Industrialisation
Industrialisation (or industrialization) is the period of social
and economic change that transforms a human group from an agrarian society into
an industrial society. This involves an
extensive re-organisation of an economy for
the purpose of manufacturing. As industrial workers' incomes rise,
markets for consumer goods and services of all kinds tend to expand and provide
a further stimulus to industrial investment and economic growth.
The term Industrial Revolution, like
similar historical concepts, is more convenient than precise. It is convenient
because history requires division into periods for purposes of understanding
and instruction and because there were sufficient innovations at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries to justify
the choice of this as one of the periods. The term is imprecise, however,
because the Industrial Revolution has no clearly defined beginning or end.
Moreover, it is misleading if it carries the implication of a once-for-all change from a “preindustrial” to a
“postindustrial” society, because, as has been seen, the events of the
traditional Industrial Revolution had been well prepared in a mounting tempo of
industrial, commercial, and technological activity from about 1000 CE and led into a continuing
acceleration of the processes of industrialization that is still proceeding in
our own time. The term Industrial Revolution must thus be employed with some
care. It is used below to describe an extraordinary quickening in the rate of
growth and change and, more particularly, to describe the first 150 years of
this period of time, as it will be convenient to pursue the developments of the
20th century separately.
The Industrial Revolution, in this
sense, has been a worldwide phenomenon, at least in so far as it has occurred
in all those parts of the world, of which there are very few exceptions, where
the influence of Western civilization has been felt. Beyond any doubt it
occurred first in Britain, and its effects spread only gradually to continental
Europe and North America. Equally clearly, the Industrial Revolution that eventually
transformed these parts of the Western world surpassed in magnitude the
achievements of Britain, and the process was carried further to change
radically the socioeconomic life of Asia, Africa, Latin
America, and
Australasia. The reasons for this succession of events are complex, but they
were implicit in the earlier account of the buildup toward rapid
industrialization. Partly through good fortune and partly through conscious
effort, Britain by the early 18th century came to possess the combination of
social needs and social resources that provided the necessary preconditions of
commercially successful innovation and a social system capable of sustaining and
institutionalizing the processes of rapid technological change once they had
started. This section will therefore be concerned, in the first place, with
events in Britain, although in discussing later phases of the period it will be
necessary to trace the way in which British technical achievements were
diffused and superseded in other parts of the Western world.
science
and technology influence industrialization
An outstanding feature of the
Industrial Revolution has been the advance in power technology. At the
beginning of this period, the major sources of power available to industry and any other potential
consumer were animate energy and the power of wind and water
, the only exception of any
significance being the atmospheric steam engines that had been installed for
pumping purposes, mainly in coal mines. It is to be emphasized that this use of
steam power was exceptional and remained so for most industrial purposes until
well into the 19th century. Steam did not simply replace other sources of
power: it transformed them. The same sort of scientific inquiry that led to the
development of the steam engine was also applied to the traditional sources of
inanimate energy, with the result that both waterwheels and windmills were
improved in design and efficiency. Numerous engineers contributed to the refinement of
waterwheel construction, and by the middle of the 19th century new designs made
possible increases in the speed of revolution of the waterwheel and thus
prepared the way for the emergence of the water turbine, which is still an
extremely efficient device for converting energy.
Meanwhile, British windmill
construction was improved considerably by the refinements of sails and by the
self-correcting device of the fantail, which kept the sails pointed into the
wind. Spring sails replaced the traditional canvas rig of the windmill with the
equivalent of a modern venetian blind, the shutters of which could be opened or
closed, to let the wind pass through or to provide a surface upon which its
pressure could be exerted. Sail design was further improved with the “patent”
sail in 1807. In mills equipped with these sails, the shutters were controlled
on all the sails simultaneously by a lever inside the mill connected by rod
linkages through the windshaft with the bar operating the movement of the
shutters on each sweep. The control could be made more fully automatic by
hanging weights on the lever in the mill to determine the maximum wind pressure
beyond which the shutters would open and spill the wind. Conversely,
counterweights could be attached to keep the shutters in the open position.
