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Essay: The Industrial Revolution – a turning point for society

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  • Subject area(s): History essays
  • Reading time: 3 minutes
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  • Published: 15 November 2019*
  • Last Modified: 18 September 2024
  • File format: Text
  • Words: 841 (approx)
  • Number of pages: 4 (approx)

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The Industrial Revolution was a period of time that Great Britain found ways to make machinery and manufacture double the amount of goods they were making. This only happen in Great Britain because they were so advanced in their technology. In the Industrial Revolution, it was predominantly agrarian and rural communities that became Industrial and urban areas because they started building new warehouses and they had big machinery to manufacture their goods. This occurred between 1760 to to the early 1840s.

Before the Industrial Revolution in the late 1700s, manufacturing was often done in people’s homes by using hand tools or basic machines. The roads were terrible because they had pot holes, they were dirt so people usually walked or used animals as transport. If people wanted to transport produce, they would use the canals, rivers and the ocean because it was the quickest way to get around. People had to harvest the land by hand when it was the right time and when they would go to plough the land, the ploughs would often break on big rocks so the land would not be ready for planting.

The Industrial Revolution consisted of many inventions and innovations. In the agricultural life, Jethro Tull invented the Seed Drill and the Horse Hoe. The seed drill was an innovation that allowed you to plant seeds underground instead on the top of the soil, it had drills that went into the floor and let out seeds. The horse hoe device allowed for much more efficient planting by getting a horse to pull a plough quickly.

Another big invention was John Kay’s “flying shuttle” which made the process of making cloth a lot easier. Using cords that were attached to a picking peg, a single weaver could operate the shuttle. The “spinning jenny” was a device that allowed one person to spin many threads at once. By turning a single wheel, one person could now produce eight threads at once.

One of the main inventions was the “steam engine” that was invented by James Watt. The steam engine created a faster mode of transport for goods and people. It allowed you to travel from one end of the country to the other in less than a week. The last main invention was Robert Fulton “steam boat”. This boat allowed faster travel between British colonies but at first it was expensive to build but the ship could take off under its own power and it was more streadfast in storms.

The Industrial Revolution made settlement for people easier because rural areas were becoming industrialised, it meant that more people didn’t move to the urban, city areas because they didn’t have to. They had transport like horse and cart and the steam engine and they had many new factories and ways to manufacture their own goods that they were almost self sufficient.

Before the Industrial Revolution, men, women and children all worked together in the cottage industries. Most business were run from home and there wasn’t much distinction between work and home life. During the Industrial Revolution, every member of the family worked in factories or mills.

At the time, women and children were just as valuable to a factory owner as men were. Conditions in the factories were appalling and they had no safety procedures at all. Working hours where long and families got no time to themselves. The government realised how dangerous the working places were and they reduced women’s working hours and children had to attend school. Children needed someone to care for them before and after school so most women left the workforce and became the homemaker and child bearers. There were not many jobs for women outside of the factories so men’s wages increased and they became the ‘bread winners’ of the family.

The Industrial Revolution has marked  a massive turning point in our worlds ecology and human relationships with the environment. It also changed our lifestyles and our health has increased. The most evidence of the Industrial Revolution’s impact on the modern world is seen with the worldwide population. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the mid 1700s, the worlds population grew by about 57 percent to 700 million. If not all the big inventions like the steam engine of the spinning jenny, our world today would not have been as sufficient as it is because we wouldn’t have discovered these things for multiple years into the future.

In conclusion, the Industrial Revolution had marked a massive turning point for our modern society today. All the inventions such as the flying shuttle and the steam boat have been improved over the years but they were the key things to the Industrial Revolution. Our agriculture, natural resources, ways to live have been passed on by those people. Kids get to go to school now and we don’t have to work in factories and women have jobs that aren’t in factories either. The Industrial Revolution was a great thing to happen in history.

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