The First Industrial Revolution: Iron Technology Spurs Innovation

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The First Industrial Revolution: Iron Technology Spurs Innovation

The Factory System. While before the Industrial Revolution much work was done at home, the use of specialized machinery led to the concentration of workers at one site and also imposed geographical constraints, primarily the need for a nearby power source, either water or coal. Thus, factories clustered near rivers or coal deposits, and industrialization was more regional than national. This new sort of production permitted increased division of labor and more efficient and more hierarchical management, thereby lowering manufacturing costs. As a result, more and more people could afford manufactured goods, and the demand for them increased.

Iron and Coal. Improvements in iron production made the rapid mechanization of industry feasible, and as in the textile industry, Great Britain led the way. The key to British predominance in iron making stemmed from their use of coal, rather than charcoal, in smelting—a practice that at first seemed a disadvantage. Iron makers preferred charcoal because, as a vegetable fuel, it did not pass on impurities to the smelted iron. In eighteenth-century England, however, widespread wood shortages made charcoal expensive, so the British used coal as a replacement fuel and got much of their iron from their North American colonies. The loss of the thirteen colonies after the War of American Independence (1775-1783) increased the demand for a way to prevent coal from creating impurities in smelted iron. Iron masters experimented until they discovered how to apply heat indirectly using a reverberatory furnace, which separated the coal from direct contact with the iron. This process, known as “puddling,” was developed by Englishman Henry Cort in 1784 and perfected in the 1790s. Further improvements made coal-smelted iron equal, or higher, in quality to that produced with charcoal and allowed rapid expansion of English iron production in the late 1790s and even faster growth during the first decades of the nineteenth century, as machines made from iron became more and more essentia to economic development.

Steam Power. The experiments of artisans and iron makers with coal and new machinery had an enormous impact on British technological creativity. The most important example was the steam engine. First developed in the late seventeenth century and improved over the course of the eighteenth century, the coal-powered steam engine ultimately replaced dependence on human or animal power. Since the first steam engines were highly inefficient, however, they were used only in places where cheap coal was readily available, usually to pump water out of coal mines. Several skilled British engineers, particularly those with experience designing and building precision tools, were responsible for improving the steam engine. In the 1760s John Smeaton (1725-1792), an instrument maker from Leeds, upgraded existing steam-engine designs and doubled their efficiency. Scottish engineer James Watt (1736-1819), an instrument maker from Glasgow, spent two decades tinkering with the engine, solving several technical problems. His improvements saved a huge

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amount of coal and permitted the engine to be moved. British entrepreneurs and craftsmen rapidly adapted the version of the engine Watt perfected in 1778 to run all sorts of industrial machines. Constantly improved, the steam engine was essential to industrial mechanization and to the emergence of the factory system. Despite their mobility, Watt’s engines were still too large and produced too little pressure to run steam-powered vehicles. In 1800 Englishman Richard Trevithick (1771-1833) developed a smaller, high-pressure steam engine powerful enough for steamboats and railroad locomotives, the most important advances in transportation of the early industrial era.

Railroads. Using Trevithick’s high-pressure steam engine, which was constantly improved by talented British engineers, the railroad emerged as a viable technology in 1814, when steam locomotives were used to haul coal at mines. The inventor of locomotives for several mines was George Stephenson (1782-1848), who in 1825 designed the Active (later renamed Locomotion), which pulled the first passenger train from Darlington to Stockton at a speed of fifteen miles per hour. In 1829 Stephenson’s Rocket reached thirty-six miles per hour, wining a race to determine which locomotive would be used on the new rail line between Liverpool and Manchester, which opened in 1830. In its first year this line carried more than four hundred thousand passengers, making the transportation of people more profitable than carrying freight, a situation that existed until the 1850s. The financial success of this line, in the heart of the rapidly industrializing region of Lancashire, spurred new railroad building. Within twenty years a web of railroad tracks traversed the British Isles; other networks spread rapidly through western Europe and North America. By 1870 extensive railroad systems covered most of the European continent, as well as the United States, Canada, Australia, and India. On the eve of World War I (1914-1918) railroads tied together disparate parts of the world, creating the beginnings of global economic structure. As the maximum

speed of the railroad train increased from fifty miles per hour in 1850 to nearly one hundred miles per hour by 1914, so too did the pace of modern life.

Economic and Social Effects. Railroads lowered the cost of transporting heavy goods, allowing remote areas to become part of a global economy. Railroads carried manufactured goods and raw materials more easily and more cheaply than ever before. As markets widened and production costs fell, larger factories could be built, allowing greater potential profits. The ease and relative affordability of railroad transportation allowed industrialists to build factories farther away from sources of raw materials and closer to consumers. As a result, cities grew, and in many industrialized countries the urban working class replaced farmers as the largest single occupational group.