Innovations in the period of industrial revolution

In the beginning, the Industrial Revolution was closely related to a small number of innovations, made in the second half of the 18th century: Textiles: The progression of the textile industry was major development in Britain’s industrialization.

Cotton spinning started by using Richard Arkwright’s water frame. This was patented in 1769 and so came out of patent in 1783. The end of the patent was rapidly followed by the creation of many cotton mills. Similar technology was afterward applied to spinning worsted yarn for various textiles and flax for linen.

Inventions in the Textile Industry:
1733 – Flying shuttle invented by John Kay – an improvement to looms that enabled weavers to weave faster.
1742 – Cotton mills were first opened in England.
1764 – Spinning jenny invented by James Hargreaves – the first machine to improve upon the spinning wheel.
1764 – Water frame invented by Richard Arkwright – the first powered textile machine.
1769 – Arkwright patented the water frame.
1770 – Hargreaves patented the Spinning Jenny.
1773 – The first all-cotton textiles were produced in factories.
1779 – Crompton invented the spinning mule that allowed for greater control over the weaving process.
1785 – Cartwright patented the power loom. It was improved upon by William Horrocks, known for his invention of the variable speed batton in 1813.
1787 – Cotton goods production had increased 10 fold since 1770.
1789 – Samuel Slater brought textile machinery design to the US.
1790 – Arkwright built the first steam powered textile factory in Nottingham, England.
1792 – Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin – a machine that automated the separation of cottonseed from the short-staple cotton fibre.
1804 – Joseph Marie Jacquard invented the Jacquard Loom that weaved complex designs. Jacquard invented a way of automatically controlling the warp and weft threads on a silk loom by recording patterns of holes in a string of cards.
1813 – William Horrocks invented the variable speed batton (for an improved power loom).
1856 – William Perkin invented the first synthetic dye (Bellis).

Steam power: The enhanced steam engine developed by James Watt which was mainly used for pumping out mines, but from the 1780s, it was applied to power machines. This permitted rapid development of efficient semi-automated factories on an earlier unimaginable scale in places where waterpower was not available.

Iron founding: In the Iron industry, coke was finally applied to all stages of iron smelting, replacing charcoal. This had been attained much earlier for lead and copper as well as for producing pig iron in a blast furnace, but the second stage in the production of bar iron depended on the use of potting and stamping.

These signify three major sectors in which innovations were recognized and which allowed the economic launch by which the Industrial Revolution is usually demarcated.

Later inventions such as the power loom and Richard Trevithick’s high pressure steam engine were also become important in the development of industrialisation in Britain.

Transfer of knowledge:

There were various means to transfer knowledge of new innovation. Employees who were trained in the technique might move to another employer or might be stolen. A common method was for someone to make a study tour, gathering information where he could. During the Industrial Revolution and for the century before, all European countries and America involved in study-touring; some nations, like Sweden and France, even trained civil servants or technicians to assume it as a matter of state policy. In other countries, particularly Britain and America, this practice was done by individual manufacturers anxious to improve their own methods. Study tours were common then, as now, as was the keeping of travel records. Records made by industrialists and technicians of the period are an unparalleled source of information about their methods.

Another way to the transmit innovation was by the network of informal philosophical societies, like the Lunar Society of Birmingham, in which members met to discuss ‘natural philosophy’ and often its application to manufacturing.

The Lunar Society succeeded from 1765 to 1809, and it has been said of them, “They were, if you like, the revolutionary committee of that most far reaching of all the eighteenth century revolutions, the Industrial Revolution”.

Technological developments in Britain:

In Britain, there were huge technical progression in every field due to industrial revolution. Textile manufacture: In the beginning of 18th century, British textile manufacture was based on wool which was processed by individual artisans.

They performed spinning and weaving task at their own premises. This system is called a cottage industry. Flax and cotton were also used for fine materials, but the processing was problematic because of the pre-processing needed, and thus small quantity of goods in these materials were produced.

Use of the spinning wheel and hand loom limited the manufacture capacity of the industry, but incremental advances increased efficiency to the extent that manufactured cotton goods became the dominant British export by the early decades of the 19th century. India was displaced as the leading supplier of cotton merchandises.

Metallurgy:
In the period of industrial revolution, the major change in the metal industries was the replacement of organic fuels based on wood with fossil fuel based on coal.

