Industrial Revolution Timeline

In 1709, Abraham Darby made iron at Coalbrookdale using a furnace fired with coke. His furnace began the switch from charcoal to coke as fuel for smelting iron. Flooded mines were the problem, so Thomas Newcomen built a steam engine that would drive a pump. A broad patent already held by Thomas Savery left Newcomen unable to patent his own engine. The first of Newcomen's steam engines was installed near Dudley in 1712. Later, Darby's Coalbrookdale ironworks cast the cylinders for Newcomen's engines.

Before the Industrial Revolution had taken hold, most spinners and weavers worked by hand at home. In 1733, John Kay invented the flying shuttle, a weaving device. With it, weavers could make wider cloth, faster. Demand for yarn rose so sharply that spinning machines were invented. Newcomen's engine, meanwhile, burned a lot of fuel, which was no problem at coal mines, where coal came cheap, but a drawback elsewhere. Its cylinder was heated and cooled on every stroke, wasting heat, a flaw that James Watt would later fix.

Britain's Industrial Revolution, the turn to mechanised industry, is usually placed between c. 1760 and c. 1840. James Brindley cut the Bridgewater Canal for the Duke of Bridgewater, carrying coal from his Worsley mines to Manchester. In 1770 James Hargreaves patented the spinning jenny, with which one worker could spin several threads at once. Some hand spinners, afraid the jenny would cost them their living, wrecked a number of the machines. Arkwright's water frame, patented in 1769, ran on water power, and this encouraged the building of large spinning factories. In 1771 Arkwright set up a water-powered spinning mill at Cromford, and its factory system found imitators across northern England.

In 1769 James Watt patented an engine whose separate condenser made it far more efficient. Boulton and Watt then added a rotary motion, so steam power could run cotton mills and other industries. Although British law barred textile workers from emigrating, Samuel Slater took Arkwright's designs to America and built copies of them. Mechanised spinning in England created soaring demand for raw cotton, which Eli Whitney's cotton gin met by stripping seeds out by machine. The gin drove a boom in American cotton output over the following decades, and slavery grew with it on the plantations. When steam replaced water power during the 19th century, mills no longer needed rivers, and the industry left valleys like Cromford's behind.

Robert Owen made his cotton mills at New Lanark in Scotland a famous showcase of better treatment for workers. In 1802, Parliament approved Britain's first factory law, the Health and Morals of Apprentices Act, sponsored by Sir Robert Peel. In France, Joseph-Marie Jacquard developed a loom run by punched cards, soon adopted widely. On 21 February 1804, the first steam railway locomotive in the world, built by Richard Trevithick, ran out of an ironworks in south Wales. Job losses to new machines drove skilled textile workers into protest, and as Luddites they smashed machinery across England's textile districts.

On 16 August 1819, cavalry with sabres attacked a peaceful reform meeting at St Peter's Field in Manchester, killing at least 11 people and injuring hundreds. The attack is known as the Peterloo Massacre. The government followed Peterloo with the Six Acts, measures that curbed public gatherings and radical publications. Parliament repealed the Combination Acts in 1824, the laws that had outlawed trade unions. In 1825 a steam train carried passengers for the first time, hauled by George Stephenson's Locomotion on the Stockton and Darlington Railway. The Stephensons' Rocket won a contest to pick locomotives for the line, and in September 1830 the Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened. The Reform Act of 1832 widened the vote, though most working men still lacked it.

The 1833 Factory Act kept children under nine out of textile factories. Earlier factory laws had never been enforced; this one appointed inspectors to apply its rules. In 1834 six Dorset farm labourers received seven years' transportation to Australia for attempting to start a trade union. A working-class movement, Chartism, grew after the Reform Act denied working men the vote. Parliament turned down the Chartists' petitions, one bearing over three million signatures, and the movement ran on into the 1840s. Railway building spread quickly across Britain once the Liverpool and Manchester line had opened.

Helped by public outrage, Lord Ashley passed the Mines Act of 1842, banning underground work for women and boys under 10. France's state met part of the cost of new railways, and private companies provided the trains. Samuel Morse's Congress-funded telegraph line opened between Washington and Baltimore on 24 May 1844. Richard Cobden's Anti-Corn Law League pressed Robert Peel into repealing the Corn Laws, restrictions on grain imports, in 1846. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels's Communist Manifesto saw history as class struggle and foretold a working-class victory. The Great Exhibition in London's Crystal Palace showed the newest machines and inventions to more than six million visitors.

Steel became cheap to mass-produce through Henry Bessemer's process, and rails in the United States and Britain soon used it. The Cobden-Chevalier trade treaty of 1860 between Britain and France was copied by many later trade treaties. In 1866 the giant steamship Great Eastern laid the first working telegraph cable across the Atlantic, speeding contact between continents. Japan's Tokugawa shoguns fell to the Meiji Restoration in 1868, which began the changes that modernised the country. On 10 May 1869 the Central Pacific and Union Pacific met at Promontory, Utah, and for the first time a railroad spanned the United States. The Suez Canal in Egypt then linked the Mediterranean with the Red Sea, shortening the route between Europe and Asia.

Late in the 19th century, western Europe and the United States entered a second industrial revolution, a rush of inventions and new technology. Alexander Graham Bell received a telephone patent on 7 March 1876. With a carbon filament, Thomas Edison and his staff produced their first successful electric lamp in October 1879. On 4 September 1882, Edison's company opened the world's first permanent commercial central power station on Pearl Street in New York City. Karl Benz filed a patent application for his motorcar, driven by a gas engine. On 4 May 1886, during a national eight-hour workday campaign, someone hurled a bomb at the police in Chicago's Haymarket Square.

In 1913, Ford Motor Company began building cars on a moving assembly line. The savings let Ford keep dropping the Model T's price, and demand for the car grew. The work's pace and dullness drove many Ford workers to quit. On 5 January 1914, Ford announced five dollars a day for its workers and a workday cut to eight hours. The higher wages let workers buy what they made, cars included, and helped lift many of its workers into the middle class. Historians say the Second Industrial Revolution came to an end c. 1914, just before World War I.