Industrialization

The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain, but by 1807, a British entrepreneur named William Cockerill had created a textile-machine-manufacturing business in Belgium that helped spread the Industrial Revolution first around Belgium, then to France, and finally around the European continent. Cockerill was particularly important because at the time, Britain was engaged in a war with Napoleonic France and most of Europe was cut off from British industrial production and innovation.

Life for factory workers during the Industrial Revolution was grueling and extremely harsh. Many people worked six days a week, for fourteen hours a day, in cramped and unhealthy conditions for little pay. Work was dangerous, and if you were injured and unable to continue working you were given no compensation. From about 1830 onwards, the nineteenth century in Britain was defined by constant social and political reform. Working conditions were slowly improved, and political suffrage rights were expanded to more and more men.

The driving force of the Industrial Revolution's early years was the English textile manufacturing industry, which gained phenomenal success on the back of a number of innovations to the production methods used for textiles. Included among such British inventions were the spinning jenny, the water frame, the power loom, and the flying shuttle, all of which mechanized and sped up the process of weaving and producing cloth. The cotton gin, which sped along the process by which cotton was separated from its seeds, was an American invention of the 1790s.

The farming industry had already been revolutionized by the Agricultural Revolution in the eighteenth century, so the first industry to be revolutionized by the Industrial Revolution was the textile industry. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, textiles were extremely laborious and inefficient (by our standards) to produce and were primarily manufactured by family units called “cottage industries”; however, with the introduction of machinery, the production of textiles skyrocketed.

Although more efficient printing techniques were developed during the Industrial Revolution, the first printing press was invented by Johannes Gutenberg in the mid-15th century. All of the other answers are advancements that did come from the period.

By the eighteenth century, most of Britain's wood was gone. Factories required a lot of energy, so the British began mining coal. The steam engines that became prominent during this period were fueled by coal.

For much of the nineteenth century, Manchester and Liverpool were both major centers of the Industrial Revolution; however, Manchester was thirty miles inland and companies in Liverpool controlled the access to raw resources that arrived via the port. In an attempt to overcome what they viewed as excessive charges, the companies of Manchester sought to build the Manchester Ship Canal to allow goods to be transported directly to Manchester, bypassing the city of Liverpool. The canal was completed in 1894 and led almost immediately to the rise of Manchester and the decline of Liverpool as industrial and economic powerhouses.

The empire grew in importance during the Industrial Revolution as industrializing nations called on the empire to produce the raw materials needed to manufacture goods. All of the other answers describe tensions that existed during the period.

Johannes Gutenberg, a German blacksmith, invented the printing press around 1440. He was the first European to create a method for mass printing. The method he used was based on agricultural screw presses that were common in farming. Before Gutenberg, all book making had to be done by hand. Monks or other literate people would copy books page by page, this was expensive and time consuming, which meant that books were rare and only for the wealthy. The invention of the printing press helped to spread enlightenment ideas throughout Europe much faster than would have otherwise been possible.

The Industrial Revolution was the rapid growth of industrial technology and manufacturing. Immediate results included improved transportation due to inventions such as the steam engine, growth of urban centers as many people moved to cities for factory jobs, and tremendous growth of manufacturing, largely in the textile industry. It did NOT immediately increase life expectancy, as factories were often hazardous to workers and cities were plagued with pollution and other unsanitary conditions that allowed diseases such as cholera to spread.