TechStuff Classic: How the Industrial Revolution Worked, Part Three

Published Dec 30, 2022, 9:08 AM

In the conclusion of our series on the Industrial Revolution, we'll look at other industries that changed along with iron and textiles. We'll also learn about the living and work conditions of laborers and how that transformed our notions about work.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and how the tech are you? It is time for a tech Stuff classic episode. This week we are wrapping up a three part series. So the first two parts published on the previous two fridays. If you have not listened to them, I recommend you check those out first. This is How the Industrial Revolution Worked, Part three It originally published on December two, two thousand fifteen. In this episode, we'll cover everything from transportation to what it was like to be a member of the working class at that time, and how we started to see some new lines dividing different classes. It used to be that it was the nobles versus the peasants, with clergy in the middle, really clergy off to the side on their own kind of ladder. But things changed in the Industrial Revolution. So during this period in Britain's history, which as you may remember, is in the mid eighteenth to mid nineteenth century, so the seven the mid seventeen hundreds to the mid eighteen hundreds, transportation was getting a major overhaul. Roads had been in really poor shape ever since the Romans had left Britain and they were in need of repair and redesign. Shipping by boat was really popular, and many of Britain's rivers became important conduits for trade goods. Engineers would actually start to begin to design canals to connect various rivers together in order to speed up transportation. And then there were the rail systems. So railroads pre date trains and locomotives by a lot, because people figured out fairly early on that it's a lot easier to push or pull a heavy cart that's along a set of hard rail than it is to move that same cart against the ground, that it will roll more smoothly and you have to use less effort to get it from point A to point B. So at first wooden rails were used and carts would have flanged wheels to allow them to stay on the rails securely. Not all carts were like this, not all rail systems were like this, but it was generally one of the accepted standards across the world by this point, where people knew if you built the wheels in this way so that they essentially kind of hug the rails, it's not likely to tip over, and you can move at a good clip. By a good clip, we're talking a couple of miles per hour, usually because you're carrying so much stuff. Now, typically you'd use horses to pull the carts along the rails. People did experiment with other things, uh, But one of the pioneers in railroads in England was Richard Reynolds. Now, Reynolds was an iron master who worked at Brookdale, and that's the iron works that was founded by Abraham Darby. You can listen to the previous episodes on this series and you'll hear me talk about the Darby family. Well, Reynolds became friends with Abraham Darby, the second, so the son of Abraham Darby. And in seventeen sixty Reynolds came up with the idea of replacing wooden rails with cast iron rails. He thought that this would be a much better use of cast iron. It would be better than the wooden ones because the wooden rails would break down over time. They could also just collapse depending upon how heavy the load was, and cast iron would last longer and be able to withstand greater weights. Now, there's no historical record of anyone doing this before Reynolds, so he might have actually been the person to invent this, but it's not safe to just declare it, so it's possible someone else did. We just don't have a record of it, so I guess for practical purposes, we can say he invented this idea before long tramways all across Britain were following his his lead, and so he was using rails in order to move giant carts of coal or iron back and forth between locations. But soon these were being used all over the place for various reasons, and so they started convert wooden railways into iron railways. This is fifty years before the invention of the locomotive, which turned railways into a major means of transport, not only in Britain but all across the world. And we'll get to the locomotive a bit later, but just imagine for fifty years, this was a way of getting heavy loads of cargo to load from location to location, but there were no trains, it was just horse drawn carts. In the last episode, I also talked about the punt custalta aqueduct, punt consulta child mangle. Every single time I try and say it's okay. The Welsh have trouble with this one too. That's just one example of the innovations and transportation that were introduced in the Industrial Revolution. Uh. It was during this time that nations like the United Kingdom and the United States really began to build extensive canals, roads and railways to speed up that travel. And I mentioned Thomas Telford as the architect who designed and built the pot Consulta aqueduct. That was the one that was a raised aqueduct made out of an iron trough that connected two rivers together, and it spanned a valley so that the waterway actually passed above the valley. It didn't have to descend into the valley and then go back up, it went straight across. He made several important contributions to England's transportation systems, not just this aqueduct, and his designs were adopted by engineers and other countries like the United States. So it might be worth looking into who Telford was like. Who was Thomas Telford. He was born in August of seventeen fifty seven on the border between England and Scotland. He's generally considered a Scottish architect. His father died when he was just a baby, and his mother relied on her relatives to help raise the child. Essentially, Telford was raised by his his relatives, not by his mother, and at age fourteen he became apprenticed to a stonemason. He was really keen to learn everything there was to learn about construction, and so he would actually study at night after working a full day shift with the stonemason. After learning his trade with the stonemason, and by the time he was