Second Industrial Revolution
HISTORY 100
WORLD HISTORY
SPRING 1998
30 MARCH
THE SECOND INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
DICTIONARY TIME-LINES
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
In this section, you should learn to define and discuss the following people
and things:
- The Industrial Revolution, Hiero, aeropile, capitalism, the Guild System,
productivity, template, linked machines, The First Phase of the Industrial
Revolution, The Mechanical Revolution, The Second Phase of the Industrial
Revolution, The Transportation Revolution, The Third Phase of the Industrial
Revolution, The Chemical Revolution, mill, millwright, belt-driven power,
Seven Years' War, Napoleonic Wars.
You should also be able to discuss the following topics in some detail:
- What are some of the necessary preconditions for technological innovations
to advance an economy?
- What are the traditional ways for businesses to lower labor costs? Are any
of these methods being used in the United States today?
- Why does Capitalism promote technological development?
- How do templates and linked machines work and how do they increase worker
productivity?
- Into what stages can the Industrial Revolution be divided, and how did
each affect the global economy?
- How did belt-power work? What were its advantages? Its limitations?
- How did the progress of The Mechanical Revolution affect the skills and
education of the workers?
- What problems did the development of The Mechanical Revolution create for
the European powers?
TEXT
As you have probably already noted, historians use the word "revolution" in
several different senses, for a violent uprising, for something strikingly
innovative and influential, and for a process that works deep and important
changes. When discussing revolutions, it is easy to shift from one definition to
another without realizing it. This is something to try to avoid, especially when
discussing something like The Industrial Revolution. Although it
is best considered as a long process of great change in the world, and
especially in the Western world, some writers prefer to emphasize the
innovations and spend a good deal of time discussing the mining and use of coal
and the principles and operation of the steam engine. Neither of these were
particularly new.
In the year 1092, a monk of the Abbey of Saint James in Liege (in modern
Belgium), wrote that a lot of "black rock" had been found under the soil in the
vicinity and that it had great advantages, "giving warmth to the poor and fire
to the artisan." In the nineteenth century, a significant steel industry was
established at Liege using that coal deposit, but it had not really been
developed until that time. The men and women of the Middle Ages found that their
"black rock" "emitted noxious vapors" (we would call it "pollution") and passed
a law against using it. Then too, back in Hellenistic times,
Hiero, one of those bright chaps at the Museum of Alexandria,
built an interesting gadget. He made a ball-shaped teapot (of course, they
didn't have tea at the time) with a tight-fitting lid and two spigots, one on
each side and pointing in opposite directions. He put water in it and suspended
it by a string above a small fire. As the water started to boil, steam built up
inside the vessel and began to escape through the spigots. The stream was
shooting out in opposite directs and so the metal ball began to spin faster and
faster. Hiero called his gadget an aeropile, and his friends
thought that it was quite ingenious. It remained nothing more than a clever toy,
however, much like the Mayan use of the wheel only for pull-toys. The aeropile
had a number of flaws, but, if Hiero and his colleagues had had an important
reason to do so, they could doubtless have developed it further into an
effective steam turbine. There was no such reason, however, and so the principle
of the aeropile was largely forgotten.
This raises a couple of interesting points. The first is that an innovation
is significant only when it is applied to something that society considers
worthwhile. Youngsters had been flying kites for a long time before the Wright
brothers (and others) realized that the same design that caused kits to go up in
the air could be used for wings to make airplanes go up in the same direction.
The second is that "inventions" don't appear until a society is, for some
reason or another, ready for them. There is a nice twentieth-century example of
this. The mechanical cotton picker was developed back in the 1920's, but cotton
growers refused to accept it, saying that it required too much maintenance,
missed too much cotton, and tore up many of the cotton bolls it did pull. They
continued to employ the migrant workers who would come up from Mexico each year
to harvest the cotton crop. In the 1950's however, the United States passed a
law that all such migrant workers should be paid the minimum wage. The cotton
growers quickly found that the mechanical cotton picker was not really so bad
after all, and, within a very few years almost all cotton in the country was
picked mechanically.
So we should avoid thinking of the Industrial Revolution simply in terms of
the innovations and inventions themselves, and ask ourselves how society had
become ready to accept such developments, what purposes they served, and what
changes they brought about.
We began our discussion of the Industrial Revolution much earlier than most
historians would do, and called the rise of capitalism the "first
industrial revolution." Let's begin there.
