The advent of the Jenny Machine - the beginning of the Industrial Revolution
In various industrial sectors in the UK, the earliest adoption of machines was not in traditional British industries, but in emerging industries. Sector cotton textile industry. This is because the cotton textile industry, as a young industrial sector, is not bound by old traditions and guilds and is prone to technological innovation and competition. At the same time, the price of cotton textiles is cheaper than that of wool textiles, and the market demand is large. In order to meet the growing demand of the market, it is necessary to expand the production scale to increase output, so there is an urgent need for technological innovation.
The invention and use of machines was the first stage of the first industrial revolution. The emergence of the Jenny machine was the first invention with far-reaching influence in the cotton textile industry, which increased textile efficiency by more than 40 times. The invention of the Jenny machine is generally considered to be the beginning of the British Industrial Revolution. After that, more machines were invented and applied. In other industries such as metallurgy and coal mining, there was also a climax of invention and use of machines.
The widespread use of steam engines and the emergence of modern factories
The great progress of the British cotton textile industry is the result of the widespread application of mechanical science principles. With the increasing use of mechanized devices, power has become a serious problem restricting the further development of machine production. To develop industry, new impetus is necessary. After years of research, Watt extensively absorbed the research results of his predecessors and created a steam engine with reliable performance, which provided powerful power for the British Industrial Revolution and brought it into a new stage of development. The steam engine solved a vital power problem for the development of large-scale machine industry, and also opened up an extremely broad geographical space for the establishment of large-scale machine factories. From then on, wherever there was fuel (coal), factories could be built. British factories can be opened where markets are prosperous and transportation is developed to purchase raw materials and sell products; they can be moved closer to densely populated areas to recruit people; many factories can be brought together to form industrial cities. The Industrial Revolution also created a new industrial system—the factory system. In factories, due to the use of complete sets of machinery and equipment, workers' tasks are reduced to the level of simple operations, which women and children can quickly master, so they are hired in large numbers as cheap labor by factories.
2) Transportation Revolution
After entering the 19th century, with the continuous improvement of steam engine technology, it became a universal and convenient power machine for vehicles, ships and other means of transportation, which contributed to the The prosperity of the transportation industry represented by railway construction. After 1800, people began to study the use of steam engines as traction power. In 1814, the world's first steam locomotive developed by the Englishman Stephenson successfully ran a trial run. In 1825, Britain built the world's first railway. Stephenson's locomotive dragged a long train of passenger cars and freight cars forward at a speed of 25 kilometers per hour. This move opened up a new era of land transportation, and mankind entered the so-called "railway age". Once the superiority of railway transportation was confirmed, a craze for railway construction quickly set off in Britain. After 1840, continental Europe and the United States also began a period of vigorous railway construction.
The transformation of human water transportation technology also began with the use of steam engines. In 1807, American Fulton invented the steamboat. He used a universal steam engine imported from Britain to drive passenger ships to sail on the Hudson River, ushering in the steamship era. In 1811, the British used this invention to quickly build their own steamboat. In this way, the strength of the British merchant fleet for ocean shipping was greatly strengthened. Ocean freighters transported British consumer goods to every corner of the world, and brought back various industrial raw materials and daily necessities that Britain needed. The transportation revolution fundamentally changed the isolation of regions on the planet. It rapidly expanded the scope of human activities and strengthened exchanges between various places, providing conditions for the formation of the world market. After the appearance of trains, Britain launched a boom in railway construction. In less than thirty years, nearly 10,000 kilometers of railways were built to connect various cities.
3) The widespread application of electricity
The second industrial revolution is characterized by the widespread application of electricity. As early as 1831, the British scientist Faraday discovered the phenomenon of electromagnetic induction and proposed the theoretical basis of the generator. Based on this discovery, scientists have conducted in-depth exploration and research on electricity since the 1860s and 1870s, and a series of electrical inventions have emerged. In 1866, the German Siemens made a generator.
In the 1870s, practical electric generators became available. During this period, electric motors that could convert electrical energy into mechanical energy were also invented, and electricity began to be used to drive machines, becoming a new energy source that supplemented and replaced steam power. Subsequently, electrical products such as electric lights, trams, electric drills, and electric welding sprung up like mushrooms after a rain. However, if electricity is to be used in production, the problem of long-distance transmission must also be solved. In 1882, the Frenchman Deppler discovered a method of transmitting electricity over long distances, and the American scientist Edison built the first thermal power station in the United States and connected transmission lines into a network. Electricity is an excellent and cheap new energy source. Its wide application has promoted the rapid development of a series of emerging industries such as the power industry and electrical appliance manufacturing industry. Human history has entered the "electrical age" from the "steam age".
4) The creation and use of the internal combustion engine
This is a major achievement in application technology during the second industrial revolution. In the mid-1880s, German inventors Daimler and Karl Benz proposed the design of a light internal combustion engine that ran on gasoline as fuel. In the 1990s, German engineer Diesel designed a more efficient internal combustion engine, also known as a diesel engine, because it could use diesel as fuel. The invention of the internal combustion engine, on the one hand, solved the engine problem of transportation and caused revolutionary changes in the field of transportation. In the late 19th century, a new form of transportation - the automobile - appeared. In the 1980s, German Karl Benz successfully built the first car powered by a gasoline internal combustion engine. In 1896, American Henry Ford built his first four-wheeled car. At the same time, many countries began to establish automobile industries. Subsequently, diesel locomotives, ocean-going ships, airplanes, etc. powered by internal combustion engines continued to emerge. In 1903, the aircraft manufactured by the Americans, the Wright Brothers, successfully made a test flight, realizing mankind's dream of flying into the sky and heralding the arrival of a new era of transportation. On the other hand, the invention of the internal combustion engine promoted the development of the oil extraction industry and the creation of the petrochemical industry. Petroleum has also become an extremely important new energy source like electricity. In 1870, only 800,000 tons of oil were mined in the world. By 1900, this surged to 20 million tons.
5) The establishment of the chemical industry
The chemical industry is an emerging industrial sector that emerged during the second industrial revolution. In the inorganic chemical industry, in the 1860s and 1970s, new methods were invented to produce soda ash using ammonia as a medium and to produce sulfuric acid using nitrogen oxide as a catalyst, which led to the rapid development of comprehensive utilization of these two basic raw materials in the chemical industry. The organic chemical industry has also developed rapidly with the comprehensive utilization of coal tar. Since the 1980s, people have begun to extract ammonia, benzene, artificial dyes, etc. from coal tar. Using chemical synthesis methods, Americans invented plastics and the French invented man-made fibers. The development of the chemical industry has greatly changed and enriched people's lives.
6) "Steel Age"
Along with the "Electrical Age" came the "Steel Age". The new technological revolution also promoted the development of old industrial sectors, most notably the steel industry. In the first half of the 19th century, due to the needs of housing structures and railways, the output of wrought iron and cast iron increased rapidly, but the output of steel stagnated. Britain was the country with the largest steel production in the world at that time. In 1850, its annual output was only 60,000 tons. In the same year, its iron output reached 2.5 million tons. Due to the limitations of the smelting process, the output of steel is not high and the price is expensive, and its use is limited to tools and instruments. In the second half of the 19th century, due to the contributions of Siemens, Thomas and others in steel smelting technology, steel was mass-produced and its quality was greatly improved. As a result, steel gradually replaced wrought iron as a new material in machinery manufacturing, railway construction, housing and bridge construction, etc. Materials are popular all over the world. The development of the steel industry is at its peak, causing the proportion of heavy industry in industry to rise sharply, which is known as the "Steel Age" in history.