound influence of the Industrial Revolution on contemporary economic systems, technological innovations, and the enduring legacy of industrialization in shaping our modern world.

• Capitalism and Industrialization: The Birth of Modern Economic Systems
• Technological Breakthroughs: The Impact of the Steam Engine, Textile Industry, and More
• The Role of Industrial Giants: Key Figures and Their Contributions
• Globalization and Trade Networks: Connecting Continents and Markets
• Innovation and the Information Age: Tracing Technological Progress
• Contemporary Challenges and Opportunities: Navigating the Post-Industrial World

Prompt Examples for Industrial Revolution Essays

The impact of industrialization on society.

Examine the social consequences of the Industrial Revolution. How did the shift from agrarian economies to industrialized societies affect the lives of individuals, families, and communities? Discuss changes in work, living conditions, and social structures.

The Role of Technological Advancements

Analyze the technological innovations that drove the Industrial Revolution. Explore the inventions and advancements in industry, transportation, and communication that transformed economies and societies. Discuss their significance and long-term effects.

Economic Transformation and Capitalism

Discuss the economic aspects of the Industrial Revolution. How did the rise of industrial capitalism reshape economic systems and create new opportunities and challenges for businesses and workers? Analyze the growth of factories, trade, and global markets.

Labor Movements and Workers' Rights

Examine the emergence of labor movements and workers' rights during the Industrial Revolution. Discuss the conditions and struggles faced by laborers and the efforts to improve working conditions, wages, and labor laws. Explore the role of unions and collective action.

Urbanization and the Growth of Cities

Explore the process of urbanization and the rapid growth of cities during the Industrial Revolution. Discuss the challenges and opportunities presented by urban life, including issues of overcrowding, sanitation, and social inequality.

Environmental Impacts and Sustainability

Analyze the environmental impacts of industrialization. How did the Industrial Revolution contribute to pollution, resource depletion, and environmental degradation? Discuss the early awareness of these issues and the emergence of sustainability concerns.

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The Most Important Factors that Contributed to America’s Industrial Revolution

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1733 - 1913

The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain in the mid-18th century. The Industrial Revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes in the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States. The beginning of industrialization in the United States is started with the opening of a textile mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1793 by Samuel Slater.

There was a few reasons of the beginning of Industrial Revolution: shortage of wood and the abundance of convenient coal deposits; high literacy rates; cheap cotton produced by slaves in North America; system of free enterprise.

Samuel Slater is most associated with starting up the textiles industry in the U.S. An early English-American industrialist known as the "Father of the American Industrial Revolution" and the "Father of the American Factory System". He opened a textile mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1793.

There were many improvements in technology and manufacturing fundamentals that improved overall production and economic growth in the United States. Several great American inventions affected manufacturing, communications, transportation, and commercial agriculture.

The Industrial Revolution resulted in greater wealth and a larger population in Europe as well as in the United States. From 1700 to 1900, there was huge migration of people living in villages to moving into towns and cities for work. The Industrial Revolution marked a major turning point in history. During the Industrial Revolution, environmental pollution increased.

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7 Negative Effects of the Industrial Revolution

By: Patrick J. Kiger

Updated: August 9, 2023 | Original: November 9, 2021

The Industrial Revolution , which began roughly in the second half of the 1700s and stretched into the early 1800s, was a period of enormous change in Europe and America. The invention of new technologies, from mechanized looms for weaving cloth and the steam-powered locomotive to improvements in iron smelting, transformed what had been largely rural societies of farmers and craftsmen who made goods by hand. Many people moved from the countryside into fast-growing cities, where they worked in factories filled with machinery.

While the Industrial Revolution created economic growth and offered new opportunities, that progress came with significant downsides, from damage to the environment and health and safety hazards to squalid living conditions for workers and their families. Historians say that many of these problems persisted and grew in the Second Industrial Revolution , another period of rapid change that began in the late 1800s.

Here are a few of the most significant negative effects of the Industrial Revolution.

1. Horrible Living Conditions for Workers

As cities grew during the Industrial Revolution, there wasn’t enough housing for all the new inhabitants, who were jammed into squalid inner-city neighborhoods as more affluent residents fled to the suburbs. In the 1830s, Dr. William Henry Duncan, a government health official in Liverpool, England, surveyed living conditions and found that a third of the city’s population lived in cellars of houses, which had earthen floors and no ventilation or sanitation. As many as 16 people were living in a single room and sharing a single privy. The lack of clean water and gutters overflowing with sewage from basement cesspits made workers and their families vulnerable to infectious diseases such as cholera.

