The Industrial Revolution

Between 1750 and 1900 the amount of work a person could do multiplied, because the work stopped coming from muscles. Coal, then oil, then electricity supplied the force instead. Everything else on this page follows from that: the factory, the railway, the city, the union, the empire that could be governed from a distance, and the machine that carried one person at walking pace and then at sixty miles an hour. The period is called the Industrial Revolution, and the first thing to settle is when it started, because the answer is not one date.

Why the Industrial Revolution has three start dates

Books give 1760, 1780, or the 1830s. All three appear in serious work, and the disagreement is not carelessness. Each date answers a different question.

1760 is the date of invention. The first machines appear around here, and Britain starts building them. The economic historian Arnold Toynbee popularised the term Industrial Revolution in the 1800s and used 1760 to 1840 for it. T. S. Ashton gave roughly 1760 to 1830. If the question is when the machines arrived, the answer is 1760.

1780 is the date of adoption. Mechanised spinning takes off in this decade, and factories start replacing workshops in the textile trade. Eric Hobsbawm held that the revolution broke out in the 1780s. If the question is when industry actually changed how goods were made, the answer is 1780.

The 1830s is the date of effect. Hobsbawm also held that the change was not fully felt until the 1830s or 1840s, and some accounts start it there. The economic historian Nicholas Crafts calculated British income per person rising very slowly from 1760 to 1830, then jumping after 1830. If the question is when ordinary people's lives measurably changed, the answer is the 1830s.

A fourth position rejects the framing. John Clapham and Nicholas Crafts argued that the change was gradual and continuous, and that the word revolution describes it badly. That argument is still live.

This page uses 1760 to 1840, because that span covers invention through to effect. Any single start date inside it is defensible, and which one is right depends entirely on what is being counted.

1769 CE — The engine becomes useful. James Watt patents a steam engine with a separate condenser. The Newcomen engine of 1712 had wasted most of its fuel reheating its own cylinder, and Watt's design fixed that, cutting coal use sharply. A later version turned a rotating shaft instead of moving up and down. Those two changes together mean the engine can be put anywhere and can drive machinery of any kind. Newcomen built the engine. Watt made it worth owning.
1760 to 1840 CE — The Industrial Revolution. Production moves out of homes and workshops and into factories. Textiles lead, because cloth is the largest trade by employment and by value. Coal supplies the power, iron supplies the machines, and Britain has both in quantity and in the same places. Output rises faster than at any earlier point in history, and so does the population.
1776 CE — Two documents. The American colonies declare independence, applying Enlightenment arguments to an actual government. In the same year Adam Smith publishes The Wealth of Nations, which sets out how specialisation and exchange increase output. Political and economic thinking about how societies should be organised arrive together.
1789 CE — The French Revolution. The French monarchy falls, and the revolution declares rights held by citizens rather than privileges granted by a king. It is followed by terror, war, and eventually an emperor, but the arguments it made spread across Europe and did not go back.
1796 CE — The smallpox vaccine. Edward Jenner demonstrates that infection with cowpox protects against smallpox. This is the first vaccine, and it starts the process that ends with smallpox eliminated from the world 184 years later.
About 1804 CE — One billion people. World population reaches one billion for the first time. It had taken the whole of human history to get there. It takes 123 years to reach the second billion.
1804 CE — The first steam journey on rails. Richard Trevithick's locomotive hauls ten tons of iron, five wagons, and seventy men about nine miles along a tramroad at Penydarren in Wales, at roughly 2.4 miles per hour. It was built to settle a bet between two ironmasters. The engine was too heavy for the track and the design was abandoned, but it proved the idea worked.
1825 CE — The first public railway using steam. The Stockton and Darlington Railway opens in north-east England, carrying coal and passengers over about 26 miles. It is the first railway open to the public that used steam locomotives. One detail is usually left out. Coal was hauled by steam from the first day, but passengers were pulled by horses until 1833.
1830 CE — The first inter-city railway. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway opens, running to a timetable, on a double track, with every train pulled by steam. This is the first railway that looks like a railway as the word is now used, and it is the model that the rest of the world copied.
1844 CE — The telegraph.
Samuel Morse sends a message over a telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore. Until this date a message travelled at the speed of the person or animal carrying it. From this date the message and the messenger separate, and information moves faster than anything physical. Every later communication technology is a change of degree. This one is a change of kind.
1848 CE — The Communist Manifesto. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels publish an argument that history is driven by conflict between economic classes and that industrial workers will eventually overturn the system. It is published in a year of failed revolutions across Europe. Its practical effect comes 69 years later, in Russia.
1850s to 1900s CE — Germ theory and sanitation. Work by John Snow, Louis Pasteur, and Robert Koch establishes that specific microorganisms cause specific diseases. Cities build sewers and supply clean water. This did more to extend human life than any medical treatment invented before it, and it worked by changing the city rather than by treating the patient.
1859 CE — The first oil well. Edwin Drake drills for oil in Pennsylvania. Oil is initially wanted for lamp fuel. It becomes the fuel that the engine of the next century runs on, and it carries far more energy per kilogram than coal.
1859 CE — Darwin. On the Origin of Species sets out evolution by natural selection. The scientific argument and the religious account of human origins now conflict in public and in print, in front of a literate population. The division that started with Galileo becomes a mass argument rather than a dispute between scholars.
1860s to 1880s CE — Unions and the working day. Trade unions are legalised in Britain and elsewhere, and laws limit working hours, restrict child labour, and set factory safety rules. Industrial work had removed the seasons and the daylight as natural limits on how long a person worked. These laws put a limit back, by statute rather than by nature.
1876 CE — Two machines. Nicolaus Otto builds a working four-stroke internal combustion engine, which is the engine in almost every petrol vehicle since. Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone, which carries the human voice rather than a code, so it needs no trained operator at either end.
1880s CE — Electric power. Generating stations and distribution networks appear, starting in New York and London. Electricity is not a source of energy, it is a way of moving it. A factory no longer needs to sit next to its power, and a machine no longer needs to be connected to a central shaft by belts. Light also stops depending on flame, which changes what hours a person can work and read.
1884 to 1885 CE — The Berlin Conference. European powers meet and agree rules for claiming territory in Africa. Borders are drawn between them, in many cases across existing societies and without reference to who lived there. Christian missions follow the administrations. Many of the borders drawn in this period are still in place.
1885 CE — Three vehicles in one year. The safety bicycle appears with two equal wheels, a chain drive to the rear wheel, and a low frame, which makes cycling possible for people who could not ride the earlier high-wheeled machines. Karl Benz builds the first petrol-driven vehicle. Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach build the first petrol motorcycle. The bicycle matters more than it looks. Bicycle manufacturers developed ball bearings, chain drives, pneumatic tyres, and the methods for making light steel tube in quantity. The car industry took all of it. The bicycle trade also created the demand for smooth surfaced roads before there were cars to drive on them.
1886 CE — The car is patented. Karl Benz patents his motor vehicle. For the next twenty years the car is a machine for the rich, made one at a time by hand.
1890s CE — Schooling and mass literacy. States across Europe and North America make schooling compulsory and pay for it. Reading stops being the property of a class and becomes something almost everyone has. Cheap printing had made text available a century earlier. Now the population able to use it catches up.