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When / How:

Began in Britain, powered by steam engines and water.

Key Technologies:

Steam engine, mechanized textile production, railroads.

Employment Changes:

Shift from agriculture → factory work.

Urbanization, rise of the factory system.

Heavy use of child and female labor, harsh working conditions.

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A Roberts loom in a weaving shed in Great Britain in 1835

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When / How:

Age of electricity, mass production, and global trade.

Key Technologies:

Electricity, steel, telephone, telegraph, assembly line (Fordism).

Employment Changes:

Expansion of manufacturing jobs, more urban growth.

Rise of the working class, labor unions, and labor protections.

Work became more repetitive, but wages and living standards slowly improved.

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A telegraph key used to transmit text messages in Morse code

The ocean liner SS Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, a steamboat. As the main means of trans-oceanic travel for more than a century, ocean liners were essential to the transport needs of national governments, commercial enterprises and the general public.

The Second Industrial Revolution, also known as the Technological Revolution, was a phase of rapid scientific discovery, standardisation, mass production and industrialisation from the late 19th century into the early 20th century. The First Industrial Revolution, which ended in the middle of the 19th century, was punctuated by a slowdown in important inventions before the Second Industrial Revolution in 1870. Though a number of its events can be traced to earlier innovations in manufacturing, such as the establishment of a machine tool industry, the development of methods for manufacturing interchangeable parts, as well as the invention of the Bessemer process and Open hearth furnace to produce steel, the Second Industrial Revolution is generally dated between 1870 and 1914 (the beginning of World War I).

Advancements in manufacturing and production technology enabled the widespread adoption of technological systems such as telegraph and railroad networks, gas and water supply, and sewage systems, which had earlier been limited to a few select cities. The enormous expansion of rail and telegraph lines after 1870 allowed unprecedented movement of people and ideas, which culminated in a new wave of globalization. In the same time period, new technological systems were introduced, most significantly electrical power and telephones. The Second Industrial Revolution continued into the 20th century with early factory electrification and the production line; it ended at the beginning of World War I.

The Second Industrial Revolution is followed by the Third Industrial Revolution starting in 1947.

The Second Industrial Revolution was a period of rapid industrial development, primarily in the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States, but also in France, the Low Countries, Italy and Japan. It followed on from the First Industrial Revolution that began in Britain in the late 18th century that then spread throughout Western Europe. It came to an end with the start of the First World War. While the First Revolution was driven by limited use of steam engines, interchangeable parts and mass production, and was largely water-powered (especially in the United States), the Second was characterized by the build-out of railroads, large-scale iron and steel production, widespread use of machinery in manufacturing, greatly increased use of steam power, widespread use of the telegraph, use of petroleum and the beginning of electrification. It also was the period during which modern organizational methods for operating large-scale businesses over vast areas came into use.

The concept was introduced by Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution (1910), and was being used by economists such as Erich Zimmermann (1951), but David Landes' use of the term in a 1966 essay and in The Unbound Prometheus (1972) standardized scholarly definitions of the term, which was most intensely promoted by Alfred Chandler (1918-2007). However, some continue to express reservations about its use.

Landes (2003) stresses the importance of new technologies, especially, the internal combustion engine, petroleum, new materials and substances, including alloys and chemicals, electricity and communication technologies (such as the telegraph, telephone and radio).[citation needed ]

A synergy between iron and steel, railroads and coal developed at the beginning of the Second Industrial Revolution. Railroads allowed cheap transportation of materials and products, which in turn led to cheap rails to build more roads. Railroads also benefited from cheap coal for their steam locomotives. This synergy led to the laying of 75,000 miles of track in the U.S. in the 1880s, the largest amount anywhere in world history.

The hot blast technique, in which the hot flue gas from a blast furnace is used to preheat combustion air blown into a blast furnace, was invented and patented by James Beaumont Neilson in 1828 at Wilsontown Ironworks in Scotland. Hot blast was the single most important advance in fuel efficiency of the blast furnace as it greatly reduced the fuel consumption for making pig iron, and was one of the most important technologies developed during the Industrial Revolution. Falling costs for producing wrought iron coincided with the emergence of the railway in the 1830s.

With the greatly reduced cost of producing pig iron with coke using hot blast, demand grew dramatically and so did the size of blast furnaces.

A diagram of the Bessemer converter. Air blown through holes in the converter bottom creates a violent reaction in the molten pig iron that oxidizes the excess carbon, converting the pig iron to pure iron or steel, depending on the residual carbon.

The Bessemer process, invented by Sir Henry Bessemer, allowed the mass-production of steel, increasing the scale and speed of production of this vital material, and decreasing the labor requirements. The key principle was the removal of excess carbon and other impurities from pig iron by oxidation with air blown through the molten iron. The oxidation also raises the temperature of the iron mass and keeps it molten.

