Great Britain's Industrial Revolution

A conventional date for the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in Britain is about 1770. This date corresponds fairly well to the substantive beginning of several developments that, taken together, seem to mark the difference in character between the industrial age and the pre-industrial world.

James Watt's steam engine made possible the application of artificially generated power to a wide range of processes, unlike its far more limited predecessor the Newcomen engine. The technique of mass production began to be pursued in a systematic and regular way, enough so for Adam Smith to employ his famous example of a pin-making factory as a contrast to traditional craft production. The publication of The Wealth of Nations itself both promulgated and marked a changing conception of what wealth was and how it was created; while Smith's economic theory might not be a necessary condition for industrialism, it clearly lent itself to industrial development. Most broadly, 1770 was roughly the time that "dark Satanic mills" began to proliferate across the British landscape, beginning the shift from a primarily rural agrarian society to an urban and industrial one. If, however, 1770 is adopted as a reasonable beginning of the Industrial Revolution, it would appear that transportation lagged far behind extraction industries such as coal mining or production industries such as textiles. The British transportation world of 1770 presents to our eyes a decidedly pre-industrial ap

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where the natural river system, even with improvements, was being more or less fully utilized. At this point, the natural next step was for river transport to jump its banks, so to speak, by the construction of canals either to reach new areas, connect river routes, or both. This is just what took place, and the first great wave of canal construction was launched. Moreover, the technical support base of skills and experience soon reached a point at which canal builders could and did undertake remarkable engineering feats, typified by the Barton Aqueduct, built in 1761 to carry the Bridgewater canal 38 feet above the Irwell, and the Chesterfield canel, with a tunnel a mile and a half long, built in 1788-92. In a purely technical sense, the canal construction of the late 18th century was the school of railway civil engineering. The requirements were similar. Both involved extensive earth-moving and careful surveying and preparation; while a canal could make much smaller-radius turns than a railway it was even more sensitive to gradients. The similarity between canal construction and railway construction has in fact left a lasting mark in the language; the workers who build and maintain railway permanent ways are still

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