December 2, 2015 • 53 mins
In the conclusion of our series on the Industrial Revolution, we'll look at other industries that changed along with iron and textiles. We'll also learn about the living and work conditions of laborers and how that transformed our notions about work.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
With technology with tech Stuff from technolog Hey there, and
welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland, and
this episode is part three, the epic finale of our
series on the Industrial Revolution. In parts one and two,
(00:26):
I looked at the textile and iron industries respectively, as
well as how steam engines came about and how technology
helped transform those trades into enormous industries. And in this
episode will cover everything from transportation to what it was
like to be a member of the working class at
that time, and how we started to see some new
(00:48):
lines dividing different classes. It used to be that it
was the nobles versus the peasants, with clergy in the middle,
really clergy off to the side on their own kind
of ladder. But things changed in the Industrial Revolution. So
during this period in Britain's history, which as you may remember,
is in the mid eighteenth to mid nineteenth century, so
(01:11):
the seven the mid seventeen hundreds to the mid eighteen hundreds,
transportation was getting a major overhaul. Roads had been in
really poor shape ever since the Romans had left Britain
and they were in need of repair and redesign. Shipping
by boat was really popular, and many of Britain's rivers
became important conduits for trade goods. Engineers would actually start
(01:33):
to begin to design canals to connect various rivers together
in order to speed up transportation. And then there were
the rail systems. So railroads pre date trains and locomotives
by a lot, because people figured out fairly early on
that it's a lot easier to push or pull a
(01:54):
heavy cart that's along a set of hard rails than
it is to move that same cart against the ground,
that it will roll more smoothly and you have to
use less effort to get it from point A to
point B. So at first wooden rails were used and
carts would have flanged wheels to allow them to stay
(02:15):
on the rails securely. Not all cards were like this,
not all rail systems were like this, but it was
generally one of the accepted standards across the world by
this point, where people knew if you built the wheels
in this way so that they essentially kind of hug
the rails, that it's not likely to tip over, and
you can move at a good clip. By a good clip,
(02:36):
we're talking a couple of miles per hour usually because
you're carrying so much stuff. Now, typically you'd use horses
to pull the carts along the rails. People did experiment
with other things, uh, But one of the pioneers in
railroads in England was Richard Reynolds. Now, Reynolds was an
iron master who worked at Colebrookdale, and that's the iron
(02:59):
works that was founded by Abraham Darby. You can listen
to the previous episodes on this series and you'll hear
me talk about the Darby family. Well, Reynolds became friends
with Abraham Darby the second, so the son of Abraham Darby.
And in seventeen sixty seven Reynolds came up with the
idea of replacing wooden rails with cast iron rails. He
(03:24):
thought that this would be a much better use of
cast iron. It would be better than the wooden ones
because the wooden rails would break down over time. They
could also just collapse depending upon how heavy the load was,
and cast iron would last longer and be able to
withstand greater weights. Now, there's no historical record of anyone
(03:44):
doing this before Reynolds, so he might have actually been
the person to invent this. But it's not safe to
just declare it, So it's possible someone else did. We
just don't have a record of it. So I guess
for practical purposes, we can say he invented the idea
before long tramways all across Britain were following his his lead,
(04:06):
and so he was using rails in order to move
giant carts of coal or iron back and forth between locations.
But soon these were being used all over the place
for various reasons, and so they started convert wooden railways
into iron railways. This is fifty years before the invention
(04:27):
of the locomotive, which turned railways into a major means
of transport, not only in Britain but all across the world.
And we'll get to the locomotive a bit later, but
just imagine for fifty years this was a way of
getting heavy loads of cargo to load from location to location,
but there were no trains. It was just horse drawn carts.
(04:49):
In the last episode, I also talked about the punt custle,
the aqueduct punt consulta child mangle. Every single time I
try and say it's okay, the Welsh have trouble with
this one too. That's just one example of the innovations
and transportation that were introduced in the Industrial Revolution. Uh.
It was during this time that nations like the United
Kingdom and the United States really began to build extensive canals,
(05:14):
roads and railways to speed up that travel. And I
mentioned Thomas Telford as the architect who designed and built
the pot consulta aqueduct. That was the one that was
a raised aqueduct made out of an iron trough that
connected two rivers together, and it spanned a valley so
that the waterway actually passed above the valley. It didn't
(05:37):
have to descend into the valley and then go back up,
it went straight across. He made several important contributions to
England's transportation systems, not just this aqueduct, and his designs
were adopted by engineers and other countries like the United States.
So it might be worth looking into who Telford was like.
Who was Thomas Telford Well. He was born in August
(06:00):
of seventeen fifty seven on the border between England and Scotland.
He's generally considered a Scottish architect. His father died when
he was just a baby, and his mother relied on
her relatives to help raise the child. Essentially, Telford was
raised by his his relatives, not by his mother, and
at age fourteen he became apprenticed to a stonemason. He
(06:24):
was really keen to learn everything there was to learn
about construction, and so he would actually study at night
after working a full day shift with the stonemason. After
learning his trade with the stonemason, and by the time
he was twenty five, he had worked on several important
construction projects and including some in Edinburgh, Scotland, and he
(06:44):
ended up picking up stakes to move to London. That's
where Telford met Sir William Chambers, who was a prominent
Scottish architect, and Chambers had begun work on Somerset House
or Somerset House if you prefer if you're being more
British with it, and Telford ended up joining the crew. Now,
if you're not familiar with London, Somerset House may sound
(07:07):
like it's a quaint cottage. It's not. House is a
not an accurate word to describe this massive building. It's
an enormous Neo Classical structure and it was big enough
so that it could house the Royal Academy of Arts,
the Royal Society, the Society of Antiquaries and the quarters
(07:27):
for the Navy Board and offices for the King's Barge Master.
This is a big, big building, massive in fact, and
it had a whole bunch of challenges that were associated
with it, not just because it was huge, but because
it was going to be the quarters for the King's
barge Master as well as for the Navy Board. It
had to be built up against the River Thames. There
(07:49):
had to be direct access to the Thames River, so
that was a big challenge. And if you're not if
you've never seen it, you should look at the pictures
of the Somerset House. The middle section of the structure
is what Telford specifically worked on. If you're looking at
a modern picture, you're going to see this really big
building that has wings on either side, but those east
(08:10):
and west wings were actually built later in the Victorian era.
It's that central structure that is what Telford worked on
as part of Chambers's crew. So Telford would go on
to work for a man named Sir William Pulteney, who
was the richest man in Britain at that time, or
at least one of them. Telford became the surveyor of
(08:31):
public Works in Shropshire, which was a position that was
created just for him. There had not been a surveyor
of public works before Telford. He would become a pioneer
in a new field that would eventually become known as
civil engineering. In two he designed and built the Mockford
stone Bridge across the River Severn, and that was the
(08:53):
one that was so important in the textile industry. If
you listen to the first episode in this series, I
talked about how important said was and uh in its
association with Lancashire and the iron working and coal industries.
Telford also began to build suspension bridges, which was a
new idea at the time, and folklore has it that
(09:15):
when Telford built his first suspension bridge, he had to
steady his nerves with a prayer before allowing the cables
to take on the weight of the structure, because even
though he had worked out the math, he still could
not be absolutely certain that this was going to work.
And suspension bridges are actually a really cool technology. It actually,
(09:36):
I guess will benefit us to describe how those work.
With a suspension bridge, typically what you have are a
pair of very tall towers and UH, these towers are
attached to the bridge via cables. You know, the typical
bridge has columns or pylons or piers underneath it that
(09:56):
holded up, but a suspension bridge doesn't. It has these
tower is that have cables attached from the tower first
to each other, and also there's vertical cables that attached
the main cables between the two towers and the bridge.
The towers actually support most of the weight. Specifically, they
(10:18):
support the force of compression. See compression pushes down on
the surface of the bridge. That compression is transferred to
the cables or chains that are attached the edges of
the bridge, the frame of the bridge, and that gets
transferred to the towers. Then you have supporting cables that
connect the towers to anchorage points on either side of
(10:38):
whatever you're building the bridge across, like a river, and
these cables support the tension forces created by the bridge.
So suspension bridges don't need any columns or pylons under them.
That frees up a lot of the space beneath the bridge.
But engineers like Telford, who were aware of how the
bridges should work, we're a little antsie of out how
(11:00):
things actually would work. Once everything was ready to go,
and luckily for us, physics tends to obey the law,
so the designs worked out in everyone's favor, but no
one was entirely sure at the time. Now, Telford's next
project was the Aqueduct, which must not be named because
I'm tired of trying to pronounce Welsh words, which was
(11:21):
a phenomenal success and that came as a great surprise
to numerous critics who were absolutely convinced it would fall
apart as soon as water was flowing, and it didn't.
It stayed together and ended up increasing the speed of
transportation in that part of England. After the aqueduct, or
well Wales, I should say England and Wales because it
was connecting the two. But after that Aqueduct, Telford became
(11:43):
the head engineer of the Caledonian Canal in Scotland. That's
a really big canal. It's sixty miles long and the
construction was a huge boon for Scotland at the time
because many people in Scotland had become homeless, and the
reason they became homeless is pretty dastardly. It was in
(12:06):
the wake of what has become known as the Highland Clearances,
which is a very polite way of describing what actually happened.
