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The Day the World Took Off is a Channel 4 2000 six-part documentary series about the roots of the Industrial Revolution in England.
Five historians of science and industry gathered at the University of Cambridge to discuss why the Industrial Revolution occurred in England, at the time it did.
From 1650 to 1740 the population of England was essentially static - due to infant mortality and many water-borne diseases. But from 1740, infant mortality decreased by one half, in no more than 20 years. There is no obvious reason why that would have or could have occurred.
This drop in infant mortality, and disease in general, helped the industrial revolution to occur. Japan, France and the Netherlands also had the relative know-how to start an industrial revolution, although the Netherlands did not have coal. Neither of these countries had the industrial revolution. To have increased industry, would require close proximity of people, and that is how disease increases, and disease control was not an established science until one hundred years later, at least. Something had happened in Great Britain to allow different groups of people to come into close proximity in factories, without huge outbreaks in contagious diseases. Japan had the largest cities in the world, and had contained frequent outbreaks of disease, but Japan's industry was not as advanced, and the country had not developed wheeled motion of vehicles.
It was directed by Ian Duncan, with series producer David Dugan.
The series began Sunday 28 May 2000 at 8pm on Channel 4. [1]
The same company that made the series followed the series up with Men of Iron, on Channel 4 on Monday 9 February 2004.
In the 1720s, the death rate had begun to increase, as the poor began to drink less beer. More industrial machines were in North West England at that time, than the rest of the world put together. The first industrial steam engine had been built in Tipton in Staffordshire. From 1760 to 1830, the population of Manchester went from 22,000 to 235,000. Prof Joel Mokyr of Northwestern University describes how nature and industrial progress were incompatible. On Wednesday 15 September 1830 Fanny Kemble wrote about her journey on the train. The trials started at 11am and the train arrived at Manchester at 2.45pm. The Prime Minister was on the train. The French Revolution had happened two months before, and one or two French revolutionary flags were seen at the station, as small emblems of discontent and disquiet. There was no political revolution in England, but an industrial one.
Britain now had many types of new of manufactured products to sell, from the 1750s.
France made mechanised objects, but mostly products such as automatons - the Digesting Duck of the innovative Jacques de Vaucanson of the 1820s. Vaucanson had the ingenuity to be the leader of an industrial revolution in France, and the King of France put him in charge of the French silk industry; Vaucanson drew up vast industrialised changes to this French industry, but workers fervently rose up against these plans and rioted - an industrial revolution in France would have much opposition to face. Britain was much more hard-nosed about innovation than France.
The iron industry began in Shropshire as coal and iron ore were found close together. The industrialist who started the industry was a Quaker.
Johann Friedrich Böttger and his factory in Meissen, which did not export, as described by Christopher Cullen. Britain had more well-established networks of entrepreneurs and inventors than France had, which lacked such networks. Through a discussion in one of these networks, the power loom was invented in 1784 in England. Five years later was the French Revolution, followed by an Anglo-French war, which ballooned Britain's national debt by 100 times, so that income tax had to be introduced. This was later removed, but permanently introduced in 1856. France had placed economic sanctions on Britain and had blockaded its maritime trade routes, but this was largely overcome at the Battle of Trafalgar on 21 October 1805.
Britain's manufactured products needed to be transported around the world: the Netherlands was an innovative and strong maritime nation too, and had more ships.
The exploration of the Halve Maen in 1609; Joel Mokyr sails on the Half Moon (1989 replica). Five years later the Dutch sailed to the same area, and landed. The Dutch had the largest merchant fleet in the world, and had established important world trade routes, across the Dutch Empire. The Dutch had invested heavily in a new type of flower, the tulip, in the 1630s; and tulips became extraordinarily and wildly expensive, and this would become Tulip mania, but everything rapidly collapsed in February 1637. The Dutch had been the first to develop a working financial investment system, which would be wholly copied by the English, leading directly to the Bank of England in 1694. Whilst the Dutch had innovatively made the main advances in investment finance, they had not also done so in the acquisition of coal or mechanical innovations, as what was currently taking place across innovative England, mainly Staffordshire. The Netherlands could also be invaded, which England never suffered from, in those centuries.
Chris Cullen investigated the navigational advantage of ships with square sails. The Royal Society coordinated research in navigation, which enabled British sailors to reach countries that other countries couldn't reach, leading to Admiral Arthur Phillip establishing a settlement in Australia, on HMS Supply in 1788.
