Industrial revolution?

Question

western Europe + netherlands + great britain exprience an agricultural change population explosion and a growth of industry. Help explain these changes.In what way are any of these three interrelated

Answer 1

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_revolution#Transfer_of_knowledge
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_revolution#Social_effects

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Answer 3

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Answer 4

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Answer 6

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Answer 7

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Answer 8

I.INTRODUCTION


Industrial Revolution, widespread replacement of manual labor by machines that began in Britain in the 18th century and is still continuing in some parts of the world. The Industrial Revolution was the result of many fundamental, interrelated changes that transformed agricultural economies into industrial ones. The most immediate changes were in the nature of production: what was produced, as well as where and how. Goods that had traditionally been made in the home or in small workshops began to be manufactured in the factory. Productivity and technical efficiency grew dramatically, in part through the systematic application of scientific and practical knowledge to the manufacturing process. Efficiency was also enhanced when large groups of business enterprises were located within a limited area. The Industrial Revolution led to the growth of cities as people moved from rural areas into urban communities in search of work.
Computerized Textile Mill






Computerized Textile Mill
This photo demonstrates how much textile production has changed as a result of industrialization. In this modern textile mill, many machines whir busily in an initial stage of processing fiber into fabric. The process is almost entirely coordinated and controlled by computer, with a small staff of managers, inspectors, and technicians to ensure quality and efficiency.
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The changes brought by the Industrial Revolution overturned not only traditional economies, but also whole societies. Economic changes caused far-reaching social changes, including the movement of people to cities, the availability of a greater variety of material goods, and new ways of doing business. The Industrial Revolution was the first step in modern economic growth and development. Economic development was combined with superior military technology to make the nations of Europe and their cultural offshoots, such as the United States, the most powerful in the world in the 18th and 19th centuries.Sidebars
HISTORICAL ESSAYS
Global Consequences of the Industrial Revolution
Encarta Historical Essays reflect the knowledge and insight of leading historians. This collection of essays is assembled to support the National Standards for World History. In this essay, Peter N. Stearns of Carnegie Mellon University examines the nature of global industrialization since it began in 18th century England. It compares and contrasts different industrial revolutions around the world in an attempt to better understand industrialization and to measure its impact on regional economies and daily life.
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The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain during the last half of the 18th century and spread through regions of Europe and to the United States during the following century. In the 20th century industrialization on a wide scale extended to parts of Asia and the Pacific Rim. Today mechanized production and modern economic growth continue to spread to new areas of the world, and much of humankind has yet to experience the changes typical of the Industrial Revolution.The Industrial Revolution is called a revolution because it changed society both significantly and rapidly. Over the course of human history, there has been only one other group of changes as significant as the Industrial Revolution. This is what anthropologists call the Neolithic Revolution, which took place in the later part of the Stone Age. In the Neolithic Revolution, people moved from social systems based on hunting and gathering to much more complex communities that depended on agriculture and the domestication of animals. This led to the rise of permanent settlements and, eventually, urban civilizations. The Industrial Revolution brought a shift from the agricultural societies created during the Neolithic Revolution to modern industrial societies.Sidebars
HISTORICAL ESSAYS
Processes that Led to Early Urbanism
Encarta Historical Essays reflect the knowledge and insight of leading historians. This collection of essays is assembled to support the National Standards for World History. In this essay, Charles L. Redman argues that expanding food production, emerging industry and trade, and increasingly hierarchical governments—as well as the resulting changes in social relations—were the major forces behind early urbanism.
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The social changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution were significant. As economic activities in many communities moved from agriculture to manufacturing, production shifted from its traditional locations in the home and the small workshop to factories. Large portions of the population relocated from the countryside to the towns and cities where manufacturing centers were found. The overall amount of goods and services produced expanded dramatically, and the proportion of capital invested per worker grew. New groups of investors, businesspeople, and managers took financial risks and reaped great rewards.
Richard Trevithick