With these and other modifications, British windmills adapted to the increasing
demands on power technology. But the use of wind
power declined
sharply in the 19th century with the spread of steam and the increasing scale
of power utilization. Windmills that had satisfactorily provided power for
small-scale industrial processes were unable to compete with the production of
large-scale steam-powered mills.
Steam
engines
Although
the qualification regarding older sources of power is important, steam became
the characteristic and ubiquitous power
source of the British Industrial Revolution. Little development took place in the
Newcomen atmospheric engine until James Watt patented
a separate condenser in 1769, but from that point onward the steam engine
underwent almost continuous improvements for more than a century. Watt’s separate condenser was
the outcome of his work on a model of a Newcomen engine that was being used in
a University of
Glasgow laboratory. Watt’s inspiration was to separate
the two actions of heating the cylinder with hot steam and cooling it to
condense the steam for every stroke of the engine. By keeping the cylinder
permanently hot and the condenser permanently cold, a great economy on energy
used could be effected. This brilliantly simple idea could not be immediately
incorporated in a full-scale engine because the engineering of
such machines had hitherto been crude and defective. The backing of a
Birmingham industrialist, Matthew Boulton,
with his resources of capital and technical competence, was needed to convert
the idea into a commercial success. Between 1775 and 1800, the period over
which Watt’s patents were extended, the Boulton and Watt partnership produced
some 500 engines, which despite their high cost in relation to a Newcomen
engine were eagerly acquired by the tin-mining industrialists of Cornwall and
other power users who badly needed a more economic and reliable source of
energy.
During
the quarter of a century in which Boulton and Watt exercised their virtual
monopoly over the manufacture of improved steam engines, they introduced many
important refinements. Basically they converted the engine from a single-acting
(i.e., applying power only on the downward stroke of the piston) atmospheric
pumping machine into
a versatile prime mover that was double-acting and could be applied to rotary
motion, thus driving the wheels of industry. The rotary action engine was
quickly adopted by British textile manufacturer Sir Richard
Arkwright for use in a cotton mill, and although the
ill-fated Albion Mill, at the southern end of Blackfriars Bridge in London, was
burned down in 1791, when it had been in use for only five years and was still
incomplete, it demonstrated the feasibility of applying steam power to
large-scale grain milling. Many other industries followed in exploring the
possibilities of steam power, and it soon became widely used.
Watt’s
patents had the temporary effect of restricting the development of
high-pressure steam, necessary in such major power applications as the
locomotive. This development came quickly once these patents lapsed in 1800.
The Cornish engineer Richard Trevithick introduced higher steam
pressures, achieving an unprecedented pressure of 145 pounds
per square inch (10 kilograms per square centimetre) in 1802 with an
experimental engine at Coalbrookdale, which worked safely and efficiently.
Almost simultaneously, the versatile American engineer Oliver Evans built
the first high-pressure steam engine in the United States, using, like
Trevithick, a cylindrical boiler with an internal fire plate and flue.
High-pressure steam engines rapidly
became popular in America, partly as a result of Evans’ initiative and
partly because very few Watt-type low-pressure engines crossed the Atlantic.
Trevithick quickly applied his engine to a vehicle, making the first successful
steam locomotive for the Penydarren tramroad in South Wales in 1804. The
success, however, was technological rather than commercial because the
locomotive fractured the cast iron track
of the tramway: the age of the railroad had to await further development both
of the permanent way and of the locomotive.