So this was a period when aristocratic people, so clan leaders, nobles,
decided it would make a great deal of sense to
evict Scottish families from their ancestral homes in order to
(12:27):
convert that land into sheep grazing territory, so converting it
from farms into gray's land. And Highlanders were forced to
leave their homes, and some of them had been in
those homes for centuries. The families had, I mean only
a few Highlanders are immortal. As the documentary series Highlander
teaches us, it's a really dark time in Scottish history
(12:48):
and it really dealt severe damage to Gaelic culture as
a result. What what seems to have happened the way
it tends to be described is that a lot of
clan leaders, for various reasons political reasons that were handed
down from the crown, from royals, had decided that rather
than be considered a clan leader, which came with a
(13:09):
bunch of responsibilities, including if someone in your clan acted up,
you were held responsible as leader, they started to call
themselves landlords instead, and that was a slippery slope that
led to these evictions. So Telford's canal took three decades
to construct, and it meant that he had to rely
heavily on a lot of labor from this part of Scotland,
(13:31):
so it gave a lot of people work when they
went home to harvest crops. He ended up hiring Irish workers,
which caused some real problems in the area. People locals
were upset at that, but Telford was already running over
budget and behind time, and unfortunately for everybody, by the
time the canal was finished, it was actually not terribly useful,
(13:56):
and that's because it just took two long to make
and technology had changed while the canal was being built.
It was built well and it's considered to be a
marvel of engineering, but ship building had changed so dramatically
by the time the canal was finished. Steamships had become
the new standard, and steamships needed more space than what
(14:18):
the canal could provide. The canal was actually too small
to accommodate steamships and so it wasn't as used used
as heavily as it had been planned. Now Telford would
go on to create super waterways. It's kind of like
super highways there were these interconnections that uh that put
various canals finally in contact with each other, so that
(14:41):
made shipping much more efficient. And in eighteen twenty he
became the very first president of the Institution of Civil
Engineers in Britain, so essentially kind of invented the discipline
of civil engineering, or at least was instrumental in the
invention of that discipline. Tell made another major contribution to
England's transportation system as well. One of his most important
(15:04):
improvements involved raising the foundation of a road in the
center of the road to aid in draining water. So
he he was very good at building roads. He used
these large flat stones as the foundation and by raising
that center, water would drain off it much more effectively.
It wouldn't pool and destroy the road over time, and
(15:26):
his work was so successful that it became the standard
road design in England and beyond. One of Telford's contemporaries
and rivals was a guy named Isambard Kingdom Brunel. And
if that name sounds at all familiar, well you might
remember him when we did our episode on subways. He
was very important in that episode. He was the son
(15:47):
of a French engineer the French engineer had actually fled
to England during the French Revolution, so Brunell grew up
in England, although he also studied in France post Revolution.
Brunell worked on many important projects throughout his career, but
he's probably best remembered for his tunnels and his underground systems.
He designed underground passages that even passed beneath bodies of
(16:09):
water like the River Thames, and he also designed several
rail railways and steamships in his time. Uh Speaking of steamships,
the idea had been kicking around since the days of
Leonardo da Vinci, but until the eighteenth century, no one
had managed to actually make a practical steamship. People had tried.
There were several challenges that were facing engineers at the time.
(16:32):
A big one was to create a mechanism that would
translate the reciprocal motion of a piston into a rotary
motion that could turn a wheel. So pistons move up
and down or left and right in a cylinder, whereas
wheels turn in a circle. So you have to figure
out a way to translate one style of motion into another,
(16:53):
and it took a while before that happened. In other words,
how do you get that simple up, down or left
right motion to become a circle? Well, Thomas Newcomin came
up with that. That was the invention that he said
he was most proud of, even beyond his improvements to
the basic steam engine. Uh, it was essentially kind of
a ratchet that allowed for this translation of motion. It
(17:13):
was the first big step to solving that particular problem. Now,
the other big challenge was to create a steam engine
capable of providing enough power to actually move a boat
through the water. Now, as I mentioned in the last episode,
early steam engines relied on using condensation to create a
vacuum and pull a piston downward. They did not use
steam to create pressure and push the piston upward because
(17:36):
the materials they were using couldn't withstand that intense pressure
that steam would create, and they were considered too dangerous.
It was just a recipe for disaster. You would have
a boiler explode and that could be deadly. Now, patents
for steamboats state all the way back to sixteen eighteen
when David Ramsey was awarded a patent for his design. Now,
there's no evidence that Ramsey ever managed to actually build
(17:58):
anything approaching a steam powered boat, and other inventors followed suit.
There was one named John Allen who patented a steamboat
design in seventeen nine, and another one was proposed by
Englishman Jonathan Holes in seventeen thirty six. Holes His approach
was to use a Newcoming engine, although again he never
(18:18):
built such a boat as far as we can tell.
For an actual working boat, you have to actually look
fifty years later, so three that's when Clode Francois Dorote
Joefrey Dabam, who, as you can imagine from that name,
was a French nobleman, built a boat powered by a
(18:40):
Newcoming two cylinder engine, and he demonstrated on a river
in France and showed that such a boat could actually
sail against the river's current under its own power. It
didn't require manpower or animal power to turn some sort
of device in order to go against the current. It's
really kind of challenging to explain how monumental this was
(19:02):
in the transportation industry at the time. But people realize
the promise of steam power would be to make everything easier,
including the shipment of cargo and people. So Joe Frey's
invention actually broke apart in the river it was not.
It was not designed to last very long. It shook
itself apart. Essentially, the boat began to split, the engine
(19:24):
began to fall apart. He was able to pilot the
boat back to the river bank before it completely disintegrated
on him, and got to shore safely. He would just
a few years later flee France himself, because that was
just as the French Revolution was getting into the swing
of things. Now, James Watt, who we talked about in
(19:46):
the last episode, invented the condenser, which made it much
more efficient. It being steam engines made steam engines much
more efficient. You no longer had to heat up and
cool down the cylinder that the piston in it. You
could keep it the same temperature, and you allowed the
condenser to pull steam in and condense into water. And
water started getting a trans Atlantic accident on there for
(20:10):
some reason, turn into water and uh create that vacuum
pressure that would pull a piston downward. And also because
around this time when people began to experiment with double
stroke engines, that's when you use steam to provide both
the push on the upstroke of a piston and the
pull on the downstroke of the piston, and makes an
(20:31):
engine much more efficient because it's doing work in both
ways rather than just pulling and then allowing gravity to
reset the piston. Watson's invention would become the foundation for
working steamboats in the future. Now, I've talked a lot
about Britain in these episodes, because Britain is the birthplace
of the Industrial Revolution, There's no question about that. Uh.
(20:55):
A lot of innovations happened in Britain first and then
eventually made their way to other parts of the world. However,
when we start talking about steamboats, we actually have to
shift our focus over to America. American engineers were facing
a pretty big challenge that the Brits weren't facing. Specifically,
they were not allowed to use British technology. Britain had
(21:17):
passed laws making it illegal to share trade secrets or
sell certain things like steam engines. So, in other words,
all that information got caught up and stuck and stayed
in Britain. Now, the reason for this was that Britain
was really trying to maintain trade superiority for as long
(21:37):
as it possibly could, and part of that was just
keeping all this this information secret so that only Britain
could take advantage of it, so American engineers were forced
to design their own steam engines. Now they had a
general idea of how the British ones were working, so
it's not like they were going completely from scratch, but
it still was a big challenge, and one trio that
(21:58):
gave it a shot can sisted of an inventor named
John Stevens, his wealthy brother in law Robert Livingstone, and
a machinist named Nicholas J. Roosevelt. Their efforts were somewhat
hampered by Livingston, who felt that since he was providing
all the cash, he should have a major input into
how the boat was actually constructed, despite the fact that
(22:21):
he didn't have the expertise of the other two. But
the other two had very little bargaining power because Livingstone
was the guy footing the bill. So despite protestations from
Roosevelt and from Stevens, Livingstone's design was what stuck, and
the resulting boat barely moved in still water. In fact,
(22:43):
on the first test it didn't go anywhere. The second test,
it moved very slowly in stillwater, something like three miles
per hour, so it could not really fight against the current,
and it also shook itself apart after a short while.
By the way, don't think that Robert Livingstone was a dummy.
He was a smart guy. In fact, he was instrumental
(23:05):
in in American history. He's the guy who essentially brokered
the Louisiana purchase deal between France and America. So very
important historically, just not necessarily the guy you want on
your team when you're designing a steam engine. However, Livingston
met another man who also shared an interest in steam power,
and that man was Robert Fulton. He was an American
(23:27):
who originally wanted to make his living as an artist.
He painted a portrait of Benjamin Franklin and felt that
he was on his way to becoming a great artist,
but his career path was cut short after he had
a disappointing meeting with another American artist who was living
in London. Fulton actually took his all of his money,
traveled to London. He had a letter of invitation, our
(23:50):
introduction for this American artist. Met with the American artist,
who is kind but essentially said no, I don't want
you as a student. You don't have what it takes.
But fortunately Fulton met Livingstone and they began to talk
and they realized they shared a lot of common interests,
including engineering and specifically in steam engines. Fulton had become
(24:12):
really obsessed with ships in general and steam engines in particular,
and Fulton saw in Livingstone a potential source of funding
for his work, pretty much the same way that Stevens
had seen Livingston earlier. So Fulton and Livingstone entered into
a partnership in which they would split the profits of
(24:33):
their work fifty fifty. That was a sore spot for Livingstone,
who argued that his money was more valuable than Fulton's work,
but Fulton was able to argue him down to the
point where they agreed, we're going to take a half
share each. So Fulton designed a steam powered flat bottomed
paddle boat. His original model actually used something similar to
(24:55):
a bicycle chain to power the paddles, but he would
eventually abandon that for more of a ratchet approach like
the newcoming engine version would use. So the paddle boat
itself wasn't a new idea that had actually been around
for centuries, although of course it had been powered by
either animals or people, not by steam, but Fulton's mechanisms
(25:17):
to provide power gave it the new Twist, and they
filed a patent for the design back in eighteen o two.
Fulton launched a steamboat named Claremont C L E R
M O N T in New York in eighteen o seven.
