Machine Tools The Industrial Revolution example essay topic

Causes The causes of the Industrial Revolution were complex and remain a topic for debate, with some historians seeing the Revolution as an outgrowth of social and institutional changes wrought by the end of feudalism in Great Britain after the English Civil War in the 17th century. The Enclosure movement and the British Agricultural Revolution made food production more efficient and less labor-intensive, forcing the surplus population who could no longer find employment in agriculture into the cities to seek work in the newly developed factories. The colonial expansion of the 17th century with the accompanying development of international trade, creation of financial markets and accumulation of capital are also cited as factors, as is the scientific revolution of the 17th century. The presence of a large domestic market should also be considered an important catalyst of the Industrial Revolution, particularly explaining why it occurred in Britain. In other nations, such as France, markets were split up by local regions, which often imposed tolls and tariffs on goods traded among them. Why Europe?

One question of active interest to historians is why the Industrial Revolution occurred in Europe and not other parts of the world, particularly China. Numerous factors have been suggested, including ecology, government, and culture. Benjamin Elman argues that China was in a high level equilibrium trap in which the nonindustrial methods were efficient enough to prevent use of industrial methods with high costs of capital. Kenneth Pommeranz, in the Great Divergence, argues that Europe and China were remarkably similar in 1700, and that the crucial differences which created the Industrial Revolution in Europe were: sources of coal near manufacturing centres and raw materials such as food and wood from the New World, which allowed Europe to expand economically in a way that China could not. Indeed, a combination of all of these factors is possible. Why did it start in Great Britain?

The debate around the concept of the initial startup of the Industrial Revolution also concerns the lead of 30 to 100 years that the British had over the continental European countries and America. Some have stressed the importance of natural or financial resources that the United Kingdom received from its many overseas colonies or that profits from the British slave trade between Africa and the Caribbean helped fuel industrial investment. Alternatively, the greater liberalization of trade from a large merchant base may have been able to utilise scientific and technological developments emerging in the United Kingdom and elsewhere more effectively than other countries with stronger monarchies, such as China and Russia. Great Britain emerged from the Napoleonic Wars as the only European nation not ravaged by financial plunder and economic collapse, as well as possessing the only merchant fleet of any useful size (European merchant fleets having been destroyed during the war by the Royal Navy).

The United Kindom's extensive exporting cottage industries also ensured markets were already open for many forms of early manufactured goods. The nature of conflict in the period resulted in most British warfare being conducted overseas, reducing the devastating effects of territorial conquest affecting much of Europe. This was further aided by Britain's geographical position - an island separated from the rest of mainland Europe. Another theory believes that Great Britain was able to succeed in the Industrial Revolution due to the availability of key resources it processed. It had a dense population for its small geographical size.

Enclosure of common land and the related Agricultural revolution made a supply of this labour readily available. There was also a local coincidence of natural resources in the North of England, the English Midlands, South Wales and the Scottish Lowlands. Local supplies of coal, iron, lead, copper, tin, limestone and water power, gave excellent conditions for the development and expansion of industry. The stable political situation in Great Britain from around 1688, and British society's greater receptiveness to change (when compared with other European countries) can also be said to be factors favouring the Industrial Revolution.

Protestant work ethic Another theory is that the British advance was due to the presence of an entrepreneurial class which believed in progress, technology and hard work. 1 The existence of this class is often linked to the Protestant work ethic and the particular status of dissenting Protestant sects, such as the Quakers, Baptists and Presbyterians that had flourished with the Civil War. Reinforcement of confidence in the rule of law, which followed the establishment of the prototype of constitutional monarchy in Great Britain in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and the emergence of a stable financial market there based on the management of the national debt by the Bank of England, contributed to the capacity for, and interest in, private financial investment in industrial ventures. Dissenters found themselves barred or discouraged from almost all public offices as well as University education at Oxford and Cambridge, when the restoration of the monarchy took place and membership in the official Anglican church became mandatory due to the Test Act.