Meanwhile,
the stationary steam engine advanced steadily to meet an ever-widening market
of industrial requirements. High-pressure steam led to the development of the
large beam pumping engines with a complex sequence of valve actions, which
became universally known as Cornish engines;
their distinctive characteristic was the cutoff of steam injection before the
stroke was complete in order to allow the steam to do work by expanding. These
engines were used all over the world for heavy pumping duties, often being
shipped out and installed by Cornish engineers. Trevithick himself spent many
years improving pumping engines in Latin America. Cornish engines, however,
were probably most common in Cornwall itself, where they were used in large
numbers in the tin and copper mining industries.
Another
consequence of high-pressure steam was the practice of compounding,
of using the steam twice or more at descending pressures before it was finally
condensed or exhausted. The technique was first applied by Arthur Woolf, a
Cornish mining engineer, who by 1811 had produced a very satisfactory and
efficient compound beam engine with a high-pressure cylinder placed
alongside the low-pressure cylinder, with both piston rods attached to the same
pin of the parallel motion, which was a parallelogram of rods connecting the
piston to the beam, patented by Watt in 1784. In 1845 John McNaught
introduced an alternative form
of compound beam
engine, with the high-pressure cylinder on the opposite end of the beam from
the low-pressure cylinder, and working with a shorter stroke. This became a
very popular design. Various other methods of compounding steam engines were
adopted, and the practice became increasingly widespread; in the second half of
the 19th century triple- or quadruple-expansion engines were being used in
industry and marine propulsion. By this time also the conventional beam-type
vertical engine adopted by Newcomen and retained by Watt began to be replaced
by horizontal-cylinder designs. Beam engines remained in use for some purposes
until the eclipse of the reciprocating steam
engine in the 20th century, and other types of vertical engine remained
popular, but for both large and small duties the engine designs with horizontal
cylinders became by far the most common.
A
demand for power to generate electricity stimulated new thinking about the
steam engine in the 1880s. The problem was that of achieving a sufficiently
high rotational speed to make the dynamos function efficiently. Such speeds
were beyond the range of the normal reciprocating engine (i.e., with a piston
moving backward and forward in a cylinder). Designers began to investigate the
possibilities of radical modifications to the reciprocating engine to achieve
the speeds desired, or of devising a steam engine working on a completely
different principle. In the first category, one solution was to enclose the
working parts of the engine and force a lubricant around them under pressure.
The Willans engine design, for instance, was of this type and was widely
adopted in early British power stations. Another important modification in the
reciprocating design was the uniflow engine, which increased efficiency by
exhausting steam from ports in the centre of the cylinder instead of requiring
it to change its direction of flow in the cylinder with every movement of the
piston. Full success in achieving a high-speed steam engine, however, depended
on the steam turbine,
a design of such novelty that it constituted a
major technological innovation. This was invented by Sir Charles Parsons in
1884. By passing steam through the blades of a series of rotors of gradually
increasing size (to allow for the expansion of the steam) the energy of the
steam was converted to very rapid circular motion, which was ideal for
generating electricity. Many refinements have since been made in turbine
construction and the size of turbines has been vastly increased, but the basic
principles remain the same, and this method still provides the main source
of electric power except
in those areas in which the mountainous terrain permits the economic generation
of hydroelectric power by
water turbines. Even the most modern nuclear power plants
use steam turbines because technology has not yet solved the problem of
transforming nuclear energy directly
into electricity. In marine propulsion, too, the steam turbine remains an
important source of power despite competition from the internal-combustion
enginee internal-combustion engine.
The development of electricity as a
source of power preceded this conjunction with steam power late in the
19th century. The pioneering work had been done by an international collection
of scientists including Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, Alessandro Volta of the University of Pavia, Italy, and Michael Faraday of Britain. It was the latter who had demonstrated the
nature of the elusive relationship between electricity and magnetism in
1831, and his experiments provided the point of departure for both the
mechanical generation of electric current, previously available only from chemical reactions within
voltaic piles or batteries, and the utilization of such current in electric
motors. Both the mechanical generator and the motor depend on the rotation of a
continuous coil of conducting wire between the poles of a strong magnet:
turning the coil produces a current in it, while passing a current through the
coil causes it to turn. Both generators and motors underwent substantial
development in the middle decades of the 19th century. In particular, French,
German, Belgian, and Swiss engineers evolved the most satisfactory forms of
armature (the coil of wire) and produced the dynamo, which made the large-scale
generation of electricity commercially feasible.