Now that would provide passage for for travelers between New
York City and Albany. So it made a trip to
(25:41):
Albany and then made a trip back from Albany to
New York City safely. And it proved that steam power
could be used to transport people in cargo. So before
long shipbuilders began to write rely heavily on steam power,
even for Transatlantic passages. Now I should add that the
steamships traveling the ocean, those were not the same design
as the flat bottom boats that were meant to float
(26:02):
on rivers here in America. The first ship to provide
regular transatlantic service didn't come from America at all. It
of course came from Britain. So while Britain did not
pioneer the steam boat, they did pioneer the steam ship,
and that first ship was called the S. S. Great Western,
(26:23):
which was built by none other than Isambard Kingdom Brunel
in eighteen thirty seven. So no longer were ships reliant
on the winds or on human powered ores or any
other mechanism. They could have a steam engine drive them
from location to location no matter what the weather was
or which way the currents were going, and travel and
shipping speeds increased dramatically, which drove up demand for trade
(26:48):
while steamboats were making waves in America. See what I
did there with boats and waves. Back in Britain, engineers
were experimenting with steam powered engines designed to push or
pull cart on tracks, which were the first locomotives. So
there was an engineer named Richard Trevithick who built the
first full scale locomotive in eighteen o four steam powered
(27:11):
locomotive in eighteen o four. But he was way ahead
of his time uh and while he built a working model,
most people weren't ready for it. They didn't think it
was a proven technology, and so he didn't receive enough
support to move forward into production. George Stephenson succeeded where
Trevithick failed, building a successful steam engine in eighteen fourteen.
(27:36):
And that engine's name was Bluecker and it could pull
thirty tons at a speed of four miles per hour.
I'm told that the Brits actually pronounced it Blcher, which
makes sense because it's spelled b l u with an
oomal out c h e er uh. The correct pronunciation
if you're going with the German or Prussian, as it
turns out, is more blucker. But they were Blucher. So
(27:58):
it was named after a Prussian general who was a
war hero in the Napoleonic Wars, and in fact, the
following year, in eighteen fifteen, Bluecher would lead an army
in a very hasty march to a little battleground called Waterloo,
which was the site of Napoleon's defeat. So Bluecher ended
up being a great name for a device meant to
(28:18):
move a lot of weight at a relatively fast pace. Now,
the locomotive became a dominant force in transportation within a
couple of decades. America's first locomotive was a British machine
called the Stourbridge Lion, and it wasn't a huge success
because the way of the machine was so great that
the American rails split underneath it. They had to re
(28:41):
engineer that. American engineer Peter Cooper built the first steam
locomotive in America that was American made, and that one
was called the tom Thumb and it moved at a
blistering eighteen miles per hour, which was pretty fast at
the time, and carried thirty six passengers on its first
run in eighteen thirty. So by the middle of the
nineteenth century, transportation had completely transformed. In less than a century,
(29:06):
road systems were redesigned, steamships were traveling across rivers and oceans,
and locomotives could do the work of dozens of teams
of horses. Steam engines continued to also power the growing
industries like textile and iron working industries. They were actually
powering the machinery in those factories. So all of this
(29:27):
industry ended up having a big requirement. They needed people
to do a lot of this work. So let's talk
a little bit about what was like being a member
of this working class that formed as a result of
the Industrial Revolution and these innovations. So keep in mind,
all this stuff made production cheaper and easier, and and
(29:47):
transportation cheaper and easier, So it meant that the price
of goods was dropping. It meant that trade was exploding.
It also meant that banks were being created in order
to handle the monetary weight of what was going on.
You had the British Empire growing as a result through
(30:09):
both conquest and trade, so big time of change. It
also meant that you had to have a lot of
bodies in these factories to actually make the stuff work.
Um and other things like conflicts throughout the world. We're
creating more requirements for clothing, for weapons, for fuel, for
all that sort of stuff. So there was a high demand.
(30:32):
It was an exciting time. So let's talk about working.
Perhaps the biggest revolution of them all really came down
to how work was done before the Industrial Revolution. Let's
say you're a cloth merchant. You're someone who sells cloth.
That process is not very straightforward. First, you would have
to purchase raw wool from shepherds. Then you would take
(30:56):
it to spinners and you would hire spinners to spin
the raw wool into yarn. You would then take that
yarn to weavers and pay the weavers to weave that
yarn into cloth, and then you would have to sell
the cloth to customers. And that means each time you
know you're you're selling, price of the cloth has to
be great enough to cover all the expenses leading up
(31:17):
to creating that cloth. That's why it was pretty expensive
at the time. It wasn't until the Industrial Revolution, where
this was streamlined and the cost for production went way down,
that suddenly these these finished goods could be of a
much better price. Some people actually called this earlier version
(31:38):
of the way things were done a putting out process.
You had to put out everything onto a different group
of people in order to get something finished. Some people
called it the domestic system, and some people referred to
this sort of stuff as a cottage industry, meaning that
people were actually working out of their own homes. It
was a multi step process that employed lots of people
(31:59):
to make a real, at least small amount of product.
But the Industrial Revolution changed all that. Now it was
possible to produce huge amounts of product like textiles, but
you also needed a much larger group of people in
order to actually run all the equipment. So while you
could have one spinner run a machine that could spend
(32:22):
multiple spools of yarn uh simultaneously, whereas before you would
have to do it one at a time. You could
do that, but it's still meant that in order to
meet the major demand, you actually had a lot more
people in place. Now, some merchants began building larger structures
to house workers during work hours, so in other words,
(32:43):
you are no longer relying on people working out of
their houses. They would actually travel to a work location
and work there for a shift, which makes sense because
most of these factories were located next to rivers or
other structures other natural boundaries that gave them some sort
(33:04):
of advantage either in the production or the shipping or
both of the material. So this was the factory. Originally,
the word factory referred to the office of a manager
of an estate, so a state manager's office was the factory,
but by the sixteen hundreds the word had limited use
to refer to a place where manufacturing happened. Uh and
(33:25):
the real rise of the factory was truly the nineteenth century.
The eighteen hundreds, the need for workers created opportunities for
people who otherwise would have just remained farmers or they
would have had very little employment at all. So this
drove a migration from farmlands to cities. People were moving
to where work was. If there wasn't enough work where
they were, they could go to a city and work
(33:47):
at a factory, and cities were growing exponentially in that
time period. Urban growth was exploding as a result of
all this. So, once upon a time, farming was the
dominant occupation in all the world. But as a result
of the Industrial Revolution, the percentage of people who are
farmers compared to the overall population began to shrink, and
(34:08):
began to shrink pretty drastically. At the same time, we
were making some progress in other areas like sanitation and medicine,
so we were starting to learn how to maintain people's health,
how to keep people from getting sick, how to keep
water systems clean. Uh, we began to learn more about
(34:29):
how to protect people when they are at their most vulnerable,
such as during the act of childbirth. Also, lifespans were
increasing because we were getting better at treating people. Largely,
lifespans were increasing simply because we're getting better and making
sure people reached the age of twenty one. There's this
common misconception that the lifespan during the Middle Ages was
(34:50):
around thirty years old because people died of old age
when they were thirty. That's not the case. The reason
why the the lifespan was so shut was that your
odds of making it to adulthood were pretty low. A
lot of people died either when they were infants or children.
(35:12):
But if you could make it too about eighteen or twenty,
you had a good chance of living a nice long life,
assuming you avoid major illness or injury. Uh. This era,
the Industrial Revolution, was one where we started to get
better about the practices that could lead to illness and injury.
(35:33):
And because the machines were doing a lot of the
hard work, it meant that people no longer had to
do this by hand. Like the stuff that would require
a lot of repetitive, monotonous motions or carrying heavy weight.
A lot of that was being done done by machine
now not by people, though not all of it, and
monany was still a big problem. Uh. Working in a
(35:56):
factory was not a picnic. It was hot and difficult
and crowded, and and you were dedicated to a specific task.
So you're doing that same task over and over again
throughout the entire day. Women, men, and children all worked
in factories during the Industrial Revolution, entire families would Typically
(36:18):
the women and men would earn a tiny amount, like
ten cents an hour in the United States terms, whereas
the children would be earning a penny an hour. Uh.
It was not a way to get rich. It was,
and and typically an entire family would be working, often
in the same factory because they couldn't afford to have
(36:40):
a single person work and someone else looking after the
home that they wouldn't make enough money. Wages were really low,
pretty much as low as business owners could get away
with in order to continue to maximize profits, and a
work week was six days long and a shift could
last between twelve and fourteen hours in a day. Meanwhile,
(37:02):
that explosion and urban growth did not mean suddenly all
these luxurious accommodations were appearing everywhere, and in a lot
of cities we were seeing cheap, flimsy housing being hastily
constructed to take advantage of all the incoming populations of workers.
And landlords were a lot like factory owners. They were
trying to maximize their profits. They would cram as many
(37:24):
tenants as they could into a building in order to
get as many renters as possible. So it was a
fairly grim situation. Now, you might think that in that
situation the workers would have some significant power because there
were a lot of them. They're way more workers than
there were factory owners, so you'd think, well, they could
(37:46):
just band together and demand better conditions and the factory
owners would ultimately have to bow to them if they
were actually able to unionize. Well, the ruling powers in
England didn't like that idea so much. Um England traditionally
had had a lot of reluctance to allow lower classes
(38:07):
to have any kind of power or say and how
things were going, so why change things now. They actually
discouraged people from organizing into a labor force that could
fight for the rights of employees by passing laws Britain passed.
Britain's parliament passed the Combination Acts of sev eighteen hundred,
(38:29):
and it actually made it illegal for workers to unionize.
If you tried to unionize workers, if you were an
employee and you were trying to convince others to banned
with you so that you could leverage your work against
the factory owners and demand better conditions, you could be
sentenced to either three months in prison or two months
(38:50):
of hard labor. So it's pretty grim. And those acts
remained law until eighteen twenty four, so a quarter of
the century. Essentially, this was the law of the land.