The "acid" Bessemer process had a serious limitation in that it required relatively scarce hematite ore which is low in phosphorus. Sidney Gilchrist Thomas developed a more sophisticated process to eliminate the phosphorus from iron. Collaborating with his cousin, Percy Gilchrist a chemist at the Blaenavon Ironworks, Wales, he patented his process in 1878; Bolckow Vaughan & Co. in Yorkshire was the first company to use his patented process. His process was especially valuable on the continent of Europe, where the proportion of phosphoric iron was much greater than in England, and both in Belgium and in Germany the name of the inventor became more widely known than in his own country. In America, although non-phosphoric iron largely predominated, an immense interest was taken in the invention.

The Barrow Hematite Steel Company operated 18 Bessemer converters and owned the largest steelworks in the world at the turn of the 20th century.

The next great advance in steel making was the Siemens-Martin process. Sir Charles William Siemens developed his regenerative furnace in the 1850s, for which he claimed in 1857 to able to recover enough heat to save 70-80% of the fuel. The furnace operated at a high temperature by using regenerative preheating of fuel and air for combustion. Through this method, an open-hearth furnace can reach temperatures high enough to melt steel, but Siemens did not initially use it in that manner.

French engineer Pierre-Émile Martin was the first to take out a license for the Siemens furnace and apply it to the production of steel in 1865. The Siemens-Martin process complemented rather than replaced the Bessemer process. Its main advantages were that it did not expose the steel to excessive nitrogen (which would cause the steel to become brittle), it was easier to control, and that it permitted the melting and refining of large amounts of scrap steel, lowering steel production costs and recycling an otherwise troublesome waste material. It became the leading steel making process by the early 20th century.

The availability of cheap steel allowed building larger bridges, railroads, skyscrapers, and ships. Other important steel products-also made using the open hearth process-were steel cable, steel rod and sheet steel which enabled large, high-pressure boilers and high-tensile strength steel for machinery which enabled much more powerful engines, gears and axles than were previously possible. With large amounts of steel it became possible to build much more powerful guns and carriages, tanks, armored fighting vehicles and naval ships.

A rail rolling mill in Donetsk, 1887

The increase in steel production from the 1860s meant that railways could finally be made from steel at a competitive cost. Being a much more durable material, steel steadily replaced iron as the standard for railway rail, and due to its greater strength, longer lengths of rails could now be rolled. Wrought iron was soft and contained flaws caused by included dross. Iron rails could also not support heavy locomotives and were damaged by hammer blow. The first to make durable rails of steel rather than wrought iron was Robert Forester Mushet at the Darkhill Ironworks, Gloucestershire in 1857.

Steel rails lasted over ten times longer than did iron, and with the falling cost of steel, heavier weight rails were used. This allowed the use of more powerful locomotives, which could pull longer trains, and longer rail cars, all of which greatly increased the productivity of railroads. Rail became the dominant form of transport infrastructure throughout the industrialized world, producing a steady decrease in the cost of shipping seen for the rest of the century.

The theoretical and practical basis for the harnessing of electric power was laid by the scientist and experimentalist Michael Faraday. Through his research on the magnetic field around a conductor carrying a direct current, Faraday established the basis for the concept of the electromagnetic field in physics. His inventions of electromagnetic rotary devices were the foundation of the practical use of electricity in technology.

In 1881, Sir Joseph Swan, inventor of the first feasible incandescent light bulb, supplied about 1,200 Swan incandescent lamps to the Savoy Theatre in the City of Westminster, London, which was the first theatre, and the first public building in the world, to be lit entirely by electricity. Swan's lightbulb had already been used in 1879 to light Mosley Street, in Newcastle upon Tyne, the first electrical street lighting installation in the world. This set the stage for the electrification of industry and the home. The first large scale central distribution supply plant was opened at Holborn Viaduct in London in 1882 and later at Pearl Street Station in New York City.

Three-phase rotating magnetic field of an AC motor. The three poles are each connected to a separate wire. Each wire carries current 120 degrees apart in phase. Arrows show the resulting magnetic force vectors. Three phase current is used in commerce and industry.

The first modern power station in the world was built by the English electrical engineer Sebastian de Ferranti at Deptford. Built on an unprecedented scale and pioneering the use of high voltage (10,000V) alternating current, it generated 800 kilowatts and supplied central London. On its completion in 1891 it supplied high-voltage AC power that was then "stepped down" with transformers for consumer use on each street. Electrification allowed the final major developments in manufacturing methods of the Second Industrial Revolution, namely the assembly line and mass production.

Electrification was called "the most important engineering achievement of the 20th century" by the National Academy of Engineering. Electric lighting in factories greatly improved working conditions, eliminating the heat and pollution caused by gas lighting, and reducing the fire hazard to the extent that the cost of electricity for lighting was often offset by the reduction in fire insurance premiums. Frank J. Sprague developed the first successful DC motor in 1886. By 1889 110 electric street railways were either using his equipment or in planning. The electric street railway became a major infrastructure before 1920. The AC motor ( Induction motor) was developed in the 1890s and soon began to be used in the electrification of industry. Household electrification did not become common until the 1920s, and then only in cities. Fluorescent lighting was commercially introduced at the 1939 World's Fair.

