Lecture 6 – The Industrial Revolution, Part 1
US and the UK During Industrial Revolution
- UK: universities, professional organizations, guilds
- Transportation: roads and waterways
- Surplus capital, colonial resources, maritime technologies
- Machines and large labor pool skilled with them
- Agricultural technologies, low population and scarce land
- America rich in natural resources, otherwise backwards
Modernism and its Discontents
- Romantic view: pre-industrial age idyllic, pollution, war,
urbanization, beautiful, connected
- Modernist: pre-industrial age and excessive work, social and
economic equality, easier life, freedom, creativity
- Scale of environmental degradation (population - food
production + preservation and medicine, industry and science
Revolutions: Industrial and American
- Technological independence for Americas after 1800
- Samuel Slater copying textile machinery in 1790
- Selection of Europeans and skills, new conditions
- Scarce, scattered population, markets and innovation
Europe and the Americas: Grain, Animals and Wood
Europe
- Grain (rye, oats, barley & wheat) cultivation
- Planting, plowing, harvesting, storing, milling and transport
- Meat and diet, variety and health, calories and land
- Wheat and fallow, productivity, animal feed, nitrogen fixing
clover or turnips
- American exports to Europe: corn (1523), tomato (18th cent),
potato (1660),
- Animals: labor, hides, protein & fertilizer, oxen and horses
- Horse for labor, racing, etc., by 1800 14 million horses & 24
million oxen in Europe
- Europeans forest dwellers, wood: heating, cooking, building
(homes, wagons, ships, machinery), smelting, by-products
- Bad harvests (wet summers, cold winters) widespread
starvation and disease, 17th century state food supplies
- Grain productivity increase + transportation
- Grain cultivation = higher populations (1750, 750 M people
worldwide), 14th to 18th century: plague, 19th century: cholera
- Europe: high infant mortality, high death rate in 20’s
- Roads and waterways, 18th century European canal building
- Markets and coastal towns, intra-national transport
- Crop diversification, inefficient with certain land
- Skills & technologies based on deficit of land & labor
The Americas
- European technology transfer to America
- Agriculture: peas, beans, turnips & parsnips, plow, sickle,
flail & millstone, iron plating, seed scattering & weeding
- Wood as fuel, wood shortage, new world forests
- Harvesting with sickle and time constraints, 1 acre per day
- Corn harvesting, longer time but more difficult
- Slave labor gangs: rice, tobacco & cotton, late mechanization
- Trapping, hunting and lumbering also done by farmers
- Travelling merchants and manufactured goods
- Stone and brick construction, plentiful wood
- Land and natural resources, population expansion
- 18th century birth rates, life expectancy, death rates
- Ample land, sheep replaced by pigs
- Forests, agriculture and harvesting of wood
- Charcoal for gunpowder, ink, paint, surfaces and medicines
- Potash, pine gum resin, tree tar, log cabins
- Tobacco export, farming, lumbering and hunting (1776)
- Land ownership and settlers, waste due to ample resources
- Labor-saving technology and specialized manufacturing
Crafts and Trades
- Crafts, complexity and mechanization, hand tools, lathes and
mills, tacit knowledge of processes
- Specialization (contracting, apprentices), blacksmith farmers
- Annealing (heat, slowly cool with charcoal, adding carbon)
softened brittle iron, tanning: clothing, shoes, machine belts
- Shoe manufacture, merchants, large-scale craft production
- Nails scarce, fit wood, local knowledge of wood
- Furniture making, coopering (barrel making), brickmakers
and stonemasons
- Sand, lime & potash (glass), land for charcoal
- Sporadic artisan work, other work done (farming)
- Master craftsmen wealthy, but most artisans poor
- Artisans and class, tobacco and imports of crafts
- Manufacturing rural and local, advantage of location
- Family businesses, generalized labor, hybrid technologies
Power in the Pre-Industrial Age
- 13th cent vertical waterwheel, watermills and windmills
- Millstones, ground wheat into flour, powered saws and
hammers (forging and pounding), drained mines, injected air
into blast furnaces, combed raw wool or cotton
- Waterwheels, Oliver Evans, 1790 first automatic gristmill
- Wood cutting and flour milling, animal treadmills during
winter and droughts
- Mining expanding, iron used for farm implements, nails,
horseshoes, wagons, cutting edges, plates (for wooden tools)
- Charcoal and transport, local supplies and iron smelting, log
burning and charcoal
- Blooming iron ore to produce malleable wrought iron
- “Pig” iron, impurities, brittleness and carbon
- Steel rare and expensive, high heats, long preparation times
- American iron production, wood and coal
Transportation
- Crafts, transport, production and specialization
- Roads: primitive, trails, local, short distances
- 1780’s privately owned turnpikes (stone foundation and
gravel), 19th century government built roads
- Crushed stone roads (MacAdam roads) in 19th century,
wooden plank roads in 1840’s
- Conestoga wagon, 6 horses, long bed, thick wheels
- Land transport expensive, water transport cheap
General
- American production: low labor, wasting resources,
flexibility and quality
- American generalists that slowly became specialized with
transferred skills and local experience
- Technological systems incorporated into America from UK:
 Technologies
 Natural resources processed by technologies
 Builders and operators of technologies (labor pool)
 Skills for technologies (both adopted and developed)
 Market for technologies (in Europe and America)
- Differences in development between the US and Britain,
speed with which the US caught up