Lecture 29 min.
The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain in the last third of the 18th century and, in the first half of the 19th century, took on a comprehensive character, subsequently spreading to other countries of Europe and America.
There is a view that the export of capital from Britain's overseas colonies was one of the sources of capital accumulation in the metropole, which contributed to the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain and to that country's rise to leadership in world industrial development. At the same time, a similar situation in other countries (for example, Spain and Portugal) did not lead to accelerated economic development.
According to the Nobel laureate in economics John Hicks, the main economic and social factors of the Industrial Revolution in England were the following:
Commercial prosperity led to the enrichment of English merchants and to the emergence of surplus capital that needed to be invested in some enterprise. On the other hand, as a result of emigration to America, England experienced a shortage of labor. We recall that, under similar circumstances, Athenian capitalists bought slaves for their workshops — the English tried to make up for the labor shortage by introducing machines. Attempts to use machines in manufactories had occurred earlier as well – the first example of this kind was the silk-throwing machine of the Italian mechanic Francesco Boridano, built as early as the 13th century; this machine was driven by a water wheel and replaced 400 workers. This example shows that the Industrial Revolution could have happened much earlier — however, Boridano's machine remained a unique case, because the introduction of technology met with resistance from artisans who feared losing their jobs. In 1579, a mechanic who had built a ribbon loom was executed in Danzig. In 1598, William Lee, the inventor of the knitting machine, was forced to flee England. In 1733, the weaver John Kay invented the "flying shuttle"; he was persecuted by weavers, his house was destroyed, and he was forced to flee to France. However, many weavers secretly continued to use Kay's shuttle – they were beaten for it, and in 1767 a major clash between weavers took place in London. In 1765, the weaver and carpenter Hargreaves built a mechanical spinning wheel, which he named after his daughter, the "Jenny"; this device increased a spinner's productivity twentyfold. Workers broke into Hargreaves's house and smashed his machine – but despite this resistance, the "Jenny" came into use among spinners some time later. In 1769, Richard Arkwright patented the water frame, a spinning machine designed to run on water power – from that point on, machines began to be used in manufactories, and inventors gained the support of powerful owners of large capital.
The success of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain was based on several innovations[8] that appeared by the end of the 18th century:
The first machines were built by self-taught mechanics; they were made of wood and required no engineering calculations. Technology developed independently of science. After the resistance of opponents of machinery began to weaken, new machines started to appear one after another. Between 1774 and 1779, Samuel Crompton designed the spinning mule, which produced higher-quality fabric than Arkwright's machine. In 1784, Edmund Cartwright created a power loom that increased weavers' productivity fortyfold.
The Industrial Revolution was a complex process that took place simultaneously in various branches of industry. In mining, one of the main production problems was pumping water out of mines. In 1698, the Englishman Savery built a machine that used the power of steam for this purpose; in 1712, Thomas Newcomen improved this machine by equipping it with a cylinder and piston. In Newcomen's engine, the steam inside the cylinder was condensed by injecting water, a vacuum was created in the cylinder, and the piston was drawn into the cylinder by atmospheric pressure. By the 1770s, about 200 Newcomen engines were operating in England, but they ran unevenly, broke down often, and were used only at mines. Attempts were made in various countries to improve these machines; in particular, in Russia the mechanic I. I. Polzunov built a two-cylinder engine of similar design. In 1763, James Watt began working on improving the Newcomen engine. At that time, Watt was a laboratory assistant at the University of Glasgow and was assigned to repair a broken model of the Newcomen engine. Having identified the model's shortcomings, Watt built a machine that differed from it in principle: first, the piston in Watt's engine was driven not by atmospheric pressure but by steam admitted from a boiler; second, after the piston's stroke was completed, the spent steam was released into a special condenser. In 1769, Watt took out a patent on his machine, but experts claimed that Watt's idea could not be put into practice: with the technology of the time it was impossible to bore a mathematically true steam cylinder. Watt was fortunate that, just at this time, a perfected machine had been created for boring cannon barrels. Watt managed to bring the major manufacturer Matthew Boulton into the venture, who staked his entire fortune on this idea. In 1775, the production of steam engines was set up at Boulton's factory in Birmingham; however, it was only ten years later that this production began to yield significant profit. In 1784, Watt patented the double-acting steam engine, in which steam alternately pushed the piston from both sides; this engine incorporated a centrifugal governor that automatically maintained a set number of revolutions.