2. Poor Nutrition

In his 1832 study entitled “Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester , ” physician and social reformer James Phillips Kay described the meager diet of the British industrial city’s lowly-paid laborers, who subsisted on a breakfast of tea or coffee with a little bread, and a midday meal that typically consisted of boiled potatoes, melted lard and butter, sometimes with a few pieces of fried fatty bacon mixed in. After finishing work, laborers might have some more tea, “often mingled with spirits” and a little bread, or else oatmeal and potatoes again. As a result of malnutrition, Kay wrote, workers frequently suffered from problems with their stomachs and bowels, lost weight, and had skin that was “pale, leaden-colored, or of the yellow hue.”

3. A Stressful, Unsatisfying Lifestyle

Workers who came from the countryside to the cities had to adjust to a very different rhythm of existence, with little personal autonomy. They had to arrive when the factory whistle blew, or else face being locked out and losing their pay, and even being forced to pay fines.

Once on the job, they couldn’t freely move around or catch a breather if they needed one, since that might necessitate shutting down a machine. Unlike craftsmen in rural towns, their days often consisted of having to perform repetitive tasks, and continual pressure to keep up—“faster pace, more supervision, less pride,” as Peter N. Stearns , a historian at George Mason University, explains. As Stearns describes in his 2013 book The Industrial Revolution in World History , when the workday finally was done, they didn’t have much time or energy left for any sort of recreation. To make matters worse, city officials often banned festivals and other activities that they’d once enjoyed in rural villages. Instead, workers often spent their leisure time at the neighborhood tavern, where alcohol provided an escape from the tedium of their lives.

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How Early Signs of Climate Change Date Back to the Industrial Revolution

Evidence of warming temperatures has been detected as early as the 1830s.

4. Dangerous Workplaces

Without much in the way of safety regulation, factories of the Industrial Revolution could be horrifyingly hazardous. As Peter Capuano details in his 2015 book Changing Hands: Industry, Evolution and the Reconfiguration of the Victorian Body , workers faced the constant risk of losing a hand in the machinery. A contemporary newspaper account described the grisly injuries suffered in 1830 by millworker Daniel Buckley, whose left hand was “caught and lacerated, and his fingers crushed” before his coworkers could stop the equipment. He eventually died as a result of the trauma.

Mines of the era, which supplied the coal needed to keep steam-powered machines running, had terrible accidents as well. David M. Turner’s and Daniel Blackie’s 2018 book Disability in the Industrial Revolution describes a gas explosion at a coal mine that left 36-year-old James Jackson with severe burns on his face, neck, chest, hands and arms, as well as internal injuries. He was in such awful shape that he required opium to cope with the excruciating pain. After six weeks of recuperation, remarkably, a doctor decided that he was fit to return to work, but probably with permanent scars from the ordeal.

5. Child Labor

While children worked prior to the Industrial Revolution, the rapid growth of factors created such a demand that poor youth and orphans were plucked from London’s poorhouses and housed in mill dormitories, while they worked long hours and were deprived of education. Compelled to do dangerous adult jobs, children often suffered horrifying fates.

John Brown’s expose A Memoir of Robert Blincoe, an Orphan Boy, published in 1832, describes a 10-year-old girl named Mary Richards whose apron became caught in the machinery in a textile mill. “In an instant, the poor girl was drawn by an irresistible force and dashed on the floor,” Brown wrote. “She uttered the most heart-rending shrieks.”

University of Alberta history professor Beverly Lemire sees “the exploitation of child labor in a systematic and sustained way, the use of which catalyzed industrial production,” as the worst negative effect of the Industrial Revolution.

6. Discrimination Against Women

The Industrial Revolution helped establish patterns of gender inequality in the workplace that lasted in the eras that followed. Laura L. Frader , a retired professor of history at Northeastern University and author of  The Industrial Revolution: A History in Documents , notes that factory owners often paid women only half of what men got for the same work, based on the false assumption that women didn’t need to support families, and were only working for “pin money” that a husband might give them to pay for non-essential personal items. 

Discrimination against and stereotyping of women workers continued into the second Industrial Revolution . “The myth that women had ‘nimble fingers’ and that they could withstand repetitive, mindless work better than men led to the displacement of men in white collar jobs such as office work, and the assignment of such jobs to women after the 1870s when the typewriter was introduced,” Frader says. 

While office work was less dangerous and better paid, “it locked women into yet another category of ‘women’s work,’ from which it was hard to escape,” Frader explains.

7. Environmental Harm

The Industrial Revolution was powered by burning coal, and big industrial cities began pumping vast quantities of pollution into the atmosphere. London’s concentration of suspended particulate matter rose dramatically between 1760 and 1830, as this chart from Our World In Data illustrates. Pollution in Manchester was so awful that writer Hugh Miller noted “the lurid gloom of the atmosphere that overhangs it,” and described “the innumerable chimneys [that] come in view, tall and dim in the dun haze, each bearing atop its own pennon of darkness.”