Much of this occurred before the Industrial Revolution, based on innovations by Sir Clement Clerke and others from 1678, using coal reverberator furnaces known as cupolas.

These were operated by the flames, which contained carbon monoxide, playing on the ore and reducing the oxide to metal. This has the benefit that impurities (such as sulphur) in the coal do not migrate into the metal. This technology was useful to lead from 1678 and to copper from 1687.

It was also applied to iron foundry work in the 1690s, but in this case the reverberatory furnace was known as an air furnace. The foundry cupola is a different invention.

Other innovation was done by Abraham Darby, who made great strides using coke to fuel his blast furnaces at Coalbrookdale in 1709.

Nevertheless, the coke pig iron he made was used mostly for the production of cast iron goods such as pots and kettles. He had the advantage over his competitors in that his pots, cast by his patented process, were thinner and cheaper than theirs.

Till that time, British iron industrialists had used considerable amounts of imported iron to supplement native supplies. This came principally from Sweden from the mid 17th century and later also from Russia from the end of the 1720s.

However, from 1785, imports reduced because of the new iron making technology, and Britain became an exporter of bar iron as well as manufactured wrought iron consumer goods.

Since iron was becoming cheaper and more abundant, it also became a major structural material following the building of the innovative Iron Bridge in 1778 by Abraham Darby III.

Upgrading was made in the production of steel, which was luxurious commodity and used only where iron would not do, such as for the cutting edge of tools and for springs. Benjamin Huntsman developed his crucible steel technique in the 1740s. The raw material for this was blister steel, made by the cementation process.

The supply of cheaper iron and steel aided the development of boilers and steam engines, and eventually railways. Developments in machine tools permitted better working of iron and steel and further enhanced the industrial progression of Britain.

Mining:

Coal mining in Britain, especially in South Wales began early. Before the steam engine, pits were often narrow bell pits following a seam of coal along the surface which were abandoned as the coal was extracted. Shaft mining was done in some areas, but the limiting factor was the problem of removing water.

These were developments that had begun before the Industrial Revolution, but the acceptance of James Watt’s more efficient steam engine from the 1770s reduced the fuel costs of engines, making mines more lucrative.

Steam power:

In the beginning of industrial revolution, there was development of the stationary steam engine however, for most of the period of the Industrial Revolution, the majority of industries still depend on wind and water power as well as horse and man-power for driving small machines.

The industrial use of steam power began with Thomas Savery in 1698. He created and patented in London the first engine, which he called the “Miner’s Friend” since he intended it to pump water from mines.

The first successful machine was the atmospheric engine, a low performance steam engine developed by Thomas Newcomen in 1712. Newcomen actually conceived his machine quite independently of Savery.

Despite using a lot of fuel, Newcomen engines continued to be used in the coalfields until the early period of the nineteenth century because they were trustworthy and easy to maintain.

Around 1800, the most common pattern of steam engine was the beam engine, which was built within a stone or brick engine-house, but during that time various patterns of portable (readily removable engines, but not on wheels) engines were invented such as the table engine.

In the beginning of 19th century after the expiration of Watt’s patent, the steam engine had many enhancements by a host of inventors and engineers.

Chemicals:

During the Industrial Revolution, huge number of chemicals were produced. The first of these was the production of sulphuric acid by the lead chamber process developed by the Englishman John Roebuck (James Watt’s first partner) in 1746. He was able to greatly increase the scale of the manufacture by substituting the relatively expensive glass vessels formerly used with larger, less expensive chambers made of riveted sheets of lead.

The production of an alkali on a large scale became an important goal as well, and Nicolas Leblanc succeeded in 1791 to introduce a method for the production of sodium carbonate. These two chemicals were very important because they enabled the introduction of a host of other inventions, replacing many small-scale operations with more lucrative and controllable processes. Sodium carbonate had many uses in the glass, textile, soap, and paper industries. Early uses for sulphuric acid included pickling (removing rust) iron and steel, and for bleaching cloth.

Scottish chemist Charles Tennant developed the chemical component bleaching powder (calcium hypochlorite) in about 1800, based on the discoveries of French chemist Claude Louis Berthollet which revolutionised the bleaching processes in the textile industry by radically reducing the time required (from months to days) for the traditional process then in use, which required repeated exposure to the sun in bleach fields after soaking the textiles with alkali or sour milk.

