Second Industrial Revolution

• 1. Introduction

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  The Second Industrial Revolution reshaped the world so thoroughly that by 1900, Britain was producing nearly a quarter of all industrial output on earth. Between 1870 and 1914, a cascade of technologies appeared in rapid succession: cheap steel, electric power, internal combustion engines, and a global telegraph network that let a merchant in London place an order with a supplier in India and expect delivery within weeks. One author called this period from 1867 to 1914 "The Age of Synergy", because the inventions did not arrive in isolation. They fed each other. A cheaper rail network needed cheaper steel. Cheaper steel needed cheaper coal. Cheaper coal powered more locomotives. In the 1880s alone, 75,000 miles of new track were laid across the United States, a figure unmatched anywhere in world history. What drove this acceleration? What made the second revolution so different from the first? And what happened to the workers, the businesses, and the cities that found themselves suddenly transformed?

• 2. Steel and Iron

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  James Beaumont Neilson invented and patented the hot blast technique in 1828 at Wilsontown Ironworks in Scotland, and it proved to be the single most important advance in blast furnace fuel efficiency of the entire Industrial Revolution. By preheating the air blown into a furnace using waste heat from the same furnace, Neilson's method drastically cut the fuel needed to produce pig iron. Early versions used iron as a heating medium, but iron cracked under repeated thermal stress. Edward Alfred Cowper solved that problem in 1857 with a stove built from firebrick, which could withstand the heat and also raised blast furnace throughput to new levels. The Cowper stove remains in use today.

  Sir Henry Bessemer then changed the economics of steel entirely. His process stripped excess carbon and other impurities from molten pig iron by blasting air through it, simultaneously purifying the metal and keeping it liquid through the heat generated by oxidation. One limitation was significant: the acid Bessemer process required hematite ore low in phosphorus, which was relatively scarce. Sidney Gilchrist Thomas, working with his cousin Percy Gilchrist at the Blaenavon Ironworks in Wales, patented a solution in 1878. Bolckow Vaughan and Co. in Yorkshire was the first company to adopt it commercially. In continental Europe, where phosphoric iron was far more common than in England, Thomas became more widely celebrated than in his own country.

  The Siemens-Martin process arrived as a complement to Bessemer, not a replacement. French engineer Pierre-Emile Martin was the first to license the Siemens furnace for steelmaking, in 1865. The open-hearth method it used did not expose steel to excessive nitrogen, was easier to control, and could melt and refine large quantities of scrap steel, turning a waste problem into a raw material. By the early twentieth century, the Siemens-Martin process had become the leading steelmaking method in the world.

  Cheap steel made possible larger bridges, railroads, skyscrapers, and ships. High-pressure boilers and high-tensile steel machinery produced engines, gears, and axles more powerful than anything previously built. Henry Clifton Sorby had laid part of the scientific groundwork in 1863, when he used acid etching to study metal under a microscope and became the first person to understand that a precise but small quantity of carbon gives steel its strength.

• 3. Electrification

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  Michael Faraday's research on the magnetic field around a current-carrying conductor established the concept of the electromagnetic field in physics, and his inventions of electromagnetic rotary devices created the practical foundation for all electrical technology that followed. But the moment electrification became visible to the public arrived in 1881, when Sir Joseph Swan supplied about 1,200 incandescent lamps to the Savoy Theatre in London's city of Westminster, making it the first public building in the world lit entirely by electricity. Swan's bulb had already appeared two years earlier on Mosley Street in Newcastle upon Tyne, the world's first electrical street lighting installation.

  The first large-scale central supply plant opened at Holborn Viaduct in London in 1882, with a second opening at Pearl Street Station in New York City shortly after. Sebastian de Ferranti, an English electrical engineer, then built the first modern power station in the world at Deptford, operating at the then-unprecedented voltage of 10,000 volts on alternating current. Completed in 1891, it generated 800 kilowatts and delivered power to central London, with transformers stepping down voltage street by street for consumer use.