Air pollution continued to rise in the 1800s, causing respiratory illness and higher death rates in areas that burned more coal. Worse yet, the burning of fossil fuel pumped carbon into the atmosphere. A study published in 2016 in Nature suggests that climate change driven by human activity began as early as the 1830s.

Despite all these ills, the Industrial Revolution had positive effects, such as creating economic growth and making goods more available. It also helped lead to the rise of a prosperous middle class that grabbed some of the economic power once held by aristocrats, and led to the rise of specialized jobs in industry.

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153 Industrial Revolution Essay Topics & Examples

If you’re looking for the Industrial Revolution essay examples and topics, this page is for you. Below, find ideas on how different inventions changed the world and people.

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Primary Source Set The Industrial Revolution in the United States

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The Industrial Revolution took place over more than a century, as production of goods moved from home businesses, where products were generally crafted by hand, to machine-aided production in factories. This revolution, which involved major changes in transportation, manufacturing, and communications, transformed the daily lives of Americans as much as— and arguably more than—any single event in U.S. history.

An early landmark moment in the Industrial Revolution came near the end of the eighteenth century, when Samuel Slater brought new manufacturing technologies from Britain to the United States and founded the first U.S. cotton mill in Beverly, Massachusetts. Slater’s Mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, like many of the mills and factories that sprang up in the next few decades, was powered by water, which confined industrial development to the northeast at first. The concentration of industry in the Northeast also facilitated the development of transportation systems such as railroads and canals, which encouraged commerce and trade.

The technological innovation that would come to mark the United States in the nineteenth century began to show itself with Robert Fulton’s establishment of steamboat service on the Hudson River, Samuel F. B. Morse’s invention of the telegraph, and Elias Howe’s invention of the sewing machine, all before the Civil War. Following the Civil War, industrialization in the United States increased at a breakneck pace. This period, encompassing most of the second half of the nineteenth century, has been called the Second Industrial Revolution or the American Industrial Revolution. Over the first half of the century, the country expanded greatly, and the new territory was rich in natural resources. Completing the first transcontinental railroad in 1869 was a major milestone, making it easier to transport people, raw materials, and products. The United States also had vast human resources: between 1860 and 1900, fourteen million immigrants came to the country, providing workers for an array of industries.

The American industrialists overseeing this expansion were ready to take risks to make their businesses successful. Andrew Carnegie established the first steel mills in the U.S. to use the British “Bessemer process” for mass producing steel, becoming a titan of the steel industry in the process. He acquired business interests in the mines that produced the raw material for steel, the mills and ovens that created the final product and the railroads and shipping lines that transported the goods, thus controlling every aspect of the steelmaking process.

Other industrialists, including John D. Rockefeller, merged the operations of many large companies to form a trust. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust came to monopolize 90% of the industry, severely limiting competition. These monopolies were often accused of intimidating smaller businesses and competitors in order to maintain high prices and profits. Economic influence gave these industrial magnates significant political clout as well. The U.S. government adopted policies that supported industrial development such as providing land for the construction of railroads and maintaining high tariffs to protect American industry from foreign competition.

American inventors like Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Alva Edison created a long list of new technologies that improved communication, transportation, and industrial production. Edison made improvements to existing technologies, including the telegraph while also creating revolutionary new technologies such as the light bulb, the phonograph, the kinetograph, and the electric dynamo. Bell, meanwhile, explored new speaking and hearing technologies, and became known as the inventor of the telephone.

For millions of working Americans, the industrial revolution changed the very nature of their daily work. Previously, they might have worked for themselves at home, in a small shop, or outdoors, crafting raw materials into products, or growing a crop from seed to table. When they took factory jobs, they were working for a large company. The repetitive work often involved only one small step in the manufacturing process, so the worker did not see or appreciate what was being made; the work was often dangerous and performed in unsanitary conditions. Some women entered the work force, as did many children. Child labor became a major issue. Dangerous working conditions, long hours, and concern over wages and child labor contributed to the growth of labor unions. In the decades after the Civil War, workers organized strikes and work stoppages that helped to publicize their problems. One especially significant labor upheaval was the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. Wage cuts in the railroad industry led to the strike, which began in West Virginia and spread to three additional states over a period of 45 days before being violently ended by a combination of vigilantes, National Guardsmen, and federal troops. Similar episodes occurred more frequently in the following decades as workers organized and asserted themselves against perceived injustices.

The new jobs for the working class were in the cities. Thus, the Industrial Revolution began the transition of the United States from a rural to an urban society. Young people raised on farms saw greater opportunities in the cities and moved there, as did millions of immigrants from Europe. Providing housing for all the new residents of cities was a problem, and many workers found themselves living in urban slums; open sewers ran alongside the streets, and the water supply was often tainted, causing disease. These deplorable urban conditions gave rise to the Progressive Movement in the early twentieth century; the result would be many new laws to protect and support people, eventually changing the relationship between government and the people.

