The Industrial Revolution: The Birth of the Modern World

so hello and welcome to yet another episode of biographics I'm your host KL small and today we're talking about the Industrial Revolution seem like a weird thing to cover on biographics but it does you know include know small biographics on a number of prominent individuals from within that time period so it fits with the theme and as with all videos here at biographics this one is based on a script submitted To Us by a member of our writing team that being Larry holsworth you find links to their socials below if they've been provided beginning in the mid 18th century a seismic shift in Humanity's existence altered the Western World it began largely in Great Britain whoop expanding through the global Empire over the ensuing Century rival Nations found expedient to catch up to the movement which became known as the first industrial revolution rather than a dependent on goods and products being made by hand by workers who learned their skills from Master Craftsman machines Rose to dominate manufacturing new sources of power drove the machines beginning with wind and water and eventually giving way to the emergence of the steam engine a new form of Industry developed called manufactur it which is awesome and I can't believe I didn't know that sites hired unskilled workers to operate the machines that made their products mechanization replaced hand production the spinning wheel and weaving of textile shifted from home production to factories by the early 19th century the manufacturing of iron mining of coal processing of leather goods processing of meat candle making soap making and many many many other trades and crafts had shifted from small businesses to Major manufacturers these changes inevitably led to changes in society as a whole cities around the manufacturers grew more efficient uses of waterways for shipping of products led to a boom in the construction of canals factories perched alongside rivers and streams developed dams and spillways to better exploit hydraulic power the apprenticeship system where young workers bound themselves to Masters in order to learn a trade gave way to Modern employment systems where daily wages were paid for shift's works the actual years the Industrial Revolution falls under and not clearly defined but the period span both the American and French revolutions the expansions of Empires into the Indian and Pacific Oceans and the opening of the American West it began in around the 1700s with a shift in one of Humanity's oldest Necessities the need to make clothes to protect on themselves from the elements the textile industry was the first to be mechanized to create modern manufacturing and shipping methods even the first to adopt supply side engineering though it wasn't yet called that here is the story of the Industrial Revolution described by some historians has and I quote the process of change from an agrarian and handicraft economy to one dominated by industry and machine manufacturing the simple spinning wheel and frame Loom are symbols of rural Simplicity today but in the early 18th century Britain they were symbolic of Industry manufacturing of threads Yarns and cloths was dominated by a cottage industry where the occupants of individual Cottages accepted raw materials from Brokers spun and or wo them and then return them them to the broker cages on agricultural land use this opportunity to create income during the leaner colder months when agricultural production was blocked by you know the snow weaving was considerably slower than spinning since the former relied on the output of the latter and in the 1720s one Weaver needed the output of four Spinners in order to produce finished cloth in usable amounts at the same time finished cotton products were a major import from India where the East India Company exploited a cheap labor available to produce finished cotton one such product known as kico became immensely popular in response the cottage workers protested to Parliament leading to that body enacting the kico acts of 1720 in 1721 Parliament banned the importation of finnished cotton but Exempted raw cotton for spinning and weaving this led to an increase in raw cotton entering Britain from India and the Americas the need to accommodate the processing of Raw to finish cotton led to Innovations from several British inventors none more important than the 1733 invention of the flying shuttle by John K of berry so John K of bu near Lancashire by the end of the decade Weaver's Productions had more than double outpacing the ability of spinners to keep them supplied other Weavers being more conservative rejected the flying shut and together with the Spinners attempt to disrupt technical progress through petitioning to the king they failed and that's just one of those things that happens throughout history of every time there is this like large like you know cultural shift towards a more efficient mechanical method that makes things easier the people who do it the more inefficient way will complain and I know that someone in the comments going to bring up ai ai can go look the arrival of strong artificial intelligence has been inevitable for decades that's different like like you know a frying pan met a ro is different from a story the part of your