The English countryside was transformed between 1760 and 1830
as the open-field system of cultivation gave way to compact farms
and enclosed fields. The rotation of nitrogen-fixing and cereal
crops obviated the necessity of leaving a third or half the land
fallow each planting. Another feature of the new farming was the
cultivation of turnips and potatoes. Jethro Tull (1674-1741) and
Lord Townshend popularized the importance of root crops. Tull's
most original contributions were the seed drill and horse hoe.
The seed drill allowed a much greater proportion of the seed to
germinate by planting it below the surface of the ground out of
reach of the birds and wind. ''Turnip'' Townshend was famous for
his cultivation of turnips and clover on his estate of Raynham
in Norfolk.
He introduced the four-course rotation of crops:
Robert Bakewell (1725-1795) pioneered in the field of systematic
stock breeding. Prior to this, sheep had been valued for wool
and cattle for strength; Bakewell showed how to breed for food
quality. Bakewell selected his animals, inbred them, kept elaborate
genealogical records, and maintained his stock carefully. He was
especially successful with sheep, and before the century's end
his principle of inbreeding was well established. Under Bakewell's
influence, Coke of Holkham in Norfolk not only improved his own
farms, but every year held ''sheep shearings'' to which farmers
from all over Europe came for instruction and the exchange of
knowledge.
Propaganda for the new agriculture was largely the work of Arthur
Young. In 1793 the Board of Agriculture was established, and Arthur
Young was its secretary. Although a failure as a practical farmer,
he was a great success as a publicist for scientific agriculture.
Even George III ploughed some land at Buckingham Palace and asked
his friends to call him ''Farmer George.''
The technological changes of the eighteenth century did not
appear suddenly. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
the methods of making glass, clocks, and chemicals advanced markedly.
By 1700 in England, and by 1750 in France, the tendency of the
state and the guilds to resist industrialization was weakening.
In fact, popular interest in industrialization resembled the wave
of enthusiasm elicited by experimental agriculture.
By the beginning of the eighteenth century in England, the use
of machines in manufacturing was already widespread. In 1762 Matthew
Boulton built a factory which employed more than six hundred workers,
and installed a steam engine to supplement power from two large
waterwheels which ran a variety of lathes and polishing and grinding
machines. In Staffordshire an industry developed which gave the
world good cheap pottery; chinaware brought in by the East India
Company often furnished a model. Josiah Wedgewood (1730-1795)
was one of those who revolutionized the production and sale of
pottery. From 1700 on, the Staffordshire potters used waterwheels
or windmills to turn machines which ground and mixed their materials.
After 1850 machinery was used extensively in the pottery-making
process. The price of crockery fell, and eating and drinking consequently
became more hygienic.
The textile industry had some special problems. It took four spinners
to keep up with one cotton loom, and ten persons to prepare yarn
for one woolen weaver. Spinners were busy, but weavers often had
to be idle for lack of yarn. In 1733 John Kay, a Lancashire mechanic,
patented his flying shuttle. Weaving could then be done more quickly,
but it still was delayed until yarn was available in more abundance.
In 1771 Richard Arkwright's ''water frame'' was producing yarn.
About the same time, James Hargreaves (d. 1778) patented a spinning
jenny on which one operator could spin many threads simultaneously.
Then in 1779 Samuel Crompton combined the jenny and the water
frame in a machine known as ''Crompton's mule,'' which produced
quantities of fine, strong yarn. The yarn famine had come to an
end.
Between 1780 and 1860 other textile processes were mechanized.
In 1784 a machine was patented which printed patterns on the surface
of cotton or linen by means of rollers. In 1894 Northrup produced
an automatic loom, and when the power loom became efficient, women
replaced men as weavers, although there were still hand weavers
in the paisley shawl trade as late as 1850. By 1812 the cost of
making cotton yarn had dropped nine-tenths, and by 1800 the number
of workers needed to turn wool into yarn had been reduced by four-fifths.
And by 1840 the labor cost of making the best woolen cloth had
fallen by at least half.
The steam engine provided a landmark in the industrial development
of Europe. The first modern steam engine was built by an engineer,
Thomas Newcomen, in 1705 to improve the pumping equipment used
to eliminate seepage in tin and copper mines. Newcomen's idea
was to put a vertical piston and cylinder at the end of a pump
handle. He put steam in the cylinder and then condensed it with
a spray of cold water; the vacuum created allowed atmospheric
pressure to push the piston down. In 1763 James watt, an instrument-maker
for Glasgow University, began to make improvements on Newcomen's
engine. He made it a reciprocating engine, thus changing it from
an atmospheric to a true "steam engine." He also added
a crank and flywheel to provide rotary motion.
