The Industrial Revolution

Bibliographic data

Monograph

Identifikator:: 1027928145

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-159926

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Cunningham, William http://d-nb.info/gnd/128907487

Title:: The Industrial Revolution

Place of publication:: Cambridge

Publisher:: The University Press

Year of publication:: 1922

Scope:: xxii S., S. 404-886

Digitisation:: 2021

Collection:: Economics Books

Usage license:: Get license information via the feedback formular.

MACHINERY IN THE TEXTILE TRADES 613 securing the well-being of the labourer that they hung aloof AD 117 for a time from the humanitarian effort to remedy particular ’ abuses by new legislation. We have no adequate means of gauging the. rapidity and violence of the Industrial Revolution which occurred in England during the seventy years from 1770 to 1840; it the seventy commenced with the changes in the hardware trades, which Yruserial have been already described, but the crisis occurred when in- #¢0#n ventive progress extended to the textile trades. Despite the gradual economic development, it seems likely enough that, while centuries passed, there was little alteration in the general aspect of England; but thé whole face of the country was changed the changed by the Industrial Revolution, In 1770 there was ot go h ace no Black Country, blighted by the conjunction of coal and cuniry- iron trades; there were no canals, or railways, and no factory towns with their masses of population, The differentiation of town and country had not been carried nearly so far as it is to-day. All the familiar features of our modern life, and all its most pressing problems, have come to the front within the last century and a quarter. 243. The changes included in the term Industrial Revo- lution are so complicated and so various that it is not easy to state, far less to solve, the questions which they raise. There have been many different forms of industrial invention. Sometimes there has been the introduction of new processes, ghar as in the important series of experiments by which the duction problem of smelting and working iron, with fuel obtained from coal, was finally solved; and this, as we have seen, was of extraordinary importance. Other improvements have con- sisted in the employment of new implements, by which the por of new skilled labourer is assisted to do his work more quickly or ments, better; one example has been noticed in the flying shuttle, and the substitution of the spinning-wheel for the whorl and spindle was another. But such a change is hardly to be described as the introduction of machinery. A machine, a8 commonly understood, does not assist a man to do his work?, it does the work itself, under human guidance: its 1 There may be machines that go by human power, but do the work in quite » different way from that in which it has previously been done : e.g. the bicycle, or spinning-jenny.

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