They became active in banking, manufacturing and the Unitarians in particular, were much involved in education by running Dissenting Academies, where, in contrast to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and schools such as Eton and Harrow, much attention was given to mathematics and the sciences -- area of scholarship vital to the development of manufacturing technologies. Historians sometimes consider this social factor to be extremely important, along with the nature of the national economies involved. While members of these sects were excluded from certain circles of the government, they were considered as fellow Protestants, to a limited extent, by many in the middle class, such as traditional financiers or other businessmen. Given this relative tolerance and the supply of capital, the natural outlet for the more enterprising members of these sects would be to seek new opportunities in the technologies created in the wake of the Scientific revolution of the 17th century. Criticism of the Calvinism hypothesis This argument has, on the whole, tended to neglect the fact that several inventors and entrepreneurs were rational free thinkers or 'Philosophers' typical of a certain class of British intellectuals in the late 18th century, and were by no means normal church goers or members of religious sects. Examples of these free thinkers were the Lunar Society of Birmingham (which flourished from 1765 to 1809).

Its members were exceptional in that they were among the very few who were conscious that an industrial revolution was then taking place in Great Britain. They actively worked as a group to encourage it, not least by investing in it and conducting scientific experiments which led to innovative products. The hypothesis that Protestantism caused the industrial revolution was further challenged by the British philosopher Bertrand Russell. He believed that a class of idle people enjoyed privileges that were based on social injustice. Workers worked so hard because they had to, not because it corresponded to their ethic.

According to Russell, it would be much more beneficial to the progress of society if nobody were forced to work longer than four hours a day, because it would give everybody the time for scientific research. 2 Innovations The invention of the steam engine was the most important innovation for the industrial revolution. Others followed: the spinning jenny revolutionized textile manufacturing and new metal working technologies were introduced. Another important innovation was the organization of human labor in factories. Transmission of innovation Knowledge of new innovation was spread by several means. Workers who were trained in the technique might move to another employer, or might be poached.

A common method was for someone to make a study tour, gathering information where he could. Today this is called Industrial espionage, with modern concepts of automatic illegality. During the whole of the Industrial Revolution and for the century before, all European countries and America undertook it. Some like Sweden and France as a matter of state policy with trained civil servants or technicians to undertake it.

In others, such as Britain and America, it was done by individual manufacturers anxious to improve their own methods. Study tours were common then, as was the writing of travel diaries, and those made by industrialists and technicians are an incomparable source of information about methods. Another means was by the ne work of informal philosophical societies like the Lunar Society of Birmingham, in which members met to discuss science and often its application to manufacturing. Some of thee societies published volumes of proceedings and transactions, and the London-based Society of Arts published an illustrated volume of new inventions, as well as papers about them in its annual Translations. There were publications describing technology.

Encyclopaedias such as Harris's Lexicon technic um (1704) and Dr Abraham Rees's Cyclopaedia (1802-1819) contain much of value. Rees's Cyclopaedia contains an enormous amount of information about the science and technology of the first half of the Industrial Revolutuion, very well illustrated by fine engravings. Foreign printed sources such as the Descriptions des Arts et Metiers and Diderot's Encyclopedie explained foreign methods with fine engraved plates. Periodical publications about manufacturing and technology began to appear in the last decade of the 18th century, and a number regularly included notice of the latest patents.

Foreign periodicals such as the Annales des Mines published accounts of travels observing British methods made by French engineers making study tours. Factories Industrialization also led to the creation of the factory. The Derby silk mill of John Lom be was operational by 1721. In 1746 an integrated brass mill was working at Warmly, near Bristol, where raw material went in at one end, was smelted into brass and turned into pans, pins, wire and other goods. Housing was provided for workers on site. Josiah Wedgwood and Matthew Boulton were other prominent early industrialists.

