The fossil fuels revolution greatly increased the energy available to human societies.

steam engines

• 1765 -- development of a general-purpose steam engine by James Watt (University of Glasgow in Scotland)

• Steam engines burned coal to boil water and create steam, which drove mechanical devices that performed work.

• Before Watt’s time, primitive steam engines had powered pumps that drew water out of coal mines, but those devices consumed too much fuel to be useful for other purposes.

• Watt's Innovation:

  • • Watt’s version relied on steam to force a piston to turn a wheel, whose rotary motion converted a simple pump into an engine that had multiple uses.

    • Watt’s contemporaries used the term horsepower to measure the energy generated by his steam engine, which did the work of numerous animals.

• By 1800 more than a thousand of Watt’s steam engines were in use in the British isles.

  • • They were especially prominent in the textile industry, where their application resulted in greater productivity for manufacturers and cheaper prices for consumers

internal combustion engine

• 1680s -- initial experiments in internal combustion engine by Dutch scientists

• 1859 -- French engineer, Jean-Joseph-Étienne Lenoir built an internal combustion engine that could operate continuously. Lenoir's engine used coal gas

• 1879 -- a German engineer, Nikolaus Otto developed engine known as the "Otto cycle."

• 1885 -- Gottlieb Daimler developed an engine that resembles the motors in twenty-first-century cars. Daimler's engine was small compared to a steam engine, and it operated continuously, for as long as petroleum was available to fuel it.

  • • used his motor to drive a four-wheeled vehicle

fossil fuels

coal

oil

steel

• 1709 British smelters began to use coke (a purified form of coal) rather than more expensive charcoal as a fuel to produce iron

  • • coke made it possible for producers to build bigger blast furnaces and turn out larger lots of iron

• 1856 Henry Bessemer built a refined blast furnace known as the Bessemer converter that made it possible to produce steel cheaply and in large quantities.

chemicals

• 1820--Quinine isolated from bark of the Cinchona tree by French chemists Pierre Pelletier and Joseph Caventou.

  • • before this, the bark was dried, ground to a fine powder, and mixed into a liquid (commonly wine) in order to be drunk

    • Large-scale use of quinine was now possible

    • Sub-Saharan Africa

      • • Without Quinine, 77% of white soldiers died

          • • Those who survived were often invalids

        • Without Quinine, less than 10% of mixed race Caribbean soldiers died

• 1839 -- vulcanization developed by American Charles Goodyear

• 1866 -- Dynamite developed by Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel

• 1869 -- new group of materials known as plastics developed by American John Wesley Hyatt

• 1909-1910 -- chemically synthesized fertilizer developed by Germans Fritz Harbor and Carl Bosch

electricity

• Michael Faraday

  • • 1831 and 1832 discovered the operating principle of electromagnetic generators...“Faraday’s Law”

    • The improvements in electrical-generation technology increased the efficiency and reliability greatly in the nineteenth century.

Development of the telephone and electric light-bulb we both based on previous attempts from other inventors

• Alexander Graham Bell invented the first workable telephone

  • • first long-distance telephone call was made on August 10, 1876

• Thomas Edison, commonly credited with inventing the lightbulb

  • • Edison founded the successful Menlo Park research lab to produce innovation

    • Edison and Nikola Tesla (Serbian-American) both advocated different systems of electricity delivery; eventually, Tesla’s alternating current (AC) system proved more practical.

    • 1879, Edison had produced a new concept: a high resistance lamp in a very high vacuum, which would burn for hundreds of hours

    • Electric lighting in factories greatly improved working conditions, eliminating the heat and pollution caused by gas lighting, and reducing the fire hazard

      • • Electric light was much brighter than that of oil or gas lamps, there was no soot, and electricity to power it was cheaper than oil or gas.

precision machinery

• availability of inexpensive, high-quality iron and steel reinforced the move toward mechanization

• steel quickly began to replace iron in tools, machines, and structures that required high strength

New innovations made exploration, development, and communication possible in interior regions globally, which led to increased trade and migration.

Railroads

Ranch economies

• Argentina

  • • British investors encouraged the development of cattle and sheep ranching

    • 1860s and the invention of refrigerated cargo ships, meat became Argentina’s largest export

    • Argentina became Britain’s principal supplier of meat

United States--Transcontinental Railroad completed in 1869

• • • cheap and fast transportation for agricultural commodities made the modern development of the plains possible

    • Railroads hauled grain, beef, and hogs from the plains states, cotton and tobacco from the south, lumber from the northwest, iron and steel from the mills of Pittsburgh, and finished products from the eastern industrial cities.

Standard time in the United States

• 1883 railroad companies divided the North American continent into four zones in which all railroad clocks read precisely the same time.

• The general public quickly adopted “railroad time” in place of local sun time

• 1918 the U.S. government legally established the four time zones as the nation’s official framework of time

Canada--transcontinental Canadian Pacific Railroad completed in 1885

• increased wheat production and the extraction of rich mineral resources, including gold, silver, copper, nickel, and asbestos

Consequences

• railroads helped European colonizers to maintain their hegemony and organize local economies to their own advantage.

• Rail transportation enabled colonial officials and armies to travel quickly through the colonies.

• It also facilitated trade in raw materials and the distribution of European manufactured goods in the colonies

steamships

• 1830s--British naval engineers adapted steam power to military uses and built large, ironclad ships equipped with powerful guns

  • • steamships traveled much faster than any sailing vessel, and as an additional advantage they could ignore the winds and travel in any direction.

    • could travel much farther upriver than sailboats, which depended on convenient winds

    • steamships enabled imperialists to project power deep into the interior regions of foreign lands

• Steam-powered gunboats later introduced European power to inland sites throughout Africa and Asia

  • • 1842 the British gunboat Nemesis led an expedition up the Yangzi River that brought the Opium War to a conclusion

• facilitated the building and maintenance of empires by enabling naval vessels to travel rapidly between the world’s seas and oceans

• lowered the costs of trade between imperial powers and subject lands

Before and after:

• 1830s -- took as long as two years for a British correspondent to receive a reply to a letter sent to India by sailing ship

• 1850s -- after the introduction of steamships, correspondence could make the round-trip between London and Bombay in four months

• 1869 (Post Suez Canal) -- steamships traveled from Britain to India in less than two weeks

the telegraph

• 1830s-- Telegraph wires carried communications over land

• 1850s --engineers devise reliable submarine cables for the transmission of messages

• By 1870 -- submarine cables carried messages between Britain and India in about five hours

• By 1902 cables linked all parts of the British empire throughout the world,

  • • other European states maintained cables to support communications with their own colonies

Structural element of empire:

• Imperial officials could rapidly mobilize forces to deal with troubles

• merchants could respond quickly to developments of economic and commercial significance