Richard Trevithick
British engineer Richard Trevithick pioneered the use of steam power for locomotion in the 1790s and 1800s. In 1804 he constructed the first practical steam locomotive operating on a railway and demonstrated its use for hauling large loads.
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In the long run the Industrial Revolution has brought economic improvement for most people in industrialized societies. Many enjoy greater prosperity and improved health, especially those in the middle and the upper classes of society. There have been costs, however. In some cases, the lower classes of society have suffered economically. Industrialization has brought factory pollutants and greater land use, which have harmed the natural environment. In particular, the application of machinery and science to agriculture has led to greater land use and, therefore, extensive loss of habitat for animals and plants. In addition, drastic population growth following industrialization has contributed to the decline of natural habitats and resources. These factors, in turn, have caused many species to become extinct or endangered.II.GREAT BRITAIN LEADS THE WAY


Adam Smith






Adam Smith
In his famous treatise, The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith argued that private competition free from regulation produces and distributes wealth better than government-regulated markets. Since 1776, when Smith produced his work, his argument has been used to justify capitalism and discourage government intervention in trade and exchange. Smith believed that private businesses seeking their own interests organize the economy most efficiently, “as if by an invisible hand.”
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Ever since the Renaissance (14th century to 17th century), Europeans had been inventing and using ever more complex machinery. Particularly important were improvements in transportation, such as faster ships, and communication, especially printing. These improvements played a key role in the development of the Industrial Revolution by encouraging the movement of new ideas and mechanisms, as well as the people who knew how to build and run them. Sidebars
HISTORIC DOCUMENTS
The Voyage to America
In the 1840s and 1850s hundreds of thousands of people from the United Kingdom and Ireland immigrated to the United States. They were driven primarily by economic hardship: The Great Potato Famine had devastated Ireland, and the Industrial Revolution displaced many rural English. These people were poor. Most could only afford passage in the cheapest accommodations on a ship, called steerage. In December 1853 this description of a typical trip to America was published anonymously in the New York Tribune.
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Then, in the 18th century in Britain, new production methods were introduced in several key industries, dramatically altering how these industries functioned. These new methods included different machines, fresh sources of power and energy, and novel forms of organizing business and labor. For the first time technical and scientific knowledge was applied to business practices on a large scale. Humankind had begun to develop mass production. The result was an increase in material goods, usually selling for lower prices than before. The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain because social, political, and legal conditions there were particularly favorable to change. Property rights, such as those for patents on mechanical improvements, were well established. More importantly, the predictable, stable rule of law in Britain meant that monarchs and aristocrats were less likely to arbitrarily seize earnings or impose taxes than they were in many other countries. As a result, earnings were safer, and ambitious businesspeople could gain wealth, social prestige, and power more easily than could people on the European continent. These factors encouraged risk taking and investment in new business ventures, both crucial to economic growth.In addition, Great Britain’s government pursued a relatively hands-off economic policy. This free-market approach was made popular through British philosopher and economist Adam Smith and his book The Wealth of Nations (1776). The hands-off policy permitted fresh methods and ideas to flourish with little interference or regulation.Britain’s nurturing social and political setting encouraged the changes that began in a few trades to spread to others. Gradually the new ways of production transformed more and more parts of the British economy, although older methods continued in many industries. Several industries played key roles in Britain’s industrialization. Iron and steel manufacture, the production of steam engines, and textiles were all powerful influences, as was the rise of a machine-building sector able to spread mechanization to other parts of the economy.A.Changes in Industry

Modern industry requires power to run its machinery. During the development of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, coal was the main source of power. Even before the 18th century, some British industries had begun using the country’s plentiful coal supply instead of wood, which was much scarcer. Coal was adopted by the brewing, metalworking, and glass and ceramics industries, demonstrating its potential for use in many industrial processes.1.Iron and Coal

