Damilola Oludotun HIS 102-05 Professor Maroules 21 Oct. 2021 The Industrial Revolution: Positive and Negative Effects The industrial revolution has been noted by many historians as the turning point of Europe and later the world from rural and ill developed into industrialized and modern ones. Products and goods that usually took a lot of effort to produce due to the lack of technology started to be produced faster in mass quantities thanks to the int roduction of modern machinery including textile and iron making technology and in other industries. The industrial revolution spread to the United States and other parts of the world during the 1830s and 1840s, this period came to be known as the First ind ustrial revolution. The oldest disagreement in history has been how the industrial revolution affected the working class’ standard of living and there were two groups the optimists who believe that the industrial revolution improved the standard of liv ing and the pessimists who believe that the industrial revolution brought about the downfall of the living standards of the working class. In the following paragraphs we will look at some of those stances that were taken by both sides. Production in Britain became more efficient and mechanized and this meant the textile factory could meet the outstanding and constantly increasing demands of cloth both in Europe and outside it. Aside from the textile industries, the iron industry also became more industrialized by developing more modern techniques to mold iron instead of using the traditional charcoal, this created a rather extreme demand of iron and steel that were used in wars such as the Napoleonic wars and in the years to come advancement of the railroad industry. In the latter part of the Industrial Revolution, there were also key advancements in communication methods, as people increasingly saw the need to communicate efficiently over long distances. In 1837, two British inventors William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone developed and patented the very first telecommunication system and at the same time American inventor Samuel morse developed his own version in the U.S. Although the Industrial Revolution brought about economic growth and created new opportunities, that progress was accompanied by a lot of downsides, from damage to the environment and health and safety hazards to poor living conditions for workers and their families. Historians believe that many of these challenges still existed and grew in the Second Industrial Revolution, another period of rising change that began in the late 1800s. The standard of living argument that exists today probes us to ask the question of when the industrial revolution made people better off rather than whether it did. One side the pessimists claim the standard of living of the working class didn’t start getting better till the 1840s and 1850s, but the optimists believe it was earlier than that around the 1810s and 1820s. As the years went by, the question that modern historians are asking now is the effects the industrial revolution had in lieu of other historical events, for instance the positive effects of the industrial revolution might have been caused by the negative effects of wars such as the American revolution and the Napoleonic wars in addition to the high tax that came with those wars. Bibliography History.com Editors. “Industrial Revolution.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 29 Oct. 2009, https://www.history.com/topics/industrial-revolution/industrial-revolution. Kiger, Patrick J. “7 Negative Effects of the Industrial Revolution.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 9 Nov. 2021, https://www.history.com/news/industrial-revolution-negativeeffects. Nardinelli, Clark, et al. “Industrial Revolution and the Standard of Living.” Econlib, 27 June 2018, https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/IndustrialRevolutionandtheStandardofLiving.html. National Geographic Society. “Industrial Revolution and Technology.” National Geographic Society, 9 Dec. 2019, https://www.nationalgeographic.org/article/industrial-revolution-andtechnology/.