The use of machine tools began with the onset of the First Industrial Revolution. The increase in mechanization required more metal parts, which were usually made of cast iron or wrought iron-and hand working lacked precision and was a slow and expensive process. One of the first machine tools was John Wilkinson's boring machine, that bored a precise hole in James Watt's first steam engine in 1774. Advances in the accuracy of machine tools can be traced to Henry Maudslay and refined by Joseph Whitworth. Standardization of screw threads began with Henry Maudslay around 1800, when the modern screw-cutting lathe made interchangeable V-thread machine screws a practical commodity.

The importance of machine tools to mass production is shown by the fact that production of the Ford Model T used 32,000 machine tools, most of which were powered by electricity. Henry Ford is quoted as saying that mass production would not have been possible without electricity because it allowed placement of machine tools and other equipment in the order of the work flow.

The first paper making machine was the Fourdrinier machine, built by Sealy and Henry Fourdrinier, stationers in London. In 1800, Matthias Koops, working in London, investigated the idea of using wood to make paper, and began his printing business a year later. However, his enterprise was unsuccessful due to the prohibitive cost at the time.

It was in the 1840s, that Charles Fenerty in Nova Scotia and Friedrich Gottlob Keller in Saxony both invented a successful machine which extracted the fibres from wood (as with rags) and from it, made paper. This started a new era for paper making, and, together with the invention of the fountain pen and the mass-produced pencil of the same period, and in conjunction with the advent of the steam driven rotary printing press, wood based paper caused a major transformation of the 19th century economy and society in industrialized countries. With the introduction of cheaper paper, schoolbooks, fiction, non-fiction, and newspapers became gradually available by 1900. Cheap wood based paper also allowed keeping personal diaries or writing letters and so, by 1850, the clerk, or writer, ceased to be a high-status job. By the 1880s chemical processes for paper manufacture were in use, becoming dominant by 1900.

The petroleum industry, both production and refining, began in 1848 with the first oil works in Scotland. The chemist James Young set up a tiny business refining the crude oil in 1848. Young found that by slow distillation he could obtain a number of useful liquids from it, one of which he named "paraffine oil" because at low temperatures it congealed into a substance resembling paraffin wax. In 1850 Young built the first truly commercial oil-works and oil refinery in the world at Bathgate, using oil extracted from locally mined torbanite, shale, and bituminous coal to manufacture naphtha and lubricating oils; paraffin for fuel use and solid paraffin were not sold till 1856.

Although there were many efforts in the mid-19th century to drill for oil, Edwin Drake's 1859 well near Titusville, Pennsylvania, is considered the first "modern oil well". Drake's well touched off a major boom in oil production in the United States. Drake learned of cable tool drilling from Chinese laborers in the U. S. The first primary product was kerosene for lamps and heaters. Similar developments around Baku fed the European market.

Kerosene lighting was much more efficient and less expensive than vegetable oils, tallow and whale oil. Although town gas lighting was available in some cities, kerosene produced a brighter light until the invention of the gas mantle. Both were replaced by electricity for street lighting following the 1890s and for households during the 1920s. Gasoline was an unwanted byproduct of oil refining until automobiles were mass-produced after 1914, and gasoline shortages appeared during World War I. The invention of the Burton process for thermal cracking doubled the yield of gasoline, which helped alleviate the shortages.

The BASF-chemical factories in Ludwigshafen, Germany, 1881

Synthetic dye was discovered by English chemist William Henry Perkin in 1856. At the time, chemistry was still in a quite primitive state; it was still a difficult proposition to determine the arrangement of the elements in compounds and chemical industry was still in its infancy. Perkin's accidental discovery was that aniline could be partly transformed into a crude mixture which when extracted with alcohol produced a substance with an intense purple colour. He scaled up production of the new " mauveine", and commercialized it as the world's first synthetic dye.

After the discovery of mauveine, many new aniline dyes appeared (some discovered by Perkin himself), and factories producing them were constructed across Europe. Towards the end of the century, Perkin and other British companies found their research and development efforts increasingly eclipsed by the German chemical industry which became world dominant by 1914.

HMS Devastation, built in 1871, as it appeared in 1896

Propellers of the RMS Olympic, 1911

This era saw the birth of the modern ship as disparate technological advances came together.

The screw propeller was introduced in 1835 by Francis Pettit Smith who discovered a new way of building propellers by accident. Up to that time, propellers were literally screws, of considerable length. But during the testing of a boat propelled by one, the screw snapped off, leaving a fragment shaped much like a modern boat propeller. The boat moved faster with the broken propeller. The superiority of screw against paddles was taken up by navies. Trials with Smith's SS Archimedes, the first steam driven screw, led to the famous tug-of-war competition in 1845 between the screw-driven HMS Rattler and the paddle steamer HMS Alecto; the former pulling the latter backward at 2.5 knots (4.6 km/h).

The first seagoing iron steamboat was built by Horseley Ironworks and named the Aaron Manby. It also used an innovative oscillating engine for power. The boat was built at Tipton using temporary bolts, disassembled for transportation to London, and reassembled on the Thames in 1822, this time using permanent rivets.