A major breakthrough in the use of coal occurred in 1709 at Coalbrookedale in the valley of the Severn River. There English industrialist Abraham Darby successfully used coke—a high-carbon, converted form of coal—to produce iron from iron ore. Using coke eliminated the need for charcoal, a more expensive, less efficient fuel. Metal makers thereafter discovered ways of using coal and coke to speed the production of raw iron, bar iron, and other metals. The most important advance in iron production occurred in 1784 when Englishman Henry Cort invented new techniques for rolling raw iron, a finishing process that shapes iron into the desired size and form. These advances in metalworking were an important part of industrialization. They enabled iron, which was relatively inexpensive and abundant, to be used in many new ways, such as building heavy machinery. Iron was well suited for heavy machinery because of its strength and durability. Because of these new developments iron came to be used in machinery for many industries. Iron was also vital to the development of railroads, which improved transportation. Better transportation made commerce easier, and along with the growth of commerce enabled economic growth to spread to additional regions. In this way, the changes of the Industrial Revolution reinforced each other, working together to transform the British economy.2.Steam


Matthew Boulton






Matthew Boulton
English manufacturer and engineer Matthew Boulton financed and introduced James Watt’s steam engine, which became the most important source of power during the Industrial Revolution. The two men became partners in the steam-engine business in 1775 and obtained a 25-year extension of the patent. Boulton and Watt shared many technological innovations with other companies, increasing the spread of industrialization.
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If iron was the key metal of the Industrial Revolution, the steam engine was perhaps the most important machine technology. Inventions and improvements in the use of steam for power began prior to the 18th century, as they had with iron. As early as 1689, English engineer Thomas Savery created a steam engine to pump water from mines. Thomas Newcomen, another English engineer, developed an improved version by 1712. Scottish inventor and mechanical engineer James Watt made the most significant improvements, allowing the steam engine to be used in many industrial settings, not just in mining. Early mills had run successfully with water power, but the advancement of using the steam engine meant that a factory could be located anywhere, not just close to water.
Parts of a Steam Engine






Parts of a Steam Engine
Harnessing the power of steam marked a significant step in technology. The introduction of the steam engine led to many new inventions, most notably in transportation and industry. Steam engines transfer the energy of heat into mechanical energy, often by allowing steam to expand in a cylinder equipped with a movable piston. As the piston moves up and down (or alternatively, from side to side), an attached arm converts this motion into parallel motion that drives a wheel. Models of the steam engine were designed as early as 1690, but it was not until 70 years later that James Watt arrived at the design of the modern steam engine.
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In 1775 Watt formed an engine-building and engineering partnership with manufacturer Matthew Boulton. This partnership became one of the most important businesses of the Industrial Revolution. Boulton & Watt served as a kind of creative technical center for much of the British economy. They solved technical problems and spread the solutions to other companies. Similar firms did the same thing in other industries and were especially important in the machine tool industry. This type of interaction between companies was important because it reduced the amount of research time and expense that each business had to spend working with its own resources. The technological advances of the Industrial Revolution happened more quickly because firms often shared information, which they then could use to create new techniques or products.
James Watt (1736-1819)






James Watt (1736-1819)
Scottish inventor James Watt (1736-1819) made vast improvements to the steam engine, making it practical for large-scale industrial use. In 1764 Watt was given a Newcomen steam engine to repair. While working on the engine, he realized that it wasted energy. He eventually introduced a variety of modifications, including a separate cooling chamber for the steam that made the engine much more efficient.
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Like iron production, steam engines found many uses in a variety of other industries, including steamboats and railroads. Steam engines are another example of how some changes brought by industrialization led to even more changes in other areas.3.Textiles