They were finally overthrown and perhaps predictably immediately after they
were overthrown. There were a series of workers strikes throughout
(39:13):
all of Britain, and in fact, the following year in
Parliament attempted to reinstate the the Acts, but that movement
failed and they never were reinstated. Meanwhile, so you've got
the working class, this very poor new class of people
in Britain. They hadn't existed before. Before they would have
been farmers or perhaps small uh skilled workers of some sort,
(39:38):
like they might be a blacksmith or a weaver, but
now they are factory workers, the working class. You had
another new class as well, that would be the industrial capitalists.
And these were the people who had the money to
start up the businesses. They were the ones who were
funding the building of a factory, the operation of an industry,
(40:00):
and they would use the profits from that industry to
improve that business, including the funding of canals and bridges
and roads throughout all of Britain. So their work would
benefit other people, but they were largely doing it to
benefit their own business, to to maximize profits even more.
And some of these people came from humble origins. They
(40:23):
weren't all very highly educated people. Some of them came
from families that were very similar to the families working
in the factories, but because of their wealth, they wielded
as much or more power as the traditional noble houses
in England at that time. Um, remember this is a
time when the noble houses, you know, the House of Lords,
(40:46):
had largely lost a lot of its power and uh,
nobility was now looked upon with something of of disdain
because a lot of the noble noble houses no longer
had any money. Uh they had titles and they had
they had the states, but they didn't necessarily have wealth,
whereas you had this new class of industrial capitalists who
(41:07):
might not have any title to their name, but we're
fabulously wealthy. So it was a very different time in
Britain's history. Now, that change, this whole change with the
working class and the industrial capitalists, that didn't go on
without any resistance. In fact, weavers would lead the way.
They protested the change from the cottage industry to factory production.
(41:30):
Early on you get stories about weavers who were upset
at factories. They felt one the factory was going to
put them out of business, and two that factories were
going to produce work that was inferior to what a weaver.
A traditional weaver would make, so there was a bit
(41:51):
of pride and a bit of self preservation in this.
They would protest this change by breaking looms. This was
an era in which the term sabotage came to prominence.
So there's a most likely apocryphal story that some weavers
threw their shoes into a loom essentially a giant water
(42:15):
powered loom, in order to destroy it. So they're coming
up the works with their shoes, and shoes in French
is sabo, so sabotage is this act of throwing one's
shoes into machinery to destroy the machines, normally as part
of a labor dispute. But most etymologists agree that that
particular story is likely just a folk tale. So don't
(42:37):
write to me and say, hey, you said sabotage comes
from throwing shoes into machines, and it says here that's
not true. I agree. It's just that the most widely
used explanation comes from the mostly most likely untrue story
that shoes have everything to do with sabotage. But there's
(42:58):
another word that also came up during this era that
also gets misused a lot, and that is the word luddite.
Now today we usually interpret luddite as someone who opposes
or doesn't adopt technological advances. So a person refusing to
get a cell phone could be called a luddite by
somebody like, Oh, you're such a luddite you won't even
get a cell phone. So we use that term just
(43:20):
I mean, you aren't going to embrace technology. You think
it's bad for some reason. But in the Industrial Revolution,
Luddites were workers in England who destroyed machinery in waves
of labor disputes during the early eighteen hundreds. Uh. They
were doing so against the law, obviously, and Parliament got
very nervous about this. Uh They you know, England had
(43:42):
already been through a civil war a couple of centuries earlier,
and Parliament was not eager to have that happen again,
so it began to assign soldiers to defend factories. Thousands
of soldiers were deployed throughout Britain to guard factories against
mobs of the working class, and the Luddites ended up
taking their name from a man named ned Lud who
(44:06):
inspired and led them to cause mischief throughout all of England.
This guy almost went Christopher walking here. This guy went
all over England. He would show up in all sorts
of villages everywhere to lead people in opposition to factory owners.
And the British authorities were having a heck of a
(44:27):
time tracking this guy down. It seemed like every time
they were responding to one crisis, he would pop up
somewhere else in England, almost magically. And the reason for
this is because ned Lud was not a real person.
He was a story. He was an idea concocted by
the Luddites themselves, kind of as a symbol of their movement.
(44:49):
Uh So, ned Lud was not a real person, but
the Luddites did take their name from ned Lud. Now,
there was someone who may have been named Lud or Ludham,
who was working as a weaver in a factory, who
might have inspired the name, but the person himself didn't exist. Now,
(45:09):
as it turns out, the Luddites weren't really organized in
any meaningful way. They were very passionate and they generally
agreed on their cause, but they weren't this massive underground
organization that Parliament was terrified of. And the workers actually
suffered way more than any of the machinery they attacked dead.
(45:30):
In April of eighteen twelve, a mob of workers were
fired upon by soldiers. A factory owner ordered the soldiers
to fire into the crowd, and as a result, three
people were killed and at least eighteen were wounded, and
more were killed in a different clash on the following day.
So violent confrontations like these would continue for the next
(45:51):
several years. Here's the thing. The Luddites weren't actually opposing
industrial machines. They depended on those machines to do their work,
so they were not anti technology. What the Luddites opposed
were what they viewed as cruel labor conditions that exploited
employees and benefited the owners. They targeted manufacturers who used
(46:14):
factories in a fraudulent and deceitful manner. What they really
wanted was better wages. They wanted the assurance that people
who were working the machines would actually be trained as
apprentices and learn how to use the machines before being
assigned a machine. Uh. This was sort of a point
of a pride to make sure that the finished product
(46:36):
was a good product and not just one that's super
cheaply made. In order to benefit the factory owner, and
all of this seems like a pretty humble set of demands.
If you ask me, you know they're they're just asking
to be paid a fair wage and to make sure
that the business isn't cutting corners when it comes to production.
(46:56):
But now today we just considered luddite to be a
term for somebody who doesn't like technology. It's kind of
interesting considering that's not what the original intent was, although
they did try and destroy machines in order to to
get their point across. Eventually workers were able to unionize legally,
but it took decades after they unionized before conditions would
(47:19):
start to really improve. Even into the Victorian era in
the mid to late eighteen hundreds, factories were still crowded
and dangerous, and London had more than its share of
slums filled with working class families and the unemployed. All
you have to read is any Charles Dickens novel and
you'll understand. You'll see this, uh that this was still
(47:41):
an issue in Britain decades after the unions were finally
able to form. Now, what about the rest of the world.
I've talked a lot about Britain, a little bit about America.
Why haven't I talked about other places. Well, it's largely
because the industrialization of other countries followed in the footsteps
of Britain by a few but lagged a few decades
(48:02):
behind um. And some places had better excuses than others,
Like France and America both had pretty good excuses. They
both were undergoing revolutionary wars around the same time Britain
was undergoing its industrial revolution, and the war was taking
way more of the focus of the people of France
and the people of America than any sort of industrial
(48:25):
revolution could America. Obviously, they concluded their revolutionary war well
ahead of time before France did, before France had even
had a revolution, and so we're able to move on,
and so they caught up not too long after that.
American ingenuity was something that people were very proud of,
(48:47):
and they were able to catch up to the Brits
before too long. France had the other drawback that after
the French Revolution there were the Napoleonic Wars, which did
not end until eighteen fifteen, so they didn't move into
industrialization until after that. Essentially, around that same time, the
other nations in Europe began to follow suit, and so
(49:11):
you started to see this pattern where countries were becoming
industrialized following similar pathways that Britain followed, but several decades behind.
So that's why we tell the story of the Industrial
Revolution largely with Britain in mind, because it acts as
the model for everybody else. But once they got started,
they actually caught up to Britain pretty quickly. So in
(49:33):
other words, it didn't take the decades and decades and
decades of work that happened in Britain to get up
to about the same speed that Britain was currently at,
and what followed was an unprecedented era of production and commerce.
Other inventions would also contribute to a very rapidly changing world.
You might remember I did an episode with Holly from
(49:56):
Stuff You Missed in History Class about the sewing machine,
for example, which it's hard, it's hard to believe, but
the sewing machine is the subject of one of the
nastiest patent wars of all time. There were people who
were willing to to kill or die for their designs
of the sewing machine. But that was another big uh
(50:18):
invention that came out around this time, and innovation was
also changing farming, which was important because so many people
were leaving the profession of farming to go to cities
and try something else. A guy named Cyrus McCormick invented
several large machines that were important in farming, including one
that was in on a motorizer or mechanized I guess
(50:40):
should I should say a mechanized reaper designed to harvest
crops far more quickly than you could by hand. So
farmers could use machines to meet the demand of these
larger populations of non farmers. You know, they were able
to the one farmer was now able to do the
work of ten or twenty farm hands. You these machines
(51:01):
because they were much more efficient and fast. When the
Industrial Revolution was coming to an end in the middle
of the nineteenth century, the stage was set. Not long
after this period we would see an unprecedented era of
scientific discoveries. Some people refer to it as the Second
Industrial Revolution, because that's when mass production really became a thing,
(51:23):
when corporations came into existence, and when we started to
see people harness things like electricity and discover radio waves,
which ended up powering all these ideas, I mean literally
powering in the case of electricity, all these ideas including
radio and television that followed in that Second Industrial Revolution,
(51:46):
and it also allowed for the age of discovery, where
we had scientists all over the world starting to break
new ground in our understanding of the universe, including in
really weird areas like quantum physics. So that wraps up
our epic three episode arc on the Industrial Revolution, and honestly,
I could have easily made this a four part series.
(52:07):
This episode has been pretty long, but I could have
gone into even more detail than I already did. And
perhaps in the future I'll devote an entire episode on
one of the technologies or one of the innovators I've
talked about in these shows. For now, however, let's close
the door on the Industrial Revolution. Next week, we'll have
an entirely new topic to talk about. That promise, And
(52:27):
if you guys have any suggestions for future episodes of
tech Stuff, please get in touch with me. My email
address is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com,
or you can drop me a line on Twitter or Facebook.