The factory system was largely responsible for the rise of the modern city, as workers migrated into the cities in search of employment in the factories. But for much of the 19th century, production was done in small mills, frequently powered by water, serving local needs. The transition to industrialization was not wholly smooth, for example in England the Luddites were workers who saw their livelihoods threatened, protested against industrialisation and sometimes sabotaged factories. One of the earliest reformers of early factory conditions was Robert Owen.

Machine tools The Industrial Revolution could not have developed without machine tools, for they enabled manufacturing machines to be made. They have their origins in the tools developed in the 18th century by makers of clocks and watches, and scientific instrument makers to enable them to batch-produce small mechanisms. The mechanical parts of early textile machines were sometimes called 'clock work' due to the metal spindles and gears they incorporated. The manufacture of textile machines drew craftsmen from these trades and is the origin of the modern engineering industry.

Machine makers early developed special purpose machines for making parts. Machines were built by various craftsmen. Carpenters for making the wooden framing, and smith and the turner for the metal parts. Because of the difficulty of manipulating metal, and the lack of machine tools, metal was reduced to a minimum. Wood framing had the disadvantage of changing dimensions with temperature and humidity, and the various joints used tended to rack (work loose) over time. As the Industrial Revolution progressed, machines with metal frames became commoner, but required machine tools to make them economically.

Before the advent of machine tools metal was worked manually using the basic hand tools of hammers, files, saws and chisels. Small metal parts were readily made by this means, but for large machine parts, such as castings for a lathe bed, where components had to slide together, the production of flat surfaces by means of the hammer and chisel followed by filing and perhaps grinding with emery paste, was very laborious and costly. Apart from workshop lathes used by craftsmen, the first large machine tool was the cylinder boring machine, used for boring the large-diameter cylinders on early steam engines. They were to be found at all steam-engine manufacturers.

The planing machine, the slotting machine and the shaping machine were developed in the first decades of the 19th century. Although Whitney's milling machine was invented at this time, it was not developed as a serious workshop tool until during the Second Industrial Revolutuion. Military production had a hand in their development. Henry Maudslay, who trained a school of machine-tool makers early in the 19th century, was employed at the Woolwich Arsenal as a lad where he would have seen the large horse-driven wooden machines for cannon boring made and worked by the Verbruggans. He later worked for Joseph B ramah on the production of metal locks, and soon after he began working on his own account was engaged to build the machinery for making ships' pulley blocks for the Royal Navy in the Portsmouth Block Mills.

These were all metal, and the first machines for mass production and making components with a degree of interchangeability. The lessons Maudslay learned about the need for stability and precision he adapted to the development of machine tools, and in his workshops he trained a generation of men to build on his work, such as Richard Roberts, Joseph Clement and Joseph Whitworth. Maudslay made his name for his lathes and precision measurement. James Fox of Derby had a healthy export trade in machine tools for the first third of the century, as did Matthew Murray of Leeds. Roberts made his name as a maker of high-quality machine tools, and as a pioneer of the use of jigs and gauges for precision workshop measurement. Textile manufacture Model of the spinning jenny in a museum in Wuppertal, Germany.

The spinning jenny was one of the innovations that started the revolution In the early 18th century, British textile manufacture was based on wool which was processed by individual artisans, doing the spinning and weaving on their own premises. This system is called a cottage industry. Flax and cotton were also used for fine materials, but the processing was difficult because of the pre-processing needed, and thus goods in these materials made only a small proportion of the output. Use of the spinning wheel and hand loom restricted the production capacity of the industry, but a number of incremental advances increased productivity to the extent that manufactured cotton goods became the dominant British export by the early decades of the 19th century.

