Why Did It Take So Long for the 'Industrial Revolution'?

Great Debates
21

The industrial revolution was made possible by steam power. Before reliable steam engines, you were dependent upon natural power sources - mainly rivers and streams that could be directed to drive a water wheel. Therefore there were few locations suitable for the use of power hungry machines. As a result there was little demand for machinery.

Once power was in essence portable, all you needed was coal and water. A factory could be built virtually anywhere and powered as reliably as if it were driven by free flowing water. The availability of power made industrial machinery practical and therefore desirable.

The Greeks had indeed come close to launching an industrial revolution. I believe it was a Greek in Alexandria, Egypt who first demonstrated steam power in the form of a hollow ball on an axle. It had 2 nozzles pointing in opposite directions. As water in the ball turned to steam, it was forced out the nozzles and caused the ball to spin quite rapidly.

Several Greek mathematicians came close to developing the infinitesimal calculus.

The problem was first that Greece was conquered by Rome and the type of unfettered inquiry Greece was famous for was curtailed and second that with so many slaves, both in Greece and Rome, there was no perceived need for mechanization.

22

Another factor was the fact that the English government didn’t stand in its way much and even protected it. The industrial revolution (and the preceding agricultural productivity improvements) displaced a lot of people who weren’t happy about it. In other countries, there would have been much more in the way of protecting old economic ways. In England, there was much less of that. When the Luddites (displaced weavers) started destroying mechanical looms, Parliament started hanging them.
England was less likely than other countries to engage in central planning which slows down creative destruction. Compare an English garden to a French one, the common law system to the civilist law system, Hume and Descartes.

The English are much more likely to let things go on their own and minimise the extent to which they meddle in it.

23

I have no personal theory but wish to comment that I was always led to believe that the I.R. started with water power, many cotton mills running on it, and the distribution system was canal barges towed by horses.

Of course there had always been coastal and other merchant ships.

24

The industrial revolution did start with water power. Many of the old mills around where I lived were water powered first and foremost, and then adapted to steam power later. The Industrial Revolution was well under way before the steam engine saw widespread use. Consider Richard Arkwright’s most famous “invention” (he actually stole the idea, and his patent was later overturned) was the water frame for spinning cotton using water power.

(Of course, there was more than one Industrial Revolution.)

25

As far as the emerging use of machinery to do previously manual tasks, that started before steam was a primary source of power - and that is an interesting question in itself. What was the motivation? Take for example even something like the cotton gin. The south still had slaves but even so, the cotton gin was still an important invention, so it wasn’t just a question of the availability of cheap/free labor.

I’m just saying that without steam, you would have been limited to very specific geographic areas that had the sort of topography and hydrodynamics (am I using that correctly?) that lent itself to hydromechanical power. I don’t know this for a fact, but I think that would have resulted in much, much less industrial development.

Maybe you still could have had some form of “revolution” under those circumstances. IDK. And of course there is also the argument that if steam hadn’t been developed to supply the power that was needed, they would have come up with something else. Maybe the internal combustion engine would have been invented a lot sooner. Who knows.

26

Allow me to propose a somewhat different take on this, culled from what I can remember of my honours thesis.

The Industrial Revolution took a long time to happen for the statistically analagous reason that it took that Earth about half a billion years to come up with life, and billions more to some up with self-replicating life; because the combination of things necessary to create it are really vast in number and had to happen in one place.

Attributing it to steam or water power is like attributing winning the lottery to correctly picking the first of 7 numbers.

Consider:

  1. It had to happen with a certain number of scientific principles understood. The Industrial Revolution was the result not just of steam power but of all the scientific advances of the preceding centuries.

  2. It had to happen on a base of technological advances, not just industrial ones, but advances in the use of chemicals, in agriculture, in the construction of ships, and on and on. It’s inconceivable to me that the Indsutrial Revolution could have happened in classical Greece for the simple reason that classical Greece did not have the agricultural capability to sustain an industrial workforce.

  3. It had to happen in a society where it was economically necessary that it happen.

  4. It had to happen in a place that had easy access to the appropriate resources.

  5. It had to happen in a society that was politically willing to let it happen.

  6. It had to happen in a society that was culturally prepared to let it happen.

The Industrial Revolution started in Britain, and spread from there. ** I believe that Great Britain in the 18th century was the one and only place in the history of the human race, up to that point, where the Industrial Revolution could possibly have happened.** Had the conditions in Britain in the 18th century not been what they were it is wholly possible we would still be waiting for it to happen, or else it would have happened later and somewhere else - the USA in the 19th century, perhaps.

Points 1 and 2 are clearly impossible prior to the 17th century at the earliest, but Britain was uniquely positioned to acheive points 3 to 6:

Economic Necessity: Britain was a burgeoning military power, but a small island country attempting to maintain a vast overseas empire, that needed productivity and materiel to continue advancing its power and way of life. Industrial-level productivity was necessary.

Resources: As it happens, two things Britain DID have in abundance were accessible deposits of iron and coal.

Political Will: Britain was a constitutional more-or-less democracy willing to allow people a historically high elvel of freedom to innovate and find profit in enterprise.

Cultural Preparedness: Britain had relatively advanced financial, legal and commercial structures in place to allow industrial enterprise to flourish.

Nowhere else was quite the same, at the same time, and so it started nowhere else.

27

I can’t believe no one’s mentioned Isaac Newton. He didn’t just come up with a set of physical laws and mathematical principles. He created a mindset. He showed people that the ways of nature can not only be perfectly predicted, but also harnessed.

Besides that, he headed the Royal Society and gave it the motto “Nulla in Verba.” This subordinated fuzzy-headed ponderers to the hard-headed experimentalists. That’s when the real work got done.

I’m not saying Newton was the sufficient condition for the IR, but I do believe he was a necessary condition.

