This paper surveys Western civilization between 1850 and 1914, focusing on the transformative effects of the Second Industrial Revolution. It examines key technological innovations—including electricity, the steam engine, Bessemer steel, and mass production—and their impact on urban life, the rise of the middle class, and the expansion of leisure time. The paper also explores how science and culture evolved alongside industrialization, from underground transit systems to Einstein's theories, before tracing the period's shift from widespread optimism to the uncertainty and devastation ushered in by the outbreak of World War I in 1914.
The Second Industrial Revolution refers to the rapid development of various technologies during the 19th century that radically improved modern civilization. These innovations included the widespread introduction of electricity, which increased the amount of productive time available for work and made city streets much safer after dark. The steam engine, and later the first internal combustion engines, followed shortly thereafter. New processes for making paper and for printing produced the first widely circulated newspapers, while new telegraph communications technologies enabled transcontinental transmission of information and dramatically decreased the time required for news to travel great distances.
New processes for producing better-quality construction materials — such as Bessemer steel — revolutionized the construction of buildings, roads, and bridges. New mass production methods, such as the assembly line introduced by Henry Ford, increased the availability of all kinds of consumer goods to the middle classes. In fact, the evolution of the middle class was itself largely a product of the Second Industrial Revolution.
As industrialization took hold in the United States and the major Western European cities, populations shifted in large numbers to urban centers where semi-skilled labor was in ever-increasing demand. While the new vocational opportunities offered many people the chance to improve their position in life, the new urban transplants also had to endure hardships unique to modern industrial city life. These included filthy city sidewalks resulting from the comparatively slow development of municipal sanitation, as well as the ever-present industrial smog and airborne soot that accompanied many industrial processes, such as coal-burning furnaces.
Science played a major role in the new technologies that fueled modern advancements in society. Electricity in particular made possible numerous industrial processes, and the impact of having incandescent light available in the home for the first time is difficult to appreciate today. For the first time, the opportunity to travel to distant cities by rail allowed even those of modest means to venture more than a few miles from their homes.
Likewise, the first underground transportation systems — such as the New York City and Boston subway systems — connected communities across the greater metropolitan areas as never before. The increasing wages and consumer goods attributable to industrialization gave rise to an entirely new concept for the non-wealthy classes: leisure time and disposable income. To a certain extent, this also disturbed members of the traditional leisure class who, for the first time, had to share beaches and other recreational spaces with the broader population. This prompted the former leisure class to seek other social outlets, such as the country drive in the new automobiles manufactured by Henry Ford.
Toward the end of the period, the work of a young Swiss patent clerk-turned-physicist, Albert Einstein, turned humanity's understanding of the universe — and of the very concepts of time, space, energy, and matter — completely upside down.
"Social upheaval and the outbreak of World War I"
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