twenty five, he had worked on several important construction projects and including some in Edinburgh, Scotland, and he ended up picking up stakes to move to London. That's where Telford met Sir William Chambers, who was a prominent Scottish architect, and Chambers had begun work on Somerset House or Somerset House if you prefer if you're being more British with it, and Telford ended up joining the crew. Now, if you're not familiar with London, Somerset House may sound like it's a quaint cottage. It's not. House is a not an accurate word to describe this massive building. It's an enormous neo classical structure, and it was big enough so that it could house the Royal Academy of Arts, the Royal Society, the Society of Antiquaries, and the quarters for the Navy Board and offices for the King's Barge Master. This is a big, big building, massive in fact, and it had a whole bunch of challenges that were associated with it, not just because it was huge, but because it was going to be the quarters for the King's barge Master as well as for the Navy Board. It had to be built up against the River Thames. There had to be direct access to the Thames River, so that was a big challenge. And if you're not if you've never seen it, you should look at the pictures of the Somerset House. The middle section of the structure is what Telford specifically worked on. If you're looking at a modern picture, you're going to see this really big building that has wings on either side, but those east and west wings were actually built later in the Victorian era. It's that central structure that is what Telford worked on as part of Chambers's crew. So Telford would go on to work for a man named Sir William Pulteney who was the richest man in Britain at that time, or at least one of them. Telford became the Surveyor of public Works in Shropshire, which was a position that was created just for him. There had not been a surveyor of public works before Telford. He would become a pioneer in a new field that would eventually become known as civil engineering. In two he designed and built the Montford Stone Bridge across the River Severn, and that was the one that was so important in the textile industry. If you listen to the first episode in this series, I talked about how important seven was and uh in its association with Lancashire and the iron working and coal industries. Telford also began to build suspension bridges, which was a new idea at the time, and folklore has it that when Telford built his first suspension bridge he had to study his nerves with a prayer before allowing the cables to take on the weight of the structure, because even though he had worked out the math, he still could not be absolutely certain that this was going to work. And suspension bridges are actually a really cool technology. It actually, I guess will benefit us to describe how those work. With a suspension bridge, typically, what you have are a pair of very tall towers and uh these towers are attached to the bridge via cables. You know, the typical bridge has columns or pylons or piers underneath it that holded up, but a suspension bridge doesn't. It has these towers that have cables attached from the tower first to each other, and also there's vertical cables that attached the main cables between the two towers and the bridge. The towers actually support most of the weight. Specifically, they support the force of compression. See compression pushes down on the surface of the bridge. That compression is transferred to the cables or chains that are attached the edges of the bridge the frame of the bridge, and that gets transferred to the towers. Then you have supporting cables that connect the towers to anchorage points on either side of whatever you're building the bridge across, like a river, and these cables support the tension forces created by the bridge. So suspension bridges don't need any columns or pylons under them. That frees up a lot of the space beneath the bridge. But engineers like Telford who were aware of how the bridges should work. We're a little antsy about how things actually would work once everything was ready to go, And luckily for us, physics tends to obey the law. So the designs worked out in everyone's favor, but no one was entirely sure at the time. Now, Telford's next project was the Aqueduct, which must not be named because I'm tired of trying to pronounce Welsh words, which was a phenomenal success and that came as a great surprise to numerous critics who were absolutely convinced it would fall apart as soon as water was flowing, and it didn't, stayed together and ended up increasing the speed of transportation in that part of England. After the aqueduct, or well Wales, I should say England and Wales because it was connecting the two. But after that Aqueduct, Telford became the head engineer of the Caledonian Canal in Scotland. That's a really big canal. It's sixty miles long and the construction was a huge boon for Scotland at the time because many people in Scotland had become homeless, and the reason they became homeless is pretty dastardly. It was in the wake of what has become known as the Highland Clearances, which is a very polite way of describing what actually happened. So this was a period when aristocratic people, so clan leaders, nobles, decided they would make a great deal of sense to evict Scottish families from their ancestral homes in order to convert that land into sheep grazing territory, so converting it from farms into gray's land. And Highlanders were forced to leave their homes, and some of them had been in those homes for centuries. Are the families had, I mean only a few Highlanders are immortal. As the documentary series Highlander teaches us, it's a really dark time in Scottish history and it really dealt severe damage to Gaelic culture as a result. What what seems to have happened the way it tends to be described, is that a lot of clan leaders, for various reasons political reasons that were handed down from the crown from royals, had decided that rather than be considered a clan leader, which came with a bunch of responsibilities, including if someone in your clan acted up you were held responsible as leader. They started to call themselves landlords instead, and that