In Watt's first engines, the pressure in the cylinder only slightly exceeded atmospheric pressure. In 1804, the engineer Arthur Woolf patented an engine operating at a pressure of 3–4 atmospheres, increasing efficiency more than threefold. Mass production of steam engines was impossible without precise lathes; the decisive step in this direction was taken by the mechanic Henry Maudslay, who created the screw-cutting slide rest. From that time on, it became possible to manufacture parts with tolerances of fractions of a millimeter – this was the beginning of modern mechanical engineering. The emergence of machines created a demand for metal. Previously, pig iron had been smelted using charcoal, and England's forests were nearly exhausted. In 1785, Henry Cort invented a method for producing iron using coal. Coal mining became one of the leading branches of industry.
Attempts to build steamboats began soon after the appearance of the steam engine. In 1802, Robert Fulton, an American of Irish descent, built a small boat with a steam engine in Paris and demonstrated it to members of the French Academy. However, neither the academicians nor Napoleon, to whom Fulton offered his invention, showed any interest in the idea of a steamboat. Fulton returned to America and, with money from his friend and patron Livingston, built the steamboat "Clermont"; the engine for this steamboat was made at Watt's factory. In 1807, the "Clermont," to the enthusiastic cheers of onlookers, made its first voyage up the Hudson – but not a single brave soul could be found willing to become a passenger on the new vessel. Four years later, Fulton and Livingston already owned a steamboat company; nine years later there were 300 steamboats in America and 150 in England. In 1819, the American steamship "Savannah" crossed the Atlantic Ocean, and in the 1830s the first regular transatlantic steamship line began operating. The largest steamship of its time, the "Great Western," with a displacement of 2,000 tons and a 400-horsepower steam engine, ran on this line. Twenty years later, steamships had become much larger: the "Great Eastern," which sailed to India, had a displacement of 27,000 tons and two engines with a combined output of 7,500 horsepower.
At the same time as steamboats were being built, attempts were made to create a steam-powered road vehicle. Many mines had rail tracks along which horses hauled wagons of ore. In 1803, the mechanic Richard Trevithick built the first locomotive, replacing horses on one of the rail lines in Wales – but Trevithick failed to gain the support of businessmen. In an attempt to draw attention to his invention, Trevithick set up an attraction using the locomotive, but eventually went bankrupt and died in poverty. Fortune was kinder to George Stephenson, a self-taught mechanic who received an order to build a locomotive for a mine near Newcastle. In 1815, Stephenson built his first locomotive, and later oversaw the construction of a railway more than 50 km long. Stephenson's key idea was to level the track by building embankments and cutting through hollows, which made it possible to achieve high speeds. In 1830, Stephenson completed the construction of the first major railway between the cities of Manchester and Liverpool; for this railway he designed the locomotive "Rocket," in which he applied a multi-tube steam boiler for the first time. The "Rocket" carried a carriage of passengers at a speed of 60 km/h; the benefits of the railway were such that Stephenson was immediately invited to oversee the construction of a railway across the whole of England, from Manchester to London. Stephenson later built railways in Belgium and Spain. In 1832, the first railway was opened in France, and somewhat later in Germany and the United States; the locomotives for these railways were manufactured at Stephenson's factory in England.
The appearance of machine tools, steam engines, locomotives, and steamships fundamentally changed people's lives. The emergence of factories producing enormous quantities of cheap fabric ruined the artisans who had worked at home or in manufactories. In 1811, an uprising of artisans who smashed machines in factories broke out in Nottingham – they were called "Luddites." The uprising was suppressed. Ruined artisans were forced to emigrate to America or go to work in factories. Factory work was less skilled than the work of an artisan; factory owners often hired women and children and paid them a pittance for 12–15 hours of labor. There were many unemployed and destitute people; after the hunger riots of 1795, they began to be paid benefits sufficient for two loaves of bread a day. Population flocked to the factories, and factory settlements soon grew into enormous cities; in 1844, London had 2.5 million inhabitants, with workers living in overcrowded houses where several families were crammed into a single room, often without a fireplace. Workers made up the greater part of England's population; this was a new industrial society, unlike the England of the 18th century.
The main branch of English industry in the first half of the 19th century was the production of cotton fabrics. The new machines made it possible to earn 300 percent or more profit a year and to produce cheap fabrics that were sold throughout the world. It was a colossal industrial boom, and fabric production increased dozens of times over. However, the new factories needed a raw material – cotton; at first cotton was expensive because it was cleaned by hand. In 1806, the American Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin; after this, the "cotton era" began in the southern states, where huge cotton plantations were established, worked by black slaves. Thus the flourishing of American slavery turned out to be directly linked to the Industrial Revolution.