soul goes into a story not into a frying pan nonetheless they failed to convince the king other inventions including further Innovations by K continued to mechanize the textile industry in the 1760s water frames for spinning threads emerge relying on water power rather than the treel Pumped by the spinner another Improvement to spinning came from a multi spindle device known as the ji which relied on water power to operate several spinning wheels simultaneously multiplying the number of threads created in a given amount of time so it's called the water Genny the use of water powerered machines displaced the cottage workers and their industry and the manufacturing of textiles moved to larger establishments located near a source of water for power rather than the work coming to them by Brokers machine operators went to their work in newly established factories called Mills in the textile industry following the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 which automated the removal of seeds from the plant raw cotton became a major cash crop in the United States and a major import to the British cotton Mills Manchester and its many surrounding towns became centers for the production and warehousing of cotton Manchester even earned the nickname cottonopolis which I didn't know and will now be using exclusively to refer to my manuri and friends and family oh how how are things over there in cottonopolis [Music] while water provided a good power source for factories and Mills located nearby it was at the best of times unreliable water levels were subject to the vagaries of nature another steady source of power to drive Industrial Development was needed and it came in the form of the steam engine like the early Innovations in textile steam was first looked upon as a Folly by conservatives who regarded it as dangerous dirty and impractical and in many ways they were right Chief among the problems faced by proponents of steam power for Mills and factories was the need to provide Power via rotating wheel which in turn drove the Machinery of the Mills James watts is often credited as the inventor of the steam engine he was not examples of working steam engines can be found years before watt's experiments with the for I think there's even that one from like turkey where some guy just invented the steam engine but then only used it to spin his damy which you know what Legend So over, 1400 working Newan steam engines invented by Thomas nukan in 1712 were employed in Britain before wat's engine nearly all of them designed for dewatering coal mines what applied his attention to the modification of the steam principle to reduce the operating cost and design a drive a flywheel which provided the rotational force with his partner Matthew Bolton W formed the manufacturing concern Bolton and W producing steam engines from 1775 his early engines burned wood and charcoal were roundly condemned for their production of smoke and Cinders steam engines Al o developed a well-earned reputation for being dangerous due to their proclivity for just randomly exploding seemingly without warning advances in Metallurgy and safety controls continue throughout the Industrial Revolution and in fact continue to this day steam became the primary motive force behind the mechanization of Industry eventually coal became the fuel of choice in the coal Rich Britain to power steam engines when a more practical means of coking coal was invented in 1768 by Englishmen John Wilkinson Coke became the preferred fuel for industrial use and that's a sentence that can be read numerous different ways given um the modern way we interpret someone saying oh I'm fueled by Coke prior to the development of a practical means to produce Coke in appreciable quantities the fledgeling iron industry relied on wood and charcoal to fuel its blast furnaces and forges like the textile industry before it iron production was localized nearly entirely within areas where you could find iron ore water Limestone and wood at first fires to smell the ore were of wood then charcoal made locally from the wood then coal the production of iron in Britain was so cost prohibitive at one point it was actually cheaper to just import iron from Scandinavia prior to the Industrial Revolution several factors contribut to the emergence of the iron industry during the Industrial Revolution Chief among them was increasing demand particularly for nails and other construction hardware and I'm sure we've all heard or familiar with those stories like people burning down wooden houses to retrieve the nails like contained therein because the iron in the nails was so hard to produce that it was worth burning down an entire house to get them back advancing Technologies in other Industries such as textile and steam engines added to the increased demand for iron new techniques developed by Iron Monga such as Henry C led to improv quality and faster production by the late 18th century blast furnaces were relocated to Coal rich areas and regions known for the production of iron were also areas where coal was mined and coked as such they became areas with wide and vast employment opportunities cour processes among other things lowered the carbon concent of cast ion making it less brittle he also developed Innovations in the process of making pig