28

Could someone give me a few examples of the sort of tech that was necessary for the IR? Because as far as I can tell, it began with the textile mills of England using water wheels to power simple machinery. Exactly which advancements were required for that?

29

Many of the rationales being presented are putting the cart before the horse, or indeed, putting one horse in front of another. Of course steam power was necessary for the Industrial Revolution, but the development of the steam engine was part and parcel of industrial technology; it didn’t come first independently and then the Industrial Revolution followed.

A major change in technology that occurred with the Industrial Revolution is that it was no longer possible to understand the basic functioning of the technology based upon personal experiment. Previously, technology consisted of craft skill, handed down via a master-apprentice (or father-son) type of arrangement, and the technology was either generally simple enough (carpentry, blacksmithy, masonry, barrelwright) that it was possible to understand the basic principles based upon direct experience, or sufficiently obscure (swordwright, astronomy, alchemy) that the arcane elements which were empirically established were kept within a tight community of specialists, preventing wider dissemination and use. However, the invention of the printing press led to a progressive increase in literacy and dissemination of ideas, including scientific concepts and empirical theories that built upon one another. This led to both an increase in general literacy among an emerging middle class of artisans and craftsmen, and the rise of the concept of intellectual property and legal protections therefore.

Both Ancient Greece and China during the Tang Dynasty approached the level of progressive technological development and manufacturing standardization that hallmarks industrial technology, but neither quite reached the summit (the Chinese because of the lack of wide use and applicability of moveable type, and limits of metallurgical and manufacturing technology with type metals and inks, the Greeks because of infighting and conquest). Prior to the invention of the Gutenberg press, no systematic effort was made to record the body of human knowledge in print. (The Chinese invented moveable type and the printing press prior to Gutenberg, but the government maintained a virtually monopoly over printing and publication, as did the Koreans later.

So to address the o.p.'s question directly, industrialization required not only the basic scientific principles to be developed into applicable technology, but also needed a system to record and disseminate the information to recreate technology widely without direct involvement or oversight of the originator. This required a system of publication, i.e. the printing press and accompanying socioeconomic institutions (literacy, trade, acceptance of new ideas versus protected monopolies) that were lacking in previous periods. As for why England in particular become the clearinghouse for the technologies that have been encompassed by the moniker of Industrial Revolution, England existed in a particular state of political liberalism, technological and scientific advancement, high (for the period) literacy, and geographical isolation that permitted relative stability in the government and institutions. The government of England itself, of course, was heavily invested in trade and business (i.e. the various incarnations of the British East India Company) and so supported the industrial base to facilitate trade. England’s vast reserves of readily accessible coal, which were not contested by other nations, allowed an unfettered energy source to support industrialization.

Stranger

30

Just because humans more or less similar to us have been around a couple hundred thousand years doesn’t mean we haven’t gotten genetically smarter much more recently. There seems to be reasonable evidence that some groups, at least, got smarter about 30,000 years ago upon leaving Africa. All sorts of factors, many mentioned above, are responsible for what happened with that intelligence, but I think it’s a misconception that we sort of finished evolving 200,000 years ago and have been static since, with no changes in the human race and no divergence in gene pools among the disparate populations. This doesn’t explain why the Industrial Revolution only occurred so recently, but it might explain why we didn’t invent numbers and more complex counting 100,000 years ago, for example. And it may explain why many populations still don’t have those concepts.

31

Who knows, maybe they were counting back then. They just weren’t writing it down.

32

Cuneiform script was developed from an earlier system for keeping track of the numbers of livestock and spears in a ruler’s storehouses, so yes, they were counting before they were writing. Accountants rule OK!!!

33

Slide rules, OK.

34

apropos Mitchell and Web:

35

Whose misconception is it? Scientists are well aware of the profound change in human mental capabilities that occurred sometime between 100 000 and 30 - 40 000 years ago. Based on archaeological evidence, we became fully human not until the Late Paleolithic times: this is known as the “Great Leap Forward.” The exact date and causes for it are highly debatable, but the proof is there.

36

I’d recommend The Pursuit of Glory: The Five Revolutions that Made Modern Europe: 1648-1815.

It is a very good treatment of the entirety of the major changes that happened in Europe during this time period. It’s one of the best single volume treatments of the dramatic changes that happened in western civilization in this time span. It also does a good job of doing the exact opposite of what people in general often do…namely, assuming that the industrial revolution sprung out of nowhere. While I won’t accuse anyone on the SDMB of it, it’s a pretty common view that Europe was just a backwards medieval society until factories started cropping up and then suddenly modern society was born. The book I linked above does a good job of showing just how slow and gradual the buildup to the industrial revolution (and all the other major “revolutions” of this time period) really was.

37

In a more general sense, things have to build upon other things. Example: even if the concept of the transistor were given to someone in detailed form in 1600 (or even to Edison in 1900), I could name a thousand technological improvements necessary before anyone could build just one, and then what would you do with it? No radio stations, electric sources, etc.

We are so used to the rapid technological change today it’s hard to envision a time when new inventions took a 100 years to become known to someone a continent away.

38

The only indispensible things are–
[ul]
[li]Metal-working[/li][li]A Patent system[/li][li]Steam power[/li][/ul]

39

Steam power wasn’t necessary, as mentioned. The IR was initiated using just water power and water and horse transport. Steam power just made what was already in widespread use even more efficient.

40

Yeah sorry, I wasn’t meaning to provide an exhaustive list. There was all sorts of other reasons why the IR happened when and where it did. The fact that we had got to a certain level of technological development, the British government came down hard on those who aimed to thwart progress, Britain had a high population density with a large middle class, and Britain was more or less a democracy which had more or less completely neutered the power of the King all contributed too, along with a million other reasons.