Topic 10. Industrial Revolution in XVIII—XIX

Trade prosperity led to the enrichment of the English merchants, to the emergence of excess capital, which required placement in some business. On the other hand, as a result of emigration to America, England experienced a shortage of labor. We remember that in similar circumstances, Athenian capitalists bought slaves for their workshops - the British tried to make up for the shortage of labor by introducing machines. Attempts to use machines in manufactories have taken place before - the first example of this kind was the Italian mechanic's silk-tiller machine Francesco Borido, created in 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, the Boridano machine remained a unique example because the introduction of technology ran into opposition from artisans who were afraid of losing their jobs. In 1579 a mechanic was executed in Danzig, who created a ribbon-weaving machine. In 1598, William Lee, the inventor of the knitting machine, was forced to flee from England. In 1733, weaver John Kay invented the “flying shuttle”, he was harassed by weavers, his house was crushed, and he was forced to flee to France. However, many weavers secretly continued to use Kay's canoe - they were beaten, in 1767 in London there was a big clash between weavers. In 1765, the weaver and carpenter Hargreaves created a mechanical spinning wheel, which he named after his daughter “Jenny”; this spinning wheel increased spinner productivity by 20 times. The workers broke into Hargreaves' house and broke his car - however, despite this resistance, after a while, “Jenny” began to be used by spinners. In 1769, Richard Arkwright patented a spinning watering machine designed for a water drive - from that moment on, machines began to be used in manufactories and the inventors received the support of powerful owners of large capitals.

The first cars were created by self-taught mechanics; they were made of wood and did not require engineering calculations. Technique developed independently of science. After the resistance of the opponents of the cars began to weaken, new cars began to appear one after another. In 1774-1779, Samuel Crompton designed a spinning machine that produced a higher-quality fabric than the Arkwright machine. In 1784, Edmund Cartwright created a weaving machine that increased the productivity of weavers 40 times.

The industrial revolution was a complex process that took place simultaneously in various industries. In the mining industry, one of the main production problems was pumping water from mines. In 1698, the Englishman Severi created a machine that used steam for this purpose; in 1712, Thomas Newcomen improved this machine by supplying it with a cylinder and a piston. In the Newcomen machine, the vapor in the cylinder was condensed by injecting water, a vacuum was created in the cylinder, and the piston was drawn into the cylinder under atmospheric pressure. By the 1770s, about 200 Newcomen machines operated in England, but they had an uneven course, often breaking down and being used only in mines. In different countries, attempts have been made to improve these machines; In particular, the Russian mechanic I.I. Ramsun built a two-cylinder machine of a similar device. In 1763, James Watt began work on improving the Newcomen machine. At that time, Watt was a lab assistant at a university in Glasgow and was assigned to repair a broken model of Newcomen machine. Having understood the shortcomings of the model, Watt created a machine that was fundamentally different from her; first, the piston in Watt’s car was driven not by atmospheric pressure, but by steam injected from a steam boiler; secondly, after the completion of the piston stroke, the exhaust steam was transferred to a special condenser. In 1769, Watt took out a patent for his car, but experts argued that Watt’s idea could not be practically realized: it was impossible to grind a mathematically correct steam cylinder with the technology of that time. Watt was lucky that just at that time a perfect machine was created, designed to drill guns. Watt was able to bring to the case of a major manufacturer Matthew Bolton, who for the sake of this idea put his whole fortune on the map. In 1775, the production of steam engines was set up at the Bolton factory in Birmingham; however, only ten years later, this production began to give a tangible profit. In 1784, Watt patented a double-action steam engine in which steam alternately pushed the piston from two sides; In this machine, a centrifugal regulator was applied, which automatically maintained the specified number of revolutions.

In the first engines of Watt, the pressure in the cylinder was only slightly higher than atmospheric. In 1804, engineer A. Wolfe patented a machine operating at a pressure of 3–4 atmospheres, increasing efficiency. more than 3 times. Mass production of steam engines was impossible without precise lathes; The decisive step in this direction was made by mechanic Henry Maudsley, who created a self-propelled caliper. Since that time, it became possible to manufacture parts with a tolerance of a fraction of a millimeter - this was the beginning of modern engineering. The emergence of machines caused the need for metal. Previously, cast iron was smelted on charcoal, and there was almost no forest left in England. In 1785, Henry Court invented a method of producing pig iron on coal. Coal mining has become one of the main industries.