iron and RW iron including the use of mass production if anyone curious about why it was called pig iron it was so named because it was formed in ingots cooled in sand along the length of the runner little piggies which is cute I like that they resemble like little piglets suckling their mother and was so named and that's adorable as for the uses of pig ion it was used primarily to be remelted and worked into rot iron because it was intended to be reworked into rot iron is sometimes referred to as crude iron when steel emerged as the primary metal for industry in the late Industrial Age Pig Iron's major use was in the manufacturing of Steel like think of it like when you use like Microsoft Edge to download Chrome so they were basically using pig iron to fuel its own obsolescence and steel owing to it being just better than iron in most regards led to a Second Industrial Revolution this isn't to say that raw iron didn't have its uses and was in fact the backbone of the first Industrial Revolution used to manufacture rails beams Hardware boilers machine frames and a myriad of other uses basically all areas of Industry used it and you know today still use I've got cast iron pan apparently it's better 's it to cut my eggs in the morning I'm a cut like Shak shuker in it moving swiftly on like just to clarify the definitions here R iron is iron which can be further worse whereas cast iron being more brittle cannot of the 1700s iron was used to build Bridges and frame buildings it was also used to manufacture the boilers and other components of watts and Bolton steam engines which in turn drove the machine machinery for the iron textile and coal Industries as well as others moving away from Britain for a moment the North American colonies participated in the revolution to an extent with widely differing results in the northern regions coal mines coking facilities and Iron Works emerged creating new cities far from the earliest towns huddled on the Atlantic coast Western Pennsylvania New York and New England all developed manufacturers in the manner of their British counterparts along with streams of New England in particular textile mills created new skylines and attracted new residents to the towns at the onset of the Industrial Revolution Goods move from producers to Consumers via waterways or roads both were subject to weather streams run freely and often dangerously during the wet Seasons but dried often to a mere trickle in the hot months roads were little more than widen mud paths often impassible oxen donkeys and horses provided power but were limited in the amount they could move like even the hardiest Beast of Burden couldn't hope to move several tons of iron in one go the creation of reliable transport networks became critical as advant production methods increase the output of factories mines and Mills an early solution was the creation of canals and improvements along navigable waterways canals were nothing new in the British AOL the Romans built canals for the purpose of draining agricultural lands and improving navigation during the first century ad Roman canals move Goods primarily agricultural products nearly 40 miles between what are the modern day regions of York and Cambridge like I I live near one you can just go to it people live in boats on them which is fun like there's a guy in one of the boats has like a big widecreen TV that takes up one of his boat and it's like that guy living his best life as such the Industrial Revolution is known as the hey day of canalization with Great Britain leading the way in 1757 the sanki Canal open in Northern Britain connecting the C fields near St Helens to the river Mery and the port of Liverpool wind was the primary mive power for the first Canal boats its success led to an explosion of canal building in Great Britain followed by a similar spike in Canal Construction in the United States most of the canals relied on animal power to pull boats the toe paths alongside the canal allowed the animals to pull lows which dwarf those haed by their Brethren on roads a single horse for example could pull a canal boat Laden with up to 30 tons of goods more than 10 times the amount possible with a wagon on the roads of the day out there like myself who's concerned for the horses and the mules and the donkeys pulling these things it also works out for them because you didn't need to just use one horse that would just get knackered by the end of its trip and they change the horse usually at every lock allowing it to rest so that was nice I always feel bad when you see like a donkey like they're such Noble looking creatur features so dumb in North America canals were viewed more as a means of transporting goods through the barrier of the Appalachian Mountains bringing raw materials from the West to the consumers and shippers of the East as such they required numerous locks to counter the grades and were expensive and timec consuming to build steam power appeared on the canals in the early 19th century steam powered Canal Boats were not significantly faster than animal drawn ones nor could they haul substantially larger loads by the 1820s in North America and Great Britain the canals had reached their heights within a decade their use had begun to decline the steam engine had found a more favorable application