My handle at both of those is text stuff H
s W. And I'll talk to you again really soon
(52:52):
for more on this and bathos of other topics. Is
it a stop works dot com, one
With technology with tech Stuff from technolog Hey there, and
welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland, and
this episode is part three, the epic finale of our
series on the Industrial Revolution. In parts one and two,
(00:26):
I looked at the textile and iron industries respectively, as
well as how steam engines came about and how technology
helped transform those trades into enormous industries. And in this
episode will cover everything from transportation to what it was
like to be a member of the working class at
that time, and how we started to see some new
(00:48):
lines dividing different classes. It used to be that it
was the nobles versus the peasants, with clergy in the middle,
really clergy off to the side on their own kind
of ladder. But things changed in the Industrial Revolution. So
during this period in Britain's history, which as you may remember,
is in the mid eighteenth to mid nineteenth century, so
(01:11):
the seven the mid seventeen hundreds to the mid eighteen hundreds,
transportation was getting a major overhaul. Roads had been in
really poor shape ever since the Romans had left Britain
and they were in need of repair and redesign. Shipping
by boat was really popular, and many of Britain's rivers
became important conduits for trade goods. Engineers would actually start
(01:33):
to begin to design canals to connect various rivers together
in order to speed up transportation. And then there were
the rail systems. So railroads pre date trains and locomotives
by a lot, because people figured out fairly early on
that it's a lot easier to push or pull a
(01:54):
heavy cart that's along a set of hard rails than
it is to move that same cart against the ground,
that it will roll more smoothly and you have to
use less effort to get it from point A to
point B. So at first wooden rails were used and
carts would have flanged wheels to allow them to stay
(02:15):
on the rails securely. Not all cards were like this,
not all rail systems were like this, but it was
generally one of the accepted standards across the world by
this point, where people knew if you built the wheels
in this way so that they essentially kind of hug
the rails, that it's not likely to tip over, and
you can move at a good clip. By a good clip,
(02:36):
we're talking a couple of miles per hour usually because
you're carrying so much stuff. Now, typically you'd use horses
to pull the carts along the rails. People did experiment
with other things, uh, But one of the pioneers in
railroads in England was Richard Reynolds. Now, Reynolds was an
iron master who worked at Colebrookdale, and that's the iron
(02:59):
works that was founded by Abraham Darby. You can listen
to the previous episodes on this series and you'll hear
me talk about the Darby family. Well, Reynolds became friends
with Abraham Darby the second, so the son of Abraham Darby.
And in seventeen sixty seven Reynolds came up with the
idea of replacing wooden rails with cast iron rails. He
(03:24):
thought that this would be a much better use of
cast iron. It would be better than the wooden ones
because the wooden rails would break down over time. They
could also just collapse depending upon how heavy the load was,
and cast iron would last longer and be able to
withstand greater weights. Now, there's no historical record of anyone
(03:44):
doing this before Reynolds, so he might have actually been
the person to invent this. But it's not safe to
just declare it, So it's possible someone else did. We
just don't have a record of it. So I guess
for practical purposes, we can say he invented the idea
before long tramways all across Britain were following his his lead,
(04:06):
and so he was using rails in order to move
giant carts of coal or iron back and forth between locations.
But soon these were being used all over the place
for various reasons, and so they started convert wooden railways
into iron railways. This is fifty years before the invention
(04:27):
of the locomotive, which turned railways into a major means
of transport, not only in Britain but all across the world.
And we'll get to the locomotive a bit later, but
just imagine for fifty years this was a way of
getting heavy loads of cargo to load from location to location,
but there were no trains. It was just horse drawn carts.
(04:49):
In the last episode, I also talked about the punt custle,
the aqueduct punt consulta child mangle. Every single time I
try and say it's okay, the Welsh have trouble with
this one too. That's just one example of the innovations
and transportation that were introduced in the Industrial Revolution. Uh.
It was during this time that nations like the United
Kingdom and the United States really began to build extensive canals,
(05:14):
roads and railways to speed up that travel. And I
mentioned Thomas Telford as the architect who designed and built
the pot consulta aqueduct. That was the one that was
a raised aqueduct made out of an iron trough that
connected two rivers together, and it spanned a valley so
that the waterway actually passed above the valley. It didn't
(05:37):
have to descend into the valley and then go back up,
it went straight across. He made several important contributions to
England's transportation systems, not just this aqueduct, and his designs
were adopted by engineers and other countries like the United States.
So it might be worth looking into who Telford was like.
Who was Thomas Telford Well. He was born in August
(06:00):
of seventeen fifty seven on the border between England and Scotland.
He's generally considered a Scottish architect. His father died when
he was just a baby, and his mother relied on
her relatives to help raise the child. Essentially, Telford was
raised by his his relatives, not by his mother, and
at age fourteen he became apprenticed to a stonemason. He
(06:24):
was really keen to learn everything there was to learn
about construction, and so he would actually study at night
after working a full day shift with the stonemason. After
learning his trade with the stonemason, and by the time
he was twenty five, he had worked on several important
construction projects and including some in Edinburgh, Scotland, and he
(06:44):
ended up picking up stakes to move to London. That's
where Telford met Sir William Chambers, who was a prominent
Scottish architect, and Chambers had begun work on Somerset House
or Somerset House if you prefer if you're being more
British with it, and Telford ended up joining the crew. Now,
if you're not familiar with London, Somerset House may sound
(07:07):
like it's a quaint cottage. It's not. House is a
not an accurate word to describe this massive building. It's
an enormous Neo Classical structure and it was big enough
so that it could house the Royal Academy of Arts,
the Royal Society, the Society of Antiquaries and the quarters
(07:27):
for the Navy Board and offices for the King's Barge Master.
This is a big, big building, massive in fact, and
it had a whole bunch of challenges that were associated
with it, not just because it was huge, but because
it was going to be the quarters for the King's
barge Master as well as for the Navy Board. It
had to be built up against the River Thames. There
(07:49):
had to be direct access to the Thames River, so
that was a big challenge. And if you're not if
you've never seen it, you should look at the pictures
of the Somerset House. The middle section of the structure
is what Telford specifically worked on. If you're looking at
a modern picture, you're going to see this really big
building that has wings on either side, but those east
(08:10):
and west wings were actually built later in the Victorian era.
It's that central structure that is what Telford worked on
as part of Chambers's crew. So Telford would go on
to work for a man named Sir William Pulteney, who
was the richest man in Britain at that time, or
at least one of them. Telford became the surveyor of
(08:31):
public Works in Shropshire, which was a position that was
created just for him. There had not been a surveyor
of public works before Telford. He would become a pioneer
in a new field that would eventually become known as
civil engineering. In two he designed and built the Mockford
stone Bridge across the River Severn, and that was the
(08:53):
one that was so important in the textile industry. If
you listen to the first episode in this series, I
talked about how important said was and uh in its
association with Lancashire and the iron working and coal industries.
Telford also began to build suspension bridges, which was a
new idea at the time, and folklore has it that
(09:15):
when Telford built his first suspension bridge, he had to
steady his nerves with a prayer before allowing the cables
to take on the weight of the structure, because even
though he had worked out the math, he still could
not be absolutely certain that this was going to work.
And suspension bridges are actually a really cool technology. It actually,
(09:36):
I guess will benefit us to describe how those work.
With a suspension bridge, typically what you have are a
pair of very tall towers and UH, these towers are
attached to the bridge via cables. You know, the typical
bridge has columns or pylons or piers underneath it that
(09:56):
holded up, but a suspension bridge doesn't. It has these
tower is that have cables attached from the tower first
to each other, and also there's vertical cables that attached
the main cables between the two towers and the bridge.
The towers actually support most of the weight. Specifically, they
(10:18):
support the force of compression. See compression pushes down on
the surface of the bridge. That compression is transferred to
the cables or chains that are attached the edges of
the bridge, the frame of the bridge, and that gets
transferred to the towers. Then you have supporting cables that
connect the towers to anchorage points on either side of
(10:38):
whatever you're building the bridge across, like a river, and
these cables support the tension forces created by the bridge.
So suspension bridges don't need any columns or pylons under them.
That frees up a lot of the space beneath the bridge.
But engineers like Telford, who were aware of how the
bridges should work, we're a little antsie of out how
(11:00):
things actually would work. Once everything was ready to go,
and luckily for us, physics tends to obey the law,
so the designs worked out in everyone's favor, but no
one was entirely sure at the time. Now, Telford's next
project was the Aqueduct, which must not be named because
I'm tired of trying to pronounce Welsh words, which was
(11:21):
a phenomenal success and that came as a great surprise
to numerous critics who were absolutely convinced it would fall
apart as soon as water was flowing, and it didn't.
It stayed together and ended up increasing the speed of
transportation in that part of England. After the aqueduct, or
well Wales, I should say England and Wales because it
was connecting the two. But after that Aqueduct, Telford became
(11:43):
the head engineer of the Caledonian Canal in Scotland. That's
a really big canal. It's sixty miles long and the
construction was a huge boon for Scotland at the time
because many people in Scotland had become homeless, and the
reason they became homeless is pretty dastardly. It was in
(12:06):
the wake of what has become known as the Highland Clearances,
which is a very polite way of describing what actually happened.
So this was a period when aristocratic people, so clan leaders, nobles,
decided it would make a great deal of sense to
evict Scottish families from their ancestral homes in order to
(12:27):
convert that land into sheep grazing territory, so converting it
from farms into gray's land. And Highlanders were forced to
leave their homes, and some of them had been in
those homes for centuries. The families had, I mean only
a few Highlanders are immortal. As the documentary series Highlander
teaches us, it's a really dark time in Scottish history
(12:48):
and it really dealt severe damage to Gaelic culture as
a result. What what seems to have happened the way
it tends to be described is that a lot of
clan leaders, for various reasons political reasons that were handed
down from the crown, from royals, had decided that rather
than be considered a clan leader, which came with a
(13:09):
bunch of responsibilities, including if someone in your clan acted up,
you were held responsible as leader, they started to call
themselves landlords instead, and that was a slippery slope that
led to these evictions. So Telford's canal took three decades
to construct, and it meant that he had to rely
heavily on a lot of labor from this part of Scotland,
(13:31):
so it gave a lot of people work when they
went home to harvest crops. He ended up hiring Irish workers,
which caused some real problems in the area. People locals
were upset at that, but Telford was already running over
budget and behind time, and unfortunately for everybody, by the
time the canal was finished, it was actually not terribly useful,
(13:56):
and that's because it just took two long to make
and technology had changed while the canal was being built.