India was displaced as the premier supplier of cotton goods. Step by step, individual inventors increased the efficiency of the individual steps of spinning (carding, twisting and spinning, and subsequently rolling) so that the supply of yarn fed a weaving industry that itself was advancing with improvements to shuttles and the loom or 'frame'. The output of an individual labourer increased dramatically, with the effect that these new machines were seen as a threat to employment, and early innovators were attacked and their inventions wrecked. The inventors often failed to exploit their inventions, and fell on hard times. To capitalize upon these advances it took a class of entrepreneurs, of which the most famous is Richard Arkwright. He is credited with a list of inventions, but these were actually developed by people such as Thomas Highs and John Kay; Arkwright nurtured the inventors, patented the ideas, financed the initiatives, and protected the machines.

He created the cotton mill which brought the production processes together in a factory, and he developed the use of power - first horse power, then water power and finally steam power - which made cotton manufacture a mechanized industry. Mining Coal mining in Britain is of great age. Before the steam engine, pits were often shallow bell pits, following a seam of coal along the surface and being abandoned as the coal was extracted. In other cases, if the geology was favourable, the coal was mined by means of an adit driven into the side of a hill. Shaft mining was done in some areas, but the limiting factor was the problem of removing water. It could be done by hauling buckets of water up the shaft by means of a horse gin, or it could be drained by an adit leading to a stream or ditch at lower level where it could flow away by gravity.

A number of historic mining areas of Britain, such as the Kingswood coalfield near Bristol, still have adits running to this day, as of 2005, almost a century after the industry ceased. The introduction of the steam engine enabled shafts to be made deeper, hence increasing output. Metallurgy In the early 18th century, small-scale iron working and extraction and processing of other metals were carried out where local resources permitted. Fuel was primarily wood in the form of charcoal, but consumption was starting to be constrained by lack of available timber. At the same time, demand for high-quality iron was dramatically increasing to keep pace with the improvements in military technology and the involvement of Britain in numerous European wars. Principle suppliers of high-quality iron goods were Sweden and Russia, with Russia being able to command increasingly high prices as Britain's need grew.

To fuel the iron smelting process, people moved from wood to coal and coke. Production of pig iron, cast iron and wrought iron improved through the exchange of ideas (although this was by no means a fast process), with the most well-known name being Abraham Darby. The first Abraham Darby made great strides with using coke to fuel his blast furnaces at Coalbrookdale (1709), although this was principally due to the nature of the coke he was using, and the scientific reasons for the improvement were only discovered later. His family followed in his footsteps, and iron became a major construction material.

Other improvements followed, with Benjamin Huntsman developing a crucible steel technique in the 1740's, and Henry Cort's puddling furnace enabling large-scale production of wrought iron to take place. The reliance on overseas supplies was diminished, and improvements in machine tools and the use of iron and steel in the development of the railways further boosted the industrial growth of Great Britain. Steam powerNewcomens atmospheric steamengineThe stationary steam engine had great influence on the progress of the Industrial Revolution, but for all of it many industries still relied on wind and water power as well as horse and man-power for driving small machines. The steam engine was first used for draining mines or for driving mills by pumping water back to a reservoir that had passed through a water wheel. James Watt's invention of rotary motion in the 1780's enabled a steam engine to drive a factory or mill directly. Until about 1800, the most common pattern of steam engine was the beam engine, which was built within a stone or brick engine-house but after then various patterns of portable (ie readily removable engines, not on wheels) were developed, such as the table engine.

The development of machine tools such as the planing and shaping machine enabled all the metal parts of the engines to be easily and accurately cut. Engines could be made in varying sizes and patterns to suit various requirements, such as for locomotives and steam boats. Transport At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, inland transport was by navigable rivers and roads, with coastwise vessels employed to move heavy goods by sea. Railways or waggon ways were used for conveying coal to rivers for further shipment, and canals were beginning to be cut for moving goods between larger towns and cities. During the Industrial Revolution, these different methods were improved and developed. Navigable rivers All the major rivers were made navigable to a great or lesser degree.

