Industry, Energy, & Geography

The hearth of modern industry—meaning the manufacturing of goods in a factory—was in northern England and southern Scotland during the second half of the eighteenth century. From that hearth, industry diffused to Europe and to North America in the nineteenth century and to other regions in the twentieth century.

The Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution was defined in Chapter 2 as a series of improvements in industrial technology that transformed the process of manufacturing goods. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, industry was geographically dispersed across the landscape. People made household tools and agricultural equipment in their own homes or obtained them in the local village. Home-based manufacturing was known as the cottage industry system.

The catalyst of the Industrial Revolution was technology, and several inventions transformed the way in which goods were manufactured. The invention most important to the development of factories was the steam engine, patented in 1769 by James Watt, a maker of mathematical instruments in Glasgow, Scotland. The large supply of steam power available from Watt’s steam engines induced firms to concentrate all their process steps in one building attached to a single power source.

The revolution in industrial technology created an unprecedented expansion in productivity and ultimately resulted in substantially higher standards of living. For example, the Industrial Revolution was cited in Chapter 2 as a principal cause of population growth in stage 2 of the demographic transition. Watt’s engine and other inventions enabled the United Kingdom to become the world’s dominant industrial power during the nineteenth century.

The term Industrial Revolution is somewhat misleading:

• The transformation was far more than industrial; it resulted in new social, economic, and political inventions, not just industrial ones.

• The changes involved a gradual diffusion of new ideas and techniques over decades rather than an instantaneous revolution.

• Nonetheless, the term is commonly used to define the process that began in the United Kingdom in the late 1700s.

Among the first industries impacted by the Industrial Revolution were:

• Iron. The first industry to benefit from Watt’s steam engine was the iron tool industry. The usefulness of iron had been known for centuries, but it was difficult to produce because ovens had to be constantly heated, which was difficult before the steam engine (Figure 11-1).

• Textiles. Textile production was transformed from a dispersed cottage industry to a concentrated factory system during the late eighteenth century. In 1768, Richard Arkwright, a barber and wigmaker in Preston, England, invented machines to untangle cotton prior to spinning. Too large to fit inside a cottage, spinning frames were placed inside factories near sources of rapidly flowing water, which supplied the power.

• Chemicals. The chemical industry was created to bleach and dye cloth. In 1746, John Roebuck and Samuel Garbett established a factory to bleach cotton with sulfuric acid obtained from burning coal. When combined with various metals, sulfuric acid produced another acid called vitriol, used for dying clothing.

• Food processing. In 1810, French confectioner Nicolas Appert started canning food in glass bottles sterilized in boiling water. Canned food helped to feed the factory workers who no longer lived on farms.

Nineteenth Century Iron Factory

Bilston Iron Company’s Stonefield Iron Works, Bilston, United Kingdom. Bilston was one of the first cities to be transformed by the Industrial Revolution.

Pause & Reflect 11.1.1

How would each of the four major industries involved in the Industrial Revolution have affected the everyday lives of ordinary people?

Transportation

Transportation improvements played a critical role in diffusing the Industrial Revolution from its hearth in the United Kingdom. First canals and then railroads enabled factories to attract large numbers of workers, bring in bulky raw materials such as iron ore and coal, and ship finished goods to consumers.

Transportation Hearth: The World’s First Railway

The Stockton & Darlington Railway opened in the north of England in 1825. When the railway’s centennial was observed in 1925, the original locomotive and cars from 1825 were brought from a museum to run on the original route. This is a colorized version of a black-and-white photo of the 1925 parade.

Diffusion of the Industrial Revolution

The construction of railroads in the United Kingdom and on the European continent reflects the diffusion of the Industrial Revolution. Europe’s political problems impeded the diffusion of the railroad. Cooperation among small neighboring states was essential to build an efficient rail network and to raise money for constructing and operating the system. Because such cooperation could not be attained, railroads in some parts of Europe were delayed 50 years after their debut in the United Kingdom.

Industrial Clusters

Industry is not distributed uniformly around the world. Rather, it is concentrated in three of the nine world regions discussed in Chapter 10: Europe, North America, and East Asia. One-half of the world’s industrial output is clustered in China, the United States, Japan, and Germany (Figure 11-4). See next page for more detail.

Industrial Output, 2017