It was built well and it's considered to be a
marvel of engineering, but ship building had changed so dramatically
by the time the canal was finished. Steamships had become
the new standard, and steamships needed more space than what
(14:18):
the canal could provide. The canal was actually too small
to accommodate steamships and so it wasn't as used used
as heavily as it had been planned. Now Telford would
go on to create super waterways. It's kind of like
super highways there were these interconnections that uh that put
various canals finally in contact with each other, so that
(14:41):
made shipping much more efficient. And in eighteen twenty he
became the very first president of the Institution of Civil
Engineers in Britain, so essentially kind of invented the discipline
of civil engineering, or at least was instrumental in the
invention of that discipline. Tell made another major contribution to
England's transportation system as well. One of his most important
(15:04):
improvements involved raising the foundation of a road in the
center of the road to aid in draining water. So
he he was very good at building roads. He used
these large flat stones as the foundation and by raising
that center, water would drain off it much more effectively.
It wouldn't pool and destroy the road over time, and
(15:26):
his work was so successful that it became the standard
road design in England and beyond. One of Telford's contemporaries
and rivals was a guy named Isambard Kingdom Brunel. And
if that name sounds at all familiar, well you might
remember him when we did our episode on subways. He
was very important in that episode. He was the son
(15:47):
of a French engineer the French engineer had actually fled
to England during the French Revolution, so Brunell grew up
in England, although he also studied in France post Revolution.
Brunell worked on many important projects throughout his career, but
he's probably best remembered for his tunnels and his underground systems.
He designed underground passages that even passed beneath bodies of
(16:09):
water like the River Thames, and he also designed several
rail railways and steamships in his time. Uh Speaking of steamships,
the idea had been kicking around since the days of
Leonardo da Vinci, but until the eighteenth century, no one
had managed to actually make a practical steamship. People had tried.
There were several challenges that were facing engineers at the time.
(16:32):
A big one was to create a mechanism that would
translate the reciprocal motion of a piston into a rotary
motion that could turn a wheel. So pistons move up
and down or left and right in a cylinder, whereas
wheels turn in a circle. So you have to figure
out a way to translate one style of motion into another,
(16:53):
and it took a while before that happened. In other words,
how do you get that simple up, down or left
right motion to become a circle? Well, Thomas Newcomin came
up with that. That was the invention that he said
he was most proud of, even beyond his improvements to
the basic steam engine. Uh, it was essentially kind of
a ratchet that allowed for this translation of motion. It
(17:13):
was the first big step to solving that particular problem. Now,
the other big challenge was to create a steam engine
capable of providing enough power to actually move a boat
through the water. Now, as I mentioned in the last episode,
early steam engines relied on using condensation to create a
vacuum and pull a piston downward. They did not use
steam to create pressure and push the piston upward because
(17:36):
the materials they were using couldn't withstand that intense pressure
that steam would create, and they were considered too dangerous.
It was just a recipe for disaster. You would have
a boiler explode and that could be deadly. Now, patents
for steamboats state all the way back to sixteen eighteen
when David Ramsey was awarded a patent for his design. Now,
there's no evidence that Ramsey ever managed to actually build
(17:58):
anything approaching a steam powered boat, and other inventors followed suit.
There was one named John Allen who patented a steamboat
design in seventeen nine, and another one was proposed by
Englishman Jonathan Holes in seventeen thirty six. Holes His approach
was to use a Newcoming engine, although again he never
(18:18):
built such a boat as far as we can tell.
For an actual working boat, you have to actually look
fifty years later, so three that's when Clode Francois Dorote
Joefrey Dabam, who, as you can imagine from that name,
was a French nobleman, built a boat powered by a
(18:40):
Newcoming two cylinder engine, and he demonstrated on a river
in France and showed that such a boat could actually
sail against the river's current under its own power. It
didn't require manpower or animal power to turn some sort
of device in order to go against the current. It's
really kind of challenging to explain how monumental this was
(19:02):
in the transportation industry at the time. But people realize
the promise of steam power would be to make everything easier,
including the shipment of cargo and people. So Joe Frey's
invention actually broke apart in the river it was not.
It was not designed to last very long. It shook
itself apart. Essentially, the boat began to split, the engine
(19:24):
began to fall apart. He was able to pilot the
boat back to the river bank before it completely disintegrated
on him, and got to shore safely. He would just
a few years later flee France himself, because that was
just as the French Revolution was getting into the swing
of things. Now, James Watt, who we talked about in
(19:46):
the last episode, invented the condenser, which made it much
more efficient. It being steam engines made steam engines much
more efficient. You no longer had to heat up and
cool down the cylinder that the piston in it. You
could keep it the same temperature, and you allowed the
condenser to pull steam in and condense into water. And
water started getting a trans Atlantic accident on there for
(20:10):
some reason, turn into water and uh create that vacuum
pressure that would pull a piston downward. And also because
around this time when people began to experiment with double
stroke engines, that's when you use steam to provide both
the push on the upstroke of a piston and the
pull on the downstroke of the piston, and makes an
(20:31):
engine much more efficient because it's doing work in both
ways rather than just pulling and then allowing gravity to
reset the piston. Watson's invention would become the foundation for
working steamboats in the future. Now, I've talked a lot
about Britain in these episodes, because Britain is the birthplace
of the Industrial Revolution, There's no question about that. Uh.
(20:55):
A lot of innovations happened in Britain first and then
eventually made their way to other parts of the world. However,
when we start talking about steamboats, we actually have to
shift our focus over to America. American engineers were facing
a pretty big challenge that the Brits weren't facing. Specifically,
they were not allowed to use British technology. Britain had
(21:17):
passed laws making it illegal to share trade secrets or
sell certain things like steam engines. So, in other words,
all that information got caught up and stuck and stayed
in Britain. Now, the reason for this was that Britain
was really trying to maintain trade superiority for as long
(21:37):
as it possibly could, and part of that was just
keeping all this this information secret so that only Britain
could take advantage of it, so American engineers were forced
to design their own steam engines. Now they had a
general idea of how the British ones were working, so
it's not like they were going completely from scratch, but
it still was a big challenge, and one trio that
(21:58):
gave it a shot can sisted of an inventor named
John Stevens, his wealthy brother in law Robert Livingstone, and
a machinist named Nicholas J. Roosevelt. Their efforts were somewhat
hampered by Livingston, who felt that since he was providing
all the cash, he should have a major input into
how the boat was actually constructed, despite the fact that
(22:21):
he didn't have the expertise of the other two. But
the other two had very little bargaining power because Livingstone
was the guy footing the bill. So despite protestations from
Roosevelt and from Stevens, Livingstone's design was what stuck, and
the resulting boat barely moved in still water. In fact,
(22:43):
on the first test it didn't go anywhere. The second test,
it moved very slowly in stillwater, something like three miles
per hour, so it could not really fight against the current,
and it also shook itself apart after a short while.
By the way, don't think that Robert Livingstone was a dummy.
He was a smart guy. In fact, he was instrumental
(23:05):
in in American history. He's the guy who essentially brokered
the Louisiana purchase deal between France and America. So very
important historically, just not necessarily the guy you want on
your team when you're designing a steam engine. However, Livingston
met another man who also shared an interest in steam power,
and that man was Robert Fulton. He was an American
(23:27):
who originally wanted to make his living as an artist.
He painted a portrait of Benjamin Franklin and felt that
he was on his way to becoming a great artist,
but his career path was cut short after he had
a disappointing meeting with another American artist who was living
in London. Fulton actually took his all of his money,
traveled to London. He had a letter of invitation, our
(23:50):
introduction for this American artist. Met with the American artist,
who is kind but essentially said no, I don't want
you as a student. You don't have what it takes.
But fortunately Fulton met Livingstone and they began to talk
and they realized they shared a lot of common interests,
including engineering and specifically in steam engines. Fulton had become
(24:12):
really obsessed with ships in general and steam engines in particular,
and Fulton saw in Livingstone a potential source of funding
for his work, pretty much the same way that Stevens
had seen Livingston earlier. So Fulton and Livingstone entered into
a partnership in which they would split the profits of
(24:33):
their work fifty fifty. That was a sore spot for Livingstone,
who argued that his money was more valuable than Fulton's work,
but Fulton was able to argue him down to the
point where they agreed, we're going to take a half
share each. So Fulton designed a steam powered flat bottomed
paddle boat. His original model actually used something similar to
(24:55):
a bicycle chain to power the paddles, but he would
eventually abandon that for more of a ratchet approach like
the newcoming engine version would use. So the paddle boat
itself wasn't a new idea that had actually been around
for centuries, although of course it had been powered by
either animals or people, not by steam, but Fulton's mechanisms
(25:17):
to provide power gave it the new Twist, and they
filed a patent for the design back in eighteen o two.
Fulton launched a steamboat named Claremont C L E R
M O N T in New York in eighteen o seven.