Sir Richard Arkwright






Sir Richard Arkwright
In 1769 British inventor Richard Arkwright patented his spinning frame, which spun cotton fiber into thread. Arkwright established huge cotton mills that became the models for the factory system of the Industrial Revolution.
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The industry most often associated with the Industrial Revolution is the textile industry. In earlier times, the spinning of yarn and the weaving of cloth occurred primarily in the home, with most of the work done by people working alone or with family members. This pattern lasted for many centuries. In 18th-century Great Britain a series of extraordinary innovations reduced and then replaced the human labor required to make cloth. Each advance created problems elsewhere in the production process that led to further improvements. Together they made a new system to supply clothing.Sidebars
HISTORIC DOCUMENTS
Account of the Cotton Industry
In this extract, Edmund Cartwright describes his invention of the power loom in 1785. The invention, and its introduction into the manufacturing industry, was opposed by many cloth workers who were, not unnaturally, afraid of losing their jobs to a machine. Mechanization, however, became one of the more significant factors that enabled the Industrial Revolution to take place.
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The first important invention in textile production came in 1733. British inventor John Kay created a device known as the flying shuttle, which partially mechanized the process of weaving. By 1770 British inventor and industrialist James Hargreaves had invented the spinning jenny, a machine that spins a number of threads at once, and British inventor and cotton manufacturer Richard Arkwright had organized the first production using water-powered spinning. These developments permitted a single spinner to make numerous strands of yarn at the same time. By about 1779 British inventor Samuel Crompton introduced a machine called the mule, which further improved mechanized spinning by decreasing the danger that threads would break and by creating a finer thread.
Flyer Spinning Frame






Flyer Spinning Frame
Introduced by Richard Arkwright in 1769, the flyer spinning frame (also called the throstle or roll-drawing machine) reflects the move toward automation that characterized the Industrial Revolution. The machine is powered by the drive wheel at the bottom, drawing out the fiber into thread, then twisting it as it is wound onto the bobbins.
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Throughout the textile industry, specialized machines powered either by water or steam appeared. Row upon row of these innovative, highly productive machines filled large, new mills and factories. Soon Britain was supplying cloth to countries throughout the world. This industry seemed to many people to be the embodiment of an emerging, mechanized civilization.The most important results of these changes were enormous increases in the output of goods per worker. A single spinner or weaver, for example, could now turn out many times the volume of yarn or cloth that earlier workers had produced. This marvel of rising productivity was the central economic achievement that made the Industrial Revolution such a milestone in human history. B.Changes in Society

The Industrial Revolution also had considerable impact upon the nature of work. It significantly changed the daily lives of ordinary men, women, and children in the regions where it took root and grew.1.Growth of Cities


Newcastle upon Tyne, England






Newcastle upon Tyne, England
Many towns throughout Britain became manufacturing centers during the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries. Newcastle upon Tyne, in northeastern England, became important for steel production and shipbuilding.
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One of the most obvious changes to people’s lives was that more people moved into the urban areas where factories were located. Many of the agricultural laborers who left villages were forced to move. Beginning in the early 18th century, more people in rural areas were competing for fewer jobs. The rural population had risen sharply as new sources of food became available, and death rates declined due to fewer plagues and wars. At the same time, many small farms disappeared. This was partly because new enclosure laws required farmers to put fences or hedges around their fields to prevent common grazing on the land. Some small farmers who could not afford to enclose their fields had to sell out to larger landholders and search for work elsewhere. These factors combined to provide a ready work force for the new industries.
Textile Mill in Lancashire, England






Textile Mill in Lancashire, England
The textile industry was one of the first industries to be mechanized in 18th-century Britain. These women worked in a textile mill in Lancashire, in northwestern England.
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New manufacturing towns and cities grew dramatically. Many of these cities were close to the coalfields that supplied fuel to the factories. Factories had to be close to sources of power because power could not be distributed very far. The names of British factory cities soon symbolized industrialization to the wider world: Liverpool, Birmingham, Leeds, Glasgow, Sheffield, and especially Manchester. In the early 1770s Manchester numbered only 25,000 inhabitants. By 1850, after it had become a center of cotton manufacturing, its population had grown to more than 350,000.In pre-industrial England, more than three-quarters of the population lived in small villages. By the mid-19th century, however, the country had made history by becoming the first nation with half its population in cities. By 1850 millions of British people lived in crowded, grim industrial cities. Reformers began to speak of the mills and factories as dark, evil places.2.Effects on Labor


