The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain in the late 1700s and spread throughout Europe and North America in the early 1800s. New machines like the spinning jenny and water frame mechanized textile production, increasing output. The development of steam power further mechanized factories and drove new machinery. This transition from manual labor to machine-driven mass production transformed economies and societies across the Western world.

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Jonathan Davila
World History, P.3
June 8, 2008
Industrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution was a time in the late 1800s and early 1900s when
changes in agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation had an effect on the cultural
conditions in Britain. The changes spread throughout Europe and North America and
eventually the world. The Industrial Revolution marked a major turning point in human
history. In the 1700s the manual economy of the Kingdom of Great Britain began to be
replaced by one dominated by industry and the manufacture of machinery. It started with
the mechanism of the textile industries and the development of iron techniques and the
increased use of coal. Trade expansion was enabled by the introduction of canals,
improved roads and railways.
During the 1700s and early 1800s, great changes took place in the lives and work
of people in several parts of the world. Industrialization is a process of social and
economic change. It is a part of a modernization process where social change and
economic development are closely related with technological innovation, particularly
with the development of large scale energy and metal production. Industrialization also
introduces a form of philosophical change, where people obtain a different attitude
towards their perception of nature. These changes resulted from the development of
industrialization. The word Industrial Revolution refers both to the changes that occurred
and to the period itself. In the 1760s two new machines revolutionized the textile
industry. One was the spinning jenny which was invented by James Hargreaves. James
was a Blackburn weaver and carpenter. The other machine was the water frame invented

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by Sir Richard Arkwright. Both machines solved many of the problems of roller
spinning, especially in the production of yarn used to make cloths. Between 1774 and
1779 a Lancashire weaver named Samuel Crompton developed the spinning mule. This
machine combined features of the spinning jenny and the water frame replaced both
machines. The mule was particularly efficient in spinning yarn for high quality cloths,
which was made before the invention of mule. During the 1780s and 1790s larger
spinning mules were built. They had metal rollers and several hundreds of spindles.
These machines ended the home spinning industry.
The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain during the 1700s. It started
spreading to other parts of Europe and to North America in the early 1800s. By the mid
1800s industrialization had become widespread in Western Europe and the northeastern
United States. The Industrial Revolution created an enormous increase in the production
of many kinds of goods. Some of this increase in production resulted from introduction of
power driven machinery and the development of factory organization. Before the
revolution manufacturing was done by hand or simple machines. Most people worked at
home in rural areas. A few worked in shops in towns as part of associations called guilds.
The Industrial Revolution eventually took manufacturing out of the home and
workshop. Power driven machines replaced handwork and factories developed as the best
way of bringing together the machines and workers to operate them. As the Industrial
Revolution grew private investors and financial institutions were needed to provide
money for the further expansion of industrialization. Financiers and banks became as
important as industrialists and factories in the growth of the revolution. For the first time
in European history wealthy business leaders called capitalists took over the control and

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organization of manufacturing. The introduction of steam power and powered machinery
increased in production capacity. The development of metal machine tools in the first two
decades of the 1900s facilitated the manufacture of more production machines for
manufacturing in other industries.
The effects spread throughout Western Europe and North America during the
1900s and eventually affecting most of the world. The impact of this change on society
was enormous. The first industrial revolution merged into the second industrial revolution
around 1850 when technological and economic progress gained development of steam
powered ships and railways. The Industrial Revolution began and era of economic
growth in capitalist economies. England was the first to industrialize because had the
most colonies to exploit the resources of yarn and wool.
The revolution both hurt and helped the poor. Farmers had to learn how to work
in factories or they would be out of business. Some poor people had good ideas. The poor
were largely left behind and the rift between rich and poor widened as it has been to this
day. There were Textiles such as Cotton spinning using Richard Arkwright’s water
frame, James Hargreaves’s Spinning Jenny, and Samuel Crompton’s Spinning Mule a
combination of the Spinning Jenny and the Water Frame. The end of the patent was
followed by many cotton mills. Similar technology was applied to spinning yarn for
various textiles and for linen. Steam power improved the steam engine invented by James
Watt was mainly used for pumping out mines. From the 1780s was applied to power
machines. This enabled rapid development of efficient automated factories on a
previously unimaginable scale in places where waterpower was not available. In the iron
industry coke was finally applied to all stages of iron smelting, replacing charcoal.

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Laissez-faire is a French phrase meaning “Let do.” In the early 18th
century British manufacture was based on wool which was processed by individual
artisans doing the spinning and weaving on their premises. This system is called a cottage
industry. Flax and cotton were also used for fine materials, but the processing was
difficult because of the preprocessing need. Goods in these materials made only a small
proportion of the output. Coal mining in Britian was often shallow pits following a seam
of coal along the surface which were abandoned as the coal was extracted. The coal was
mined into the side of a hill. Shaft mining was done in some areas, but the factor was the
problem of removing water. It could be done by moving buckets of water up the shaft.
The water had to be discharged into a steam at a level where it could flow away by
gravity.
The introduction of the steam engine greatly facilitated the removal of water and
enabled shafts to be made deeper which would enable more coal to be extracted. These
developments that had begun before the Industiral Revolution, but the adoption of James
Watt’s steam engine from the 1770s reduced the fuel costs of engines making mines more
profitable. The spinning wheel and hand loom restricted the production capacity of the
industry. Incremental advances increased productivity to the manufactured cotton goods
became the dominant British export by the early decades of the 1900s. The development
of the steam engine was an essential early element of the Industrial Revolution. For most
of the period of the Industrial Revolution the majority of industries still relied on wind
and water power as well as horse and man power for driving small machines. The first
real attempt at industrial use of steam power was due to Thomas Savery in 1698. He
constructed in London a lift combined vacuum and pressure water pump that generated

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about one horsepower and was used as in numerous water works and tried in a few
mines, but it was not a success since it was limited in pumping height and prone to boiler
explosions.
Bibliography
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt_steam_engine
3. http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761577952/Industrial_Revolution.html
4. http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/lecture17a.html
5. World History Book – Chapter 25 Industrial Revolution
6. History Channel