for moving goods and people the railroad the railroads actually appeared before the steam locomotive despite the fact they're eternally coupled in people's minds the first use of a railway to carry Goods took place in 1802 in tikol England the rail cars connected tikel and its outlying areas to the Ashby Canal its purpose was to convey lime Limestone and bricks from the various yards around tikn the rail cars which traveled on several branches as well as the trunk line of the railroad called a Tramway were initially pulled by horses and mules you go horses and mules saving Humanity's ass for thousands of years this was the first successful industrial Railroad and it remained in service with some improvements such as like know adding a train until 1913 moving Limestone was also the initial purpose of the Swansea mumbles Railway which opened in 1804 and by 1807 the railway was conveying passengers in hor drawn carriages as well as Limestone just love the idea of A horra Train That's So quaint to me the use of steam powered locomotives began in Britain in the 1820s and they were at first considered a daring novelty the engines of the day were noisy belt dark heavy costic smoke interlac with glowing Cinders and as noted earlier had a fairly well-deserved reputation for just exploding at random by 1831 you could expect to find speeds on Railways of up to 25 mph and this gives me an opportunity to talk about one of my favorite facts from history when railroads and Railways were first becoming a thing women were heavily advised Ed by the men in their lives and doctors and experts not to ride them because traveling at such high speeds speeds remember being like 25 M hour might cause their uteruses to fall out of their bodies and one day I would love to have the confidence of a man telling a woman you can't go on the train you uterus will Fallout moving swiftly on the canal simply could not compete with such blistering speeds nor could they take advantage of the rapidly evolving technological improvements to steam engines railroads demanded improvements in the quality and durability of iron and later steel they built larger and more powerful engines rail car frames and trucks Bridges Rail Yards and all the infrastructure needed for the much needed expansion to produce more and better iron the industry required better cing methods to remove the impurities from coal as well as vast amounts of coke delivered to their foundaries the railroads coal mines Coke manufacturers iron mines and blast furnaces became mutually dependent on one another with improvements in each benefiting the others Ci's industrial centers and ports became linked by a network which delivered prosperity and progress never before achieved in human society manufacturers needed workers to operate and maintain these new machines that drove their new Industries these workers could be found in populated areas in Great Britain places like Manchester Leeds Liverpool dunde Edinburgh Cardiff and many others including the city I'm in right now Sheffield which is also like a center for steel production even to this day I've got some Sheffield steel knocking about somewhere but it's like a spoon I don't really think I was going hold up a spoon and say this was made in the city that I live in it's a spoon but it's still a point of Pride for many people who live here we even have like a steel Museum anyway these cities became industrial complexes cluttered with factories warehouses and shipping centers over in the United States New England became a textile industry Powerhouse similar growth in various Industries occurred throughout the United States particularly in the north and Western cities of Buffalo Cleveland and Cincinnati in both Britain and America immigration of workers exploded during the Industrial Revolution Irish workers left their Homeland for both Britain and America to work the mines build canals and railroads and labor in the foundaries the warehouses the docks or the Looms a relatively new form of housing evolved from this multiple families occupied rooms in buildings often with several floors the buildings grouped together in neighborhoods within cities they became the tenaments that led to the population explosion in various cities around the globe so rather than learning a trade or a craft that would lead to becoming a master Carpenter Iron Monger or Weaver men instead took jobs operating the machines that supplanted these professions they labored in the new factories often for six days per week performing simple menial tasks to keep the machines running in return for their labor they received a wage there were no benefits and no breaks other than for a simple midday meal the newly veled labor force existed to feed the machines the raw materials they required and deliver their products to the next machine in the chain it just so happens that one of those resources was human labor As Cities grew so did their social problems basic services such as water supply sewage removal Transportation education and Crime Control were all strained by the influx of new workers and their families it was possible to survive on the prevailing wages of a time especially if there was more than one wage earner in a household but thriving or elevating one's status was next to Impossible seemingly by