By the 1840s, England had become the "workshop of the world," accounting for more than half of world metal and cotton fabric production and the greater part of machine production. Cheap English fabrics flooded the entire world and ruined artisans not only in England but in many countries of Europe and Asia. In India, millions of weavers died of starvation; many large craft cities, such as Dhaka and Ahmedabad, became depopulated. The incomes that had previously supported the artisans of Europe and Asia now flowed to England. Many states tried to shut themselves off from English commercial intervention – in response, England proclaimed "free trade"; by every means – often using military force – it sought the removal of protectionist customs barriers and the "opening" of other countries to English goods.
In the 1870s, a landmark turning point occurred in the development of the world economy, a turning point linked to a colossal expansion of the world market. In the preceding period, large-scale railway construction had drawn vast continental regions into world trade, while the advent of steamships had made sea transport much cheaper. American and Russian wheat poured onto the markets in an enormous flood – wheat prices fell by one and a half to two times. These events are traditionally called the "world agrarian crisis." They led to the ruin of many landowners in Europe – but at the same time provided cheap bread for millions of workers. From this time on, an industrial specialization of Europe took shape: many European states now lived off exchanging their industrial goods for food. Population growth was no longer constrained by the amount of arable land; the disasters and crises caused by overpopulation became a thing of the past. The old laws of history gave way to the laws of the new industrial society.
The Industrial Revolution placed a new weapon in the hands of Europeans – rifles and steel cannons. It had long been known that rifling in the barrel's bore gave the bullet spin, which doubled its range and increased its accuracy twelvefold. However, loading such a gun from the muzzle took considerable effort, and the rate of fire was very low, no more than one shot per minute. In 1808, at Napoleon's request, the French gunsmith Pauly created a breech-loading gun; the paper cartridge held powder and a priming charge, set off by the prick of a needle-shaped striker. Had Napoleon received such guns in time, he would have been invincible – but the fact was that manufacturing the breech bolt required jeweler's precision, and Pauly did not have a high-precision lathe. Later, when Maudslay's slide-rest lathe appeared, Pauly's assistant, the German Dreyse, designed a needle gun, which was adopted by the Prussian army in 1841. The Dreyse rifle fired 9 rounds a minute – five times more than the smoothbore guns of other armies. Its range was 800 meters – three times that of other guns.
At the same time, another revolution took place in military affairs, brought about by the appearance of steel cannons. Cast iron was too brittle, and cast-iron cannons often burst when fired; steel cannons made it possible to use a much more powerful charge. In the 1850s, the English inventor and entrepreneur Henry Bessemer invented the Bessemer converter, and in the 1860s the French engineer Émile Martin created the open-hearth furnace. After this, the industrial production of steel and of steel cannons was established. In Russia, the first steel cannons were manufactured at the Zlatoust factory under the direction of P. M. Obukhov; production was later organized at the Obukhov factory in St. Petersburg. The German industrialist Alfred Krupp achieved the greatest success in the production of artillery pieces; in the 1860s, Krupp set up the mass production of breech-loading rifled guns. The Dreyse rifle and Krupp's cannons secured Prussia's victories in the wars against Austria and France – the mighty German Empire owed its birth to this new weaponry.
The invention of the power loom, the steam engine, the locomotive, the steamship, the rifle, and the rapid-fire steel cannon – all these were fundamental discoveries that gave rise to a new cultural sphere, the society known as industrial civilization. The wave of this new culture emanated from England; it quickly spread across the states of Europe – above all France and Germany. Rapid modernization along English lines began in Europe; at its first stage this involved borrowing technology – machine tools, steam engines, railways. The second stage involved political transformation – in 1848 a wave of revolutions swept over Europe, whose banner was the overthrow of monarchies and parliamentary reforms modeled on England. Russia attempted to resist this modernization – war broke out with England and France, and rifles forced Russia onto the path of reform. In the 1860s, the cultural expansion of industrial civilization gave way to military expansion – a fundamental discovery always gives rise to a wave of conquests. The age of colonial wars began; in the end, the entire world was divided up among the industrial powers. England, taking advantage of its head start, created a vast colonial empire with a population of 390 million people.
Thomas Savery's first steam engine
The beginning of the Industrial Revolution is associated with the invention of an efficient steam engine in Great Britain in the second half of the 17th century. Although the invention itself would hardly have accomplished much on its own (the necessary technical solutions had already been known earlier), by that period English society was prepared to put innovations to use on a large scale. This was due to the fact that England had by then moved from a static traditional society to one with developed market relations and an active entrepreneurial class. In addition, England had sufficient financial resources (being the world's leading trading power and possessing colonies), a population raised in the traditions of the Protestant work ethic, and a liberal political system in which the state did not suppress economic activity.