was a slippery slope that led to these evictions. So Telford's canal took three decades to construct, and it meant that he had to rely heavily on a lot of labor from this part of Scotland, so it gave a lot of people work when they went home to harvest crops. He ended up hiring Irish workers, which caused some real problems in the area. People locals were upset at that, but Telford was already running over budget and behind time, and unfortunately for everybody, by the time the canal was finished, it was actually not terribly useful, and that's because it just took too long to make and technology had changed while the canal was being built. It was built well, and it's considered to be a marvel of engineering, but ship building had changed so dramatically by the time the canal was finished. Steamships had become the new standard, and steamships needed more space than what the canal could provide. The canal was actually too small to accommodate steamships, and so it wasn't as used used as heavily as it had been planned. Now Telford would go on to create super waterways. It's kind of like super highways. There were these interconnections that uh that put various canals finally in contact with each other, so that made shipping much more efficient. And in eighteen twenty he became the very first president of the Institution of Civil Engineers in Britain, so essentially kind of invented the discipline of civil engineering, or at least was instrumental in the mention of that discipline. Telford made another major contribution to England's transportation system as well. One of his most important improvements involved raising the foundation of a road in the center of the road to aid in draining water. So he was very good at building roads. He used these large flat stones as the foundation, and by raising that center, water would drain off it much more effectively. It wouldn't pool and destroy the road over time, and his work was so successful that it became the standard road design in England and beyond. One of Telford's contemporaries and rivals was a guy named Isambard Kingdom Brunel. And if that name sounds at all familiar, what you might remember him when we did our episode on subways. He was very important in that episode. He was the son of a French engineer. The French engineer had actually fled to England during the French Revolution, so Brunell grew up in England, although he also studied in France post revolution. Brunell worked on many important projects throughout his career, but he's probably best remembered for his tunnels and his underground systems. He designed underground passages that even passed beneath bodies of water like the River Thames, and he also designed several rail railways and steamships in his time. Speaking of steamships, the idea had been kicking around since the days of Leonardo da Vinci, but until the eighteenth century, no one had managed to actually make a practical steamship. People had tried. There were several challenges that were facing engineers at the time. A big one was to create a mechanism that would translate the reciprocal motion of a piston into a rotary motion that could turn a wheel. So pistons move up and down or left and right in a cylinder, whereas wheels turn in a circle. So you have to figure out a way to translate one style of motion into another. And it took a while before that happened. In other words, how do you get that simple update own or left right motion to become a circle? Well, Thomas Newcomin came up with that. That was the invention that he said he was most proud of, even beyond his improvements to the basic steam engine. Uh. It was essentially kind of a ratchet that allowed for this translation of motion. It was the first big step to solving that particular problem. Will be back to talk more about the Industrial Revolution in just a second, but first let's take this quick break. Now, the other big challenge was to create a steam engine capable of providing enough power to actually move a boat through the water. Now, as I mentioned in the last episode, early steam engines relied on using condensation to create a vacuum and pull a piston downward. They did not use steam to create pressure and push the piston upward because the materials they were using couldn't withstand that intense pressure that steam would create, and they were concer they're too dangerous. It was just a recipe for disaster. You would have a boiler explode and that could be deadly. Now, pattents for steamboats date all the way back to six eighteen, when David Ramsey was awarded a patent for his design. Now, there's no evidence that Ramsey ever managed to actually build anything approaching a steam powered boat, and other inventors followed suit. There was one named John Allen who patented a steamboat design in seventeen nine, and another one was proposed by Englishman Jonathan Holes in seventeen thirty six. Holes approach was to use a Newcoming engine, although again he never built such a boat as far as we can tell. For an actual working boat, you have to actually look fifty years later, so three that's when Cloude Francois Dorote Joefrey Dabam, who as you can imagine from that name, was a French nobleman, built a boat powered by a new Coming two cylinder engine, and he demonstrated on a river in France and showed that such a boat could actually sail against the river's current under its own power. It didn't require manpower or animal power to turn some sort of device in order to go against the current. It's really kind of challenging to explain how monumental this was in the transportation industry at the time, but people realize the promise of steam power would be to make everything easier, including the shipment of cargo and people. So Joe Frey's invention actually broke apart in the river. It was not it was not designed to last very long. It shook itself apart. Essentially, the boat began to split, the engine began to fall apart. He was able to pilot the boat back to the river bank before it completely disintegrated on him and got to shore safely. He would just a few years later flee France himself because that was just as the French Revolution was getting into the swing of things. Now, James Watt, who we talked about in the last episode, invented