Design between 1800 and 1850 the accepted second half of the Industrial Revolution the population of Great Britain doubled and by the latter year about half of Britain's population lived in cities and towns similar numbers apply to the United States especially in regions north of the Ohio river and east of the Mississippi River the crowding of cities coupled with the expansion of industrial areas within those same cities led to overcrowding in the tenaments and densely populated Urban cores while the owners and stockholders of the emerging corporations in Industries acquired fortunes and lived in conspicuous Comfort the workers running the machines existed in less than idilic circumstances death the author is going to let that one sit a through the early Decades of the Industrial Revolution communication between remote areas remained much as it had been for the preceding centuries messages whether in writing or verbal were carried by criers or postmen who relied on two legs four legs or some combination thereof during the Napoleonic Wars the transmission of messages via longdistance semaphor stations was developed in Europe where encountered problems with obstructed visibility based on weather conditions during the Industrial Revolution advances in the science of electromagnetics Drew the attention of several diverse entities on both sides of the Atlantic in Britain William Cook and Charles wheatstone devised a method of transmitting messages using electromagnetic pulses in 1837 they patented their invention and by the end of the following year a 13m stretch of Britain's Great Western Railway was flanked by Telegraph wires carrying coded messages in seconds their system used multiple wires and batteries and presented complicated codes to its operators in the United States on the other hand a much better known individual called Samuel Moss A Portrait Painter of considerable Renown among his subjects were President James Monroe and the Marque de Lafayette learned of the British system and developed improvements that allowed messages to be sent along a single electrical line Mor's system eventually became the international standard for telegraphs to make transmission even clearer mors even invented a system that continues to bear his name mors code and again as an aside I don't know when else I get a chance to talk about this in a video people out there probably know one bit of M code if if they're wholly unfamiliar with the the language system as a whole that'll be SOS think it's like it's three dashes three dots three dashes which even if that's wrong it's technically still right and other lesser fact touting channels and websites will tell you that SOS stands for something like save our souls which is a acronym that being an acronym that's applied retroactively um to a group of letters and in fact SOS meant nothing that was precisely the reason it was chosen as the international symbol for I am in distress because there was no other understood meaning of those three letters in a row and one of the reasons SOS was picked in addition to that is because SOS regardless of which order it's transmitted in will always be understood to mean SOS because it's just three dots three dashes three dots three dashes like done in sequence you you listen to it for more than a few seconds you'll notice that it's just it's repeat it's basically a repeating code of two letters similarly when written down SOS can be read backwards upside down Every Which Way but Loose and still be understood to read slos and that's why it was picked just that's just a fun story about mors code like the one fact about mors code that I know I thought I'd slip in uh before we move on with this video about the Industrial Revolution Telegraph lines soon cluttered the skies and cities of towns and for longer distances Transmissions often ran along existing right of way for railroads and highways the telegraph revolutionized Communications allowing near instantaneous Communications and dissemination of information to businesses governments newspapers individuals between nations and of course individuals by the mid 19th century access to Telegraph traffic was critical for virtually all forms of Industry telegraphs order products and materials M their locations follow their transfer and report on the activities of the competition yeah now that is a spy movie I would not watch the industrial revolution saw an entirely New Concept develop in Industry one that would have been unthinking able in a non-mechanized age so for the first time in history mechanized tools were being developed for the express purpose of making other tools or components of other tools and machines the development of tools designed to shape materials into other usable forms created one of the first Machine Tools machine tools were a critical component of the age in that they allowed for the assembly of machines using interchangeable parts and just yeah it's one of those things is it's like when you go might watch a show like how it's made it's like oh we have a machine here all it does is like roll the TW in a very certain way you think well someone to make that machine someone out there as a machine that makes the machines that make twink Cas and then presumably there's a machine that makes the machine that makes the