Other technological developments followed, including the invention of the surface condenser, which allowed boilers to run on purified water rather than salt water, eliminating the need to stop to clean them on long sea journeys. The Great Western , built by engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, was the longest ship in the world at 236 ft (72 m) with a 250-foot (76 m) keel and was the first to prove that transatlantic steamship services were viable. The ship was constructed mainly from wood, but Brunel added bolts and iron diagonal reinforcements to maintain the keel's strength. In addition to its steam-powered paddle wheels, the ship carried four masts for sails.

Brunel followed this up with the Great Britain, launched in 1843 and considered the first modern ship built of metal rather than wood, powered by an engine rather than wind or oars, and driven by propeller rather than paddle wheel. Brunel's vision and engineering innovations made the building of large-scale, propeller-driven, all-metal steamships a practical reality, but the prevailing economic and industrial conditions meant that it would be several decades before transoceanic steamship travel emerged as a viable industry.

Highly efficient multiple expansion steam engines began being used on ships, allowing them to carry less coal than freight. The oscillating engine was first built by Aaron Manby and Joseph Maudslay in the 1820s as a type of direct-acting engine that was designed to achieve further reductions in engine size and weight. Oscillating engines had the piston rods connected directly to the crankshaft, dispensing with the need for connecting rods. To achieve this aim, the engine cylinders were not immobile as in most engines, but secured in the middle by trunnions which allowed the cylinders themselves to pivot back and forth as the crankshaft rotated, hence the term oscillating.

It was John Penn, engineer for the Royal Navy who perfected the oscillating engine. One of his earliest engines was the grasshopper beam engine. In 1844 he replaced the engines of the Admiralty yacht, HMS Black Eagle with oscillating engines of double the power, without increasing either the weight or space occupied, an achievement which broke the naval supply dominance of Boulton & Watt and Maudslay, Son & Field. Penn also introduced the trunk engine for driving screw propellers in vessels of war. HMS Encounter (1846) and HMS Arrogant (1848) were the first ships to be fitted with such engines and such was their efficacy that by the time of Penn's death in 1878, the engines had been fitted in 230 ships and were the first mass-produced, high-pressure and high-revolution marine engines.

The revolution in naval design led to the first modern battleships in the 1870s, evolved from the ironclad design of the 1860s. The Devastation-class turret ships were built for the British Royal Navy as the first class of ocean-going capital ship that did not carry sails, and the first whose entire main armament was mounted on top of the hull rather than inside it.

The vulcanization of rubber, by American Charles Goodyear and Englishman Thomas Hancock in the 1840s paved the way for a growing rubber industry, especially the manufacture of rubber tyres

John Boyd Dunlop developed the first practical pneumatic tyre in 1887 in South Belfast. Willie Hume demonstrated the supremacy of Dunlop's newly invented pneumatic tyres in 1889, winning the tyre's first ever races in Ireland and then England. Dunlop's development of the pneumatic tyre arrived at a crucial time in the development of road transport and commercial production began in late 1890.

The modern bicycle was designed by the English engineer Harry John Lawson in 1876, although it was John Kemp Starley who produced the first commercially successful safety bicycle a few years later. Its popularity soon grew, causing the bike boom of the 1890s.

Road networks improved greatly in the period, using the Macadam method pioneered by Scottish engineer John Loudon McAdam, and hard surfaced roads were built around the time of the bicycle craze of the 1890s. Modern tarmac was patented by British civil engineer Edgar Purnell Hooley in 1901.

German inventor Karl Benz patented the world's first automobile in 1886. It featured wire wheels (unlike carriages' wooden ones) with a four-stroke engine of his own design between the rear wheels, with a very advanced coil ignition and evaporative cooling rather than a radiator. Power was transmitted by means of two roller chains to the rear axle. It was the first automobile entirely designed as such to generate its own power, not simply a motorized-stage coach or horse carriage.

Benz began to sell the vehicle (advertising it as the Benz Patent Motorwagen) in the late summer of 1888, making it the first commercially available automobile in history.

Henry Ford built his first car in 1896 and worked as a pioneer in the industry, with others who would eventually form their own companies, until the founding of Ford Motor Company in 1903. Ford and others at the company struggled with ways to scale up production in keeping with Henry Ford's vision of a car designed and manufactured on a scale so as to be affordable by the average worker. The solution that Ford Motor developed was a completely redesigned factory with machine tools and special purpose machines that were systematically positioned in the work sequence. All unnecessary human motions were eliminated by placing all work and tools within easy reach, and where practical on conveyors, forming the assembly line, the complete process being called mass production. This was the first time in history when a large, complex product consisting of 5000 parts had been produced on a scale of hundreds of thousands per year. The savings from mass production methods allowed the price of the Model T to decline from $780 in 1910 to $360 in 1916. In 1924 2 million T-Fords were produced and retailed $290 each.