The next problem was that of finding
a market. In Britain, with its now well-established tradition of steam power,
coal, and coal gas, such a market was not immediately obvious. But in
continental Europe and North
America there
was more scope for experiment. In the United States Thomas Edison applied his inventive genius to finding fresh uses for
electricity, and his development of the carbon-filament lamp showed how this
form of energy could rival gas as a domestic illuminant. The problem had been
that electricity had been used successfully for large installations such as
lighthouses in which arc lamps had been powered by generators on the premises, but no way of subdividing the electric light into many
small units had been devised. The principle of the filament lamp was that a thin conductor could be made incandescent
by an electric current provided that it was sealed in a vacuum to keep it from
burning out. Edison and the English chemist Sir Joseph Swan experimented with various materials for the filament
and both chose carbon. The result was a highly successful small lamp, which
could be varied in size for any sort of requirement. It is relevant that the
success of the carbon-filament lamp did not immediately mean the supersession
of gas lighting. Coal gas had first been used for lighting by William Murdock at his home in Redruth, Cornwall, where he was the
agent for the Boulton and Watt company, in 1792. When he moved to the
headquarters of the firm at Soho in Birmingham in 1798, Matthew Boulton authorized him to experiment in lighting the buildings
there by gas, and gas lighting was subsequently adopted by firms and towns all
over Britain in the first half of the 19th century. Lighting was normally
provided by a fishtail jet of burning gas, but under the stimulus of
competition from electric lighting the quality of gas lighting was
greatly enhanced by the invention of the gas
mantle. Thus
improved, gas lighting remained popular for some forms of street lighting until
the middle of the 20th century.
Lighting alone could not provide an
economical market for electricity because its use was confined to the hours of
darkness. Successful commercial generation depended upon the development of
other uses for electricity, and particularly on electric traction. The
popularity of urban electric tramways and the adoption of electric traction on
subway systems such as the London Underground thus coincided with the widespread construction of
generating equipment in the late 1880s and 1890s. The subsequent spread of this
form of energy is one of the most remarkable technological success stories of
the 20th century, but most of the basic techniques of generation, distribution,
and utilization had been mastered by the end of the 19th century.
Electricity does not constitute a prime mover, for however important it may be as a
form of energy it has to be derived from a mechanical generator powered by
water, steam, or internal combustion. The internal-combustion engine is a prime
mover, and it emerged in the 19th century as a result both of greater
scientific understanding of the principles of thermodynamics and of a search by
engineers for a substitute for steam power in certain circumstances. In an
internal-combustion engine the fuel is burned in the engine: the cannon
provided an early model of a single-stroke engine; and several persons had
experimented with gunpowder as a means of driving a piston in a cylinder. The
major problem was that of finding a suitable fuel, and the secondary problem
was that of igniting the fuel in an enclosed space to produce an action that
could be easily and quickly repeated. The first problem was solved in the
mid-19th century by the introduction of town gas supplies, but the second
problem proved more intractable as it was difficult to maintain ignition
evenly. The first successful gas engine was made by Étienne Lenoir in Paris in 1859. It was modeled closely on a
horizontal steam engine, with an explosive mixture of gas and air ignited
by an electric spark on alternate sides of the piston when it was in midstroke
position. Although technically satisfactory, the engine was expensive to
operate, and it was not until the refinement introduced by the German
inventor Nikolaus Otto in 1878 that the gas engine became a commercial
success. Otto adopted the four-stroke cycle of induction-compression-firing-exhaust that has been
known by his name ever since. Gas engines became extensively used for small
industrial establishments, which could thus dispense with the upkeep of a
boiler necessary in any steam plant, however small.