In 1774 the industrialist Michael Boulton took Watt into partnership,
and their firm produced nearly five hundred engines before Watt's
patent expired in 1800. Water power continued in use, but the
factory was now liberated from the streamside. A Watt engine drove
Robert Fulton's experimental steam vessel Clermont up the Hudson
in 1807.
It was not until 1873 that a dynamo capable of prolonged operation
was developed, but as early as 1831 Michael Faraday demonstrated
how electricity could be mechanically produced. Through the nineteenth
century the use of electric power was limited by small productive
capacity, short transmission lines, and high cost. Up to 1900
the only cheap electricity was that produced by generators making
use of falling water in the mountains of southeastern France and
northern Italy. Italy, without coal resources, soon had electricity
in every village north of Rome. Electric current ran Italian textile
looms and, eventually, automobile factories. As early as 1890
Florence boasted the world's first electric streetcar.
The electrification of Europe proceeded apace in the twentieth
century. Russia harnessed the Dneiper River and the Irish Free
State built power plants on the River Shannon. Germany was supplied
with electricity in the 1920's, and by 1936 Great Britain had
built an ''electric grid'' completely covering the country. Electricity
was a major factor in the phenomenally rapid industrialization
of Russia in the 1930's.
The coming of the railroads greatly facilitated the industrialization
of Europe. At mid.eighteenth century the plate or rail track had
been in common use for moving coal from the pithead to the colliery
or furnace. After 1800 flat tracks were in use outside London,
Sheffield, and Munich. With the expansion of commerce, facilities
for the movement of goods from the factory to the ports or cities
came into pressing demand. In 1801 Richard Trevithick had an engine
pulling trucks around the mine where he worked in Cornwall. By
1830 a railway was opened from Liverpool to Manchester; and on
this line George Stephenson's ''Rocket'' pulled a train of cars
at fourteen miles an hour.
The big railway boom in Britain came in the years 1844 to 1847.
The railway builders had to fight vested interests-for example,
canal stockholders, turnpike trusts, and horse breeders-but by
1850, aided by cheap iron and better machine tools, a network
of railways had been built. By midcentury railroad trains travelling
at thirty to fifty miles an hour were not uncommon, and freight
steadily became more important than passengers. After 1850 in
England the state had to intervene to regulate what amounted to
a monopoly of inland transport. But as time went on the British
railways developed problems. The First World War (1914-1918) found
them suffering from overcapitalization, rising costs, and state
regulation.
British success with steam locomotion, however, was enough to
encourage the building of railroads in most European countries,
often with British capital, equipment, and technicians. Railroads
became a standard item of British export. After 1842 France began
a railroad system which combined private and public enterprise.
The government provided the roadbed and then leased it to a private
company which provided the equipment. In Russia, Canada, and the
United States, railways served to link communities separated by
vast distances. In Germany there were no vast empty spaces, but
railroads did help to affect political and economic integration.
The internal combustion engine was developed in Europe before
1900, but in the American automobile it came into its own. By
mid-twentieth century, middle-class and working-class people owned
automobiles in Europe as well as in the United States, and the
motorcar began to transform social patterns. It has been said
with some truth that Americans in the twentieth century carried
on a love affair with their automobiles; certainly motorcars were
marketed as sex and status symbols. But at the same time, the
growth of the automobile industry created large fields for investment,
produced new types of service occupations, and revolutionized
road-making. This was true in western Europe as well as in America
after the Second World War.
The First World War saw the beginning of commercial aviation.
Germany's geographical position and the ban on military aircraft
imposed by the peace treaty led to the development of civilian
airlines. By 1929 commercial planes were flying out of the European
capitals to all important places on the globe. And the day was
not far off when airplanes were to eclipse railroad trains as
commercial passenger carriers.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century the steam-driven
ship appeared on the horizon. From 1770 onward various men had
experimented with engines in boats in England, Scotland, and the
United States. When Robert Fulton's Clermont travelled up the
Hudson to Albany, tradition has it, people on the bank seeing
the sparks from the smokestack thought the Devil had gone by on
a raft. In 1811 Bell built the Comet and ran it for eight years
between Glasgow and a port twenty-five miles distant. Two basic
economic problems in connection with steam vessels soon came to
light. First, the self-propelled ship was more expensive to build
and operate than sailing vessels; and second, its boiler and machinery
were so bulky that there was little room left for passengers.