Soon after the appearance of the steam engine, attempts to create steamboats began. In 1802, an Irish-American, Robert Fulton, 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, were not interested in the ideas of the steamer. Fulton returned to America and with the money of his friend and patron Livingstone built the steamer “Claremont”; The machine for this steamer was manufactured at Watt's factory. In 1807, under the enthusiastic cries of the audience, the “Claremont” made the first flight across the Hudson River - but there was not a single brave person who wanted to become a passenger of the new vessel. Four years later, Fulton and Livingston were already the owners of the shipping company, nine years later there were 300 steamboats in America, and 150 in England. In 1819, the American steamer Savannah crossed the Atlantic Ocean, and in the 1830s the first regular transatlantic shipping line. The largest Great Western steamer, which had a displacement of 2 thousand tons and a steam engine with a capacity of 400 horsepower, was cruised on this line. Twenty years later, the steamboats became much larger: the Great Eastern steamer sailing to India had a displacement of 27 thousand tons and two cars with a total capacity of 7.5 thousand liters. with.

Simultaneously with the construction of steamboats, attempts were made to create a steam wagon. At many mines there were rail tracks through which horses dragged trolleys with ore. In 1803, mechanic Richard Trevithik built the first steam locomotive, replacing horses on one of the rail roads in Wales - however, Trevithika could not get the support of entrepreneurs. Trying to draw attention to his invention, Trevitik arranged an attraction using a steam locomotive, but in the end, he went bankrupt and died in poverty. Fate was more supportive of George Stephenson, a self-taught mechanic who received an order to build a locomotive for one of the mines near Newcastle. In 1815, Stephenson built his first steam locomotive, and then supervised the construction of a railway more than 50 km long. The main idea of ​​Stephenson was alignment of the path by creating embankments and cutting through the grooves, thus achieving a high speed of movement. In 1830, Stephenson completed the construction of the first large railway between the cities of Manchester and Liverpool; for this road he designed the “Rocket” locomotive on which he first used a tubular steam boiler. "Rocket" was carrying a carriage with passengers at a speed of 60 km / h; the benefits of the road were such that Stephenson was immediately offered to direct the construction of the road through all of England from Manchester to London. Later Stephenson built railways in Belgium and in Spain. In 1832, the first railway was launched in France, a little later - in Germany and the USA; locomotives for these roads were manufactured at the factory of Stephenson in England.

The appearance of machine tools, steam engines, steam locomotives and steamboats radically changed the lives of people. The emergence of factories that produce a huge amount of cheap fabrics, ruined artisans who worked at home or in manufactories. In 1811, an uprising of artisans broke out in Nottingham, which broke machines in factories - they were called "Luddites." The uprising was crushed. Ruined artisans were forced to leave for America or go to work in factories. The work of a worker at a factory was less skilled than the work of an artisan, manufacturers often hired women and children, for 12-15 hours of work they paid pennies. There were many unemployed and beggars, after the famine uprisings of 1795 they began to pay benefits, which were enough for two loaves of bread a day. The population flowed to the factories, and the factory villages soon turned into a huge city; in 1844 in London there were 2.5 million inhabitants, and the workers lived in overcrowded houses, where in one room, often without a fireplace, crowded into several families. Workers made up the majority of the population of England; it was a new industrial society, not like 18th century England.

The main branch of English industry in the first half of the XIX century was the production of cotton fabrics. New cars made it possible to get 300 percent or more of profit a year and produce cheap fabrics that were sold all over the world. It was a huge industrial boom, the production of fabrics increased tenfold. However, new factories required raw materials - cotton; at first, cotton was expensive because it was manually cleaned. In 1806, American Eli Whitney created a cotton gin; after that, the “era of cotton” began in the southern states, huge cotton plantations were created here, on which slaves worked. Thus, the heyday of American slavery was directly linked to the industrial revolution.