The Severn in particular was used for the movement of goods to the Midlands which had been imported into Bristol from abroad, and the export of goods from centres of production in Shropshire such as iron goods from Coalbrookdale. Transport was by way of Trows -- small sailing vessels which could pass the various shallows and bridges in the river. These could navigate the Bristol Channel to the South Wales ports and Somerset ports, such as Bridgwater and even as far as France. Roads Much of the road system was bad, but some were turn piked and maintained by a toll on the users.

Major roads radiated from London and were the means by which the Royal Mail was able to reach the rest of the country. Heavy goods transport on these roads was by means of broad wheeled carts hauled by teams of horses. Lighter goods were conveyed by smaller carts or by teams of pack horses. Stage coaches transported people.

The less wealthy walked. Coastwise sail Sailing vessels were long used for moving goods round the coast. Transporting coal to London from Newcastle began in medieval times. The major seaports such as London, Bristol and Liverpool were the means by which raw materials such as cotton might be imported and finished goods exported.

Transporting goods by sea was common during the whole of the Industrial Revolution and only fell away with the growth of the railways at the end of the period. RailwaysWagonways for moving coal in the mining areas had started in the 17th century, and were often associated with canal or river systems for the further movement of coal. These were all horse drawn or relied on gravity, with a stationary steam engine to haul the wagons back to the top of the incline. The first applications of the steam locomotive were on waggon or plate ways (as they were then often called from the cast iron plates used). Horse-drawn public railways did not begin until the early years of the 19th century. Steam-hauled public railways began with the Liverpool and Manchester and Stockton and Darlington Railways of the late 1820's.

The construction of major railways connecting the larger cities and towns began in the 1830's but only gained momentum at the very end of the Industrial Revolution. CanalsBritain's canal network is, next to surviving mill buildings, the most enduring feature today of the Industrial Revolution. They tended to link the major manufacturing centres in the midlands with seaports and with London, at that time the largest manufacturing centre in the country. They were eventually largely killed off as commercial enterprises by the spread of the railways from the 1840's. Social problems The industrial revolution lead to a number of social problems within the newly developed working class. Children worked under miserable conditions and the families lived in bad housing.

Child labor Child labor existed before the Industrial Revolution and in fact dates back to prehistoric times. But during the Industrial Revolution it grew more abusive than ever before. Politicians tried to limit child labor by law. Factory owners resisted -- they felt that they were aiding the poor by giving their children work from the age of five years onward. In 1833 the first law against child labor, the Factory Act, was passed in England: Children younger than nine were not allowed to work, they were not permitted to work at night and the work day of youth under the age of 18 was limited to twelve hours. Factory inspectors supervised the execution of this law.

About ten years later children and women were forbidden to work in mining. These laws improved the situation; however child labor remained a problem in Europe up to the 20th century. Housing situation In 1832 James Phillips Kay, an Edinburgh doctor, published a detailed report on the working conditions of the poor and describes worker's housing establishments as follows: Here, without distinction of age or sex, careless of all decency, they are crowded in small and wretched apartments; the same bed receiving a succession of tenants until too offensive for their un fastidious senses. 3 In 1842 a Sanitary Report was produced by Edwin Chadwick: In a cellar in Pendleton, I recollect there were three beds in the two apartments of which the habitation consisted, but having no door between them, in one of which a man and his wife slept; in another, a man, his wife and child; and in a third two unmarried females.

(... ) I have met with upwards of 40 persons sleeping in the same room, married and single, including, of course, children and several young adult persons of either sex. Effects Roughly exponential increase in carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels, driven by increasing energy demands since the Industrial Revolution. The application of steam power to the industrial processes of printing supported a massive expansion of newspaper and popular book publishing, which reinforced rising literacy and demands for mass political participation.

Universal white male suffrage was adopted in the United States, resulting in the election of the popular Andrew Jackson in 1828 and the creation of political parties organized for mass participation in elections. In the United Kingdom, the Reform Act 1832 addressed the concentration of population in districts with almost no representation in Parliament, expanding the electorate, leading to the founding of modern political parties and initiating a series of reforms which would continue into the 20th century. In France, the July Revolution widened the franchise and established a constitutional monarchy. Belgium established its independence from the Netherlands, as a constitutional monarchy, in 1830.