  Frank J. Sprague developed the first successful DC motor in 1886. Within three years, 110 electric street railways were either using his equipment or actively planning to do so. The AC induction motor followed in the 1890s and spread through industry from there. Household electrification in cities did not become common until the 1920s. Fluorescent lighting was not introduced commercially until the 1939 World's Fair.

  Electrification also made possible inexpensive production of electro-chemicals: aluminium, chlorine, sodium hydroxide, and magnesium. The National Academy of Engineering would later call electrification "the most important engineering achievement of the 20th century". In factories, electric light replaced gas lighting, eliminating associated heat and pollution and reducing fire risk enough that the cost of electricity for lighting was often offset by lower fire insurance premiums. It was electric power, too, that made the assembly line possible by allowing machine tools to be arranged in the exact sequence work required.

• 4. Telecommunications

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  Sir William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone installed the first commercial telegraph in May 1837, connecting Euston railway station to Camden Town in London. Within decades, the network spanned continents. John Watkins Brett built the first undersea telegraph cable between France and England. The Atlantic Telegraph Company, formed in London in 1856, pushed the technology across the ocean, and on the 18th of July 1866, the ship SS Great Eastern, captained by Sir James Anderson, successfully completed the first working transatlantic cable after many earlier failures. From the 1850s until 1911, British submarine cable networks dominated the world system under a deliberate strategic goal called the All Red Line.

  Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone in 1876, and like the early telegraph it was first adopted mainly to speed business transactions. Radio emerged through a different path. David Edward Hughes and Heinrich Hertz both confirmed the existence of electromagnetic waves that James Clerk Maxwell had predicted. Guglielmo Marconi then commercialized the technology: he founded The Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company in Britain in 1897, transmitted Morse code across Salisbury Plain that same year, sent the first wireless communication over open sea, and in 1901 made the first transatlantic wireless transmission from Poldhu, Cornwall, to Signal Hill, Newfoundland. By 1904, Marconi was running a commercial service transmitting nightly news summaries to subscribing ships.

  Sir John Ambrose Fleming's development of the vacuum tube in 1904 underpinned modern electronics and radio broadcasting. Lee De Forest's subsequent triode invention allowed electronic signals to be amplified, opening the path to the broadcast radio industry of the 1920s. Maxwell himself had earlier developed the first durable color photograph in 1861 and published the first scientific treatment of control theory, the analytical framework that governs automated processes in ships, aircraft, and industrial plants.

• 5. Petroleum and Chemicals

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  The petroleum industry began in Scotland in 1848, when the chemist James Young started a small business refining crude oil through slow distillation. Young extracted several useful liquids from it, naming one "paraffine oil" for the paraffin-like substance it formed at low temperatures. In 1850 he built what is regarded as the first truly commercial oil works and refinery in the world, at Bathgate, using oil derived from locally mined torbanite, shale, and bituminous coal. Edwin Drake's 1859 well near Titusville, Pennsylvania, is considered the first modern oil well and touched off a major American oil boom. Drake learned the cable tool drilling method from Chinese laborers in the United States, a technique itself developed in ancient China for drilling brine wells.

  Kerosene from oil refining proved far more efficient and affordable than vegetable oils, tallow, or whale oil for lighting. Gasoline was initially an unwanted byproduct of refining until automobiles entered mass production after 1914, at which point shortages appeared during World War I. The Burton process for thermal cracking doubled gasoline yield and helped ease those shortages.

  Synthetic dye was discovered by English chemist William Henry Perkin in 1856, when he found that aniline could be partially transformed into a mixture that, when extracted with alcohol, produced an intense purple color. He named the dye mauveine, scaled up production, and commercialized it as the world's first synthetic dye. After mauveine, many new aniline dyes appeared, and factories spread across Europe. By the end of the century, German chemical firms had pulled far ahead. By 1900 the German chemical industry dominated the world market for synthetic dyes. By 1913, eight German firms, led by BASF, Bayer, and Hoechst, produced nearly 90 percent of the world supply of dyestuffs and sold roughly 80 percent of that production abroad. Alfred Chandler called the leading German dye companies "the world's first truly managerial industrial enterprises".