Applied science opened many opportunities. By the middle of the 19th century there was a scientific understanding of chemistry and a fundamental understanding of thermodynamics and by the last quarter of the century both of these sciences were near their present-day basic form. Thermodynamic principles were used in the development of physical chemistry. Understanding chemistry greatly aided the development of basic inorganic chemical manufacturing and the aniline dye industries.

The science of metallurgy was advanced through the work of Henry Clifton Sorby and others. Sorby pioneered the study of iron and steel under microscope, which paved the way for a scientific understanding of metal and the mass-production of steel. In 1863 he used etching with acid to study the microscopic structure of metals and was the first to understand that a small but precise quantity of carbon gave steel its strength. This paved the way for Henry Bessemer and Robert Forester Mushet to develop the method for mass-producing steel.

Other processes were developed for purifying various elements such as chromium, molybdenum, titanium, vanadium and nickel which could be used for making alloys with special properties, especially with steel. Vanadium steel, for example, is strong and fatigue resistant, and was used in half the automotive steel. Alloy steels were used for ball bearings which were used in large scale bicycle production in the 1880s. Ball and roller bearings also began being used in machinery. Other important alloys are used in high temperatures, such as steam turbine blades, and stainless steels for corrosion resistance.

The work of Justus von Liebig and August Wilhelm von Hofmann laid the groundwork for modern industrial chemistry. Liebig is considered the "father of the fertilizer industry" for his discovery of nitrogen as an essential plant nutrient and went on to establish Liebig's Extract of Meat Company which produced the Oxo meat extract. Hofmann headed a school of practical chemistry in London, under the style of the Royal College of Chemistry, introduced modern conventions for molecular modeling and taught Perkin who discovered the first synthetic dye.

The science of thermodynamics was developed into its modern form by Sadi Carnot, William Rankine, Rudolf Clausius, William Thomson, James Clerk Maxwell, Ludwig Boltzmann and J. Willard Gibbs. These scientific principles were applied to a variety of industrial concerns, including improving the efficiency of boilers and steam turbines. The work of Michael Faraday and others was pivotal in laying the foundations of the modern scientific understanding of electricity.

Scottish scientist James Clerk Maxwell was particularly influential-his discoveries ushered in the era of modern physics. His most prominent achievement was to formulate a set of equations that described electricity, magnetism, and optics as manifestations of the same phenomenon, namely the electromagnetic field. The unification of light and electrical phenomena led to the prediction of the existence of radio waves and was the basis for the future development of radio technology by Hughes, Marconi and others.

Maxwell himself developed the first durable colour photograph in 1861 and published the first scientific treatment of control theory. Control theory is the basis for process control, which is widely used in automation, particularly for process industries, and for controlling ships and airplanes. Control theory was developed to analyze the functioning of centrifugal governors on steam engines. These governors came into use in the late 18th century on wind and water mills to correctly position the gap between mill stones, and were adapted to steam engines by James Watt. Improved versions were used to stabilize automatic tracking mechanisms of telescopes and to control speed of ship propellers and rudders. However, those governors were sluggish and oscillated about the set point. James Clerk Maxwell wrote a paper mathematically analyzing the actions of governors, which marked the beginning of the formal development of control theory. The science was continually improved and evolved into an engineering discipline.

Justus von Liebig was the first to understand the importance of ammonia as fertilizer, and promoted the importance of inorganic minerals to plant nutrition. In England, he attempted to implement his theories commercially through a fertilizer created by treating phosphate of lime in bone meal with sulfuric acid. Another pioneer was John Bennet Lawes who began to experiment on the effects of various manures on plants growing in pots in 1837, leading to a manure formed by treating phosphates with sulphuric acid; this was to be the first product of the nascent artificial manure industry.

The discovery of coprolites in commercial quantities in East Anglia, led Fisons and Edward Packard to develop one of the first large-scale commercial fertilizer plants at Bramford, and Snape in the 1850s. By the 1870s superphosphates produced in those factories, were being shipped around the world from the port at Ipswich.

The Birkeland-Eyde process was developed by Norwegian industrialist and scientist Kristian Birkeland along with his business partner Sam Eyde in 1903, but was soon replaced by the much more efficient Haber process, developed by the Nobel prize-winning chemists Carl Bosch of IG Farben and Fritz Haber in Germany. The process used molecular nitrogen (N ₂) and methane (CH ₄) gas in an economically sustainable synthesis of ammonia (NH ₃). The ammonia produced in the Haber process is the main raw material for production of nitric acid.

The steam turbine was developed by Sir Charles Parsons in 1884. His first model was connected to a dynamo that generated 7.5 kW (10 hp) of electricity. The invention of Parson's steam turbine made cheap and plentiful electricity possible and revolutionized marine transport and naval warfare. By the time of Parson's death, his turbine had been adopted for all major world power stations. Unlike earlier steam engines, the turbine produced rotary power rather than reciprocating power which required a crank and heavy flywheel. The large number of stages of the turbine allowed for high efficiency and reduced size by 90%. The turbine's first application was in shipping followed by electric generation in 1903.

