Industrial history

“ All clothing, carpets, draperies, tools, implements, furniture—everything was hand-made. In this process no large capital was needed, no great factories, no great assemblage of laborers, no great organization of industry. The work was done in homes and small shops by individual enterprise, mainly, or in combinations of laborers and masters. Power manufacture and the inventions named above changed the whole structure of industrial society. ”

“ In a remarkable sketch of the history of civilization, Professor Huxley remarked, in 1887, that the wonderful increase of industrial production by the application of machinery, the improvement of old technical processes and the invention of new ones, constitutes the most salient feature of the world's progress during the last fifty years. ”

“ Introduction of new industries.—Machinery has not only revolutionized old industries; it has created many new ones. A distinguished American economist expressed the opinion, about 1890, that half of all those who were then earning their living by industrial pursuits did so in occupations that not only had no existence, but which had not even been conceived of, a hundred years before. I may write with a steel pen, with a fountain pen, or with a typewriter ”

“ Because the Industrial Revolution profoundly influenced the social and political life of England, and later of the whole world, the history of the factory, which contributed so much to its influence, becomes of vast importance. The first chapter relates to brilliant achievements in the field of mechanical invention. Then follows [Pg 15] the dismal story of how a multitude of craftsmen were transformed into factory operatives—the untold suffering of oppressed workingmen. ”

“ From the dawn of history the manufacturer and craftsman had been, as we have said, a sort of middle-class townsman. The machine and the employer now superseded his skill, and he either became an employer of his fellows, and grew towards wealth and equality with the other rich classes, or he remained a worker and sank very rapidly to the level of a mere labourer. This great change in human affairs is known as the Industrial Revolution. ”

“ The excessive demand for exchangeable goods, the accumulation of wealth, and the enlarged capacity for enjoyment centred the activities of life in industry, and man entered the industrial stage. At first he employed hand power for manufacturing goods, but soon he changed to power manufacture, brought about by discovery and invention. Water and steam were now applied to turn machinery, and the new conditions of production changed the whole industrial life. A revolution in industrial society caused an immediate shifting of social life. ”

“ Almost all other forms of economic occupation have subsequently taken on the main characteristics of the factory system, in utilizing improved machinery, in the extensive scale on which they are administered, in the use of large capital, and in the organization of employees in large bodies. ”

“ Capital had, therefore, to be brought into manufacturing which had been previously used in trade or other employments. Capital was in reality abundant relatively to existing opportunities for investment, and the early machine spinners and weavers drew into partnership moneyed men from the towns who had previously no connection with manufacturing. Again, the new industry required bodies of laborers working regular hours under the control of their employers and in the buildings where the machines were placed and the (p. 213) power provided. ”

“ Technologically, this era is marked by an ever advancing growth of craftsmanship; until it passes over into the régime of the machine industry when its technology had finally outgrown those limitations of handicraft and petty trade that gave it its character as a distinct phase of economic history. ”

“ Thus the structure of regulation of industry, which had (p. 232) been built up in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, or which had survived from the Middle Ages, was now torn down; the use of the powers of government to make men carry on their economic life in a certain way, to buy and sell, labor and hire, manufacture and cultivate, export and import, only in such ways as were thought to be best for the nation, seemed to be entirely abandoned. ”

“ Moreover, the introduction of agricultural machinery has changed the slow, plodding life of the farmer to that of the master of the steam-tractor, thresher, and automobile, changed the demand from a slow, inactive mind to the keenest, most alert, best-educated man of the nation, who must study the highest arts of production, the greatest economy, and the best methods of marketing. Truly, the industrial revolution applies not to factories alone.
The Building of the City.—The modern industrial development has forced upon the landscape the great city. ”

“ Beginning in Great Britain, it spread during the nineteenth century throughout the world.
As the Industrial Revolution went on, a great gulf opened between employer and employed. In the past every manufacturing worker had the hope of becoming an independent master. Even the slave craftsmen of Babylon and Rome were protected by laws that enabled them to save and buy their freedom and to set up for themselves. But now a factory and its engines and machines became a vast and costly thing, measured by the scale of the worker’s pocket. Wealthy men had to come together to create an enterprise ”

“ There is a tendency in many histories to confuse together what we have here called the mechanical revolution, which was an entirely new thing in human experience arising out of the development of organized science, a new step like the invention of agriculture or the discovery of metals, with something else, quite different in its origins, something for which there was already an historical precedent, the social and financial development which is called the industrial revolution. ”

“ Nowhere were the results of the great revolution more in evidence than in the vast difference between the workshop attached to the house of the early industrialist and the forest of chimneys and stacks, and the acres and square miles of floorspace in present-day industrial establishments, with their personnel numbered in thousands and the capital invested in plant and equipment running into the millions or billions of dollars. ”

“ American manufactures began, in this period, to outgrow the simple forms of domestic industry, and to attract the capital necessary for the establishment of regular factories. Many companies were incorporated to manufacture goods by means of power machinery, and industrial methods which had long been practised in England were now first introduced in this country on an extensive scale. The development of the textile industries was especially rapid. ”

“ The very discovery of improved industrial methods, by leading to specialisation, makes manual labourer and brain- worker alike dependent on the rest of the community for the means of subsistence, and subordinates them, even in their own crafts, to the action of others. ”