The technical problems were solved shortly, but the economic aspects
took more time. Yet the steamship had some undeniable advantages:
lt could not be becalmed, it was not helpless in a storm, and
it could arrive and depart under its own power. By the 1840's
the North Atlantic was crossed regularly by steamship.
In 1839 Sir Samuel Cunard secured from the British government
a contract to carry mails between Liverpool, Halifax, and Boston.
The run was a great success, and soon Cunard was operating a regular
schedule. The tremendous growth of steamship traffic in the last
half of the nineteenth century was accompanied by significant
improvements in hull design, engines, and fuel. By 1839 the propellor
had replaced the paddle wheel, steel replaced iron in the hull,
and multi-cylinder engines became available. After 1920 the diesel
engine, much smaller and lighter than a steam unit of equal power,
marked another major changeover.
A penny post on all letters was inaugurated in Britain in 1840
after it was discovered that handling, not the distance sent,
was the critical cost in delivering mall. All letters weighing
a half-ounce or less could be carried for an English penny (two
cents). By 1875 the Universal Postal Union had been established
to facilitate the transmission of mail between foreign countries.
In 1871 telegraph cables reached from London to Australia; massages
could be flashed halfway around the globe in a matter of minutes,
speeding commercial transactions.
Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 transmitted the human voice over
a wire, although it was several decades before the telephone became
popular. At the end of the century the wireless telegraph became
a standard safety device on oceangoing vessels. Radio did not
come until 1920; then it was commercially exploited in America
to a much greater extent than in Europe. In Europe the broadcasting
systems were either operated or closely controlled by the state
and did not carry commercial advertising. The world continued
to shrink at a great rate as new means of transport and communication
speeded the pace of life.
The Industrial Revolution brought with it an increase in population
and urbanization, as well as new social classes. The increase
in population was nothing short of dramatic. England and Germany
showed a growth rate of something more than one percent annually;
at this rate the population would double in about seventy years.
In the United States the increase was more than three percent,
which might have been disastrous had it not been for a practically
empty continent and fabulous natural resources. Only the population
of France tended to remain static after the eighteenth century.
The general population increase was aided by a greater supply
of food made available by the Agricultural Revolution, and by
the growth of medical science and public health measures which
decreased the death rate and added to the population base.
Until the Industrial Revolution, most of the world's population
was rural. However, by mid-nineteenth century, half of the English
people lived in cities, and by the end of the century, the same
was true of other European countries. Between 1800 and 1950 most
large European cities exhibited spectacular growth. At the beginning
of the nineteenth century there were scarcely two dozen cities
in Europe with a population of 100,000, but by 1900 there were
more than 150 cities of this size. The rise of great cities can
be accounted for in various ways:
First, industrialization called for the concentration of a work
force; and indeed, the factories themselves were often located
where coal or some other essential material was available, as
the Ruhr in Germany and Lille in northern France.
Second, the necessity for marketing finished goods created great
urban centers where there was access to water or railways. Such
was the case with Liverpool, Hamburg, Marseilles, and New York.
And third, there was a natural tendency for established political
centers such as London, Paris, and Berlin to become centers fort
he banking and marketing functions of the new industrialism.
Rapid growth of the cities was not an unmixed blessing. The factory
towns of England tended to become rookeries of jerry-built tenements,
while the mining towns became long monotonous rows of company-built
cottages, furnishing minimal shelter and little more. The bad
living conditions in the towns can be traced to lack of good brick,
the absence of building codes, and the lack of machinery for public
sanitation. But, it must be added, they were also due to the factory
owners' tendency to regard laborers as commodities and not as
a group of human beings.
In addition to a new factory-owning bourgeoisie, the Industrial
Revolution created a new working class. The new class of industrial
workers included all the men, women, and children laboring in
the textile mills, pottery works, and mines. Often skilled artisans
found themselves degraded to routine process laborers as machines
began to mass produce the products formerly made by hand. Generally
speaking, wages were low, hours were long, and working conditions
unpleasant and dangerous. The industrial workers had helped to
pass the Reform Bill of 1832, but they had not been enfranchised
by it.