Now that would provide passage for for travelers between New
York City and Albany. So it made a trip to
(25:41):
Albany and then made a trip back from Albany to
New York City safely. And it proved that steam power
could be used to transport people in cargo. So before
long shipbuilders began to write rely heavily on steam power,
even for Transatlantic passages. Now I should add that the
steamships traveling the ocean, those were not the same design
as the flat bottom boats that were meant to float
(26:02):
on rivers here in America. The first ship to provide
regular transatlantic service didn't come from America at all. It
of course came from Britain. So while Britain did not
pioneer the steam boat, they did pioneer the steam ship,
and that first ship was called the S. S. Great Western,
(26:23):
which was built by none other than Isambard Kingdom Brunel
in eighteen thirty seven. So no longer were ships reliant
on the winds or on human powered ores or any
other mechanism. They could have a steam engine drive them
from location to location no matter what the weather was
or which way the currents were going, and travel and
shipping speeds increased dramatically, which drove up demand for trade
(26:48):
while steamboats were making waves in America. See what I
did there with boats and waves. Back in Britain, engineers
were experimenting with steam powered engines designed to push or
pull cart on tracks, which were the first locomotives. So
there was an engineer named Richard Trevithick who built the
first full scale locomotive in eighteen o four steam powered
(27:11):
locomotive in eighteen o four. But he was way ahead
of his time uh and while he built a working model,
most people weren't ready for it. They didn't think it
was a proven technology, and so he didn't receive enough
support to move forward into production. George Stephenson succeeded where
Trevithick failed, building a successful steam engine in eighteen fourteen.
(27:36):
And that engine's name was Bluecker and it could pull
thirty tons at a speed of four miles per hour.
I'm told that the Brits actually pronounced it Blcher, which
makes sense because it's spelled b l u with an
oomal out c h e er uh. The correct pronunciation
if you're going with the German or Prussian, as it
turns out, is more blucker. But they were Blucher. So
(27:58):
it was named after a Prussian general who was a
war hero in the Napoleonic Wars, and in fact, the
following year, in eighteen fifteen, Bluecher would lead an army
in a very hasty march to a little battleground called Waterloo,
which was the site of Napoleon's defeat. So Bluecher ended
up being a great name for a device meant to
(28:18):
move a lot of weight at a relatively fast pace. Now,
the locomotive became a dominant force in transportation within a
couple of decades. America's first locomotive was a British machine
called the Stourbridge Lion, and it wasn't a huge success
because the way of the machine was so great that
the American rails split underneath it. They had to re
(28:41):
engineer that. American engineer Peter Cooper built the first steam
locomotive in America that was American made, and that one
was called the tom Thumb and it moved at a
blistering eighteen miles per hour, which was pretty fast at
the time, and carried thirty six passengers on its first
run in eighteen thirty. So by the middle of the
nineteenth century, transportation had completely transformed. In less than a century,
(29:06):
road systems were redesigned, steamships were traveling across rivers and oceans,
and locomotives could do the work of dozens of teams
of horses. Steam engines continued to also power the growing
industries like textile and iron working industries. They were actually
powering the machinery in those factories. So all of this
(29:27):
industry ended up having a big requirement. They needed people
to do a lot of this work. So let's talk
a little bit about what was like being a member
of this working class that formed as a result of
the Industrial Revolution and these innovations. So keep in mind,
all this stuff made production cheaper and easier, and and
(29:47):
transportation cheaper and easier, So it meant that the price
of goods was dropping. It meant that trade was exploding.
It also meant that banks were being created in order
to handle the monetary weight of what was going on.
You had the British Empire growing as a result through
(30:09):
both conquest and trade, so big time of change. It
also meant that you had to have a lot of
bodies in these factories to actually make the stuff work.
Um and other things like conflicts throughout the world. We're
creating more requirements for clothing, for weapons, for fuel, for
all that sort of stuff. So there was a high demand.
(30:32):
It was an exciting time. So let's talk about working.
Perhaps the biggest revolution of them all really came down
to how work was done before the Industrial Revolution. Let's
say you're a cloth merchant. You're someone who sells cloth.
That process is not very straightforward. First, you would have
to purchase raw wool from shepherds. Then you would take
(30:56):
it to spinners and you would hire spinners to spin
the raw wool into yarn. You would then take that
yarn to weavers and pay the weavers to weave that
yarn into cloth, and then you would have to sell
the cloth to customers. And that means each time you
know you're you're selling, price of the cloth has to
be great enough to cover all the expenses leading up
(31:17):
to creating that cloth. That's why it was pretty expensive
at the time. It wasn't until the Industrial Revolution, where
this was streamlined and the cost for production went way down,
that suddenly these these finished goods could be of a
much better price. Some people actually called this earlier version
(31:38):
of the way things were done a putting out process.
You had to put out everything onto a different group
of people in order to get something finished. Some people
called it the domestic system, and some people referred to
this sort of stuff as a cottage industry, meaning that
people were actually working out of their own homes. It
was a multi step process that employed lots of people
(31:59):
to make a real, at least small amount of product.
But the Industrial Revolution changed all that. Now it was
possible to produce huge amounts of product like textiles, but
you also needed a much larger group of people in
order to actually run all the equipment. So while you
could have one spinner run a machine that could spend
(32:22):
multiple spools of yarn uh simultaneously, whereas before you would
have to do it one at a time. You could
do that, but it's still meant that in order to
meet the major demand, you actually had a lot more
people in place. Now, some merchants began building larger structures
to house workers during work hours, so in other words,
(32:43):
you are no longer relying on people working out of
their houses. They would actually travel to a work location
and work there for a shift, which makes sense because
most of these factories were located next to rivers or
other structures other natural boundaries that gave them some sort
(33:04):
of advantage either in the production or the shipping or
both of the material. So this was the factory. Originally,
the word factory referred to the office of a manager
of an estate, so a state manager's office was the factory,
but by the sixteen hundreds the word had limited use
to refer to a place where manufacturing happened. Uh and
(33:25):
the real rise of the factory was truly the nineteenth century.
The eighteen hundreds, the need for workers created opportunities for
people who otherwise would have just remained farmers or they
would have had very little employment at all. So this
drove a migration from farmlands to cities. People were moving
to where work was. If there wasn't enough work where
they were, they could go to a city and work
(33:47):
at a factory, and cities were growing exponentially in that
time period. Urban growth was exploding as a result of
all this. So, once upon a time, farming was the
dominant occupation in all the world. But as a result
of the Industrial Revolution, the percentage of people who are
farmers compared to the overall population began to shrink, and
(34:08):
began to shrink pretty drastically. At the same time, we
were making some progress in other areas like sanitation and medicine,
so we were starting to learn how to maintain people's health,
how to keep people from getting sick, how to keep
water systems clean. Uh, we began to learn more about
(34:29):
how to protect people when they are at their most vulnerable,
such as during the act of childbirth. Also, lifespans were
increasing because we were getting better at treating people. Largely,
lifespans were increasing simply because we're getting better and making
sure people reached the age of twenty one. There's this
common misconception that the lifespan during the Middle Ages was
(34:50):
around thirty years old because people died of old age
when they were thirty. That's not the case. The reason
why the the lifespan was so shut was that your
odds of making it to adulthood were pretty low. A
lot of people died either when they were infants or children.
(35:12):
But if you could make it too about eighteen or twenty,
you had a good chance of living a nice long life,
assuming you avoid major illness or injury. Uh. This era,
the Industrial Revolution, was one where we started to get
better about the practices that could lead to illness and injury.
(35:33):
And because the machines were doing a lot of the
hard work, it meant that people no longer had to
do this by hand. Like the stuff that would require
a lot of repetitive, monotonous motions or carrying heavy weight.
A lot of that was being done done by machine
now not by people, though not all of it, and
monany was still a big problem. Uh. Working in a
(35:56):
factory was not a picnic. It was hot and difficult
and crowded, and and you were dedicated to a specific task.
So you're doing that same task over and over again
throughout the entire day. Women, men, and children all worked
in factories during the Industrial Revolution, entire families would Typically
(36:18):
the women and men would earn a tiny amount, like
ten cents an hour in the United States terms, whereas
the children would be earning a penny an hour. Uh.
It was not a way to get rich. It was,
and and typically an entire family would be working, often
in the same factory because they couldn't afford to have
(36:40):
a single person work and someone else looking after the
home that they wouldn't make enough money. Wages were really low,
pretty much as low as business owners could get away
with in order to continue to maximize profits, and a
work week was six days long and a shift could
last between twelve and fourteen hours in a day. Meanwhile,
(37:02):
that explosion and urban growth did not mean suddenly all
these luxurious accommodations were appearing everywhere, and in a lot
of cities we were seeing cheap, flimsy housing being hastily
constructed to take advantage of all the incoming populations of workers.
And landlords were a lot like factory owners. They were
trying to maximize their profits. They would cram as many
(37:24):
tenants as they could into a building in order to
get as many renters as possible. So it was a
fairly grim situation. Now, you might think that in that
situation the workers would have some significant power because there
were a lot of them. They're way more workers than
there were factory owners, so you'd think, well, they could
(37:46):
just band together and demand better conditions and the factory
owners would ultimately have to bow to them if they
were actually able to unionize. Well, the ruling powers in
England didn't like that idea so much. Um England traditionally
had had a lot of reluctance to allow lower classes
(38:07):
to have any kind of power or say and how
things were going, so why change things now. They actually
discouraged people from organizing into a labor force that could
fight for the rights of employees by passing laws Britain passed.
Britain's parliament passed the Combination Acts of sev eighteen hundred,
(38:29):
and it actually made it illegal for workers to unionize.
If you tried to unionize workers, if you were an
employee and you were trying to convince others to banned
with you so that you could leverage your work against
the factory owners and demand better conditions, you could be
sentenced to either three months in prison or two months
(38:50):
of hard labor. So it's pretty grim. And those acts
remained law until eighteen twenty four, so a quarter of
the century. Essentially, this was the law of the land.
