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— CH. 1 · INTRODUCTION —

Industrial Revolution

~11 min read · Ch. 1 of 8
8 sections

  • In 1799, a French envoy named Louis-Guillaume Otto wrote that France had entered the race to industrialise, and in doing so he left behind the earliest recorded use of the phrase Industrial Revolution. The era he was naming began in Great Britain around 1760 and reached continental Europe and the United States by about 1840. Economic historians regard its onset as the most important event in human history, comparable only to the adoption of agriculture. For the first time, both population and income per person began to climb together, an upward curve never seen before. So what made a damp island the workshop of the world? Why did spinning thread by water and burning coke instead of charcoal change how billions would live? And who were the inventors, ironmasters, and orphaned child workers caught inside the change?

  • In 1750, Britain imported 2.5 million pounds of raw cotton, most of it spun and woven by hand in the cottages of Lancashire. By 1800 the British textile industry used 52 million pounds, and by 1850 that figure reached 588 million pounds. The textile industry was the first to adopt modern production methods, and it became dominant in employment, value of output, and capital invested. Manchester earned the nickname Cottonopolis in the early 19th century for its sprawl of factories.

    The machines arrived in a rush. In 1764, at Oswaldtwistle in Lancashire, James Hargreaves built the spinning jenny, the first practical spinning frame with multiple spindles, costing only six pounds for a 40-spindle model in 1792. Richard Arkwright patented the water frame in 1769 and ran it on water power at Cromford in Derbyshire in 1771, giving the invention its name. Samuel Crompton's spinning mule of 1779 was a hybrid of those two machines, producing finer, stronger thread that let Britain make highly competitive yarn in bulk.

    In 1788 there were 50,000 spindles in Britain, a number that rose to 7 million within thirty years. Mechanised cotton spinning powered first by water, then steam, raised output per worker by a factor of around 500, while Edmund Cartwright's power loom, patented in 1785, lifted weaving output by a factor of 40. Across the Atlantic, Eli Whitney's cotton gin let one man remove in a single day the seed that had previously taken two months.

    Arkwright is the best-remembered figure, though many inventions credited to him came from men like Kay and Thomas Highs. He nurtured inventors, patented ideas, financed ventures, and built the cotton mill that gathered production under one roof. By the mid-19th century, machine-woven British cloth still could not match the quality of hand-woven Indian cloth, yet its cheap coarse grades undersold Indian fabric in low-wage India and destroyed that industry.

  • In 1709, Abraham Darby fed his blast furnaces at Coalbrookdale with coke instead of charcoal, and in doing so began the slow replacement of wood with coal across the iron trade. Mining coal demanded far less labour than cutting and charring wood, and coal was more abundant just as wood supplies grew scarce. Darby's coke pig iron suited cast iron goods, and his patented pots were thinner and cheaper than his rivals'.

    In the UK in 1720, the country made 20,500 tons of charcoal iron against just 400 tons with coke. By 1806, charcoal iron had fallen to 7,800 tons while coke cast iron reached 250,000 tons. The bottleneck was water power for the blast bellows, a limit broken by the steam engine. In 1757 the ironmaster John Wilkinson patented a hydraulic blowing engine, and the first cast iron blowing cylinder is believed to be the one used at Carrington in 1768, designed by John Smeaton.

    Henry Cort transformed refining with rolling in 1783 and puddling in 1784, producing structural grade iron cheaply. The work was brutal, backbreaking and extremely hot, and few puddlers lived to be 40. The rolling mill ran fifteen times faster than hammering wrought iron by hand. In 1828 the Scottish inventor James Beaumont Neilson patented hot blast, the century's most important energy saving in pig iron, cutting fuel use by a third with coke or two-thirds with coal.

    Cheap cast iron found a new life as a structural material. A famous early example is The Iron Bridge of 1778, cast from iron made by Abraham Darby III. By the 1790s, increased British output let the country eliminate imports of bar iron, which it had once drawn from Sweden and Russia, and become a net exporter.

  • In 1698 Thomas Savery patented the first commercially successful industrial use of steam, a low-lift vacuum and pressure water pump that generated about one horsepower for waterworks and a few mines. Before 1712, Thomas Newcomen introduced the first successful piston steam engine, installed to drain deep mines and producing upwards of 5 horsepower. Newcomen engines were wildly inefficient yet reliable and easy to maintain, and 1,454 had been built by 1800.