• 6. Transport and Mobility

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  Karl Benz patented the world's first automobile in 1886. It ran on a four-stroke engine of his own design, used wire wheels rather than wooden carriage wheels, and transmitted power to the rear axle via two roller chains. He began selling it as the Benz Patent Motorwagen in the late summer of 1888, making it the first commercially available automobile in history. Henry Ford built his first car in 1896, and by 1903 founded the Ford Motor Company. The problem Ford and his colleagues solved was production scale: a completely redesigned factory with machine tools positioned in exact work sequence, all unnecessary human motion removed, and conveyors threading parts through the line. The Model T's price fell from $780 in 1910 to $360 in 1916 as a result. By 1924, two million T-Fords were being produced per year and retailing at $290 each.

  At sea, Isambard Kingdom Brunel built the Great Western, the longest ship in the world at 236 feet with a 250-foot keel, proving transatlantic steamship service was viable. His follow-up, the Great Britain, launched in 1843, was considered the first modern ship: built of metal, powered by an engine, and driven by a propeller rather than a paddle wheel. John Penn perfected the oscillating engine for the Royal Navy; by the time of his death in 1878, his engines had been fitted to 230 ships and represented the first mass-produced, high-pressure, high-revolution marine engines.

  John Boyd Dunlop developed the first practical pneumatic tire in 1887 in South Belfast. Willie Hume demonstrated its advantages by winning the tire's first ever races in Ireland and then England in 1889. Commercial production of the pneumatic tire began in late 1890. The modern bicycle had been designed by Harry John Lawson in 1876, and John Kemp Starley produced the first commercially successful safety bicycle shortly after. The resulting bike boom of the 1890s helped drive improvements to road surfaces; modern tarmac was patented by British civil engineer Edgar Purnell Hooley in 1901.

  Charles Parsons developed the steam turbine in 1884, with his first model generating 7.5 kilowatts. The turbine was 90 percent smaller than comparable earlier steam engines, produced rotary rather than reciprocating power, and by the time of Parsons' death had been adopted for all major world power stations.

• 7. Business and Society Transformed

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  A railway collision in Massachusetts in 1841 led to calls for safety reform that produced something far larger than better signaling: it produced the modern corporate organization. Railroads required expertise distributed across hundreds of miles of track to manage daily crises and breakdowns, and the answer was to divide operations into departments with clear management hierarchies. When the telegraph arrived, companies ran telegraph lines alongside their tracks to monitor trains in real time. The accounting methods railways developed to track costs, calculate ton-mile freight rates, and locate missing railcars were eventually adopted by steel firms and other industries, forming the basis of modern accounting.

  Frederick Winslow Taylor extended this logic to the factory floor with scientific management, or Taylorism. His approach replaced informal practice with methods derived from time-and-motion studies of specific tasks, from bricklaying to shoveling. His core principles included selecting and training each worker according to scientific analysis rather than leaving training to chance, providing detailed supervision of each worker's discrete task, and dividing planning work between managers and execution between workers. These ideas eventually spread far beyond factory floors into industrial engineering and business management broadly.

  The period from 1870 to 1890 saw the greatest sustained increase in economic growth ever recorded up to that point. Prices of goods fell dramatically, and crop failures in regions connected to large markets by rail and telegraph no longer caused starvation. The London sewerage system, built in the 1860s, along with the Metropolis Water Act of 1852, which established minimum water quality standards, sharply reduced infection and death rates from many diseases.

  By 1890 the share of British workers employed in agriculture had fallen below 10 percent, with the vast majority of the population now living in cities. By 1900 Britain accounted for 24 percent of world industrial production, followed by the United States at 19 percent, Germany at 13 percent, Russia at 9 percent, and France at 7 percent. The first billion-dollar corporation, United States Steel, was formed by J. P. Morgan in 1901 through the consolidation of firms built by Andrew Carnegie and others, a signal of how thoroughly economic concentration had reshaped American industry by the century's close.