ABSTRACT: The Industrial Revolution brought about new changes with technology. Many inventions were innovated including the steam engine, electric power, railroads, advances in transportation, and also the steamship as well. This went into a world of "higher incomes and cheaper commodities, unheard-of-devices and materials, insatiable appetites. New, new, new. Money, money, money". Dr. Samuel Johnson said "all the business of the world is to be done in a new way".

The Industrial Revolution

~Mental or Material?~

by Alexandra Butler

The process of the Industrial Revolution could be interpreted by being either mostly a mental or mostly a physical revolution. There are many ways to look at how the Industrial Revolution changed the way things were done in many instances. It brought about new innovations and that in turn made this period of time 'the Industrial Revolution'. People 'industrialized' technology and that helped to industrialize the way that many things were done by humans. "The Industrial Revolution brought the world closer together, made it smaller and more homogenous. But the same revolution fragmented the globe by estranging winners and losers. It begat multiple worlds".

The Industrial Revolution could be defined as the time of power machinery turned to manufacturing. It is still going on in some places in thw world as well. Europe, in the eighteenth century, began to industrialize very quickly, although this whole process was probably most quickly industrialized in England. Although, by 1850, western Europe was fairly industrialized because of the coming of electricity as well as cheap steel speeded up the whole process.

There were many technological changes during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries including methods of making glass, clocks, and also chemicals. During this time, these methods advanced greatly with technology. By the start of the eighteenth century in England, many people were already using machines in manufacturing. The steam engine was one of the machines which helped the industrial development in Europe. The use of electricity for machines was limited and cost very high prices through the nineteenth century. Up until about 1900, the only cheap electricity that was used was the electricity made by generators using falling water in mountains of parts of France as well as Italy. Europe eventually gained electricity to use, in the twentieth century. Germany gained electricity in the 1920's, and Great Britain had electricity nearly all over the country by 1936. Electricity was also a huge factor in the quickly changing industrialization of Russia during the 1930's.

What these changes and innovations meant was that machines would now be substituted for human work, effort and skill. This also meant that sources of power opened up a new limitless supply of energy. During the Industrial Revolution (as stated in The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, pg. 187), both the economy and knowledge were growing fast enough to generate a continuing flow of improvements. It also changed political power in nations, between nations, and also between civilizations. It also changed the social order. The Industrial Revolution changed ways that people thought as much as ways that people did things. The word 'revolution' could mean many varying things. It could mean simply 'transformation' or it could mean a 'turning'. In the book The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, David S. Landes uses revolution to mean "instance of great change or alteration in affairs or some particular thing". Revolutions can be considered good, or something that changes everything. Or they can be considered bad, or destructive of things of value. Revolutions note that it takes many small, as well as large, improvements to make an idea into a way of doing things.

On page 191 of The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, it says that "innovation was catching because the principles that underlay a given technique could take many forms, find many uses". This means that there could be many ideas put together to make one thing work, and that these ideas could also be used in another way with other ideas, to make other things work. Examples from the book include; if you could print or make fabric by using cylinders, you could also print or make wallpaper that same way. You could use it to print text faster than by using a press, and make cheap tabliods and novels by the hundreds of thousands. The early economists did not have statistical proof. They relied on history and on personal observations. "We now put our trust in hard data provided they are sanctioned by theory". We probably expect the economic historians to have put their own trust in hard, numerical data, although only if they are proved by historical evidence.

We can see that through the Industrial Revolution came many new ideas and thoughts as how to do things mostly involving manufacturing. It can be seen that there was a lot of thought put into making new innovations in technology and thinking about how things would work and work together. It seems that the Industrial Revolution took a lot of mental skill from humans to 'industrialize' ways of doing things. This also meant that once things were 'industrialized' people did not have to work as hard to get things done, they relied on 'materials' to do things for them. Thinking of the Industrial Revolution like this, you can see how people could consider it either a mental revolution or a material revolution.