The Industrial Revolution was a period of great industrialization and innovation that took place in the late 1700s and early 1800s. The Industrial Revolution began in Britain and quickly spread around the world. In the half-century following the invention of basic machine tools, the machinery industry became the largest industrial sector in the U.S. economy in terms of value-added. [65] The impact of the Industrial Revolution on living conditions was highly controversial and was hotly debated by economic and social historians from the 1950s to the 1980s. [106] A series of essays from the 1950s by Henry Phelps Brown and Sheila V. Hopkins later established the academic consensus that the majority of the population at the bottom of the social ladder suffered serious losses in their standard of living. [106] In the years 1813-1913, there was a significant increase in workers` wages. [107] [108] An icon of the Industrial Revolution appeared in the early 1700s when Thomas Newcomen designed the prototype of the first modern steam engine. Newcomen`s invention, dubbed the “atmospheric steam engine,” was originally used to power the machines used to pump water from mine shafts.
Economic historians and authors such as Mendels, Pomeranz and Kridte argue that proto-industrialization in parts of Europe, the Islamic world, Mughal India and China created the social and economic conditions that led to the Industrial Revolution and thus caused the great divergence. [26] [27] [28] The first large precision machine tool was the cylinder drill, invented by John Wilkinson in 1774. It was used to drill large cylinders on early steam engines. Wilkinson`s drill differed from earlier cantilevered machines used to drill the guns in that the cutting tool was mounted on a beam that ran through the drilled cylinder and was worn out on both ends. [21] Lewis Paul patented the roller spinning frame and flyer-and-coil system to pull the wool to a more uniform thickness. The technology was developed with the help of John Wyatt of Birmingham. Paul and Wyatt opened a factory in Birmingham using their new donkey-powered rolling machine. In 1743, a factory was opened in Northampton with 50 pins on each of Paul and Wyatt`s five machines. It operated until about 1764. A similar mill was built by Daniel Bourn in Leominster, but it burned down. Lewis Paul and Daniel Bourn both patented carders in 1748.
Based on two sets of rollers that operated at different speeds, it was later used in the first cotton spinning mill. Lewis` invention was later developed and improved by Richard Arkwright in his water frame and Samuel Crompton in his rotating mule. Knowledge about innovation has been disseminated in a number of ways. Workers who have been trained in technology could move to another employer or be poached. A common method was for someone to go on a study trip and gather information where they could. Throughout the Industrial Revolution and the previous century, all European countries and America engaged in study tours; Some countries, such as Sweden and France, have even trained civil servants or technicians to adopt this as a matter of state policy. In other countries, particularly the UK and America, this practice has been implemented by individual manufacturers eager to improve their own methods. Study trips were common then as they are today, as was keeping travel diaries. The files of industrialists and technicians of the time are an unparalleled source of information on their methods. In the early 1800s, Richard Trevithick made his debut with a steam locomotive, and in 1830 similar locomotives began transporting goods (and passengers) between the industrial centres of Manchester and Liverpool. By this time, ships and steamships were already widely used, carrying goods along British rivers and canals, as well as across the Atlantic. The development of bleaching powder (calcium hypochlorite) by scottish chemist Charles Tennant around 1800, based on the discoveries of French chemist Claude Louis Berthollet, revolutionized bleaching processes in the textile industry by significantly reducing the time for the then traditional process used, which required repeated sunlight in bleaching fields after soaking textiles with alkaline or sour milk (from month to day).
Tennant`s plant in St Rollox, north of Glasgow, has become the largest chemical plant in the world. Oliver Evans invented an automated flour mill in the mid-1780s that used control mechanisms and conveyors, so no work was needed from the moment the grain was loaded into the elevator shovels until the flour was put into a cart. This is considered the first modern conveyor system to be an important step on the road to mass production. [35] The use of coal in iron smelting began somewhat before the Industrial Revolution, based on innovations by Sir Clement Clerke and others from 1678, using coal reverberation furnaces known as domes. These were fueled by flames that played on the mixture of ore and charcoal or coke and reduced the oxide to metal. This has the advantage that impurities (such as sulfur ash) in the coal do not migrate into the metal. This technology was applied to lead from 1678 and copper from 1687. It was also applied to iron foundry work in the 1690s, but in this case, the hall furnace was known as an air furnace.
(The foundry dome is a different and later innovation.) [Citation needed] Politicians and the government tried to limit child labor by law, but factory owners resisted; Some thought they were helping the poor by giving their children money to buy food to avoid starvation, and others simply adopted cheap labor. In 1833 and 1844, the first general laws against child labour, the Factory Acts, were passed in Britain: children under the age of nine were not allowed to work, children were not allowed to work at night, and the working day of young people under the age of 18 was limited to twelve hours. Labour inspectors oversaw the enforcement of the law, but their scarcity made it difficult to enforce. [Citation needed] A decade later, the use of children and women in mines was banned. Although such laws reduced the number of child labourers, child labour remained significantly present in Europe and the United States until the 20th century. [156] An economic recession occurred from the late 1830s to the early 1840s, when the introduction of early innovations of the Industrial Revolution, such as mechanized spinning and weaving, slowed down and their markets matured. Innovations developed at the end of this period, such as the increasing introduction of locomotives, steamships, and steamships, hot cast iron fusion, and new technologies such as the electric telegraph, widely used in the 1840s and 1850s, were not powerful enough to achieve high growth rates. .
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