the condenser, which made it much more efficient. It being steam engines made steam engines much more efficient. You no longer had to heat up and cool down the cylinder that had the piston in it. You could keep it the same temperature, and you allowed the condenser to pull steam in and condense into water. And water started getting a trans Atlantic accident on there for some reason, turn into water and uh create that vacuum pressure that would pull a piston downward. And also as around this time when people began to experiment with double stroke engines. That's when you use steam to provide both the push on the upstroke of a piston and the poll on the downstroke of the piston, and makes an engine much more efficient because it's doing work in both ways rather than just pulling and then allowing gravity to reset the piston. Watson's invention and we become the foundation for working steamboats in the future. Now, I've talked a lot about Britain in these episodes, because Britain is the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, there's no question about that. Uh. A lot of innovations happened in Britain first and then eventually made their way to other parts of the world. However, when we start talking about steamboats, we actually have to shift our focus over to America. American engineers were facing a pretty big challenge that the Brits weren't facing. Specifically, they were not allowed to use British technology. Britain had passed laws making it illegal to share trade secrets or sell certain things like steam engines. So, in other words, all that information got caught up and stuck and stayed in Britain. Now, the reason for this was that Britain was really trying to maintain trade superiority for as long as it possibly could, and part of that was just keeping all this this information secret so that only Britain could take advantage of it. So American engineers were forced to design their own steam engines. Now they had a general idea of how the British ones were working, so it's not like they were going completely from scratch, but it still was a big challenge, and one trio that gave it a shot consisted of an inventor named John Stevens, his wealthy brother in law Robert Livingstone, and a machinist named Nicholas J. Roosevelt. Their efforts were somewhat hampered by Livingstone, who felt that since he was providing all the cash, he should have a major input into how the boat was actually constructed, despite the fact that he didn't have the expertise of the other two. But the other two had very little bargaining power because Livingstone was the guy footing the bill, So despite protestations from Roosevelt and from Stevens, Livingstone's design was what stuck, and the resulting boat barely moved in still water in fact, on the first test it didn't go anywhere. The second test it moved very slowly in stillwater, something like three miles per hour, so it could not really fight against the current, and it also shook itself apart after a short while. By the way, I don't think that Robert Livingstone was a dummy. He was a smart guy. In fact, he was instrumental in in American history. He's the guy who essentially brokered the Louisiana purchase deal between France and America. So very important historically, just not necessarily the guy you want on your team when you're designing a steam engine. However, Livingston met another man who also shared an interest in steam power, and that man was Robert Fulton. He was an American who originally wanted to make his living as an artist. He painted a portrait of Benjamin Franklin and felt that he was on his way to becoming a great artist, but his career path was cut short after he had a disappointing meeting with another Erican artist who was living in London. Fulton actually took his all of his money traveled to London. He had a letter of invitation our introduction for this American artist met with the American artist who is kind but essentially said no, I don't want you as a student. You don't have what it takes. But fortunately Fulton met Livingstone and they began to talk, and they realized they shared a lot of common interests, including engineering and specifically in steam engines. Fulton had become really obsessed with ships in general and steam engines in particular, and Fulton saw in Livingstone a potential source of funding for his work, pretty much the same way that Stevens had seen Livingston earlier. So Fulton and Livingston entered into a partnership in which they would split the profits of their work fifty fifty. That was a sore spot for Livingstone, who argued that his money was more valuable than Fulton's work. It Fulton was able to argue him down to the point where they agreed, we're going to take a half share each. So Fulton designed a steam powered, flat bottomed paddle boat. His original model actually used something similar to a bicycle chain to power the paddles, but he would eventually abandon that for more of a ratchet approach like the newcoming engine version would use. So the paddle boat itself wasn't a new idea that had actually been around for centuries, although of course it had been powered by either animals or people, not by steam. But Fulton's mechanisms to provide power gave it the new twist, and they filed a patent for the design back in eighteen o two. Fulton launched a steamboat named Claremont C L E R M O N T in New York in eight o seven. Now that would provide passage for travelers between New York City and Albany. So it made a trip to Albany and then made a trip back from Albody to New York City safely, and it proved that steam power could be used to transport people in cargo, so before long shipbuilders began to rely heavily on steam power, even for Transatlantic passages. Now I should add that the steamships traveling the ocean, those were not the same design as the flat bottomed boats that were meant to float on rivers here in America. The first ship to provide regular transatlantic service didn't come from America at all. It of course came from Britain. So while Britain did not pioneer the steam boat, they did pioneer the steam ship, and that first ship was called the S. S. Great Western, which was built by none other than is Embard Kingdom Brunel in eighteen thirty