They were finally overthrown and perhaps predictably immediately after they
were overthrown. There were a series of workers strikes throughout
(39:13):
all of Britain, and in fact, the following year in
Parliament attempted to reinstate the the Acts, but that movement
failed and they never were reinstated. Meanwhile, so you've got
the working class, this very poor new class of people
in Britain. They hadn't existed before. Before they would have
been farmers or perhaps small uh skilled workers of some sort,
(39:38):
like they might be a blacksmith or a weaver, but
now they are factory workers, the working class. You had
another new class as well, that would be the industrial capitalists.
And these were the people who had the money to
start up the businesses. They were the ones who were
funding the building of a factory, the operation of an industry,
(40:00):
and they would use the profits from that industry to
improve that business, including the funding of canals and bridges
and roads throughout all of Britain. So their work would
benefit other people, but they were largely doing it to
benefit their own business, to to maximize profits even more.
And some of these people came from humble origins. They
(40:23):
weren't all very highly educated people. Some of them came
from families that were very similar to the families working
in the factories, but because of their wealth, they wielded
as much or more power as the traditional noble houses
in England at that time. Um, remember this is a
time when the noble houses, you know, the House of Lords,
(40:46):
had largely lost a lot of its power and uh,
nobility was now looked upon with something of of disdain
because a lot of the noble noble houses no longer
had any money. Uh they had titles and they had
they had the states, but they didn't necessarily have wealth,
whereas you had this new class of industrial capitalists who
(41:07):
might not have any title to their name, but we're
fabulously wealthy. So it was a very different time in
Britain's history. Now, that change, this whole change with the
working class and the industrial capitalists, that didn't go on
without any resistance. In fact, weavers would lead the way.
They protested the change from the cottage industry to factory production.
(41:30):
Early on you get stories about weavers who were upset
at factories. They felt one the factory was going to
put them out of business, and two that factories were
going to produce work that was inferior to what a weaver.
A traditional weaver would make, so there was a bit
(41:51):
of pride and a bit of self preservation in this.
They would protest this change by breaking looms. This was
an era in which the term sabotage came to prominence.
So there's a most likely apocryphal story that some weavers
threw their shoes into a loom essentially a giant water
(42:15):
powered loom, in order to destroy it. So they're coming
up the works with their shoes, and shoes in French
is sabo, so sabotage is this act of throwing one's
shoes into machinery to destroy the machines, normally as part
of a labor dispute. But most etymologists agree that that
particular story is likely just a folk tale. So don't
(42:37):
write to me and say, hey, you said sabotage comes
from throwing shoes into machines, and it says here that's
not true. I agree. It's just that the most widely
used explanation comes from the mostly most likely untrue story
that shoes have everything to do with sabotage. But there's
(42:58):
another word that also came up during this era that
also gets misused a lot, and that is the word luddite.
Now today we usually interpret luddite as someone who opposes
or doesn't adopt technological advances. So a person refusing to
get a cell phone could be called a luddite by
somebody like, Oh, you're such a luddite you won't even
get a cell phone. So we use that term just
(43:20):
I mean, you aren't going to embrace technology. You think
it's bad for some reason. But in the Industrial Revolution,
Luddites were workers in England who destroyed machinery in waves
of labor disputes during the early eighteen hundreds. Uh. They
were doing so against the law, obviously, and Parliament got
very nervous about this. Uh They you know, England had
(43:42):
already been through a civil war a couple of centuries earlier,
and Parliament was not eager to have that happen again,
so it began to assign soldiers to defend factories. Thousands
of soldiers were deployed throughout Britain to guard factories against
mobs of the working class, and the Luddites ended up
taking their name from a man named ned Lud who
(44:06):
inspired and led them to cause mischief throughout all of England.
This guy almost went Christopher walking here. This guy went
all over England. He would show up in all sorts
of villages everywhere to lead people in opposition to factory owners.
And the British authorities were having a heck of a
(44:27):
time tracking this guy down. It seemed like every time
they were responding to one crisis, he would pop up
somewhere else in England, almost magically. And the reason for
this is because ned Lud was not a real person.
He was a story. He was an idea concocted by
the Luddites themselves, kind of as a symbol of their movement.
(44:49):
Uh So, ned Lud was not a real person, but
the Luddites did take their name from ned Lud. Now,
there was someone who may have been named Lud or Ludham,
who was working as a weaver in a factory, who
might have inspired the name, but the person himself didn't exist. Now,
(45:09):
as it turns out, the Luddites weren't really organized in
any meaningful way. They were very passionate and they generally
agreed on their cause, but they weren't this massive underground
organization that Parliament was terrified of. And the workers actually
suffered way more than any of the machinery they attacked dead.
(45:30):
In April of eighteen twelve, a mob of workers were
fired upon by soldiers. A factory owner ordered the soldiers
to fire into the crowd, and as a result, three
people were killed and at least eighteen were wounded, and
more were killed in a different clash on the following day.
So violent confrontations like these would continue for the next
(45:51):
several years. Here's the thing. The Luddites weren't actually opposing
industrial machines. They depended on those machines to do their work,
so they were not anti technology. What the Luddites opposed
were what they viewed as cruel labor conditions that exploited
employees and benefited the owners. They targeted manufacturers who used
(46:14):
factories in a fraudulent and deceitful manner. What they really
wanted was better wages. They wanted the assurance that people
who were working the machines would actually be trained as
apprentices and learn how to use the machines before being
assigned a machine. Uh. This was sort of a point
of a pride to make sure that the finished product
(46:36):
was a good product and not just one that's super
cheaply made. In order to benefit the factory owner, and
all of this seems like a pretty humble set of demands.
If you ask me, you know they're they're just asking
to be paid a fair wage and to make sure
that the business isn't cutting corners when it comes to production.
(46:56):
But now today we just considered luddite to be a
term for somebody who doesn't like technology. It's kind of
interesting considering that's not what the original intent was, although
they did try and destroy machines in order to to
get their point across. Eventually workers were able to unionize legally,
but it took decades after they unionized before conditions would
(47:19):
start to really improve. Even into the Victorian era in
the mid to late eighteen hundreds, factories were still crowded
and dangerous, and London had more than its share of
slums filled with working class families and the unemployed. All
you have to read is any Charles Dickens novel and
you'll understand. You'll see this, uh that this was still
(47:41):
an issue in Britain decades after the unions were finally
able to form. Now, what about the rest of the world.
I've talked a lot about Britain, a little bit about America.
Why haven't I talked about other places. Well, it's largely
because the industrialization of other countries followed in the footsteps
of Britain by a few but lagged a few decades
(48:02):
behind um. And some places had better excuses than others,
Like France and America both had pretty good excuses. They
both were undergoing revolutionary wars around the same time Britain
was undergoing its industrial revolution, and the war was taking
way more of the focus of the people of France
and the people of America than any sort of industrial
(48:25):
revolution could America. Obviously, they concluded their revolutionary war well
ahead of time before France did, before France had even
had a revolution, and so we're able to move on,
and so they caught up not too long after that.
American ingenuity was something that people were very proud of,
(48:47):
and they were able to catch up to the Brits
before too long. France had the other drawback that after
the French Revolution there were the Napoleonic Wars, which did
not end until eighteen fifteen, so they didn't move into
industrialization until after that. Essentially, around that same time, the
other nations in Europe began to follow suit, and so
(49:11):
you started to see this pattern where countries were becoming
industrialized following similar pathways that Britain followed, but several decades behind.
So that's why we tell the story of the Industrial
Revolution largely with Britain in mind, because it acts as
the model for everybody else. But once they got started,
they actually caught up to Britain pretty quickly. So in
(49:33):
other words, it didn't take the decades and decades and
decades of work that happened in Britain to get up
to about the same speed that Britain was currently at,
and what followed was an unprecedented era of production and commerce.
Other inventions would also contribute to a very rapidly changing world.
You might remember I did an episode with Holly from
(49:56):
Stuff You Missed in History Class about the sewing machine,
for example, which it's hard, it's hard to believe, but
the sewing machine is the subject of one of the
nastiest patent wars of all time. There were people who
were willing to to kill or die for their designs
of the sewing machine. But that was another big uh
(50:18):
invention that came out around this time, and innovation was
also changing farming, which was important because so many people
were leaving the profession of farming to go to cities
and try something else. A guy named Cyrus McCormick invented
several large machines that were important in farming, including one
that was in on a motorizer or mechanized I guess
(50:40):
should I should say a mechanized reaper designed to harvest
crops far more quickly than you could by hand. So
farmers could use machines to meet the demand of these
larger populations of non farmers. You know, they were able
to the one farmer was now able to do the
work of ten or twenty farm hands. You these machines
(51:01):
because they were much more efficient and fast. When the
Industrial Revolution was coming to an end in the middle
of the nineteenth century, the stage was set. Not long
after this period we would see an unprecedented era of
scientific discoveries. Some people refer to it as the Second
Industrial Revolution, because that's when mass production really became a thing,
(51:23):
when corporations came into existence, and when we started to
see people harness things like electricity and discover radio waves,
which ended up powering all these ideas, I mean literally
powering in the case of electricity, all these ideas including
radio and television that followed in that Second Industrial Revolution,
(51:46):
and it also allowed for the age of discovery, where
we had scientists all over the world starting to break
new ground in our understanding of the universe, including in
really weird areas like quantum physics. So that wraps up
our epic three episode arc on the Industrial Revolution, and honestly,
I could have easily made this a four part series.
(52:07):
This episode has been pretty long, but I could have
gone into even more detail than I already did. And
perhaps in the future I'll devote an entire episode on
one of the technologies or one of the innovators I've
talked about in these shows. For now, however, let's close
the door on the Industrial Revolution. Next week, we'll have
an entirely new topic to talk about. That promise, And
(52:27):
if you guys have any suggestions for future episodes of
tech Stuff, please get in touch with me. My email
address is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com,
or you can drop me a line on Twitter or Facebook.
My handle at both of those is text stuff H
s W. And I'll talk to you again really soon
(52:52):
for more on this and bathos of other topics. Is
it a stop works dot com, one
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.