"Capitalism" has to do with the ownership of the means of production,
and is not all that difficult to understand. Let us say that there is a man who
owns three hundred acres of good land, but no tractor, horses, or other farm
equipment and has very little in his bank account. He is a capitalist in that he
owns the land -- the means of production -- but needs the labor necessary to
raise a crop and make a profit from his land. How might he go about it? He could
lease the land to other people for a cash payment or a portion of the crop. He
could get a loan from the bank to lease equipment and hire workers, or he could
form a company and sell enough shares to get the money he needed (keeping back
enough unsold shares for himself to make certain that he controlled the company
and got his share of its profits). Whatever tactic he might use, his interest
would be in increasing the amount of profit that he received and he would use
his power as the owner of the land to do so. He would have no necessary interest
in the welfare of the people who provided the labor necessary to produce a
profit, and would be concerned primarily with reducing the portion of his land's
revenues that he had to share with the workers.
The decline of the Guild System and the rise of a class of
capitalists who managed to control the lion's share of profits produced by the
economy created a society that was ready to accept the innovations that gave
rise to the Industrial Revolution. The capitalists considered that their
ownership of the means of production entitled them to as much profit as they
could obtain from the use of this property. This meant that they were interested
in reducing the labor costs of producing whatever it was that they produced, and
there were two basic ways of accomplishing this.
The first was to reduce the worker's pay to a bare minimum. Any provisions
the guilds had made for workers -- old age benefits, health insurance,
education, workers' safety, care of widows and orphans, and the like -- were
abandoned, and workers were given a straight salary based either on a full day's
work or a payment for each piece of work completed. These salaries were made as
low as possible, and women and children who could be paid less than men were
employed wherever possible. Authors of this era of the Industrial Revolution
described working conditions and the condition of the workers in the darkest
terms imaginable, and the European working classes began to devise means by
which they could gain a greater share of the profits of the economy.
The other means by which the capitalists could decrease labor costs was by
increasing the workers' productivity, the amount that a worker
could produce in a day's work. This could be done by increasing the hours of
labor required to receive a day's wages, or by requiring workers to work
extremely hard and firing those who were incapable of keeping the pace that was
set for them. Neither of these methods were too effective, however, since the
increase in productivity was marginal at best. The best solution was to provide
the worker with machines that would multiply his efforts. The basic device for
obtaining this end was the template and linked
machines. Some of you may have seen such a device used by politicians to
allow them to sign thousands of letters "personally". The politician signs a
letter, and a couple of dozen pens, linked to the pen he is using, repeat the
motion of his pen exactly so that his one "personal" signature becomes
twenty-five, none distinguishable from the original. It works even better if the
politician has had his "personal" signature engraved on a metal plate. That way,
anyone in his office can simply take up the pen, follow the grooves in the
plate, and make twenty-five of the politician's "personal" signatures at a time.
It works even better if the politician's "personal" signature is engraved on a
cylinder that is driven by some sort of motor. That way, anyone on the office
can fit the main pen into the beginning of the signature groove, turn on the
switch, and the cylinder will begin to turn, producing twenty-five personal
signatures with every revolution. Of course, the person has to stand around and
watch the operation, because the pen sometimes jumps out of its groove, one of
the pens is always running out of ink, the paper changer runs out of paper or
gets jammed, or any of a number of other things may happen. The person watching
the machine has to be able to service it, or even repair it if necessary.
This may sound silly, and it is. But it does happen, and this silly machine
embodies all of the basic innovations that made up The First Phase of the
Industrial Revolution, which for want of a better term we might call
The Mechanical Revolution, lasting until about 1800 and
characterized by the development and proliferation of machines of production. We
might call The Second Phase of the Industrial Revolution The
Transportation Revolution, lasting until about 1860. Mechanical
developments continued during this period, but the most interesting changes were
those that occurred as a result of the development of transportation technology.
The Third Phase of the Industrial Revolution lasted perhaps into
the 1970's, and might be called The Chemical Revolution.
Mechanical and Transportation continued to develop, but the great advances of
the period were made in the area of chemical engineering and consisted of the
development of man-made substances that were superior to and cheaper than the
natural substances they replaced. Steel industries, once the core of a national
industry, began to decline, and new economic powers, lacking the natural
resources to support an industrial economy of the traditional sort, began to
arise. People have suggested various names for the stage of the Industrial
Revolution into which you have been born: The Age of Ceramics, The Age of
Plastics, The Atomic Age, The Age of Genetic Engineering, The Age of the
Computer, The Information Age, The Jet Age, and even The Post-Industrial Age.
People usually find it more difficult to think clearly about their own times
than about the more remote past.