The Heavenly Machine
How Europe developed over 500 years from 1350, and development of glass and the mechanical clock. Pluscarden Abbey in Moray in Scotland; the Rule of Saint Benedict; Buddhists and the Chinese were heavily influenced by rituals; Su Song; the Italian islands of Murano, known for its glass making; glass windows only developed, largely, in north-west Europe; shaped glass helped scientific instruments to be made, and lenses; other areas of the world did not develop this; the Japanese and Chinese had no glass technology, but developed pottery instead, and had paper windows, not glass; the first Chinese ship arrived in the West in 1850; historian Maxine Berg of the University of Warwick; the development of interchangeable parts in machinery; the US was now rapidly developing, in its industry, from the 1850s
Animal Farm
The first McDonald's restaurant in Des Plaines, Illinois, the McDonald's No. 1 Store Museum; in 1955 the company had 1,000 customers per day, in 2000 the company had 43m per day; 10,000 years ago the first agriculture began in the Middle East and China; anthropologist Alan Macfarlane, of the University of Cambridge, in Nepal; the cow was human's first 'machine'; in 4000 BC, domesticated animals were found only in Eurasia; in the rest of the world animals were only hunted; animals in Africa, South America and Australia were less tame than elsewhere; developed agriculture led to population increase, and surplus time for 'hobbies' and skilled crafts, such as clothmaking and iron smelting; cities only developed in Eurasia; writing possibly developed for financial transactions; hunter-gatherer societies did not develop writing, but sang communal songs instead for communication; the Chinese language has 80,000 characters; the Robert Smail's Printing Works in the Scottish Borders; in 1788 the native Australian population was 300,00, by 1888 it was 50,000; 168 Spanish overcame 80,000 Incas; previously the only domesticated animals in South America were llamas in the Andes, and turkeys in Mexico; European settlers brought deadly diseases to natives around the world, who had no resistance in their immune systems; the Mandan natives were soon killed off by smallpox in 1781; in 1492 there were 5m native Americans, by 1900 there were 250,000; the native bison was replaced by European cattle from the 1830s; in 1800 there was 40m North American buffalo, by 1900 there was only 1,000; the railway appeared in England at the same time, which would soon connect America, centred on Chicago, which would become known for its meat trade; the meat factory process lines led to other factory mass production process lines; but the European approach did not greatly rever natural systems or conservation;
The Industrial Revolution, sometimes divided into the First Industrial Revolution and Second Industrial Revolution, was a period of global transition of the human economy towards more widespread, efficient and stable manufacturing processes that succeeded the Agricultural Revolution. Beginning in Great Britain, the Industrial Revolution spread to continental Europe and the United States, from around 1760 to about 1820–1840. This transition included going from hand production methods to machines; new chemical manufacturing and iron production processes; the increasing use of water power and steam power; the development of machine tools; and the rise of the mechanised factory system. Output greatly increased, and the result was an unprecedented rise in population and the rate of population growth. The textile industry was the first to use modern production methods, and textiles became the dominant industry in terms of employment, value of output, and capital invested.
Manufacturing is the creation or production of goods with the help of equipment, labor, machines, tools, and chemical or biological processing or formulation. It is the essence of the secondary sector of the economy. The term may refer to a range of human activity, from handicraft to high-tech, but it is most commonly applied to industrial design, in which raw materials from the primary sector are transformed into finished goods on a large scale. Such goods may be sold to other manufacturers for the production of other more complex products, or distributed via the tertiary industry to end users and consumers.
The British Agricultural Revolution, or Second Agricultural Revolution, was an unprecedented increase in agricultural production in Britain arising from increases in labor and land productivity between the mid-17th and late 19th centuries. Agricultural output grew faster than the population over the hundred-year period ending in 1770, and thereafter productivity remained among the highest in the world. This increase in the food supply contributed to the rapid growth of population in England and Wales, from 5.5 million in 1700 to over 9 million by 1801, though domestic production gave way increasingly to food imports in the 19th century as the population more than tripled to over 35 million.
The Second Industrial Revolution, also known as the Technological Revolution, was a phase of rapid scientific discovery, standardisation, mass production and industrialisation from the late 19th century into the early 20th century. The First Industrial Revolution, which ended in the middle of the 19th century, was punctuated by a slowdown in important inventions before the Second Industrial Revolution in 1870. Though a number of its events can be traced to earlier innovations in manufacturing, such as the establishment of a machine tool industry, the development of methods for manufacturing interchangeable parts, as well as the invention of the Bessemer process and open hearth furnace to produce steel, later developments harkened the Second Industrial Revolution, which is generally dated between 1870 and 1914.