The diesel engine was independently designed by Rudolf Diesel and Herbert Akroyd Stuart in the 1890s using thermodynamic principles with the specific intention of being highly efficient. It took several years to perfect and become popular, but found application in shipping before powering locomotives. It remains the world's most efficient prime mover.

The first commercial telegraph system was installed by Sir William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone in May 1837 between Euston railway station and Camden Town in London.

The rapid expansion of telegraph networks took place throughout the century, with the first undersea telegraph cable being built by John Watkins Brett between France and England. The Atlantic Telegraph Company was formed in London in 1856 to undertake construction of a commercial telegraph cable across the Atlantic Ocean. This was successfully completed on 18 July 1866 by the ship SS Great Eastern, captained by Sir James Anderson after many mishaps along the away. From the 1850s until 1911, British submarine cable systems dominated the world system. This was set out as a formal strategic goal, which became known as the All Red Line.

As mentioned above, one of the most important scientific advancements in all of history was the unification of light, electricity and magnetism through Maxwell's electromagnetic theory. A scientific understanding of electricity was necessary for the development of efficient electric generators, motors and transformers. David Edward Hughes and Heinrich Hertz both demonstrated and confirmed the phenomenon of electromagnetic waves that had been predicted by Maxwell.

It was Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi who successfully commercialized radio at the turn of the century. He founded The Wireless Telegraph & Signal Company in Britain in 1897 and in the same year transmitted Morse code across Salisbury Plain, sent the first ever wireless communication over open sea and made the first transatlantic transmission in 1901 from Poldhu, Cornwall to Signal Hill, Newfoundland. Marconi built high-powered stations on both sides of the Atlantic and began a commercial service to transmit nightly news summaries to subscribing ships in 1904.

The key development of the vacuum tube by Sir John Ambrose Fleming in 1904 underpinned the development of modern electronics and radio broadcasting. Lee De Forest's subsequent invention of the triode allowed the amplification of electronic signals, which paved the way for radio broadcasting in the 1920s.

Railroads involved complex operations and employed extremely large amounts of capital and ran a more complicated business compared to anything previous. Consequently, they needed better ways to track costs. For example, to calculate rates they needed to know the cost of a ton-mile of freight. They also needed to keep track of cars, which could go missing for months at a time. This led to what was called "railroad accounting", which was later adopted by steel and other industries, and eventually became modern accounting.

Later in the Second Industrial Revolution, Frederick Winslow Taylor and others in America developed the concept of scientific management or Taylorism. Scientific management initially concentrated on reducing the steps taken in performing work (such as bricklaying or shoveling) by using analysis such as time-and-motion studies, but the concepts evolved into fields such as industrial engineering, manufacturing engineering, and business management that helped to completely restructure[citation needed ] the operations of factories, and later entire segments of the economy.

Taylor's core principles included:[citation needed ]

replacing rule-of-thumb work methods with methods based on a scientific study of the tasks

scientifically selecting, training, and developing each employee rather than passively leaving them to train themselves

providing "detailed instruction and supervision of each worker in the performance of that worker's discrete task"

dividing work nearly equally between managers and workers, such that the managers apply scientific-management principles to planning the work and the workers actually perform the tasks

"The economic changes that have occurred during the last quarter of a century -or during the present generation of living men- have unquestionably been more important and more varied than during any period of the world's history".

Crop failures no longer resulted in starvation in areas connected to large markets through transport infrastructure.

Massive improvements in public health and sanitation resulted from public health initiatives, such as the construction of the London sewerage system in the 1860s and the passage of laws that regulated filtered water supplies-(the Metropolis Water Act introduced regulation of the water supply companies in London, including minimum standards of water quality for the first time in 1852). This greatly reduced the infection and death rates from many diseases.

By 1870 the work done by steam engines exceeded that done by animal and human power. Horses and mules remained important in agriculture until the development of the internal combustion tractor near the end of the Second Industrial Revolution.

The tremendous growth in productivity, transportation networks, industrial production and agricultural output lowered the prices of almost all goods. This led to many business failures and periods that were called depressions that occurred as the world economy actually grew. See also: Long depression

By 1900, the leaders in industrial production was Britain with 24% of the world total, followed by the US (19%), Germany (13%), Russia (9%) and France (7%). Europe together accounted for 62%.

Relative per capita levels of industrialization, 1750-1910 (relative to G.B. in 1900 = 100)[96]

New products and services were introduced which greatly increased international trade. Improvements in steam engine design and the wide availability of cheap steel meant that slow, sailing ships were replaced with faster steamship, which could handle more trade with smaller crews. The chemical industries also moved to the forefront. Britain invested less in technological research than the U.S. and Germany, which caught up.

The development of more intricate and efficient machines along with mass production techniques (after 1910) greatly expanded output and lowered production costs. As a result, production often exceeded domestic demand. Among the new conditions, more markedly evident in Britain, the forerunner of Europe's industrial states, were the long-term effects of the severe Long Depression of 1873-1896, which had followed fifteen years of great economic instability. Businesses in practically every industry suffered from lengthy periods of low - and falling - profit rates and price deflation after 1873.