The Industrial Revolution is a complex set of economic, technological, and social changes that occurred over a substantial period of time. Teachers should consider the documents in this collection as tools for stimulating student thinking about aspects of the Industrial Revolution.

Suggestions for Teachers

• After providing a definition of the Industrial Revolution and explaining the time span across which it took place, teachers might supply small groups of students with a set of the documents in this primary source set. Students can categorize the documents by whether they provide information about what happened, why it happened, or its effects. Some documents may fit into more than one category. When small groups have completed their work, the teacher can facilitate creating a class list of events of the Industrial Revolution, causes (or supporting factors), and effects. Students may search the Library’s online collections to find additional evidence to support the causes and effects on the class chart.
• Using the documents in this primary source set, students can create a timeline of important events in the Industrial Revolution. The last document in the set is dated 1919. Was the Industrial Revolution over by 1919? Challenge students to find evidence in the Library of Congress digital collections to support their answer (there are documents that suggest industrialization in the South was still taking place into the 1930s).
• Understanding a historical event as it was experienced by those who lived through it is an important skill of historical thinking—and one that can be difficult to develop. Teachers may challenge students to study documents in the collection to identify varied perspectives on the changes brought by the Industrial Revolution, as experienced by people of the day. Would students classify the responses as mainly positive, mainly negative, or about equally divided? How did people respond to what they perceived as negative effects of the Industrial Revolution?
• In 1893, Chicago hosted the World’s Columbian Exposition, which highlighted achievements of the United States and other nations in a variety of fields, including manufacturing and technology. An entire building was devoted to electricity. Using the primary source set as a starting point, ask students to design an exhibit about the development of American industry for the World’s Columbian Exposition.

Additional Resources

Detroit Publishing Company

Built in America

Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers at the Library of Congress

Inside an American Factory: Films of the Westinghouse Works

National Child Labor Committee Collection

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• Table Of Contents

In the period 1760 to 1830 the Industrial Revolution was largely confined to Britain . Aware of their head start, the British forbade the export of machinery , skilled workers, and manufacturing techniques. The British monopoly could not last forever, especially since some Britons saw profitable industrial opportunities abroad, while continental European businessmen sought to lure British know-how to their countries. Two Englishmen, William and John Cockerill , brought the Industrial Revolution to Belgium by developing machine shops at Liège (c. 1807), and Belgium became the first country in continental Europe to be transformed economically. Like its British progenitor, the Belgian Industrial Revolution centred in iron , coal , and textiles .

France was more slowly and less thoroughly industrialized than either Britain or Belgium. While Britain was establishing its industrial leadership, France was immersed in its Revolution , and the uncertain political situation discouraged large investments in industrial innovations . By 1848 France had become an industrial power, but, despite great growth under the Second Empire , it remained behind Britain.

Other European countries lagged far behind. Their bourgeoisie lacked the wealth, power, and opportunities of their British, French, and Belgian counterparts. Political conditions in the other nations also hindered industrial expansion. Germany , for example, despite vast resources of coal and iron, did not begin its industrial expansion until after national unity was achieved in 1870. Once begun, Germany’s industrial production grew so rapidly that by the turn of the century that nation was outproducing Britain in steel and had become the world leader in the chemical industries. The rise of U.S. industrial power in the 19th and 20th centuries also far outstripped European efforts. And Japan too joined the Industrial Revolution with striking success.

The eastern European countries were behind early in the 20th century. It was not until the five-year plans that the Soviet Union became a major industrial power, telescoping into a few decades the industrialization that had taken a century and a half in Britain. The mid-20th century witnessed the spread of the Industrial Revolution into hitherto nonindustrialized areas such as China and India .

The technological and economic aspects of the Industrial Revolution brought about significant sociocultural changes. In its initial stages it seemed to deepen labourers’ poverty and misery. Their employment and subsistence became dependent on costly means of production that few people could afford to own. Job security was lacking: workers were frequently displaced by technological improvements and a large labour pool. Lack of worker protections and regulations meant long work hours for miserable wages, living in unsanitary tenements, and exploitation and abuse in the workplace. But even as problems arose, so too did new ideas that aimed to address them. These ideas pushed innovations and regulations that provided people with more material conveniences while also enabling them to produce more, travel faster, and communicate more rapidly.

Despite considerable overlapping with the “old,” there was mounting evidence for a “new” Industrial Revolution in the late 19th and 20th centuries. In terms of basic materials, modern industry began to exploit many natural and synthetic resources not hitherto utilized: lighter metals , rare earths , new alloys , and synthetic products such as plastics , as well as new energy sources. Combined with these were developments in machines , tools , and computers that gave rise to the automatic factory . Although some segments of industry were almost completely mechanized in the early to mid-19th century, automatic operation, as distinct from the assembly line , first achieved major significance in the second half of the 20th century.