seven. So no longer were ships reliant on the winds, or on human powered ores or any other mechanism. They could have a steam engine drive them from location to location, no matter what the weather was or which way the current were going, and travel and shipping speeds increased dramatically, which drove up demand for trade. While steamboats were making waves in America. See what I did there when boats and waves. Back in Britain, engineers were experimenting with steam powered engines designed to push or pull carts on tracks, which were the first locomotives. We've got more to say in this classic episode of tech stuff after these quick messages. So there was an engineer named Richard Trevithick who built the first full scale locomotive in eighteen o four steam powered locomotive in eighteen o four. But he was way ahead of his time. Uh and while he built a working model, most people weren't ready for it. They didn't think it was a proven technology, and so he didn't receive enough support to move forward it into production. George Stephenson succeeded where Trevithick failed, building a successful steam engine in eighteen fourteen, and that engine's name was Blucker and it could pull thirty tons at a speed of four miles per hour. I'm told that the Brits actually pronounced it Blucher, which makes sense because it's spelled b l u with an umalout c ch e r uh. The correct pronunciation if you're going with the German or Prussian, as it turns out, is more blucker. But they were Blutcher. So it was named after a Prussian general who was a war hero in the Napoleonic Wars, and in fact, the following year, in eighteen fifteen, Blucher would lead an army in a very hasty march to a little battleground called Waterloo, which was the site of Napoleon's defeat. So Bluecher ended up being a great name for a device meant to move a lot of weight at a relatively fast pace. Now, the locomotive became a dominant force in transportation within a couple of decades. America's first locomotive was a British machine called the Stourbridge Lion, and it wasn't a huge success because the way of the machine was so great that the American rails split underneath it. They had to re engineer that. American engineer Peter Cooper built the first steam locomotive in America that was American made, and that one was called the Tom Thumb and it moved at a blistering eighteen miles per hour, which was pretty fast at the time, and carried thirty six passengers on its first run in eighteen thirty. So by the middle of the nineteenth century, transportation had completely transformed. In less than a century, road systems were redesigned, steamships were traveling across rivers and oceans, and locomotives could do the work of dozens of teams of horses. Steam engines continued to also power the growing industries like textile and iron working industries. They were actually powering the machinery in those factories. So all of this industry ended up having a big requirement. They needed people to do a lot of this work. So let's talk a little bit about what was like being a member of this working class that formed as a result of the Industrial Revolution, and these innovations. So keep in mind, all this stuff made production cheaper and easier, and and transportation cheaper and easier, So it meant that the price of goods was dropping. It meant that trade was exploding. It also meant that banks were being created in order to handle the monetary weight of what was going on. You had the British Empire growing as a result through both conquest and trade, so big time of change. It also meant that you had to have a lot of bodies in these factories to actually make the stuff work. Um and other things like conflicts throughout the world were creating more requirements for clothing, for weapons, for fuel, for all that sort of stuff, so there was a high demand. It was an exciting time. So let's talk about working. Perhaps the biggest revolution of them all really came down to how work was done before the Industrial Revolution. Let's say you're a cloth merchant. You're someone who sells cloth. That process is not very straightforward. First, you would have to purchase raw wool from shepherds. Then you would take it to spinners and you would hire spinners to spin the raw wool into yarn. You would then take that yarn to weavers and pay the weavers to weave that yarn into cloth, and then you would have to sell the cloth to customers. And that means each time you know you're you're selling, price of the cloth has to be great enough to cover all the expenses leading up to creating that cloth. That's why it was pretty expensive at the time. It wasn't until the Industrial Revolution, where this was streamlined and the cost for production went way down, that suddenly these these finished goods could be of a much better price. Some people actually called this earlier version of the way things were done a putting out process. You had to put out everything onto a different group of people in order to get something finished. Some people called it the domestic system, and some people referred to this sort of stuff as a cottage industry, meaning that people were actually working out of their own homes. It was a multi step process that employed lots of people to make a relatively small amount of product. But the Industrial Revolution changed all that. Now it was possible to produce huge amounts a product like textiles, but you will also needed a much larger group of people in order to actually run all the equipment. So while you could have one spinner run a machine that could spend multiple spools of yarn uh simultaneously, whereas before you would have to do it one at a time. You could do that, but it's still meant that in order to meet the major demand, you actually had a lot more people in place. Now, some merchants began building larger structures to house workers during work hours, so in other words, you are no longer relying on people working out of their houses. They would actually travel to a work location and work there for a shift, which makes sense because most of these factories were located next to rivers or other structures other natural boundaries that gave them some sort of advantage either in the production or the shipping