machine that makes Twinkies and so on and so forth and so that's why you need machine pressy someone's got to build it so until the Industrial Revolution the simple screw was an expensive handcrafted piece of Hardware made by Artisans to exacting specifications provided to them the development of the screw cutting lathe in 1775 adapted hand operated techniques used by Artisans from Archimedes to Leonardo da Vinci to the mass production of precision screw screws The Humble threaded Fastener became a critical part of industrialization as it remains so in the 21st century other critical machine tools that emerged during the Industrial Revolution included the milling machine used to remove unwanted materials in order to achieve a desired shape And the cylinder boring tool which created precisely Dimension cylinders the latter was a critical component of steam engines locomotives and other machines that powered the Industrial Age Machine Tools remained critical in manufacturing in the 21st century and often computer controlled achieving a Precision their earliest proponents could scarcely dare to imagine he often said that the Industrial Revolution Mar the Western World shift from an agrarian to an industrial society certainly agriculture did not Escape its influence as machines were developed to plant Harvest and process many crops industrialization of machines also influenced which crops were planted the demand for cotton in British and American textile mills contributed to the labor intensive crop dominating the fields of the American Deep South the industrial revolution saw rise in income per capita simultaneously with an increas in population it also marked an increase in children surviving into adulthood you know so they could work in those factories they also saw an increase in child labor oh the children yearn for the minds as there were few laws existing to the contrary not until 1844 did the factory acts in Britain establish that children under 9 years of age were not allowed to labor in the factories those over the age of nine were limited by law to a 12-hour workday 6 days per week so that be a reminder to everybody out there the existence of child labor laws um is proof that if um corporations could they would indeed exploit children for labor and it's only the law telling that they can't that prevents them from doing so well many of the more important developments of the Industrial Revolution have been discussed there were many other events prevailing in the period including the manufacturing distribution of gas for lighting and heat the impact of Cholera and other diseases on the cities in the workforce the resistance of the Lites and the illegality of Labor and trade unions cities such as London Manchester Glasgow and Pittsburgh gained Fame for the clouds of smoke which obscured them its dangers then pretty much wholly unknown fossil fuels were burned indiscriminately their clouds seen as signs of progress in Industry rather than carbon Footprints the waste of industrial plants was dumped untreated into public waterways where it mingled with the offall of cities and towns children were seen as laborers laborers themselves as replaceable as cogs in the machine known as progress there is no doubt the first Industrial Revolution changed forever the way people lived and work worked but not always for the better mass production replaced local craftsmanship Artisans were replaced by Factory workers cities became overcrowded crime rates Rose foul air of foul water marked urban areas the DS of the workplace breakdowns rotating machines excessive heat explosions mine catastrophes noise and a multitude of other factors were of little concern to employers they were all signs of progress measured by the expansion of facilities and of course profits this was the Heyday of unfettered unrelenting capitalism the Industrial Revolution did see a shift from an agrarian to an industrial society it saw Humanity using Newfound industrial might to exploit the bounties of the planet without regard to the problems it created for future Generations its impact is still felt to this very day in industry in society in education geopolitics and of course the environment and as far as can be foreseen well into the future and I'm of course reminded right now of that uh very poignant quite harrowing quote from Albert Einstein when asked to Muse on the thought of uh industry and warfare I do not know with which weapons World War III will be fought but I do know that World War I will be fought with sticks and stones anyway I hope everyone enjoyed this video I certainly enjoyed presenting it and yeah if you did like the video like leave a like if you got anything to say about it if you got some feedback something you'd like us to cover in another video do so in the comments subscribe for more like this as always go follow the writer of this video Larry holsworth and the socials that provide for us below myself if you want to see more of my work I'm on Twitter I'm on Twitch I'm on YouTube at fact Fe with Cal Smallwood and Wiki weekends as well as the sister channels to biographics um Geographics and top 10s I'm nearly running out of fingers now so I'm going to call it there and just as I always like to say to everyone out there watching at home have the day you all deserve