Ownership of the means of production also underwent changes. The oligarchical ownership of the means of production that characterized the Industrial Revolution in the early to mid-19th century gave way to a wider distribution of ownership through purchase of common stocks by individuals and by institutions such as insurance companies. In the first half of the 20th century, many countries of Europe socialized basic sectors of their economies. There was also during that period a change in political theories: instead of the laissez-faire ideas that dominated the economic and social thought of the classical Industrial Revolution, governments generally moved into the social and economic realm to meet the needs of their more complex industrial societies. That trend was reversed in the United States and the United Kingdom beginning in the 1980s.

Why the Industrial Revolution Started in Britain

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The Industrial Revolution saw a wave of technological and social changes in many countries of the world in the 18th and 19th centuries, but it began in Britain for a number of specific reasons. Britain had cheap energy with its abundant supply of coal, and labour was relatively expensive, so inventors and investors alike were lured by the possibility of profit if machines could be made that ran on coal and saved labour.

In the Industrial Revolution the steam engine first powered pumps in mines. Steam power allowed machines like the power loom to replace costly skilled labour and massively increase textile production. Steam was used as the power source for trains and ships. Even in agriculture , devices like the threshing machine could now replace human labour. Mechanised factories replaced cottage industries and accelerated the rate of urbanisation. Whole towns developed around the major coalfields. Wages rose and new jobs were created, albeit very often less skilled work than before. Inhabitants of towns and cities then wanted manufactured consumer goods, as did markets abroad, and so the industrialisation process was perpetuated and accelerated. This process, with some variations, eventually happened in many countries, but Britain experienced it first.

The following factors were all present in Britain and explain why it experienced the Industrial Revolution first:

• efficient agriculture
• coal as a cheap fuel
• significant urbanisation
• high cost of labour
• intercontinental trade opportunities
• government support of business
• innovation and entrepreneurship
• venture capital investors
• new sales and marketing techniques

Before examining Britain, it is perhaps worth noting what industrialisation meant and what its timescale was in general. The Encyclopedia of the Victorian World defines industrialisation as follows:

Generic term for the economic and social processes by which a society shifts from an agricultural basis to a manufacturing basis dependent on modern machinery. In Britain the revolution was essentially over by the early years of the Victorian era, with a flourishing factory system in place, a large urban population at work, and a powerful capitalist class thriving. For the other western powers, however, the industrial revolution was just beginning. France underwent it after 1830, Germany after 1850, and the United States after 1865…Elsewhere – Russia, China , Japan , and what is now called the developing world – it would become a fact of life in the twentieth century. (235)

The Cost of Labour

The question, then, is: why was Britain the first to industrialise? The first area to examine in answering this question is the level of wages in Britain. The population of Britain rose dramatically in the 17th century, particularly in London and other cities. Only in the Netherlands was there similar urbanisation as there was seen in Britain in this period. Wages rose because the amount of arable land was fixed. Agriculture was obliged to become more efficient to meet the rise in population, both in the use of equipment and in organisation such as land enclosures which put communal land to farming uses. These two factors: urban growth and greater agricultural efficiency (what some historians have called an agricultural revolution) led to rising demand for labour, and so wages rose. An additional factor in the rise in the cost of labour was the necessity for landowners to attract labour and prevent it from relocating to the growing urban areas. This phenomenon was not the case in contemporary France, Italy , and Spain where wages and living standards were falling. Where wages were low, capital investment in machines was much less attractive, as the cost-savings of mechanising production would be far less or none at all.

A third factor in labour costs rising was intercontinental trade, which created more demand for goods and so labour. Britain had established colonies or trading centres in North America, the Caribbean, and in Bengal and other parts of India . Other European countries also had empires which gave trade benefits, but not all European countries did, notably Germany. Spain extracted great wealth from the Americas (less from trade and more from direct acquisition), but this proved detrimental to its own economy since the consequent hyperinflation meant that no manufacturing could ever be profitable there under those labour conditions. Britain made vast amounts of money from its colonial trade in raw materials, manufactured goods, and slaves. This money could be reinvested in new technology. Further, the British Empire grew to become a huge market for British-manufactured goods like machinery and textiles. Governments protected this trade by suppressing local competition, restricting the sales of certain goods to and by colonists, keeping out rival imperialist powers by force or the threat of it, and by blocking certain exports to Britain, such as Irish meat and dairy products.