Jacques de Vaucanson was a French inventor and artist who built the first all-metal lathe. This invention was crucial for the Industrial Revolution. The lathe is known as the mother of machine tools, as it was the first machine tool that led to the invention of other machine tools. He was responsible for the creation of impressive and innovative automata. He also was the first person to design an automatic loom.
Textile manufacture during the British Industrial Revolution was centred in south Lancashire and the towns on both sides of the Pennines in the United Kingdom. The main drivers of the Industrial Revolution were textile manufacturing, iron founding, steam power, oil drilling, the discovery of electricity and its many industrial applications, the telegraph and many others. Railroads, steamboats, the telegraph and other innovations massively increased worker productivity and raised standards of living by greatly reducing time spent during travel, transportation and communications.
The Great Divergence or European miracle is the socioeconomic shift in which the Western world overcame pre-modern growth constraints and emerged during the 19th century as the most powerful and wealthy world civilizations, eclipsing previously dominant or comparable civilizations from the Middle East and Asia such as Qing China, Mughal India, the Ottoman Empire, Safavid Iran, and Tokugawa Japan, among others.
Chance Brothers and Company was a glassworks originally based in Spon Lane, Smethwick, West Midlands, in England. It was a leading glass manufacturer and a pioneer of British glassmaking technology.
The production of silk originated in Neolithic China within the Yangshao culture. Though it would later reach other places in the world, the art of silk production remained confined to China until the Silk Road opened at 114 BC. Even after trade opened, China maintained a virtual monopoly over silk production for another thousand years. The use of silk within China was not confined to clothing alone, and silk was used for a number of applications, such as writing. Within clothing, the color of silk worn also held social importance, and formed an important guide of social class during the Tang dynasty of China.
Joel Mokyr is a Dutch-born American-Israeli economic historian who has served as a professor of economics and history and as the Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University since 1994. Since 2001, he has also served as the Sackler Professorial Fellow at the Eitan Berglas School of Economics at Tel Aviv University.
The economic history of the Netherlands (1500–1815) covers the Netherlands as the Habsburg Netherlands, through the era of the Dutch Republic, the Batavian Republic and the Kingdom of Holland.
Life in Great Britain during the Industrial Revolution shifted from an agrarian based society to an urban, industrialised society. New social and technological ideas were developed, such as the factory system and the steam engine. Work became more regimented, disciplined, and moved outside the home with large segments of the rural population migrating to the cities.
What the Industrial Revolution Did for Us is a BBC documentary series produced in conjunction with the Open University that examines the impact of the Industrial Revolution on modern society. It was originally broadcast on BBC Two from 7 October to 11 November 2003.
The technological and industrial history of Canada encompasses the country's development in the areas of transportation, communication, energy, materials, public works, public services, domestic/consumer and defense technologies. Most technologies diffused in Canada came from other places; only a small number actually originated in Canada. For more about those with a Canadian origin, see Invention in Canada.
This article covers the Economic history of Europe from about 1000 AD to the present. For the context, see History of Europe.
In Scotland, the Industrial Revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes and economic expansion between the mid-eighteenth century and the late nineteenth century. By the start of the eighteenth century, a political union between Scotland and England became politically and economically attractive, promising to open up the much larger markets of England, as well as those of the growing British Empire, resulting in the Treaty of Union of 1707. There was a conscious attempt among the gentry and nobility to improve agriculture in Scotland. New crops were introduced and enclosures began to displace the run rig system and free pasture. The economic benefits of union were very slow to appear, some progress was visible, such as the sales of linen and cattle to England, the cash flows from military service, and the tobacco trade that was dominated by Glasgow after 1740. Merchants who profited from the American trade began investing in leather, textiles, iron, coal, sugar, rope, sailcloth, glass-works, breweries, and soap-works, setting the foundations for the city's emergence as a leading industrial center after 1815.
The machine industry or machinery industry is a subsector of the industry, that produces and maintains machines for consumers, the industry, and most other companies in the economy.
In the United States from the late 18th and 19th centuries, the Industrial Revolution affected the U.S. economy, progressing it from manual labor, farm labor and handicraft work, to a greater degree of industrialization based on wage labor. There were many improvements in technology and manufacturing fundamentals with results that greatly improved overall production and economic growth in the U.S.
Industrialization in the Russian Empire saw the development of an industrial economy, whereby labor productivity increased and the demand for industrial goods was partially provided from within the empire. Industrialization in the Russian Empire was a reaction to the industrialization process in Western European countries.
British industrial architecture has been created, mainly from 1700 onwards, to house industries of many kinds in Britain, home of the Industrial Revolution in this period. Both the new industrial technologies and industrial architecture soon spread worldwide. As such, the architecture of surviving industrial buildings records part of the history of the modern world.
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