The first attempt to use a steam engine in industry is considered to be Thomas Savery's water pump, patented in 1699. However, it was not successful due to frequent boiler explosions and limited power. A more advanced machine was that of Thomas Newcomen, developed by 1712[9][10]. Newcomen apparently made use of experimental data obtained earlier by Denis Papin, who had studied the pressure of water vapor on a piston in a cylinder and initially heated and cooled the steam by hand to return the piston to its starting position.
An 18th-century spinning machine model from the Wuppertal Museum, Germany
A weaving mill in the town of Reddish, Great Britain
At the beginning of the 18th century, the British textile industry was still based on the processing of local wool by individual craftsmen. This system was called "cottage industry," since the work was carried out at home, in small cottage houses where the craftsmen lived with their families. The production of thread from flax and cotton, which required finer processing, had not become widespread in medieval England, so cotton textiles were imported from India.
A lathe from 1811
In medieval Europe, the manufacture of mechanisms was carried out by clockmakers and makers of navigational and scientific instruments. Parts from clockwork mechanisms were even used in the manufacture of the first spinning machines. Many parts were made of wood by carpenters, since metal was expensive and difficult to work.
With the ever-growing demand for metal parts for spinning machines, steam engines, as well as seed drills and other mechanisms introduced into use in British agriculture from the early 18th century[16], lathes were invented, and in the first half of the 19th century, milling machines and other metalworking machine tools followed.
Coalbrookdale by Night, Philip James de Loutherbourg the Younger, 1801
The lights of the blast furnace in the town of Coalbrookdale
The increase in the number of machines caused a heightened demand for metal, which in turn required the development of metallurgy. The chief achievement of this era in metallurgy was the replacement of the charcoal used by medieval blacksmiths with coal coke. It was introduced into use in the 17th century by Clement Clerke and his forge and foundry masters.
In 1709, in the village of Coalbrookdale, Abraham Darby, founder of an entire dynasty of metallurgists and blacksmiths, used coke to smelt pig iron from ore in a blast furnace. At first only kitchenware was made from it, which differed from competitors' products only in that its walls were thinner and its weight lighter. In the 1750s, Darby's son (Abraham Darby II) built several more blast furnaces, and by that time his products were also cheaper than those made with charcoal. In 1778, Darby's grandson, Abraham Darby III, used his own castings to build the famous Iron Bridge in Shropshire, the first bridge in Europe made entirely of metal structures.
The Iron Bridge over the River Severn, Shropshire, Great Britain.
A train on the Liverpool–Manchester line
At the end of the 18th century, Great Britain began mass construction of canals for transporting goods (coal above all) by river.
The advent of railways was of enormous significance. The first steam locomotive was built in 1804 by Richard Trevithick. In the years that followed, many engineers attempted to build locomotives, but the most successful of them was George Stephenson, who between 1812 and 1829 proposed several successful locomotive designs. His locomotive was used on the world's first public railway, from Darlington to Stockton, opened in 1825. After 1830, rapid railway construction began in Great Britain.
The steamship Savannah
In 1807, Robert Fulton built the world's first steamship, the "Clermont," which made voyages along the Hudson River from New York to Albany. In 1819, the American steamship "Savannah" was the first to cross the Atlantic Ocean, though it traveled most of the distance under sail, which continued to be retained on steamships for a long time as an auxiliary means of propulsion. It was only in 1838 (19 years after the "Savannah") that the British steamship "Sirius" first crossed the Atlantic Ocean without using sails.
The first electric telegraph was created by the Russian scientist Pavel Lvovich Schilling in 1832. Subsequently, an electromagnetic telegraph was built in Germany by Carl Gauss and Wilhelm Weber (1833), in Great Britain by Cooke and Wheatstone (1837), while in the USA the electromagnetic telegraph was patented by S. Morse in 1837. A great achievement of Morse's was the invention of the telegraph code, in which the letters of the alphabet were represented by combinations of short and long signals — "dots" and "dashes" (Morse code). Commercial operation of the electric telegraph was first launched in London in 1837.
The main telegraph lines as of 1891.
In 1858, a transatlantic telegraph connection was established. A cable was then laid to Africa, which in 1870 made it possible to establish a direct telegraph link between London and Bombay (via a relay station in Egypt and on Malta).
The Industrial Revolution made possible the industrial production of some of the chemicals most in demand on the market, laying the foundation for the development of the chemical industry. Sulfuric acid had been known since the Middle Ages, but it was obtained from oxides formed by burning mineral sulfur, in glass vessels. In 1746, John Roebuck replaced these with more capacious lead vessels, significantly increasing the productivity of the process.