We will be touching on this continuing development throughout the remainder
of this course, but we should first consider some other of the characteristics
of The Mechanical Revolution. The basic idea of the template not only made it
possible to increase productivity and to create more or less self-operating
machines, but it produced items that were exactly identical. This meant that
common machines could become more complex that had ever been possible before.
It's a simple rule of life that the more complicated an operation becomes, the
more things that can go wrong with it, and the more parts something has, the
more frequently one of them will break. Before the use of the template became
widespread in manufacturing, everything that was produced was composed of unique
parts, each of which was so crafted that it fitted the others. When any single
part of a machine broke, the entire machine was useless until an artisan could
create a replacement sufficiently similar that it could take the place of the
original. There was no such problem with things produced by template. Since all
the things produced by this method were identical, any broken element could be
easily replaced. This stimulated producers to develop more and more precise
templates so that increasingly complex machines could be produced. This increase
of complexity and precision began to change the character of the industrial
workforce. No matter how ingenious the machines became, there was still a need
for an operator to feed them raw materials, adjust their operation when
necessary, and repair them when the need arose. This meant that the operators
had to be mechanically skilled, and this usually meant that they had to be
experienced and more or less educated. In fact, many of the more important
innovations of the period were devised by workers. Then, too, the linked
machines needed some source of power to drive them since they were not being
operated by a human hand. Throughout the world dams -- such as the one on the
Kaw here in Lawrence, Kansas, USA -- were built and mill-races constructed to
turn great water-wheels. This rotary power was distributed to nearby factories
by long belts made of leather, rope, or some other suitable material. In each
factory, there were one or more "power wheels" that were turned by their links
with the main mill wheel. Incidentally, this is why we still sometimes refer to
a factory as amill. Within the factory, power was distributed from
the main wheel to the machines by complex systems of belts, wheels, brakes,
gears, disengagement levers, and the like. A special class of worker, the
millwright, emerged, a worker who tended, repaired and adjusted
these complicated systems. Millwrights were essential to a factory's operation
and came to form a bridge between the capitalist and the ordinary worker. This
belt-driven power system was complex and not very energy
efficient; it was dangerous and workers were forever getting caught in the gears
or cut into pieces when a high-speed belt broke and whipped out across the
factory floor. The biggest problem, from the mill owner's point of view, was
that this sort of power could not be carried very far, and sources of needed raw
material and water power were often located at some distance from each other.
Nevertheless, the stage of the Industrial Revolution dominated by the
template, linked machines, and belt-driven power systems increased European
production to such an extent that the Continent could not produce enough raw
materials to maintain full production, and it could not sell all of its goods
when it did reach full production. Part of the problem was solved as the Western
nations moved plants and animals from one part of their empire to other parts
and refined the plantation system. The cotton fields of the Southeastern United
States were only one element of a colonial system that fed the factories of
Europe the raw materials that they required. The problem of markets was somewhat
more difficult to resolve, since it required turning the great populations of
India and China into markets for European goods.
While the European powers were involved in the Seven Years' War
and the Napoleonic Wars, many of their colonies claimed and gained
their independence. The old colonial system of the sea- borne empires had
vanished, and the European economy demanded new markets and sources of raw
materials. When the American inventor, Robert Fulton, developed the
steam-powered ship, the basis of a new imperial system was laid. At the same
time, the influence of the Industrial Revolution began to be felt through the
development of new means of transportation, means that in a very real sense
re-drew the map of the world. Our discussion of the emergence of the United
States as a world power will provide an example of that transformation.
ASSIGNMENTS
REQUIRED ASSIGNMENTS
There are several excellent sites dealing with the Industrial Revolution of
the 18th century. The Mining Company deals with several aspects of the movement
in its site devoted to the Eighteenth Century. Evansville
offers a good introduction to Industry. There is also
the text of a lecture on the Industrial Revolution deliver many years ago by one
of the first of the world historians, Arnold Toynbee. You should
spend some time on each of these.
RECOMMENDED ASSIGNMENTS
It is well to remember that the Industrial Revolution created the wealth that
we enjoy today and that the Industrial Revolution was paid for in the blood of
workers -- men, women, and children. If you have the time, I would suggest that
you might browse through The Life
of a Coal Miner, Coal Mine Workers
(Women in World History), and The
Boys in the Breakers to get an idea of Avondale
may give you something of an idea of how high that price could be.
This text was produced by Lynn H. Nelson, Department of
History, University of Kansas.
27 March 1998
Lawrence
KS
.