Division of Labor in Industry






Division of Labor in Industry
Division of labor is a basic tenet of industrialization. In division of labor, each worker is assigned to a different task, or step, in the manufacturing process, and as a result, total production increases. As this illustration shows, one person performing all five steps in the manufacture of a product can make one unit in a day. Five workers, each specializing in one of the five steps, can make 10 units in the same amount of time.
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The movement of people away from agriculture and into industrial cities brought great stresses to many people in the labor force. Women in households who had earned income from spinning found the new factories taking away their source of income. Traditional handloom weavers could no longer compete with the mechanized production of cloth. Skilled laborers sometimes lost their jobs as new machines replaced them.Sidebars
HISTORIC DOCUMENTS
Employment of Children in Factories
Children have always worked, to varying degrees, in nearly all cultures, but with the development of the Industrial Revolution in Britain in the 18th century, child labor was practiced on a large scale in the new “manufactories.” Children were a cheap source of labor for employers and were often easier to manage. In 1833 a Factory Act was enacted that regulated the conditions in which children worked. It was considered one of the first effective pieces of protective labor legislation.
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In the factories, people had to work long hours under harsh conditions, often with few rewards. Factory owners and managers paid the minimum amount necessary for a work force, often recruiting women and children to tend the machines because they could be hired for very low wages. Soon critics attacked this exploitation, particularly the use of child labor.The nature of work changed as a result of division of labor, an idea important to the Industrial Revolution that called for dividing the production process into basic, individual tasks. Each worker would then perform one task, rather than a single worker doing the entire job. Such division of labor greatly improved productivity, but many of the simplified factory jobs were repetitive and boring. Workers also had to labor for many hours, often more than 12 hours a day, sometimes more than 14, and people worked six days a week. Factory workers faced strict rules and close supervision by managers and overseers. The clock ruled life in the mills.By about the 1820s, income levels for most workers began to improve, and people adjusted to the different circumstances and conditions. By that time, Britain had changed forever. The economy was expanding at a rate that was more than twice the pace at which it had grown before the Industrial Revolution. Although vast differences existed between the rich and the poor, most of the population enjoyed some of the fruits of economic growth. The widespread poverty and constant threat of mass starvation that had haunted the preindustrial age lessened in industrial Britain. Although the overall health and material conditions of the populace clearly improved, critics continued to point to urban crowding and the harsh working conditions for many in the mills.III.THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN THE UNITED STATES

Interior of the Crystal PalaceAlexander Hamilton





Interior of the Crystal Palace
Sir Joseph Paxton, an English landscape gardener and greenhouse architect, designed the Crystal Palace to house the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London. The Crystal Palace, constructed entirely of cast iron and glass, expanded notions of architectural beauty. As the largest structure to be built from prefabricated units up to that time, it also was a landmark of architectural design, anticipating later industrial construction.
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Alexander Hamilton
Alexander Hamilton was one of the boldest American political thinkers of his time. As the United States’ first secretary of the treasury, Hamilton was very influential in setting his country on the road to industrialization.
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The economic successes of the British soon led other nations to try to follow the same path. In northern Europe, mechanics and investors in France, Belgium, Holland, and some of the German states set out to imitate Britain’s successful example. In the young United States, Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton called for an Industrial Revolution in his Report on Manufactures (1791). Many Americans felt that the United States had to become economically strong in order to maintain its recently won independence from Great Britain. In cities up and down the Atlantic Coast, leading citizens organized associations devoted to the encouragement of manufactures.Sidebars
HISTORIC DOCUMENTS
Daniel Webster on New Technology
The United States entered the Industrial Revolution in the early 19th century. By this time, England had already begun building up a strong industrial base. Some people in both England and the United States began to question the social and economic effects of using machines to manufacture important goods such as clothing. For example, in England a group of highly skilled textile workers known as the Luddites destroyed textile machines in a series of riots from 1811 to 1812. In this 1836 speech before the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, American statesman and Whig Party leader Daniel Webster fully endorsed the coming technological revolution and expounded its economic and political benefits for all members of society.
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The Industrial Revolution unfolded in the United States even more vigorously than it had in Great Britain. The young nation began as a weak, loose association of former colonies with a traditional economy. More than three-quarters of the labor force worked in agriculture in 1790. Americans soon enjoyed striking success in mechanization, however. This was clear in 1851 when producers from many nations gathered to display their industrial triumphs at the first World’s Fair, at the Crystal Palace in London. There, it was the work of Americans that attracted the most attention. Shortly after that, the British government dispatched a special committee to the United States to study the manufacturing accomplishments of its former colonies. By the end of the century, the United States was the world leader in manufacturing, unfolding what became known as the Second Industrial Revolution. The American economy had emerged as the largest and most productive on the globe.A.American Advantages