Another important task was the production of alkaline compounds. A method for the industrial production of sodium carbonate was developed in 1791 by the French chemist Nicolas Leblanc. He mixed sulfuric acid with common salt, and the resulting sodium sulfate was heated together with a mixture of limestone and coal. The mixture of reaction products was treated with water, sodium carbonate was obtained from the solution, and the insoluble substances (limestone, coal, and calcium sulfide) were discarded. Hydrogen chloride at first also polluted the air of production facilities, but later it came to be used to produce hydrochloric acid. The Leblanc process was simple, cheap, and yielded a far more affordable product than the previously used method of obtaining soda from plant ash[18].
The Thames Tunnel, the first tunnel in Europe built under a body of water, opened in 1843. Cement was used in its construction.
Sodium carbonate was used in a great many manufacturing processes, including the production of soap, glass, and paper, as well as in the textile industry. Besides being used to produce soda, sulfuric acid also found application in removing rust from metal items and as a bleaching agent for fabrics. It was not until the beginning of the 19th century that Charles Tennant and Claude Louis Berthollet developed a more effective bleaching agent based on chlorinated lime. Tennant's factory for producing the new bleaching agent remained for a long time the largest chemical enterprise in the world.
In 1824, the British bricklayer Joseph Aspdin patented a chemical process for producing Portland cement. It consisted of sintering clay with limestone. The mixture was then ground into a powder and mixed with water, sand, and gravel, producing concrete. A few years later, the engineer Marc Isambard Brunel used concrete to build the world's first watertight tunnel under the River Thames[19], and in the mid-19th century it was used to build modern urban sewer systems.
Another achievement of the Industrial Revolution was street lighting. Its appearance in British cities was made possible by the Scottish engineer William Murdoch. He invented a process for producing coal gas by the pyrolysis of coal, as well as methods for storing, transporting, and using it in gas lamps. The first gas lamps were installed in London between 1812 and 1820. Soon most of the coal mined in Great Britain was going toward lighting needs, since it not only increased comfort and safety on city streets but also contributed to the lengthening of the working day at factories and mills, which had previously depended on relatively expensive candles and oil lamps for lighting.
The rapidly developing industry and service sector provided many new jobs. At the same time, the appearance of cheap manufactured goods led to the ruin of small producers, and ruined craftsmen became hired workers. But the main source that swelled the ranks of hired labor was the impoverished peasantry, who moved to the cities. From 1880 to 1914 alone, 60 million Europeans moved from villages to cities. Rapid urban population growth and internal migration in the 19th century became an almost universal phenomenon throughout Europe. For example, the population of Paris grew by more than 92% between 1800 and 1850, and the population of Manchester increased tenfold between 1790 and 1900. In a number of countries the urban population had become the majority by the early 20th century (in Belgium, according to the 1910 census, it stood at 54%; in Great Britain (1911) at 51.5%). In Germany in 1907 it stood at 43.7%, and in France in 1911 at 36.5% of the total population.
Rapid urbanization and the growing number of hired workers greatly intensified social problems. As long as centers of factory production remained relatively small, a city dweller could, in addition to factory earnings, cultivate a kitchen garden, and if he lost his job could hire himself out on a farm. But as cities grew, such opportunities became ever fewer. Peasants who had migrated to the cities found it difficult to adapt to the unfamiliar conditions of urban life[20].
A Philosopher Giving a Lecture on the Orrery. J. Wright, c. 1766. Scientific knowledge was spread in informal philosophical circles
Knowledge of innovations spread in various ways. Workers who had gained qualifications with one employer could then move on to another. This method of raising one's skill level was quite widespread; in some countries, such as France and Sweden, sending workers abroad for training was even a matter of state policy. Trainees, as is still the case today, usually kept records of their work, which have come down to us as monuments of the era.
Subsequent global transformations of the mode of production are also often identified as industrial revolutions.
The Second Industrial Revolution is periodized from the second half of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century, and is characterized by the mass adoption of assembly-line production and the widespread use of electricity and chemicals; the concept of the Second Industrial Revolution was brought into wide use by David Landes[ .
The Third Industrial Revolution is the term usually used to denote the so-called "digital revolution" — the widespread shift in production to the use of information and communication technologies, which contributed to the formation of a post-industrial society; mass publications about the Third Revolution appeared at the beginning of the 21st century .
Although the concept of the Third Industrial Revolution had not fully taken shape as of the mid-2010s, there are already notions of a "Fourth Industrial Revolution" — this term is associated with the German public-private program Industrie 4.0 *, within which major German conglomerates, with grant support for research from the federal government, are creating fully automated production facilities, lines, and products that interact with one another and with consumers within the concept of the Internet of Things, thereby making possible the output of individualized products
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