Industrial Revolution (1800’s-1940’s)
41 The Industrial Revolution and STS
Cassia Michael; Madysun Green; Gracie Travis; Robert Ayers; Amelia Godolphin; Catherine Denaux; Matt Erickson; and Anthony Hernandez
Introduction
The Industrial Revolution occurred from the 1880s to the mid-1940s, and it was a period of great innovation and discoveries that launched society forward. It began in Great Britain and many of the inventions during this time period were created by British inventors as Britain was the world’s leading commercial nation. It led to the invention of industrial machines in production, it led to a new, safer way to do mining, and it fostered innovation in healthcare with the creation of the iron lung. Not only was it a time of great innovation, but it was also a time of great growth with an unprecedented rise in the world’s population. In this chapter you will learn how every life was touched in some way by this revolution, and the overall standard of living became much better than it ever had been. It resulted in a change in the way most people lived as society shifted from being dominated by agriculture to being industrialized and urban. These changes in society were mostly the result of the great leaps that inventors were able to make in regards to technology. This chapter relates to STS, because it shows how great things can come from developments in society, science and technology as a whole. The Industrial Revolution set the ball rolling for many of our modes of transportation today, such as planes, high-speed trains, cars and even the new modes of transportation that continue to be developed, to benefit our society as a whole.
The steam engine
One of the major innovations during the Industrial Revolution was the steam engine. The steam engine went through many different incarnations over time before it reached its most beneficial form. While the science surrounding the steam engine and the improvement of the steam engine itself moved rapidly during the Industrial Revolution, there were some barriers to its improvement such as the new patent system and lack of resources (such as money). The three main versions of the steam engine were the ones created by Thomas Savery, Thomas Newcomen, and James Watt. The creation and improvement of the steam engine was a driving factor of the Industrial Revolution leading to the creation of the first true industrial machines used in production and transportation that were a defining part of the period.
Thomas Savery, an English engineer, and inventor created the first functional version of the steam engine. He was inspired to create the steam engine when examining the difficult problem of pumping water out of coal mines. Savery’s version was a vast improvement on previous methods, which were slow and expensive, he patented this design in 1698 for 14 years (Lira, 2013). This design was used to “raise water from mines by suction produced from condensing steam” (Britannica, 2019). While this version