    The Scotsman James Watt changed the working principle itself. With financial backing from his English partner Matthew Boulton, by 1778 he had perfected an engine with a separate condenser chamber, which did away with the cooling water injected into the cylinder. Boulton and Watt's engines used only 20 to 25 percent as much coal per horsepower-hour as Newcomen's. The pair opened the Soho Foundry in 1795, and by 1800 had built 496 engines, with 308 driving mill machinery.

    Watt's 1783 double-acting rotative engine could turn the rotary machinery of a factory directly, but he refused to build high-pressure engines for fear of their dangers. That step fell to the Cornish engineer Richard Trevithick and the American Oliver Evans around 1800, when the Boulton and Watt patent expired. Their high-pressure engines exhausted against the atmosphere, light and compact enough for road and rail locomotives and steamboats.

    The scale of the shift shows in raw numbers. In Britain by 1800, steam supplied an estimated 10,000 horsepower; by 1815 that had grown to 210,000. Yet small workshops still ran on animal and human muscle, crank, treadle, and horse power, until widespread electrification arrived in the following century.

  • The first large precision machine tool was the cylinder boring machine John Wilkinson invented in 1774 to bore the great cylinders of steam engines. It was the first to use line-boring, supporting the cutting tool at both ends. James Watt had struggled to get a cylinder made for his first engine, and once Wilkinson bored a successful one for a Boulton and Watt engine in 1776, he won an exclusive contract to supply them.

    Henry Maudslay built the school of British machine tool making. Hired by Joseph Bramah to produce high-security locks, he perfected a lathe that cut machine screws of different thread pitches, work impossible with precision before. At the Portsmouth Block Mills he built all-metal machinery for making ships' pulley blocks for the Royal Navy, the first machines for mass production of interchangeable components. He trained Richard Roberts, Joseph Clement, and Joseph Whitworth to carry the work forward.

    Chemistry scaled up alongside metal. John Roebuck invented the lead chamber process for sulphuric acid in 1746, replacing fragile glass vessels with riveted lead chambers that made around 100 pounds each, a tenfold increase. In 1791 Nicolas Leblanc introduced a method for making sodium carbonate, or soda ash, used in glass, textiles, soap, and paper. In 1800 Charles Tennant developed bleaching powder, and his St Rollox Chemical Works in Glasgow grew into the world's largest chemical plant.

    After 1860 the lead in chemical innovation passed to dyestuffs, and Germany took command. Aspiring chemists flocked to German universities between 1860 and 1914, while British science lacked research universities and instead hired German-trained chemists. That gap would shape which nations dominated the industries to come.

  • Opened in 1761 and largely funded by the 3rd Duke of Bridgewater, the Bridgewater Canal ran from Worsley to the growing town of Manchester at a cost of 168,000 pounds. Within a single year the price of coal in Manchester fell by half. That success triggered Canal Mania, with the Leeds and Liverpool Canal and the Thames and Severn Canal among the notable results, opening in 1774 and 1789. By the 1820s a national canal network existed, and a horse could pull a barge holding tens of times what it could draw in a cart.

    Roads improved more slowly. Most British roads were poorly maintained by local parishes until turnpike trusts began charging tolls from the 1720s. Engineers John Metcalf, Thomas Telford, and John McAdam built new roads, with the first macadam stretch laid at Marsh Road, Ashton Gate, Bristol in 1816. Between 1690 and 1840, productivity tripled for long-distance carrying and rose fourfold in stage coaching.

    Railways became practical once inexpensive puddled iron, the rolling mill for rails, and the high-pressure steam engine came together after 1800. Steam-hauled public railways began with the Stockton and Darlington Railway in 1825. The 1829 Rainhill trials proved Robert Stephenson's locomotive design and accelerated the spread of rail.

    On the 15th of September 1830, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened as the first inter-city railway in the world. Engineered by Joseph Locke and George Stephenson, it linked industrial Manchester with the port of Liverpool and proved highly successful with passengers and freight. Its triumph set off Railway Mania. Workers who finished building the lines often stayed in the cities rather than return to the countryside, supplying yet more factory labour.

  • Most textile factory workers during the Industrial Revolution were unmarried women and children, including many orphans, working 12 to 14 hours with only Sundays off. Children as young as eight handled chores and added to family income, and many were taken out of school to work alongside their parents. The change in the worker's social relationship, set against the older life of farmers and cottagers, was viewed unfavourably by Karl Marx, though he acknowledged the rise in productivity that technology brought.