or both of the material. So this was the factory. Originally, the word factory referred to the office of a manager of an estate, so a state manager's office was the factory. But by the sixteen hundreds the word had limited use to refer to a place where manufacturing happened uh, and the real rise of the factory was truly the nineteenth century. The eighteen hundreds, the need for workers created opportunities for people who otherwise would have just remained farmers, or they would have had very little employment at all, so this drove a migration from farmlands to cities. People were moving to where work was. If there wasn't enough work where they were, they could go to a city and work at a factory, and cities were growing exponentially in that time period. Urban growth was exploding as a result of all this. So once upon a time, farming was the dominant occupation in all the world. But as a result of the Industrial Revolution, the percentage of people who are farmers compared to the overall population began to shrink, and it began to shrink pretty drastically. At the same time, we were making some progress in other areas like sanitation and medicine, so we were starting to learn how to maintain people's health, how to keep people from getting sick, how to keep water systems clean. We began to learn more about how to protect people when they are at their most vulnerable, such as during the act of childbirth. Also, lifespans were increasing because we were getting better at treating people. Largely, lifespans were increasing simply because we're getting better and making sure people reached the age of twenty one. There's this common misconception that the lifespan during the Middle Ages was around thirty years old. Because people died of old age when they were thirty. That's not the case. The reason why the the lifespan was so short was that your odds of making it to adulthood were pretty low. A lot of people died either when they were infants were children. But if you can make it too about eighteen or twenty, you had a good chance of living a nice long life, assuming you avoid major illness or injury. Uh. This era, the Industrial Revolution, was one where we started to get better about the practices that could lead to illness and injury. And because the machines were doing a lot of the hard work, it meant that people no longer had to do this by hand. Like the stuff that would require a lot of repetitive, monotonous motions or carrying heavy weight. A lot of that was being done done by machine now not by people, though not all of it, and monany was still a big problem. Working in a factory was not a picnic. It was hot and difficult and crowded, and and you were dedicated to a specific task, so you're doing that same task over and over again throughout the entire day. Women, men, and children all worked in factories during the Industrial Revolution. Entire families would typically the women and men would earn a tiny amount like ten cents an hour in the United States terms, whereas the children would be earning a penny an hour. Uh, it was not a way to get rich. It was and and typically an entire family would be working, often in the same factory because they couldn't afford to have a single person work and someone else looking after the home that they wouldn't make enough money. Wages were really low, pretty much as low as business owners could get away with in order to continue to maximize profits, and a work week was six days long and a shift could last between twelve and fourteen hours in a day. Well, we're almost ready to wrap up the Industrial Revolution, but before we can do that, we need to take one last break for ads. Meanwhile, that explosion and urban growth did not mean suddenly all these luxurious accommodations were appearing everywhere, and in a lot of citys we were seeing cheap, flimsy housing being hastily constructed to take advantage of all the incoming populations of workers. And landlords were a lot like factory owners. They were trying to maximize their profits. They would cram as many tenants as they could into a building in order to get as many renters as possible, So it was a fairly grim situation. Now, you might think that in that situation the workers would have some significant power because there were a lot of them. They're way more workers than there were factory owners. So you'd think, well, they could just band together and demand better conditions and the factory owners would ultimately have to bow to them if they were actually able to unionize. Well, the ruling powers in England didn't like that idea so much. Um England traditionally had had a lot of reluctance to allow lower classes to have any kind of power or say and help things were going, so why change things now. They actually discouraged people from organizing into a labor force that could fight for the rights of employees by passing laws Britain passed. Britain's parliament passed the Combination Acts of eight hundred, and it actually made it illegal for workers to unionize. If you've tried to unionize workers, if you were an employee and you were trying to convince others to band with you, So that you could leverage your work against the factory owners and demand better conditions. You could be sentenced to either three months in prison or two months of hard labor. So it's pretty grim. And those acts remained law until eighteen twenty four, so a quarter of a century. Essentially, this was the law of the land. They were finally overthrown, and perhaps predictably, immediately after they were overthrown, there were a series of workers strikes throughout all of Britain, and in fact, the following year in Parliament attempted to reinstate the Acts, but that movement failed and they never were reinstated. Meanwhile, so you've got the working class, this very poor new class of people in Britain. They hadn't existed before. Before they would have been farmers or perhaps small uh skilled workers of some sort, like they might be a blacksmith or a weaver, but now they are factory workers, the working class. You had another new class as well, that would be the industrial capitalists. And these were the people who had the money to start up the businesses. They were the ones who were funding the