A Gallery of 30 Industrial Revolution Inventions

Once the cycle of industrialisation had begun and a consumer market was created, so high wages perpetuated the process, as here explained by the economic historian R. C. Allen:

High wages increased the supply of British technology as well as the demand for it. High wages meant that the population at large was better placed to buy education and training than their counterparts elsewhere in the world. The resulting high rates of literacy and numeracy contributed to invention and innovation. (137)

Innovation, Entrepreneurship, & State Support

Another reason for Britain's early industrialisation was the strong spirit of entrepreneurship. Unlike, say in France, where government sponsorship of inventions was usually limited to military purposes or a direct benefit to the state, in Britain, inventors of all kinds were encouraged by private investors. These were either business owners or those simply seeking a good return on a capital investment. The latter group were at the time called 'projectors'; today we would call them venture capitalists. The investors were looking for inventors who could create any means whatsoever to increase production efficiency and so profits. There were also some inventors who were self-funded and motivated by either the search for profit or to create a benefit for society or both.

Inventors were also helped by the state's policies of relatively low taxation (in this area but not others) and the fact that interest rates were lower in Britain, which meant loans could be more easily acquired for research and development. There was also a system of strong protection for patents. Consequently, inventors were encouraged. On the other side of the coin , governments significantly helped capitalists who might buy the inventions with restrictions imposed by acts of Parliament on worker rights (for example, to form trade unions or for skilled machinists to emigrate). At the same time, there was a relative openness of the state and inventors to ideas from anywhere, including abroad. Skills were brought in by immigrants that increased productivity, which was not always the case in some of the more closed and authoritarian European states of this period. Another factor in favour of Britain's industrialisation was its political stability which increased investor confidence. The combination of all of these various political and economic factors encouraged investors to take risks in new technologies and ride out any worker backlash to mechanisation, more so than in other countries.

The simplest way to increase profits was to increase the quantities of manufacturing or mining production and at the same time reduce the number of workers needed. Machines could achieve both of these aims. Once sizeable factories were established, more inventors were funded to find yet more cost savings, and so the industrialisation process spread deeper and wider. British inventors were not slow to imitate and improve upon inventions they came across in other countries either. Sometimes, a new technology appeared in countries where it was not fully exploited, for economic reasons or otherwise, but Britain's industrialisation often meant these innovations could work or work better in the economic environment of Britain. British engineers, in particular, became experts at developing and improving upon inventions first made elsewhere. Often called tinkering, it was this side of inventing that Britain excelled at rather than creating new machines from scratch.

Just as there was an environment of financial investment in new ideas, there was, too, a spirit of invention, or rather, an environment in Britain which somehow fostered new ideas and, more importantly, their fruition into practical reality. A traditional view is that "Newtonian Science , the Enlightenment and genius [were important] in providing knowledge for technologists to exploit, habits of mind that enhanced research, networks of communication that disseminated ideas, and sparks of creativity that led to breakthroughs that would not have been achieved by ordinary research and development" (Allen, 138). However, Allen points out that the genius of inventors in itself was not unique to Britain. As we have already noted, several other factors were necessary for genius to thrive and be useful to the industrialists who would take new ideas off the drawing board and put them onto the factory floor. In short, adoption promoted invention.

The industrialisation process was perpetuated by greater demand, which was driven by a rise in population, urbanisation, education, and consumerism. Conflicts like the Napoleonic Wars (1792-1815) also pushed innovation. Many British manufacturers ( Josiah Wedgwood is perhaps the clearest example) were innovative pioneers in their use of sales and marketing tools, such as using touring salespeople, offering elegant showrooms, giving free samples to the rich and famous for endorsement, creating a range of products that reflected new tastes in fashion, and providing discounts and refund possibilities. All of these techniques together helped achieve more sales, which further drove production, which meant there was more capital to invest in yet more innovations in industrialisation.

Inventing a machine was one thing, but having it run at a low cost was often quite another stage of development. A crucial factor in the question of whether machines could reduce production costs was the cost of the fuel they needed to run. Here Britain had a tremendous advantage over several other European countries (but by no means all). Britain was rich in coal. As a bonus, there were other natural resources of importance such as high-quality iron ore, lead, copper , and tin. Mining had been going on for centuries but had increased prior to the Industrial Revolution due to deforestation and the scarcity of wood. Coal became a cheap alternative to wood burning. It is no coincidence that many of the new cities growing up in Britain were near coalfields. These coalfields were all conveniently located near water for transportation, another great natural advantage Britain had.

The long history of mining in Britain meant that there was already the technological know-how of how to exploit minerals in the earth, which meant that when the new machines needed more coal than ever mined before, it was a question of increasing production rather than the more problematic issue of starting from scratch, as was the case in some other countries. Once again, when the first machines, usually steam engines, were in place and working, this encouraged further technological development to make them even more fuel-efficient and so, again, increase profits.

The mines accelerated both the growth in urbanisation and the rise in labour costs. In addition, cheap fuel often more than compensated for the high British labour costs and so meant that exports could be competitive.

