The Industrial Revolution in Great Britain

The industrial revolution in Britain started with the steam engine and other innovations in engineering and manufacturing, leading many to urbanize and work long, dangerous hours in factories. With the rise of industrialization in Great Britain, a wealth divide between the low, middle and upper classes emerged.

Follow us on social media:

#IndustrialRevolution #Britain #Documentary #History #Biography

Today's Daily Dose short history film covers the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain, which forever transformed British culture and landscape. The filmmaker has included the original voice over script to further assist your understanding:

Today on The Daily Dose, The Industrial Revolution in Great Britain.

Thanks to Thomas Newcomen’s prototype steam engine designed in the early 1700s—later to be improved upon by Scottish engineer James Watt with the addition of a separate water condenser—the First Industrial Revolution in Great Britain exploded in the 1830s and 40s, in a way that transformed British life and landscape forever. Britain’s damp climate made it an ideal haven for raising sheep, and when innovations like the flying shuttle, the spinning jenny, and the power loom came on the scene, weaving cloth and spinning yarn became much easier and faster than the pre-revolution cottage industry that required dedicated artisans. In response, some British weavers known as Luddites, grew fearful that unskilled machine operators would soon threaten their livelihoods, inspiring them to break into textile factories with the intent of destroying the very machines that, in their minds, anyway, threatened their existence.

The steam engine also combined with the invention of interchangeable parts, creating a mechanized factory system that impacted nearly every form of manufacturing, which in turn allowed British industries to meet the growing consumer demands both at home and in their many overseas colonies. Demand for coal, steel and iron rose dramatically during the Napoleonic Wars of 1803 to 1815, driving thousands of British workers from rural areas into newly-industrialized cities such as Liverpool and Manchester, while the rise of large factories turned smaller towns into major cities over the short span of several decades.
Despite brutally low wages, long hours and oftentimes dangerous working conditions, overcrowded cities witnessed a dramatic rise in pollution, poor sanitation and fowl drinking water, and while poor and working class people continued to struggle at the bottom, a burgeoning middle and upper class soon benefited from wide-ranging improvements in living standards and rising incomes.

Britain’s First Industrial Revolution also ushered in improvements to roadways, rail lines and canals, creating logistic networks that vastly improved the outflow of goods from industrial hubs like never before. The Industrial Revolution also witnessed key advances in communication, when in 1837, British inventors William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone patented the first commercial telegraphy system, virtually in tandem with Samuel Morse and other inventors in the United States. As steam driven trains began to travel at higher rates of speed, Cooke and Wheatstone’s sophisticated communication method proved vitally important in the area of railroad signaling. Banks and industrial financiers also rose to new prominence during the period, while mechanized factory systems ushered in refined management and logistics techniques, making the Industrial Revolution a key turning point—both good and bad—in the history of Great Britain.

[Walter-wv]

Britain from 1800 to 1900.
20, 000 Waterwheels decreased in number.
Windmills decreased in number.
Englishman Thomas Newcomen's 1, 500 Atmospheric Pumps disappeared.
Scotsman James Watt's 500 Steam Engines and their descendants increased in number to 10, 000, 000 !!!
For every SINGLE Waterwheel in 1800 we now had an additional 500 Steam Engines in 1900 !!!
The Power output for the whole country increased by 500 times in one human lifetime !!!
It was a Power Revolution!
This WAS the Industrial Revolution.
And all it needed was one SINGLE Invention, James Watt's Invention of the world's first PRACTICAL Steam Powered Engine.
Take away Steam Power, you get no Industrial Revolution.

[walterbennie]

Newcomen's Atmospheric Pump wasn't a Steam Engine, it was an Atmospheric Pump, it provided Atmospheric Power.
It couldn't be improved, even by James Watt.
Even a 100% efficient Newcomen Atmospheric Pump would provide only 14.7psi. and we know that's impossible, it would be more like 10psi. and no rotary Power.
Watt dumped Newcomen's Atmospheric Power and Arkwright's Water-Power for High Pressure Steam Power.
To achieve that he had to INVENT a new engine, the world's first PRACTICAL High Pressure Steam Engine, it provided High Pressure Steam Power.
Then?
An Industrial Revolution!
It was the one and only invention that kicked off the Industrial Revolution.
Now, no need for Newcomen's 70 years old Atmospheric Pump or Arkwright's Water-Power.

[Melvin-qv]

Basically, it seems there is the automobile industry, oil industry, mining industry, and textile industry. The industrial revolution seemed to have industries within it. Textiles i think were made by a woman(later on, women). It dealt with the making of clothes. Textile machines, like in the movies, The Wanted and Mouse trap.

[haruka]

what song is playing in the background?

[Ingens_Scherz]

This is mostly nonsense, and tired American nonsense at that.
The Industrial Revolution in Britain wasn't some sudden, cataclysmic change that stampeded through an entire society overnight. It was a long process that began with Abraham Darby I's discoveries in Coalbrookdale in Shropshire between 1702 and 1707, but which took a full century before it began to accelerate into early, recognisable forms of mechanisation. That this process began in Britain and nowhere else in the world is because of the socio-political changes that Britain experienced during the 17th Century, including the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution, which prepared the soil for the seeds that grew into what would eventually become known as the "First Industrial Revolution" - almost 200 years later. The whole "class" thing (which is really about the problem of poverty, and is something generations of reformers in Britain have tried to tackle to this day, with a mixture of great success and abject failure) - as framed by Karl Marx in his hopelessly wordy and data-less theories - but which seem somehow to obsess Americans ad nauseum for some inexplicable reason, came long after the emergent, and initially unique, phenomenon that was British industrialisation.
So to my first point: read more or just shut up.