building of a factory, the operation of an industry, and they would use the profits from that industry to improve that business, including the funding of canals and bridges and roads throughout all of Britain. So their work would benefit other people, but they were largely doing it to benefit their own business, to to maximize profits even more. And some of these people came from humble origins. They weren't all very highly educated people. Some of them came from families that were very similar to the families working in the factories. But because of their wealth, they wielded as much or more power as the traditional noble houses in England at that time. Um, remember this is a time when the noble houses, you know, the House of Lords, had largely lost a lot of its power and uh, nobility was now looked upon with something of of disdain because a lot of the noble noble houses no longer had any money. Uh they had titles and they had they had estates, but they didn't necessarily have wealth, whereas you had this new class of industrial capitalists who might not have any title to their name, but we're fabulously wealthy. So it was a very different time in Britain's history. Now that change, this whole change with the working class and the industrial capitalists that didn't go on without any resistance. In fact, weavers would lead the way. They protested the change from the cottage industry to factory production. Early on, you get stories about weavers who were upset at factories. They they felt one the factory was going to put them out of business, and two that factories were going to produce work that was inferior to what a weaver, a traditional weaver would make, So there was a bit of pride and a bit of self preservation in this. They would protest this change by breaking looms. This was a an era in which the term sabotage came to prominence. So there's a most likely apocryphal story that some weavers through their shoes into a loom essentially a giant water powered loom, in order to destroy it. So they're coming up the works with their shoes and shoes in French is sabo, So sabotage is this act of throwing one's shoes into machinery to destroy the machines, normally as part of a labor dispute. But most etymologists agree that that particular story is likely just a folk tale. So don't write to me and say, hey, you said sabotage comes from throwing shoes into machines, and it says here that's not true. I agree, It's just that the most widely used explanation comes from the mostly most likely untrue story that shoes have everything to do with sabotage. But there's another word that also came up during this era that also gets misused a lot, and that is the word luddite. Now, today, we usually interpret luddite as someone who opposes or doesn't adopt technological advances. So a person refusing to get a cell phone could be called a luddite by somebody like, Oh, you're such a luddite you won't even get a cell phone. So we use that term just I mean, you aren't going to embrace technology. You think it's bad for some reason. But in the Industrial Revolution, luddites were workers in England who destroyed machinery in waves of labor disputes during the early eighteen hundreds. Uh. They were doing so against the law, obviously, and Parliament got very nervous about this. Uh. They you know, England had already been through a civil war a couple of centuries earlier, and Parliament was not eager to have that happen again, so it began to assign soldiers to defend factories. Thousands of soldiers were deployed throughout Britain to guard factories against mobs of the working class. And the Luddites ended up taking their name from a man named ned Ludd who inspired and led them to cause mischief throughout all of England. This guy almost went Christopher walking here. This guy went all over England. He would show up in all sorts of villages everywhere to lead people in opposition to factory owners. And the British authorities were having a heck of a time tracking this guy down. It seemed like every time they were responding to one crisis, he would pop up somewhere else in England, almost magically. And the reason for this is because ned Lud was not a real person. He was a story. He was an idea concocted by the Luddites themselves, kind of as a symbol of their movement. Uh So, ned Lud was not a real person, but the Luddites did take their name from ned Lud. Now, there was someone who may have been named Lud or Ludham, who was working as a weaver in a factory who might have inspired the name, but the person himself didn't exist. Now, as it turns out, the Luddites weren't really organized in any meaningful way. They were very passionate, and they generally agreed on their cause, but they weren't this massive underground organization that Parliament was terrified of, and the workers actually suffered way more than any of the machinery they attacked dead. In April of eighteen twelve, a mob of workers were fired upon by soldiers. A factory owner ordered the soldiers to fire into the crowd, and as a result, three people were killed and at least eighteen were wounded, and more were killed in a different clash on the following day. So violent confrontations like these would continue for the next several years. Here's the thing. The Luddites weren't actually opposing industrial machines. They depended on those machines to do their work, so they were not anti technology. What the Luddites opposed were what they viewed as cruel labor conditions that exploited employee and benefited the owners. They targeted manufacturers who used factories in a fraudulent and deceitful manner. What they really wanted was better wages. They wanted the assurance that people who were working the machines would actually be trained as apprentices and learn how to use the machines before being assigned a machine. Uh. This was sort of a point of a pride to make sure that the finished product was a good product and not just one that's super cheaply made in order to benefit the factory owner. And all of this seems like a pretty humble set of demands if you ask me, you know, they're they're just asking to be paid a fair wage and to make sure that the business isn't cutting corners when it comes to production. But now today we just