In summary, then, several European countries had the advantages that Britain enjoyed in terms of creating a platform on which could be built a rapid process of industrialisation, but only Britain enjoyed all of the necessary, or most beneficial factors together. Some countries had trump cards. There was more gold in Spain, more coal in Germany, greater urbanisation in the Netherlands, and so on, but, overall, Britain had the winning hand in just where in the Western world industrialisation would take off. Then, once the wheels of industrialisation had started turning, more innovation meant they soon turned even faster, leaving behind most of Britain's European and North American rivals until they caught up later in the 18th or even 19th century. From around 1750 to 1850, the British were, it seems, justified in calling their island the workshop of the world.

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Bibliography

• Allen, Robert C. The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective . Cambridge University Press, 2009.
• Armstrong, Benjamin. Britain 1783-1885 . Hodder Education, 2020.
• Dugan, Sally & Dugan, David. The Day the World Took Off. Channel 4 Book, 2023.
• Horn, Jeff. The Industrial Revolution . Greenwood, 2007.
• Yorke, Stan. The Industrial Revolution Explained. Countryside Books, 2005.

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Essay on Industrial Revolution

Students are often asked to write an essay on Industrial Revolution in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

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100 Words Essay on Industrial Revolution

What was the industrial revolution.

The Industrial Revolution was a big change in how things were made. Before, people made goods by hand at home. Then, machines in big buildings called factories started doing this work. This change began in Britain in the late 1700s and spread to other countries.

Changes in Technology

New machines could spin thread much faster than by hand. The steam engine was also invented. This could power machines and move trains and ships. These inventions made making things and moving them around quicker and cheaper.

Impact on People

Many people left farms to work in factories in cities. Life became hard for these workers. They worked long hours for little money. But, more goods were made, and over time, people’s lives improved as new jobs were created.

Global Effects

The Industrial Revolution changed the world. Countries with factories got rich and powerful. They used resources from other places to make goods. This led to big changes in trade and made some countries very wealthy.

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250 Words Essay on Industrial Revolution

What was the industrial revolution.

The Industrial Revolution was a big change in the way things were made. Before this time, people made goods by hand at home or in small shops. Around the late 18th century, this changed. Machines began to do the work in big factories. This started in Britain and then spread to other parts of the world.

Changes in Industry

Machines could make things faster and cheaper than humans could by hand. This meant more products could be made and more people could buy them. Steam engines powered these machines, and coal was the fuel. This led to a rise in coal mining and iron production.

Life During the Revolution

Because of factory work, cities grew as people moved there for jobs. This was a big shift from life on farms. Working in factories was hard, and many worked long hours for low pay. The air and water got dirty from the factories, too.

Impact on Society

The Industrial Revolution changed life a lot. Travel became easier with trains and steamships. Communication got better with inventions like the telegraph. People’s lives improved with new goods and technology. But, there were also bad parts, like child labor and pollution.

500 Words Essay on Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution was a time of big change in how people worked and lived. It started in the late 1700s and went on until the early 1800s. Before this period, most goods were made by hand, and people lived in small villages and worked on farms. But during the Industrial Revolution, machines began to do the work that people and animals used to do. This change began in Britain and then spread to other countries, including the United States and parts of Europe.

New Inventions

One of the most important parts of the Industrial Revolution was the creation of new machines. These machines could make things faster and cheaper than before. For example, the spinning jenny allowed one worker to make several threads at the same time, and the steam engine could power different kinds of machines. Because of these inventions, factories were built where many machines could work together. This was much different from the old way of making things at home or in small workshops.

Life in Factories

Transportation changes.

The Industrial Revolution also changed how goods and people moved from place to place. The steam locomotive made it possible to build railways, which could transport goods and people much faster than horses and carts. Ships also got steam engines, which made travel across oceans quicker and easier. This meant that goods could be sold far away, and it was easier for people to move to new places.

The Industrial Revolution had a big impact on society. It made some people very rich, especially those who owned the factories. But many workers lived in poor conditions and did not get much money. Over time, this led to new laws to protect workers and improve their lives.

Changes in Agriculture

Farming also changed during the Industrial Revolution. New machines like the seed drill and the mechanical reaper made farming more efficient. This meant fewer people were needed to work on farms, so they went to work in the factories instead.

The Industrial Revolution was a time of great change. It made life different in many ways, from how people made things to how they lived and worked. It was not always easy or good for everyone, but it led to the modern world we know today. We still feel the effects of these changes in our daily lives, as the new ways of making and doing things that started back then continue to shape our world.

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4th Industrial Revolution: Essay & Important Notes

Evolution of the fourth industrial revolution.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution finds its foundations laid on the third industrial revolution. With the changing technologies and innovations being made throughout the different revolutions, the fourth revolution was bound to take place. The term Fourth Industrial Revolution was coined by Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum.

Technologies Driving Change in the Fourth Industrial Revolution

The 4 th revolution is dominated by a myriad of technologies. These include:

Artificial Intelligence

AI is being used in many ways in different aspects of life. AI can recognize complex patterns, reach voluminous information, and also take decisions on a logical basis. The advent of AI has reached a level wherein people can control appliances in their homes by just giving instructions.