In 1824 Joseph Aspdin, patented a chemical process for making portland cement which was an important development in the building trades.

Machine tools:

In the era of the Industrial Revolution, several machine tools were developed. They have their origins in the tools developed in the 18th century by makers of clocks and watches and scientific instrument makers to assist them to batch-produce small mechanisms.

Machine tools changed manufacturing process in Birmingham, England, in 1830. The invention of a new machine by William Joseph Gillott, William Mitchell and James Stephen Perry permitted mass manufacture of vigorous, inexpensive steel pen nibs.

The process had been laborious and expensive. Due to difficulty in manipulating metal and the lack of machine tools, the use of metal was kept to a minimum. Wood framing had the drawback of changing dimensions with temperature and humidity, and the various joints tended to rack (work loose) over time. As the Industrial Revolution advanced, machines with metal frames became more common, but they required machine tools to make them economically.

Before the initiation of machine tools, metal was worked manually using the basic hand tools of hammers, files, scrapers, saws and chisels. Besides workshop lathes used by craftsmen, the first big machine tool was the cylinder boring machine used for boring the large-diameter cylinders on early steam engines.

The planing machine, the slotting machine and the shaping machine were developed in the early period of the 19th century. Although the milling machine was developed at this time, it was not developed as an important workshop tool until during the Second Industrial Revolution.

Gas lighting:

In the later period of industrial revolution, another major industry was gas lighting. Though others made a similar invention elsewhere, the large scale introduction of this was the work of William Murdoch, an employee of Boulton and Watt, the Birmingham steam engine pioneers.

Gas-lighting had immense impact on social and industrial organisation because it permitted factories and stores to remain open longer than with tallow candles or oil.

Transport in Britain:

In the start of the Industrial Revolution, inland transport was by navigable rivers and roads, with coastal vessels employed to move heavy goods by sea. Railways or wagon ways were used for carrying coal to rivers for further shipment, but canals had not yet been built.

Animals supplied all of the motive power on land, with sails providing the motive power on the sea. The Industrial Revolution enhanced transport infrastructure of Britain with a turnpike road network, a canal, and waterway network, and a railway network. Raw materials and finished products could be transported more rapidly and inexpensively than earlier period.

Coastal sail:

Coastal sail were improved during industrial revolution period. Sailing vessels had been used for moving goods round the British coast since long time. The trade transporting coal to London from Newcastle had begun in mediaeval times. The major international seaports such as London, Bristol, and Liverpool, were the means by which raw materials such as cotton might be imported and finished goods exported. Transporting goods onwards within Britain by sea was common during the whole of the Industrial Revolution and become down with the development of the railways at the end of the period.

Navigable rivers:

In the period of the Industrial Revolution, all the major rivers of the United Kingdom were navigable. Some were anciently navigable, particularly the Severn, Thames, and Trent. Some were enhanced, or had navigation extended upstream. River, The Severn mainly used for the transportation of goods to the Midlands which had been imported into Bristol from abroad, and for the export of goods from centres of production in Shropshire and the Black Country.

Canals:

Another development in Britain during industrial revolution era was construction of canals. Canals began to be built in the late eighteenth century to connect the major manufacturing centres in the Midlands and north with seaports and with London, at that time itself the largest manufacturing centre in the country. Canals were the first technology to allow bulk materials to be easily transported across nation. By the 1820s, a national network was in existence. Canal construction served as a model for the organisation and methods later used to build the railways.

Roads:

The original British road system was poorly maintained well by thousands of local communities, but from the 1720s, turnpike trusts were established to charge tolls and maintain some roads. Increasing numbers of main roads were turnpiked from the 1750s to the extent that almost every main road in England and Wales was the responsibility of some turnpike trust.

New planned roads were constructed by John Metcalf, Thomas Telford and John Macadam. The major turnpikes radiated from London and were the means by which the Royal Mail was able to reach the rest of the country. Heavy goods transport on these roads was by means of slow broad wheeled carts dragged by teams of horses. Lighter goods were transported by smaller carts or by teams of pack horses.

Railways:

Wagon ways to transport coal in the mining areas had begun in the 17th century and were often related with canal or river systems for the further movement of coal. These were all horse drawn or relied on gravity, with a stationary steam engine to drag the wagons back to the top of the incline.

The first applications of the steam locomotive were on wagon or plate ways. Horse-drawn public railways did not begin until the beginning of the 19th century.