considered ludite to be a term for somebody who doesn't like technology. It's kind of interesting considering that's not what the original intent was, although they did try and destroy machines in order to to get their point of us. Eventually workers were able to unionize legally, but it took decades after they unionized before conditions would start to really improve. Even into the Victorian era in the mid to late eighteen hundreds, factories were still crowded and dangerous, and London had more than its share of slums filled with working class families and the unemployed. All you have to read is any Charles Dickens novel and you'll understand. You'll see this, uh that this was still an issue in Britain decades after the unions were finally able to form. Now, what about the rest of the world. I've talked a lot about Britain, a little bit about America. Why haven't I talked about other places? Well, it's largely because the industrialization of other countries followed in the footsteps of Britain by a few but lagged a few decades behind um. And some places had better excuses than others. Like France and America both had pretty good excuses. They both are undergoing revolutionary wars around the same time Britain was undergoing its industrial revolution, and the war was taking way more of the focus of the people of France and the people of America than any sort of industrial revolution could America. Obviously, they concluded their revolutionary war well ahead of time before France did, before France had even had a revolution, and so we're able to move on, and so they caught up not too long after that. American ingenuity was something that people were very proud of and they were able to catch up to the Brits before too long. France had the other drawback that after the French Revolution, there were the Napoleonic Wars, which did not end until eighteen fifteen, so they didn't move into industrialization until after that. Essentially around that same time, the other nations in Europe began to follow suit, and so you started to see this pattern where countries were becoming industrialized following similar pathways that Britain followed, but several decades behind. So that's why we tell the story of the industrial Revolution largely with Britain in mind, because it acts as the model for everybody else. But once they got started, they actually caught up to Britain pretty quickly. So in other words, it didn't take the decades and decades and decades of work that happened in Britain to get up to about the same speed that Britain was currently at, and what followed was an unprecedented era of production and commerce. Other inventions would also contribute to a very rapidly changing world. You might remember I did an episode with Holly from Stuff You Missed in History Class about the sewing machine for example, which it's hard, it's hard to believe, but the sewing machine is the subject of one of the nastiest patent wars of all time. There were people who were willing to to kill or die for their designs of the sewing machine. But that was another big uh invention that came out around this time. And innovation was also changing farming, which was important because so many people were leaving the profession of farming to go to cities and try something else. A guy named Cyrus McCormick invented several large machines that were important in farming, including one that was in on a motorizer or mechanized I guess I should say a mechanized reaper designed to harvest crops far more quickly than you could by hand. So farmers could use machines to meet the demand of these larger populations of non farmers. You know, they were able to the one farmer was now able to do the work of ten or twenty farm hands using these machines because they were much more efficient and fast. When the Industrial Revolution was coming to an end in the middle of the nineteenth century, the stage was set. Not long after this period, we would see an unprecedented era of scientific discoveries. Some people refer to it as the Second Industrial Revolution, because that's when mass production really became a thing, when corporations came into existence, and when we started to see people harness things like electricity and discover radio waves, which ended up powering all these ideas, I mean literally powering in the case of electricity, all these ideas including radio and television that followed in that Second Industrial Revolution, And it also allowed for the age of discovery, where we had scientists all over the world starting to break new ground in our understanding of the universe, including in really weird areas like quantum physics. I hope you enjoyed that classics series from tech Stuff on how the Industrial Revolution worked. I thought that was a fascinating topic to really look into. You know, some of the stuff I knew a little bit about, but most of it was brand new for me at the time and really exciting to learn about how quickly new technologies were being developed and adopted and how much, you know, stress there was, how much how much conflict there was as various technologies were coming mature. And of course we still see that sort of stuff today. Typically we're seeing it in the digital realm more than in the engineering realm. But yeah, I mean it's it was the stuff of of real drama back then. If you have suggestions for topics that we should cover on tech Stuff, whether they're historical or futuristic or anything in between, there are a couple of different ways you can get in touch. One is to download the I Heart Radio app. It's free to download and to use. You can navigate over to the tech Stuff page. Just search tech Stuff in the search bar, bringing right to us. If you click into tech Stuff, you'll see that there's a little microphone I con and if you touch that, you can leave a message up to thirty seconds in length. If you prefer to send your message other in other ways, the best way to do it is over Twitter. The handle for our show is text Stuff hs W. Just send us a tweet and tell me what it is you would like us to cover, and I'll try to get to it and I'll talk to you again really soon. YEA. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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