Early Industrial Plant






Early Industrial Plant
As the Industrial Revolution spread to the United States, plants such as this textile factory appeared. Soon the production of exports outpaced import of goods, and by the late 1800s America emerged as the world’s largest industrial power.
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The United States enjoyed many advantages that made it fertile ground for an Industrial Revolution. A rich, sparsely inhabited continent lay open to exploitation and development. It proved relatively easy for the United States government to buy or seize vast lands across North America from Native Americans, from European nations, and from Mexico. In addition, the American population was highly literate, and most felt that economic growth was desirable. With settlement stretched across the continent from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean, the United States enjoyed a huge internal market. Within its distant borders there was remarkably free movement of goods, people, capital, and ideas.The young nation also inherited many advantages from Great Britain. The stable legal and political systems that had encouraged enterprise and rewarded initiative in Great Britain also did so, with minor variations, in the United States. No nation was more open to social mobility, at least for white male Protestants. Others—particularly African Americans, Native Americans, other minorities, and women—found the atmosphere much more difficult. In the context of the times, however, the United States was relatively open to change. It quickly adopted many of the technologies, forms of organization, and attitudes shaping the new industrial world, and then proceeded to generate its own advances.One initial American advantage was the fact that the United States shared the language and much of the culture of Great Britain, the pioneering industrial nation. This helped Americans transfer technology to the United States. As descriptions of new machines and processes appeared in print, Americans read about them eagerly and tried their own versions of the inventions sweeping Britain.Critical to furthering industrialization in the United States were machines and knowledgeable people. Although the British tried to prevent skilled mechanics from leaving Britain and advanced machines from being exported, those efforts mostly proved ineffective. Americans worked actively to encourage such transfers, even offering bounties (special monetary rewards) to encourage people with knowledge of the latest methods and devices to move to the United States.The most dramatic early example of a successful technical transfer is the case of Samuel Slater. Slater was an important figure in a leading British textile firm who sailed to the United States masquerading as a farmer. He eventually moved to Rhode Island, where he worked with mechanics, machine builders, and merchants to create the first important textile mill in the United States. Slater had worked as an apprentice under Richard Arkwright, and Slater’s mill used Arkwright’s innovative system of mechanized spinning. The firm of Almy, Brown, and Slater inspired many imitators and gave birth to a vast textile industry in New England.The lure of the open, growing United States was strong. Its opportunities attracted knowledgeable, ambitious individuals not only from Britain but from other European countries as well. In 1800, for example, a young Frenchman named Eleuthère Irénée du Pont de Nemours brought to the United States his knowledge of the latest French advances in chemistry and gunpowder making. In 1802 he founded what would become one of the largest and most successful American businesses, E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, better known simply as DuPont.B.American Challenges