“ The Industrial Revolution had converted millions of superstitious, frustrated peasants into craftsmen and professionals confident in their ability to use nature effectively, to advance their own interests and to improve society. ”

“ Thus in manufacturing and artisan life as in agricultural the period was marked by an extension and increase of the amount of industry, on the same general lines as had been reached by 1600, rather than by any considerable changes. ”

“ The talent, the energy, the ambition that formerly sought expression in the management of great estates and the control of hosts of slaves, now seek a field of action in trade, in manufacturing enterprises, or in the general enterprises of development. This was for the ruling class of the South the natural outcome of the great economic revolution that followed the war."
As in all other parts of the world, the mechanical revolution was attended by the growth of a population of industrial workers dependent not upon the soil but upon wages for their livelihood. ”

“ This leads us to the third branch of industrial administration the settlement of the conditions under which the human beings are to be employed. The adoption of one material rather than another, the choice between alternative processes or alternative ways of organising the factory, the selection of particular grades of workers, or even of a particular foreman, may affect, for the worse, the Standard of Life of the operatives concerned. ”

“ We have already noted how the industrial revolution had split the manufacturing class, which had hitherto been a middling and various sort of class, into two sections, the employers, who became rich enough to mingle with the financial, merchandizing, and landowning classes, and the employees, who drifted to a status closer and closer to that of mere gang and agricultural labour. ”

“ The use of coal and iron, both important indexes of industrial development, extended largely; and the population engaged in industry and commerce grew by nearly a million workers in the period 1861-1866. The increase in the products of French industry found a market both abroad and at home. The exports of manufactures increased, it is true, but slowly except in the case of special products; but the consumption of manufactures within the country extended greatly, as new purchasers appeared for wares which formerly had been beyond their means. ”

“ Hand-loom Weaving.
(Hogarth: The Industrious and the Lazy Apprentice.)
(p. 187) These industries old and new were in some cases regulated and supervised as to the quality of ware and methods of manufacture, by the remaining gilds or companies, with the authority which they possessed from the national government. Indeed, there were within the later sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries some new companies organized or old ones renewed especially for this oversight, and to guard the monopoly of their members over certain industries in certain towns. ”

“ Rise of Great Corporations.%—That mechanical progress so astonishing should powerfully affect the business and industrial world was inevitable. Trades, occupations, industries of all sorts, began to concentrate and combine, and corporations took the place of individuals and small companies. In place of the forty little telegraph companies of 1856, there was the great Western Union Company. In place of many petty railroads, there were a few trunk lines. ”

“ There are two obvious reasons for the growth of the towns since the industrial revolution. In the first place, factories are established in places where there is an abundant supply of coal, or where conditions are otherwise favorable ”

“ From this period dates the industrial revolution which gradually abolished domestic industries, separated mill-owners and mill-hands into almost hostile classes, undermined the system of apprenticeship, and brought about a large migration of manufactures from centres with abundant water-power to centres in close proximity to coal-fields. ”

“ The English people were the most advanced, in industrial and mercantile ability, of any people in the world. They had the start on others in manufactures and trade, and reaped the benefits of their early378 training in this period. (2) The geographical situation of England, and the physical resources of the country, especially its coal, made the English superior to most peoples and equal to any, in this age of transportation and manufacture by steam. (3) The commercial policy of the government allowed the people to make the most of their advantages. ”

“ To this we must add the changes produced by the discovery of steam and the invention of machinery, which rapidly changed England from an agricultural to a manufacturing nation, introduced the factory system, and caused this period to be known as the Age of Industrial Revolution. ”

“ The Manufacturing Industry.—It is the function of the agriculturist and the herdsman, the miner and the lumberman, to produce the raw material. The sailor and the train-hand, the longshoreman and the teamster, transport them to the industrial centres. It is the business of [181] the manufacturer and his employees to turn them into the finished product for the use of society. ”

“ The Industrial Revolution, thus springing from the sudden growth in the use of machinery, occasioned not only economic but political and social results. On the economic side, the effect was to extend old industries and to create new ones, as well as to revolutionize the methods of the production and distribution of wealth. ”

“ It was provincial in thought, speech, and habits. It was given over to agriculture, small trade, and rude home manufacture. Presently came the revolutionary inventions of textile machinery, of the steam-engine, and of processes for extracting and utilizing coal and iron. The heavy, costly machinery required capital and the factory. Concentrated capital and machinery required workers. The working people were forced to give up their small home manufacturing and their unprofitable farming and move to the industrial barracks and workrooms of the manufacturing centres. ”

“ Trusting to the reports of our exhibitions of industrial skill, I was ready to swear that we had left our neighbours of England a hundred leagues behind, and that their manufacturers, to avoid being reduced to beggary by our competition, would soon be obliged to come over to learn how to smelt and refine iron, how to spin cotton, how to manufacture steel, how to manage the most gigantic establishments in the most economical manner, how to despatch mountains of merchandise beyond sea most expeditiously. ”

“ Similarly all industry, not agricultural or handicraft, is indiscriminately comprised in the term of manufacture, and thereby the distinction is obliterated between two great and essentially different periods of economic history: the period of manufacture proper, based on the division of manual labor, and the period of modern industry based on machinery. ”