Chapter 6.1 Inventions, Innovations, and Mechanization
Chapter 6.1 Inventions, Innovations, and Mechanization
Learning Objectives
By the end of this section, you will be able to:
- Describe the effects on everyday life of the major innovations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
- Analyze the ways in which technology and mechanization affected the industrial work experience
- Explain how the working-class family changed because of industrialization
Before the nineteenth century, life changed little from one era to the next. Generations of people worked on farms, rising when the sun did and going to sleep when it set. They had relatively little in the way of material possessions: clothing, furniture, tools. If they did not live on isolated farms, they inhabited small villages and usually did not venture far from the place where they were born. They raised enough food to feed themselves and sold any surplus in market towns, using their earnings to buy only the handcrafted goods they could not make for themselves. They had just a few years of schooling, if that. When they fell ill, they prayed because they knew there was little doctors could do. In the world’s few large cities like London and Paris, scientific discoveries were made, but they had little effect on the majority of the population. Beautiful works of art were sculpted or painted, music composed, and poems written, but before the Industrial Revolution, most ordinary people never saw, heard, or read them. All that changed in the nineteenth century, as new forms of technology and new sources of power transformed the way people in industrialized nations lived.
The Industrial Workplace
Some of the most profound changes brought by industrialization were those that affected the workplace, bringing new challenges while also transforming the nature of labor. During the Second Industrial Revolution, new forms of energy were harnessed, transportation and communication became faster, and industrialized nations mass-produced not only steel and industrial machinery, which had been the focus of prior industrial efforts, but also consumer goods such as clothing, furniture, shoes, and packaged foods.
Perhaps the greatest change was the development of a new source of energy—electricity. Water power had earlier replaced animal power, and steam engines fueled by burning coal had driven the machinery of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. So too did electricity supplant steam by the end of the nineteenth century. Electricity ran machinery on the factory floors, as did internal combustion engines powered by petroleum. Electricity also turned night into day. When first oil lamps and then gas lights had illuminated the workplace, workdays in the winter were often short. Dependent on daylight to see what they were doing, workers were commonly allowed to go home after dark. With electric lights, though, the factory floor could be lit twenty-four hours a day, and workers could labor long into the night in all seasons.
Electricity also