The economic potential for the
internal-combustion engine lay in the need for a light locomotive engine. This
could not be provided by the gas engine, depending on a piped supply of town
gas, any more than by the steam engine, with its need for a cumbersome boiler;
but, by using alternative fuels derived from oil, the internal-combustion engine
took to wheels, with momentous consequences. Bituminous deposits had been known
in Southwest Asia from antiquity and had been worked for building material, illuminants, and
medicinal products. The westward expansion of settlement in America, with many
homesteads beyond the range of city gas supplies, promoted the exploitation of
the easily available sources of crude
oil for the manufacture of
kerosene (paraffin). In 1859 the oil industry took on new significance
when Edwin L. Drake bored successfully through 69 feet (21 metres) of rock
to strike oil in Pennsylvania, thus inaugurating the search for and
exploitation of the deep oil resources of the world. While world supplies of
oil expanded dramatically, the main demand was at first for the kerosene, the middle fraction distilled from
the raw material, which was used as the fuel in oil lamps. The most volatile
fraction of the oil, gasoline, remained an embarrassing waste product until it
was discovered that this could be burned in a light internal-combustion engine;
the result was an ideal prime mover for vehicles. The way was prepared for this
development by the success of oil engines burning cruder fractions of oil.
Kerosene-burning oil engines, modeled closely on existing gas engines, had
emerged in the 1870s, and by the late 1880s engines using the vapour of heavy
oil in a jet of compressed air and working on the Otto cycle had become an attractive
proposition for light duties in places too isolated to use town gas.
The greatest refinements in the
heavy-oil engine are associated with the work of Rudolf Diesel of Germany, who took out his first patents in 1892.
Working from thermodynamic principles of minimizing heat losses, Diesel devised
an engine in which the very high compression of the air in the
cylinder secured the spontaneous ignition of the oil when it was
injected in a carefully determined quantity. This ensured high thermal efficiency, but it also made necessary a heavy structure because of
the high compression maintained, and also a rather rough performance at low
speeds compared with other oil engines. It was therefore not immediately
suitable for locomotive purposes, but Diesel went on improving his engine and
in the 20th century it became an important form of vehicular propulsion.
Meantime the light high-speed
gasoline (petrol) engine predominated. The first applications of the new engine
to locomotion were made in Germany, where Gottlieb Daimler and Carl
Benz equipped the first motorcycle
and the first motorcar respectively with engines of their own design in 1885.
Benz’s “horseless carriage” became the prototype of the modern automobile, the development and
consequences of which can be more conveniently considered in relation to the
revolution in transport.
By the end of the 19th century, the
internal-combustion engine was challenging the steam engine in many industrial
and transport applications. It is notable that, whereas the pioneers of the
steam engine had been almost all Britons, most of the innovators in internal
combustion were continental Europeans and Americans. The transition, indeed,
reflects the general change in international leadership in the Industrial Revolution, with Britain being gradually
displaced from its position of unchallenged superiority in industrialization
and technological innovation. A similar transition occurred in the theoretical
understanding of heat engines: it was the work of the Frenchman Sadi Carnot and other scientific investigators that led to the new
science of thermodynamics, rather than that of the British engineers who had
most practical experience of the engines on which the science was based.
It should not be concluded, however,
that British innovation in prime movers was confined to the steam engine, or
even that steam and internal combustion represent the only significant
developments in this field during the Industrial Revolution. Rather, the
success of these machines stimulated speculation about alternative sources of
power, and in at least one case achieved a success the full consequences of
which were not completely developed. This was the hot-air engine, for
which a Scotsman, Robert Stirling, took out a patent in 1816. The hot-air engine depends for its power on the expansion and
displacement of air inside a cylinder, heated by the external and continuous
combustion of the fuel. Even before the exposition of the laws of
thermodynamics, Stirling had devised a cycle of heat
transfer that
was ingenious and economical. Various constructional problems limited the size
of hot-air engines to very small units, so that although they were widely used
for driving fans and similar light duties before the availability of the electric motor, they did not assume great technological significance. But
the economy and comparative cleanness of the hot-air engine were making it once
more the subject of intensive research in the early 1970s.