The U.S. had its highest economic growth rate in the last two decades of the Second Industrial Revolution; however, population growth slowed while productivity growth peaked around the mid 20th century. The Gilded Age in America was based on heavy industry such as factories, railroads and coal mining. The iconic event was the opening of the First transcontinental railroad in 1869, providing six-day service between the East Coast and San Francisco.

During the Gilded Age, American railroad mileage tripled between 1860 and 1880, and tripled again by 1920, opening new areas to commercial farming, creating a truly national marketplace and inspiring a boom in coal mining and steel production. The voracious appetite for capital of the great trunk railroads facilitated the consolidation of the nation's financial market in Wall Street. By 1900, the process of economic concentration had extended into most branches of industry-a few large corporations, some organized as "trusts" (e.g. Standard Oil), dominated in steel, oil, sugar, meatpacking, and the manufacture of agriculture machinery. Other major components of this infrastructure were the new methods for manufacturing steel, especially the Bessemer process. The first billion-dollar corporation was United States Steel, formed by financier J. P. Morgan in 1901, who purchased and consolidated steel firms built by Andrew Carnegie and others.

Increased mechanization of industry and improvements to worker efficiency, increased the productivity of factories while undercutting the need for skilled labor. Mechanical innovations such as batch and continuous processing began to become much more prominent in factories. This mechanization made some factories an assemblage of unskilled laborers performing simple and repetitive tasks under the direction of skilled foremen and engineers. In some cases, the advancement of such mechanization substituted for low-skilled workers altogether. Both the number of unskilled and skilled workers increased, as their wage rates grew Engineering colleges were established to feed the enormous demand for expertise. Together with rapid growth of small business, a new middle class was rapidly growing, especially in northern cities.

In the early 1900s there was a disparity between the levels of employment seen in the northern and southern United States. On average, states in the North had both a higher population, and a higher rate of employment than states in the South. The higher rate of employment is easily seen by considering the 1909 rates of employment compared to the populations of each state in the 1910 census. This difference was most notable in the states with the largest populations, such as New York and Pennsylvania. Each of these states had roughly 5 percent more of the total US workforce than would be expected given their populations. Conversely, the states in the South with the best actual rates of employment, North Carolina and Georgia, had roughly 2 percent less of the workforce than one would expect from their population. When the averages of all southern states and all northern states are taken, the trend holds with the North over-performing by about 2 percent, and the South under-performing by about 1 percent.

The German Empire came to rival Britain as Europe's primary industrial nation during this period. Since Germany industrialized later, it was able to model its factories after those of Britain, thus making more efficient use of its capital and avoiding legacy methods in its leap to the envelope of technology. Germany invested more heavily than the British in research, especially in chemistry, motors and electricity. The German concern system (known as Konzerne), being significantly concentrated, was able to make more efficient use of capital. Germany was not weighted down with an expensive worldwide empire that needed defense. Following Germany's annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871, it absorbed parts of what had been France's industrial base.

By 1900 the German chemical industry dominated the world market for synthetic dyes. The three major firms BASF, Bayer and Hoechst produced several hundred different dyes, along with the five smaller firms. In 1913 these eight firms produced almost 90 percent of the world supply of dyestuffs, and sold about 80 percent of their production abroad. The three major firms had also integrated upstream into the production of essential raw materials and they began to expand into other areas of chemistry such as pharmaceuticals, photographic film, agricultural chemicals and electrochemical. Top-level decision-making was in the hands of professional salaried managers, leading Chandler to call the German dye companies "the world's first truly managerial industrial enterprises". There were many spin offs from research-such as the pharmaceutical industry, which emerged from chemical research.

Belgium during the Belle Époque showed the value of the railways for speeding the Second Industrial Revolution. After 1830, when it broke away from the Netherlands and became a new nation, it decided to stimulate industry. It planned and funded a simple cruciform system that connected major cities, ports and mining areas, and linked to neighboring countries. Belgium thus became the railway center of the region. The system was soundly built along British lines, so that profits were low but the infrastructure necessary for rapid industrial growth was put in place.

There have been other times that have been called "second industrial revolution". Industrial revolutions may be renumbered by taking earlier developments, such as the rise of medieval technology in the 12th century, or of ancient Chinese technology during the Tang dynasty, or of ancient Roman technology, as first. "Second industrial revolution" has been used in the popular press and by technologists or industrialists to refer to the changes following the spread of new technology after World War I.

Excitement and debate over the dangers and benefits of the Atomic Age were more intense and lasting than those over the Space age but both were predicted to lead to another industrial revolution. At the start of the 21st century the term "second industrial revolution" has been used to describe the anticipated effects of hypothetical molecular nanotechnology systems upon society. In this more recent scenario, they would render the majority of today's modern manufacturing processes obsolete, transforming all facets of the modern economy. Subsequent industrial revolutions include the Digital revolution and Environmental revolution.

in alphabetical order

Economic history of selected countries:

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23. Compare: ^ Chandler, Alfred Jr. (1993). The Visible Hand. Harvard University Press. p. 115. ISBN 0674417682. [...] American railroad accounting overstated operating costs and understated capital consumption.[...] The basic innovations in financial and capital accounting appeared in the 1850s in response to specific needs and were perfected in the years after the Civil War. Innovations in a third type of accounting - cost accounting - came more slowly.