    People poured into the cities faster than housing could be built. Low-income newcomers squeezed into overcrowded slums where clean water, sanitation, and public health were inadequate. Cholera from polluted water and typhoid were endemic, and tuberculosis struck young adults. In The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, Friedrich Engels described the backstreets of Manchester, where people lived in shanties with dirt floors and no sanitary facilities.

    The filth eventually forced reform. In 1854 John Snow traced a cholera outbreak in Soho, London to a public water well fouled by a nearby cesspit. In 1855 the chemist Michael Faraday wrote to a London newspaper about the foul state of the River Thames. London's population more than doubled between 1800 and 1850, and the Metropolitan Board of Works, led by chief engineer Joseph Bazalgette, began building a modern sewer system in 1859 with 82 miles of main and 1,100 miles of street sewers.

    The numbers behind the suffering are stark and double-edged. Average height declined as nutrition fell, and some studies estimate British wages rose only 15 percent between the 1780s and the 1850s. Yet the share of Londoners who died before age five fell from 75 percent in 1730 to 1749 down to 32 percent in 1810 to 1829. England's population doubled from 8.3 million in 1801 to 17 million in 1850, then doubled again to 31 million by 1901.

  • Founded by the potter and retail entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood in 1759, Wedgwood fine china became a common feature on dining tables, and ordinary workers who once ate from metal platters now dined on porcelain. Coffee, tea, sugar, tobacco, and chocolate grew affordable across Europe, and the expanding northern textile trade put the three-piece suit within reach of the masses. The age of mass consumption had arrived.

    New shops and businesses spread through British towns and cities. One of the first department stores opened in 1796 by Harding, Howell and Co. on Pall Mall in London, while the oldest toy store, Hamleys, had opened in London in 1760. Fry's of Bristol produced the first chocolate bar in 1847, and its competitor Cadbury of Birmingham first tied confectionery to romance with a heart-shaped box of chocolates for Valentine's Day in 1868.

    Cheap reading matter rode the same wave. Penny dreadfuls, created in the 1830s, became Britain's first taste of mass-produced popular culture for the young, and by the 1860s and 70s more than a million boys' periodicals sold each week. Charles Dickens, called an authorpreneur, used new printing presses, advertising, and the railways to sell books. His first novel, The Pickwick Papers of 1836, became a phenomenon that spawned Pickwick cigars, playing cards, china figurines, and boot polish.

    Retail itself was reinvented. In 1861 the Welsh entrepreneur Pryce Pryce-Jones formed the first mail order business, selling Welsh flannel through catalogues. His scheme followed the Uniform Penny Post of 1840 and the Penny Black stamp, which carried a letter between any two places in the UK for a single penny, and goods reached buyers by the new railways. As the railways expanded overseas, so did his business.

Common questions

When did the Industrial Revolution begin and end?

The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain around 1760 and had spread to continental Europe and the United States by about 1840. It is sometimes called the First Industrial Revolution in contrast to the later Second Industrial Revolution, whose rapid growth resumed after 1870.

Where did the Industrial Revolution start and why in Britain?

The Industrial Revolution started in Great Britain, which by the mid-18th century was the leading commercial nation with GDP per capita considerably over the world average. High agricultural productivity, abundant coal, iron, and water power, skilled entrepreneurs, good transport, political stability, and access to capital all enabled its industrialisation.

What were the key inventions of the Industrial Revolution?

Key inventions included James Hargreaves's spinning jenny of 1764, Richard Arkwright's water frame patented in 1769, Samuel Crompton's spinning mule of 1779, and Edmund Cartwright's power loom patented in 1785. James Watt's improved steam engine, perfected by 1778, and John Wilkinson's cylinder boring machine of 1774 were also central.

How did the Industrial Revolution affect workers and living conditions?

Most textile factory workers were unmarried women and children, including orphans, working 12 to 14 hours with only Sundays off. Many moved into overcrowded city slums where cholera and typhoid were endemic, average height declined as nutrition fell, and British wages are estimated to have risen only 15 percent between the 1780s and 1850s.

Why was the textile industry so important to the Industrial Revolution?

The textile industry was the first to use modern production methods and became dominant in employment, value of output, and capital invested. British raw cotton consumption rose from 2.5 million pounds in 1750 to 588 million pounds in 1850, and mechanised cotton spinning raised output per worker by a factor of around 500.

How did the Industrial Revolution change transportation in Britain?

The Industrial Revolution built turnpike roads, canals, and railways that moved goods faster and cheaper. The Bridgewater Canal opened in 1761 and halved Manchester's coal price within a year, while the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the first inter-city railway in the world, opened on the 15th of September 1830.

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All sources

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