-
Richard Arkwright
Their first spinning frame is put into use in 1768. Able to spin 128 threads at a time, it’s faster than anything before it and the thread it produces is stronger.
It is the first powered, automatic, and continuous textile machine.
It marks the move away from home production to mass manufacturing in factories. “Arkwright didn’t just invent the spinning machine. He invented the modern factory.”
Edward Meig -
James Watt
Scottish instrument maker and inventor whose steam engine contributed substantially to the Industrial Revolution. While repairing a model steam engine in 1764, he was impressed by its waste of steam. After wrestling with the problem of improving it, he suddenly came upon a solution leading to his greatest creation. Watt had realized the loss of latent was the worst defect of the engine and that therefore condensation must be effected in a chamber distinct from the cylinder but connected to it. -
Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism is one of the most powerful and persuasive approaches to normative ethics in the history of philosophy. Though not fully articulated until the 19th century, proto-utilitarian positions can be discerned throughout the history of ethical theory. -
Thomas Malthus
In 1819 Malthus was elected a fellow of the Royal Society; in 1821 he joined the Political Economy Club, whose members included Ricardo and James Mill; and in 1824 he was elected one of the 10 royal associates of the Royal Society of Literature. In 1833 he was elected to the French Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques and to the Royal Academy of Berlin. Malthus was one of the cofounders, in 1834, of the Statistical Society of London. -
George Stephenson
Stephenson was the son of a mechanic who operated a Newcomen atmospheric-steam engine that was used to pump out a coal mine at Newcastle upon Tyne. The boy went to work at an early age and without formal schooling; by age 19 he was operating a Newcomen engine. His curiosity aroused by the Napoleonic war news, he enrolled in night school and learned to read and write. He got a mechanic friend, the future Sir William Fairbairn, to take over his engine part-time. -
Mutual-Aid Societies
A mutual aid society is an organization that provides benefits or other help to its members when they are affected by things such as death, sickness, disability, old age, or unemployment. -
Corporations
a company or group of people authorized to act as a single entity (legally a person) and recognized as such in law. -
Cotton Gin
In 1794, U.S.-born inventor Eli Whitney (1765-1825) patented the cotton gin, a machine that revolutionized the production of cotton by greatly speeding up the process of removing seeds from cotton fiber. By the mid-19th century, cotton had become America’s leading export. Despite its success, the gin made little money for Whitney due to patent-infringement issues. -
Interchangeable Parts
The event that laid the groundwork for this monumental change was the introduction of pre-manufactured parts that were for all practical purposes identical, into the firearms industry. Interchangeable parts, popularized in America when Eli Whitney used them to assemble muskets in the first years of the 19th century, allowed relatively unskilled workers to produce large numbers of weapons quickly and at lower cost, and made repair and replacement of parts infinitely easier. -
Karl Marx
German philosopher and revolutionary socialist Karl Marx published The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, anticapitalist works that form the basis of Marxism. -
Socialism
Socialism is a range of economic and social systems characterised by social ownership of the means of production and workers' self-management as well as the political theories and movements associated with them. Social ownership can be public, collective or cooperative ownership, or citizen ownership of equity. -
Automobile
The automobile was first invented and perfected in Germany and France in the late 1800s, though Americans quickly came to dominate the automotive industry in the first half of the twentieth century. Henry Ford innovated mass-production techniques that became standard, and Ford, General Motors and Chrysler emerged as the “Big Three” auto companies by the 1920s.Manufacturers funneled their resources to the military during World War ll -
Airplane
In 1799, Sir George Cayley defined the forces of lift and drag and presented the first scientific design for a fixed-wing aircraft. Building on his pioneering work in aeronautics, scientists and engineers began designing and testing airplanes. A young boy made the first manned flight in a glider designed by Cayley in 1849. In 1874, Felix duTemple made the first attempt at powered flight by hopping off the end of a ramp in a steam-driven monoplane. -
Communism
Communism, sometimes referred to as revolutionary socialism, also originated as a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, and came to be defined by Marx’s theories—taken to their extreme end. In fact, Marxists often refer to socialism as the first, necessary phase on the way from capitalism to communism. -
Social Democracy
Social democracy, political ideology that originally advocated a peaceful evolutionary transition of society from capitalism to socialism using established political processes. In the second half of the 20th century, there emerged a more moderate version of the doctrine, which generally espoused state regulation, rather than state ownership, of the means of production and extensive social welfare programs.
