43 Facts About Industrial Revolution

1.

Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain, and many of the technological and architectural innovations were of British origin.

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2.

Comparable only to humanity's adoption of agriculture with respect to material advancement, the Industrial Revolution influenced in some way almost every aspect of daily life.

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3.

Some economists have said the most important effect of the Industrial Revolution was that the standard of living for the general population in the western world began to increase consistently for the first time in history, although others have said that it did not begin to meaningfully improve until the late 19th and 20th centuries.

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4.

Economic historians are in agreement that the onset of the Industrial Revolution is the most important event in the history of humanity since the domestication of animals and plants.

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5.

Precise start and end of the Industrial Revolution is still debated among historians, as is the pace of economic and social changes.

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6.

Eric Hobsbawm held that the Industrial Revolution began in Britain in the 1780s and was not fully felt until the 1830s or 1840s, while T S Ashton held that it occurred roughly between 1760 and 1830.

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7.

Commencement of the Industrial Revolution is closely linked to a small number of innovations, beginning in the second half of the 18th century.

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8.

Industrial Revolution is credited with a list of inventions, but these were actually developed by such people as Thomas Highs and John Kay; Arkwright nurtured the inventors, patented the ideas, financed the initiatives, and protected the machines.

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9.

Industrial Revolution created the cotton mill which brought the production processes together in a factory, and he developed the use of power—first horsepower and then water power—which made cotton manufacture a mechanised industry.

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10.

Major change in the iron industries during the Industrial Revolution was the replacement of wood and other bio-fuels with coal.

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11.

Use of coal in iron smelting started somewhat before the Industrial Revolution, based on innovations by Sir Clement Clerke and others from 1678, using coal reverberatory furnaces known as cupolas.

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12.

Industrial Revolution had the advantage over his rivals in that his pots, cast by his patented process, were thinner and cheaper than theirs.

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13.

Industrial Revolution constructed and patented in London a low-lift combined vacuum and pressure water pump, that generated about one horsepower and was used in numerous waterworks and in a few mines (hence its "brand name", The Miner's Friend).

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14.

Industrial Revolution was engaged to build the machinery for making ships' pulley blocks for the Royal Navy in the Portsmouth Block Mills.

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15.

Effect of machine tools during the Industrial Revolution was not that great because other than firearms, threaded fasteners, and a few other industries there were few mass-produced metal parts.

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16.

Industrial Revolution was able to greatly increase the scale of the manufacture by replacing the relatively expensive glass vessels formerly used with larger, less expensive chambers made of riveted sheets of lead.

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17.

British Agricultural Revolution is considered one of the causes of the Industrial Revolution because improved agricultural productivity freed up workers to work in other sectors of the economy.

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18.

Machine tools and metalworking techniques developed during the Industrial Revolution eventually resulted in precision manufacturing techniques in the late 19th century for mass-producing agricultural equipment, such as reapers, binders, and combine harvesters.

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19.

Industrial Revolution improved Britain's transport infrastructure with a turnpike road network, a canal and waterway network, and a railway network.

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20.

Majority of textile factory workers during the Industrial Revolution were unmarried women and children, including many orphans.

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21.

Similarly, the average height of the population declined during the Industrial Revolution, implying that their nutritional status was decreasing.

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22.

The Industrial Revolution created a middle class of businessmen, clerks, foremen, and engineers who lived in much better conditions.

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23.

Industrial Revolution was the first period in history during which there was a simultaneous increase in both population and per capita income.

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24.

In terms of social structure, the Industrial Revolution witnessed the triumph of a middle class of industrialists and businessmen over a landed class of nobility and gentry.

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25.

Industrial Revolution led to a population increase but the chances of surviving childhood did not improve throughout the Industrial Revolution, although infant mortality rates were reduced markedly.

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26.

Industrial Revolution concentrated labour into mills, factories, and mines, thus facilitating the organisation of combinations or trade unions to help advance the interests of working people.

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27.

Industrial Revolution generated an enormous and unprecedented economic division in the world, as measured by the share of manufacturing output.

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28.

Belgium was the second country in which the Industrial Revolution took place and the first in continental Europe: Wallonia took the lead.

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29.

Important American technological contributions during the period of the Industrial Revolution were the cotton gin and the development of a system for making interchangeable parts, the latter aided by the development of the milling machine in the US.

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30.

Industrial Revolution had learned of the new textile technologies as a boy apprentice in Derbyshire, England, and defied laws against the emigration of skilled workers by leaving for New York in 1789, hoping to make money with his knowledge.

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31.

Steel is often cited as the first of several new areas for industrial mass-production, which are said to characterise a "Second Industrial Revolution", beginning around 1850, although a method for mass manufacture of steel was not invented until the 1860s, when Sir Henry Bessemer invented a new furnace which could convert molten pig iron into steel in large quantities.

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32.

Some historians believe the Industrial Revolution was an outgrowth of social and institutional changes brought by the end of feudalism in Britain after the English Civil War in the 17th century, although feudalism began to break down after the Black Death of the mid 14th century, followed by other epidemics, until the population reached a low in the 14th century.

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33.

Enclosure movement and the British Agricultural Industrial Revolution made food production more efficient and less labour-intensive, forcing the farmers who could no longer be self-sufficient in agriculture into cottage industry, for example weaving, and in the longer term into the cities and the newly developed factories.

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34.

Lewis Mumford has proposed that the Industrial Revolution had its origins in the Early Middle Ages, much earlier than most estimates.

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35.

Industrial Revolution explains that the model for standardised mass production was the printing press and that "the archetypal model for the industrial era was the clock".

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36.

Industrial Revolution cites the monastic emphasis on order and time-keeping, as well as the fact that medieval cities had at their centre a church with bell ringing at regular intervals as being necessary precursors to a greater synchronisation necessary for later, more physical, manifestations such as the steam engine.

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37.

Presence of a large domestic market should be considered an important driver of the Industrial Revolution, particularly explaining why it occurred in Britain.

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38.

One question of active interest to historians is why the Industrial Revolution occurred in Europe and not in other parts of the world in the 18th century, particularly China, India, and the Middle East, or at other times like in Classical Antiquity or the Middle Ages.

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39.

In fact, before the Industrial Revolution, "there existed something of a global economic parity between the most advanced regions in the world economy.

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40.

Critics of the Industrial revolution promoted a more interventionist state and formed new organizations to promote human rights.

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41.

Primitivism argues that the Industrial Revolution have created an un-natural frame of society and the world in which humans need to adapt to an un-natural urban landscape in which humans are perpetual cogs without personal autonomy.

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42.

The Industrial revolution has been stated as is inherently unsustainable and will lead to eventual collapse of society, mass hunger, starvation, and resource scarcity.

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43.

The effects include permanent changes to the earth's atmosphere and soil, forests, the mass destruction of the Industrial revolution has led to catastrophic impacts on the earth.

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