By the 1840s, England had become a “workshop of the world,” its share was more than half of the production of metal and cotton fabrics, the bulk of the production of machines. Cheap English fabrics have filled the whole world and have ruined artisans not only in England, but also in many countries of Europe and Asia. In India, millions of weavers died of hunger; many large handicraft cities, such as Dhaka and Ahmedabad, have become extinct. The incomes on which the artisans of Europe and Asia had previously existed now went to England. Many states tried to close off British commodity intervention — in response, England proclaimed “free trade”; she in every way — often with the use of military force — sought to remove the protectionist customs barriers, the “discovery” of other countries for British goods.

In the 1870s, a significant turning point came in the development of the world economy; this change was associated with a colossal expansion of the world market. In the previous period, the large-scale construction of railways led to the inclusion in the world trade of vast continental areas; the emergence of steamers much cheaper shipping by sea. American and Russian wheat rushed to the markets in a huge stream - wheat prices fell by one and a half, 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 millions of workers with cheap bread. Since that time, there has been an industrial specialization of Europe: many European states now lived by exchanging their industrial goods for food. Population growth was no longer constrained by the size of arable land; disasters and crises caused by overpopulation are a thing of the past. The old laws of history have been replaced by the laws of a new industrial society.

The industrial revolution gave Europeans new weapons - rifles and steel cannons. It has long been known that rifled rifles in the barrel bore give the bullet a spin, causing the range to double, and accuracy 12 times. However, to charge such a gun from the muzzle cost a lot of work, and the rate of fire was very low, not more than one shot per minute. In 1808, on the order of Napoleon, French gunsmith Pauly created a breech-loading rifle; gunpowder and seed blasted with a needle drummer prick were placed in the paper cartridge. If Napoleon had received such rifles on time, he would have been unbeatable - but the fact is that the manufacture of the state bolt required precision jewelry, and Poly did not have a high-precision turning machine. Later, when the machine with the caliper Maudsley appeared, the assistant to Pauli, the German Dreyze constructed a needle gun, which was adopted by the Prussian army in 1841. The Dreza shotgun made 9 rounds per minute - 5 times more than the smooth-bore guns of other armies. The firing range was 800 meters - three times more than other rifles.

At the same time, there was another revolution in military affairs, caused by the appearance of steel cannons. The cast iron was too fragile and the cast iron cannons were often torn when fired; steel guns allowed the use of a much more powerful charge. In the 1850s, the English inventor and entrepreneur Henry Bessemer invented the Bessemer converter, and in the 60s the French engineer Emil Marten created the open-hearth furnace. After that, industrial production of steel and production of steel cannons were established. In Russia, the first steel cannons were manufactured at the Zlatoust plant under the direction of P. M. Obukhov; then production was organized at the Obukhov plant in St. Petersburg. The greatest success in the production of artillery shells was achieved by the German industrialist Alfred Krupp, in the 60s Krupp established the mass production of breech-loading rifled guns. Draize’s rifles and Krupp’s cannon ensured Prussia’s victories in the wars with Austria and France — the powerful German Empire owed its birth to this new weapon.

The invention of the loom, the steam engine, the steam locomotive, the steamer, the rifle, and the steel guns — all these were fundamental discoveries that brought about the emergence of a new cultural circle — the society that is called industrial civilization. A wave of new culture emanated from England; it quickly spread to European states - first of all France and Germany. In Europe, the rapid modernization of the English model began, at the first stage it included the borrowing of machinery - machine tools, steam engines, railways. The second stage included political transformations - in 1848 Europe was swept by a wave of revolutions, the banner of which was the overthrow of monarchies and parliamentary reforms following the English pattern. Russia tried to resist this modernization - the war began with Britain and France, and the rifles forced Russia to take the path of reform. In the 1960s, the cultural expansion of industrial civilization was replaced by military expansion — a fundamental discovery always generates a wave of conquest. The era of colonial wars has begun; eventually, the whole world was divided between the industrial powers. England, taking advantage of its primacy, created a huge colonial empire with a population of 390 million people.