The transformation of power technology in the Industrial Revolution
had repercussions throughout industry and society. In the first place,
the demand for fuel stimulated the coal industry, which had already grown
rapidly by the beginning of the 18th century, into continuing expansion and
innovation. The steam engine, which enormously increased the need for coal,
contributed significantly toward obtaining it by providing more efficient mine
pumps and, eventually, improved ventilating equipment. Other inventions such as
that of the miners’ safety lamp helped to improve working conditions, although the
immediate consequence of its introduction in 1816 was to persuade mineowners to
work dangerous seams, which had thitherto been regarded as inaccessible. The
principle of the lamp was that the flame from the wick of an oil lamp was
enclosed within a cylinder of wire gauze, through which insufficient heat
passed to ignite the explosive gas (firedamp) outside. It was subsequently
improved, but remained a vital source of light in coal mines until the advent
of electric battery lamps. With these improvements, together with the
simultaneous revolution in the transport system, British coal production
increased steadily throughout the 19th century. The other important fuel for
the new prime movers was petroleum, and the rapid expansion of its production
has already been mentioned. In the hands of John D. Rockefeller and his Standard
Oil organization it grew into a
vast undertaking in the United States after the end of the Civil War, but the
oil-extraction industry was not so well organized elsewhere until the 20th
century.
Development of industries
Metallurgy
Another industry that interacted closely with
the power revolution was that concerned with metallurgy and the
metal trades. The development of techniques for working with iron and steel was
one of the outstanding British achievements of the Industrial Revolution. The essential characteristic of
this achievement was that changing the fuel of the iron and steel industry from charcoal to coal
enormously increased the production of these metals. It also provided another
incentive to coal production and made available the materials that were
indispensable for the construction of steam engines and every other
sophisticated form of machine. The transformation that began with
a coke-smelting process in 1709 was carried further by the development of crucible steel in about 1740 and by the puddling and rolling
process to produce wrought iron in 1784. The first development led to high-quality
cast steel by fusion of the ingredients (wrought iron and charcoal, in
carefully measured proportions) in sealed ceramic crucibles that could be heated in a coal-fired furnace. The
second applied the principle of the reverberatory furnace, whereby the hot gases passed over
the surface of the metal being heated rather than through it, thus greatly
reducing the risk of contamination by impurities in the coal fuels, and the discovery
that by puddling, or stirring, the molten metal and by passing it hot from the
furnace to be hammered and rolled, the metal could be consolidated and the
conversion of cast
iron to wrought iron made
completely effective.
Adopting
appropriate technologies leads directly to higher productivity, which is the
key to growth. In societies that have large stock and flows of knowledge,
virtuous circles that encourage widespread creativity and technological
innovation emerge naturally, and allow sustained growth over long periods. In
societies with limited stocks of knowledge, bright and creative people feel
stifled and emigrate as soon as they can, creating a vicious circle that traps
those who remain in a more impoverished space. Such societies stay mired in
poverty and dependency.
The
investment climate is crucial, as are the right incentive structures, to guide
the allocation of resources, and to encourage research and development.
Successful
countries have grown their ability to innovate and learn by doing, by investing
public funding to help finance research and development in critical areas.
Everyone is involved – big and small, public and private, rich and poor.
The
benefits that are certain to flow from technological revolution in an
increasingly connected world and knowledge-intensive world will be seized by
those countries and companies that are alive to the rapidly changing
environment, and nimble enough to take advantage of the opportunities. Those
that succeed will make substantial advances in reducing poverty and inequality
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