Telegraph






Telegraph
In 1837 the first electrical telegraph instruments were invented by Samuel Morse in the United States and by Sir Charles Wheatstone and Sir William F. Cooke in Britain. Morse sent the first public telegraph message in 1844. Pictured here is the original Morse receiving device.
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Soon the United States was pioneering on its own. Because local circumstances and conditions in the United States were somewhat different than those in Britain, industrialization also developed somewhat differently. Although the United States had many natural resources in abundance, some were more plentiful than others. The profusion of wood in North America, for example, led Americans to use that material much more than Europeans did. They burned wood widely as fuel and also made use of it in machinery and in construction. Taking advantage of the vast forest resources in their country, Americans built the world’s best woodworking machines.
Transcontinental Railroad






Transcontinental Railroad
Locomotives from the eastern and western United States are depicted here meeting in Promontory, Utah, where crowds gathered to watch the joining of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads on May 10, 1869. This first transcontinental railroad opened the West to supplies and resources from the East and served as the chief means of transportation for settlers in the West.
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Transportation and communication were special challenges in a nation that stretched across the North American continent. Economic growth depended on tying together the resources, markets, and people of this large area. Despite the general conviction that private enterprise was best, the government played an active role in uniting the country, particularly by building roads. From 1815 to 1860 state and local governments also provided almost three-quarters of the financing for canal construction and related improvements to waterways.
Samuel Morse






Samuel Morse
Samuel F. B. Morse devoted most of his life to art and politics, and he turned to projects like the telegraph only as alternative means of supporting his other careers. However, Morse’s telegraph became the most important 19th-century improvement in communication.
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When the British began building railroads, Americans embraced this new technology eagerly, and substantial public money was invested in rail systems. By 1860 more than half the railroad tracks in the world were in the United States. The most critical 19th-century improvement in communication, the telegraph, was invented by American Samuel F. B. Morse. The telegraph allowed messages to be sent long distances almost instantly by using a code of electronic pulses passing over a wire. The railroad and the telegraph spread across North America and helped create a national market, which in turn encouraged additional improvements in transportation and communication.Another challenge in the United States was a relative shortage of labor. Much more than in continental Europe or in Britain, labor was in chronically short supply in the United States. This led industrialists to develop machinery to replace human labor. C.Changes in Industry

Americans soon demonstrated a great talent for mechanization. Famed American arms maker Samuel Colt summarized his fellow citizens’ faith in technology when he declared in 1851, “There is nothing that cannot be produced by machinery.” 1.Continuous-Process Manufacturing


Water-Powered Mill






Water-Powered Mill
Early manufacturing employed water-powered machinery. Water turned the paddles of a wheel, which in turn moved grinding stones or other mechanical devices. Modern water wheels, called water turbines, drive generators that produce electricity.
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An important American development was continuous-process manufacturing. In continuous-process manufacturing, large quantities of the same product, such as cigarettes or canned food, are made in a nonstop operation. The process runs continuously, except for repairs to or maintenance of the machinery used. In the late 18th century, inventor Oliver Evans of Delaware created a remarkable water-powered flour mill. In Evans’s mill, machinery elevated the grain to the top of the mill and then moved it mechanically through various processing steps, eventually producing flour at the bottom of the mill. The process greatly reduced the need for manual labor and cut milling costs dramatically. Mills modeled after Evans’s were built along the Delaware and Brandywine rivers and Chesapeake Bay, and by the time of the American Revolution (1775-1783) they were arguably the most productive in the world. Similar milling technology was also used to grind snuff and other tobacco products in the same region.As the 19th century passed, Americans improved continuous-process technology and expanded its use. The basic principle of utilizing gravity-powered and mechanized systems to move and process materials proved applicable in many settings. The meatpacking industry in the Midwest employed a form of this technology, as did many industries using distilling and refining processes. Items made using continuous-process manufacturing included kerosene, gasoline, and other petroleum products, as well as many processed foods. Mechanized, continuous processing yielded uniform quantity production with a minimum need for human labor.2.The American System