Struggles for liberal reforms in Switzerland's various cantons in the 1830's had mixed results. A further series of attempts at political reform or revolution would sweep Europe in 1848, with mixed results, and initiated massive migration to North America, as well as parts of South America, South Africa, and Australia. The mass migration of rural families into urban areas saw the growth of bad living conditions in cities, long work hours without the traditional agricultural breaks (such as after harvest or in mid winter), a rise in child labor (the children received less pay and benefits than adults) and the rise of nationalism in most of Europe. The beginnings of coal usage also started the greenhouse effect and pollution in general. The Industrial Revolution had significant impacts on the structure of society. Prior to its rise, the public and private spheres held strong overlaps; work was often conducted through the home, and thus was shared in many cases by both a wife and her husband.

However, during this period the two began to separate, with work and home life considered quite distinct from one another. This shift made it necessary for one partner to maintain the home and care for children. Women, holding the distinction of being able to breastfeed, thus more often maintained the home, with men making up a sizeable fraction of the workforce. With much of the family income coming from men, then, their power in relation to women increased further, with the latter often dependent on men's income.

This had enormous impacts on the defining of gender roles and was effectively the model for what was later termed the traditional family. Capitalist The advent of The Enlightenment provided an intellectual framework which welcomed the practical application of the growing body of scientific knowledge - a factor evidenced in the systematic development of the steam engine, guided by scientific analysis, and the development of the political and sociological analyses, culminating in Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. Marxism Karl Marx saw the industrialization process as the logical dialectical progression of feudal economic modes, necessary for the full development of capitalism, which he saw as in itself a necessary precursor to the development of socialism and eventually communism. According to Marx, industrialization engenders the polarization of societies into two classes, the bourgeoisie - those who own the means of production, i.e. the factories and the land, and the much larger proletariat - the working class who actually perform the labor necessary to extract something valuable from the means of production. Marx asserts that the relationship between the two classes is fundamentally parasitic, insofar as the proletariat are always under compensated for the true value of their labor by the bourgeoisie (according to the labor theory of value), which allows the bourgeoisie to grow absurdly wealthy through nothing more than the wholesale exploitation of the proletarians' labor.

Rapid advancements in technology left many skilled workers unemployed, as one agricultural and manufacturing task after another was mechanized. The flight of millions of newly unemployed people from rural areas or small towns to the large cities, and thus the development of large urban population centers, led to unprecedented conditions of poverty in the slums that housed workers for the new factories. At the same time, the bourgeois class, at only a small fraction of the proletariat's size, became exceedingly wealthy. Marx says that the industrial proletariat will eventually develop class consciousness and revolt against the bourgeois, leading to a more egalitarian socialist and eventually Communist state where the workers themselves own the means of industrial production. See Marxism.

The Second Industrial Revolution The insatiable demand of the railroads for more durable rail led to the development of the means to cheaply mass-produce steel. Steel is often cited as the first of several new areas for industrial mass-production, which are said to characterize a 'Second Industrial Revolution,' beginning around 1870. This 'second' Industrial Revolution gradually grew to include the chemical industries, petroleum refining and distribution, electrical industries, and, in the twentieth century, the automotive industries, and was marked by a transition of technological leadership from Great Britain to the United States and Germany. The introduction of hydroelectric power generation in the Alps enabled the rapid industrialization of coal-starved northern Italy, beginning in the 1890's. The increasing availability of economic petroleum products also reduced the relation of coal to the potential for industrialization. By the 1890's, industrialization in these areas had created the first giant industrial corporations with often nearly global international operations and interests, as companies like U.S. Steel, General Electric, and Bayer AG joined the railroads on the world's stock markets and among huge, bureaucratic organizations.