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The Industrial Revolution and the Railroads

in northern Europe. One of the most famous alliances was called the Hanseatic League, comprising Cologne, Hamburg, Bremen, Hamburg, Munster, Lubeck, and Kiel, and navigated northern Europe's large rivers southward and Baltic trade northward (Cipolla, 1994, pp. 14-15; 163; Cameron, p. 63).

The kernel of significance for the present research is the development and refinement of transportation as the key to successful and spreading commerce. Commerce fed and was fed by the technological advancements of the Industrial Revolution, and "industrial-strength" transportation was the enabling feature of that dynamic. Mechanized and technological achievements of the Industrial Revolution could not have resonated as they did without a transportation infrastructure that was equally mechanized.

The Industrial Revolution has been dated anywhere from 1700 to 1760 in England. In 1708 one Abraham Darby, a Quaker who had apprenticed in metalworking, developed a method of using coke rather than charcoal for smelting iron ore for manufacture of iron products. Independently, in 1712 in another part of England, Thomas Newcomen, a religious dissenter, had developed a steam engine. By 1768, James Watt had refined steam-engine technology further, and by 1776 steam power was increasingly being used in a variety of industries to turn wheels and gears of numerous stationary engines. Throughout those decades, the principal industrial focus was on iron, coal, smelting, and textile production, as well as exports of coal and iron (Burke, 1978; Vialls, 1982). In America, the Industrial Revolution developed along a somewhat different line. For one thing, it occurred later. The Revolutionary War, the fits and starts of the postwar U.S. political and economic infrastructure, economic war with Britain, and the War of 1812 all contributed to the delay. Even so, its earliest manifestations are conventionally associated with two inventions by Eli Whitney, the cotton gin...

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The Industrial Revolution and the Railroads. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 03:23, March 19, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1689233.html