Blockchain is a secure and decentralized manner of recording and sharing data. With this technology, it is possible to improve and track the supply chain, secure sensitive data, and also combat frauds. The best example of this technology being uses these days is the use of cryptocurrency.

Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality

These technologies enable people to experience anything digitally. The use of these technologies has enabled people to overcome the boundaries between the virtual and physical worlds. A good example is how many stores allow their customers to try and experiment with products before making a purchasing decision.

Biotechnology

Biotechnology has made it possible to develop new medicines and drugs to cure life-taking illnesses. These have also made it possible to process and produce cleaner and greener energy, thereby enhancing the chances of a sustainable world.

The design and use of robots for personal and commercial purposes have become commonplace these days. Robots are being used in several industries to enhance efficiency and productivity and reduce human effort.

Internet of Things

Internet of Things has made it possible to connect devices used daily with the internet. With the help of IoT, it has become easy to track different aspects of businesses and industries. An example is the use of IoT by farmers to monitor the quality of fertilizers.

Pros and Cons of Fourth Industrial Revolution

The Fourth Industrial Revolution has brought several advantages for society and businesses including:

• Increased productivity
• Improved quality of life
• Lower barriers to entrepreneurship
• New markets for businesses

However, the industrial revolution propagated by technology also has some cons too. These include:

• Inequality: The industrial revolution is beneficial for those who have access to the technologies and can use it for their benefit in the right way. People, businesses, and societies that cannot access technologies lag behind others and cannot benefit from the revolution in any manner.
• Cybersecurity risk: With the increasing technological innovations, the threat of cybercrimes has also increased. Gadgets, robots, computers, and every technology are prone to attacks by unknown people.
• Increased competition: The advent of technologies and their subsequent use in different industries and businesses has increased competition and businesses have to do more to survive the competition. Additionally, it also brings forth the issue of ethics as businesses make use of any means to survive the competition.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution radically impacts the daily life of people. The era can be that of knowledge, growth, and improvement in the manner in which people, businesses, and societies work and operates.

Important Notes

• The Fourth Industrial Revolution is dominating the society and businesses of today.
• Technological innovations have brought about changes in the way people live and carry out everyday activities.
• There are many advantages of the Fourth Industrial Revolution as it brings about improvements in the lifestyle and also improves productivity.

With the increasing use of technologies, there are issues related to ethics and unequal access to technologies

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David Wallace-Wells

What will we do with our free power.

By David Wallace-Wells

Opinion Writer

“I simply cannot believe where we are with solar,” says Jenny Chase, the BloombergNEF analyst and quite possibly the person in the world who knows the most about the business of turning the light of the sun into electricity. “And if you’d told me nearly 20 years ago what would be the case now, 20 years later,” she continues, “I would have just said you were crazy. I would have laughed in your face. There is genuinely a revolution happening.” By just 2030, Chase estimates, solar power will be absolutely and reliably free during the sunny parts of the day for much of the year “pretty much everywhere.”

In 2023, the world installed 444 gigawatts of new solar photovoltaic capacity, according to BloombergNEF. While that figure can be hard for normie brains to process, it represents a staggering step forward: nearly an 80 percent year-on-year jump and more than was cumulatively installed between the invention of the solar cell in 1954 and 2017. Although solar power still provides just under 6 percent of global electricity, its share has nearly quadrupled since 2018, an exponential curve that is expected to continue for some time.

“When it was a 10th of its current size 10 years ago, solar power was still seen as marginal even by experts who knew how fast it had grown,” The Economist noted in a recent cover story. “The next tenfold increase will be equivalent to multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight in less than the time it typically takes to build just a single one of them.” By the 2030s — not very long from now — solar power will most likely be the largest source of electricity on the planet.

Even more remarkable than the scale is the cost. By one measure, the cost of solar power is less than one-thousandth of what it was when hippies and environmentalists first made a point of installing panels on their roofs in the 1960s. A decade ago, it was considered a moonshot goal to reduce the price of a solar module to a dollar per watt; now they are being manufactured for one-tenth as much. The price fell by nearly half in 2023 alone.

One result is that, by some ways of tabulating, solar power is already cheaper than all other new sources of electricity for something like 95 percent of the world. Another result is that the price of a solar panel is becoming a smaller and smaller fraction of the true cost of generating and using electricity from it — with a much larger portion coming from the price of installation and interconnection, grid expansion and whatever it is you might be doing to supplement that solar at night and in winter.

Of course, because the sun can be simply counted on to rise every day, you don’t need to pay in any ongoing way for a commodity input, like oil or gas, to keep the system humming — only to set it up initially to manage and endure the novel challenges of drawing reliable energy from the giant fireball 94 million miles away.

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