The American Revolution has had innumerable chroniclers ; the glory and the horrors of the French Revolution are just as familiar. But the story of the Industrial Revolution, whose impact on society has become more and more pronounced as the years go by, has less often been told. The Industrial Revolution evolved through a remarkable series of inventions, going back at least as far as the middle years of the eighteenth century. Power machinery was substituted for hand tools ; the factory system first supplemented and then replaced the domestic system of work ; and industry gradually assumed the form that is familiar to us. The basic drive behind the Industrial Revolution was production. By the use of laborsaving machinery it became possible to produce far greater quantities of goods for example, cloth than earlier generations had deemed possible. We of the twentieth century are so much the children of the Industrial Revolution that we sometimes forget how differently men lived be-fore they learned how to harness power and set the forces of nature to do the heavy work of the world. The men who invented the machines that made the Industrial Revolution were not so much scientists as artisans carpenters, weavers, millwrights and instrument-makers, with a few mathematicians and clergymen thrown in for good measure. But the men who were chiefly responsible for carrying forward the Industrial Revolution were businessmen, capitalists and entrepreneurs (risk takers). You can compare them with the merchant adventurers of earlier centuries, who had supported scientific exploration. From the outset these new industrialists were aware of the need for science and research in the technological development of industry. Here, for example, is part of a letter written in 1780 by Matthew Bouillon, an English manufacturer :
No comments:
Post a Comment