Industrial and post-industrial society: concepts and transitions

Industrialization

Urban Industrialization

During the 19th Century, the application of science to invention started the Industrial Revolution -- the mass production of material goods by machines. Although population growth had reached new highs, the first step in this revolution happened in mid-eighteenth-century England, with the development of the steam engine and machines for spinning and weaving textiles. Increased production of coal, iron, and steel fueled expansion of industry and commerce meant production of goods shifting from homes and small shops to manufactured goods being produced "in factories, mills and mines. It demanded enormous investments of capital and the efforts of a large labor force; it stimulated growth." (Fiero 1)

Industrialism was the reason for the West's economic and military dominance over the rest of the world. This process is illustrated in the history of the railroad, "the most important technological phenomenon of the early nineteenth century and one made possible by the combined technologies of steam power, coal, and iron." The first all-iron rails were forged in Britain in 1789, but it was not until 1804 that the first steam railway locomotive was built, and several more decades until "iron horses" became a major mode of transportation. The rails throughout Europe and the United States provided the means through which industry spread their factories and goods. Industrialism was the basis of the West's spread of their control over the rest of the world. Industrialization polarized nations into the strong and the weak. With the ability to produce mechanized automatic weapons, such as the machine gun, and enormous amounts of ammunition, Western imperialism spread throughout the world. The factory and mill workers worked long, hard hours, even children worked, without much compensation or care about their physical conditions. In the 1830's have of London's funerals were for children under ten. Mass production gave the people more goods and raised their standards of living in industrialized nations, but the unequal distribution of wealth created dissatisfaction and unrest among the poor.

Wealthy entrepreneurs and corporations were able to create great structures in the major cities. In 1856 Henry Bessemer (British) perfected the process for producing inexpensive steel; and the next year E.G. Otis (American) installed the first safety elevator. From 1773, cast iron provided strength without bulk and provided architects to span broader widths and raise structures to greater heights than traditional stone buildings. John Nash used cast iron in 1815 for the Brighton Pavilion. The first cast-iron suspension bridge began to be constructed in 1836, but not until mid-century was iron used as skeletal support for mills, warehouses and railroad stations. Joseph Paxton built Paxton's Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of London in 1851 of glass and steel in only nine months (Clark. 1972) it was a prefabricated structure, and after the exhibition was moved to a new site. It burned down in 1930. The Eiffel Tower was also built as a novelty, but became an emblem of modernism. Designed as a viewing tower by Gustave Eiffel for the Paris World Exhibition of 1889, it is a 1,064-foot-high cast iron skeleton equipped with elevators. (Fiero 106)