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26. ^ David Grigg (1992). "Agriculture in the World Economy: an Historical Geography of Decline". Geography. 77 (3): 210-222. JSTOR 40572192.

27. Paul Kennedy, ^ The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987) p. 149, based on Paul Bairoch, "International Industrialization Levels from 1750 to 1980," Journal of European Economic History (1982) v. 11

28. ^ Vatter, Harold G.; Walker, John F.; Alperovitz, Gar (June 1995). "The onset and persistence of secular stagnation in the U.S. economy: 1910-1990". Journal of Economic Issues. 29 (2): 591-600. JSTOR 4226974.

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Broadberry, Stephen, and Kevin H. O'Rourke. The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Europe (2 vol. 2010), covers 1700 to present

Chandler, Jr., Alfred D. Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (1990).

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Kornblith, Gary. The Industrial Revolution in America (1997)

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Smil, Vaclav. Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations of 1867-1914 and Their Lasting Impact

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Second Industrial Revolution - Wikipedia

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The Second Industrial Revolution, also known as the Technological Revolution, was a phase of rapid scientific discovery, standardisation, mass production and industrialisation from the late 19th century into the early 20th century. The First Industrial Revolution, which ended in the middle of the 19th century, was punctuated by a slowdown in important inventions before the Second Industrial Revolution in 1870.

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Overview of the 2nd Industrial Revolution

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When / How:

Digital and information revolution after WWII.

Key Technologies:

Computers, semiconductors, the Internet, automation.

Employment Changes:

Decline of traditional manufacturing jobs.

Growth of service economy and knowledge-based work.

Globalization and outsourcing reshaped labor markets.

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Third Industrial Revolution ✓ We explore the Third Industrial Revolution and its characteristics. Also, the innovations of this period and their impact.

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When / How:

Term popularized by Klaus Schwab (2016). Fusion of physical, digital, and biological systems: Fourth Revolution.

Key Technologies:

Artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, Internet of Things, big data, biotechnology, 3D printing, quantum computing.

Employment Changes:

Automation replaces many routine jobs.

Rise of the gig economy (Uber, food delivery), flexible but unstable workfourth revolution.

New skills required: digital literacy, data analysis, machine learning.

Remote work, platform-based jobs, and flexible models become mainstream.

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The Fourth Industrial Revolution (or Industry 4.0) is the ongoing automation of traditional manufacturing and industrial practices, using modern smart technology. Large-scale machine-to-machine communication (M2M) and the internet of things (IoT) are integrated for increased automation, improved communication and self-monitoring, and production of smart machines that can analyze and diagnose issues without the need for human intervention.

The phrase Fourth Industrial Revolution was first introduced by a team of scientists developing a high-tech strategy for the German government. Klaus Schwab, executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, introduced the phrase to a wider audience in a 2015 article published by Foreign Affairs, "Mastering the Fourth Industrial Revolution" was the 2016 theme of the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland.

On October 10, 2016, the Forum announced the opening of its Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution in San Francisco. This was also subject and title of Schwab's 2016 book. Schwab includes in this fourth era technologies that combine hardware, software, and biology ( cyber-physical systems), and emphasizes advances in communication and connectivity. Schwab expects this era to be marked by breakthroughs in emerging technologies in fields such as robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, quantum computing, biotechnology, the internet of things, the industrial internet of things, decentralized consensus, fifth-generation wireless technologies, 3D printing, and fully autonomous vehicles.

In The Great Reset proposal by the World Economic Forum, The Fourth Industrial Revolution is included as a Strategic Intelligence in the solution to rebuild the economy sustainably following the COVID-19 pandemic

The First Industrial Revolution was marked by a transition from hand production methods to machines through the use of steam power and water power. The implementation of new technologies took a long time, so the period which this refers to it is between 1760 and 1820, or 1840 in Europe and the United States. Its effects had consequences on textile manufacturing, which was first to adopt such changes, as well as iron industry, agriculture, and mining although it also had societal effects with an ever stronger middle class. It also had an effect on British industry at the time.

The Third Industrial Revolution, also known as the Digital Revolution, occurred in the late 20th century, after the end of the two world wars, resulting from a slowdown of industrialization and technological advancement compared to previous periods. The production of the Z1 computer, which used binary floating-point numbers and Boolean logic, a decade later, was the beginning of more advanced digital developments. The next significant development in communication technologies was the supercomputer, with extensive use of computer and communication technologies in the production process; machinery began to abrogate the need for human power.

The term "Industrie 4.0", shortened to I4.0 or simply I4, originated in 2011 from a project in the high-tech strategy of the German government, which promotes the computerization of manufacturing. The term "Industrie 4.0" was publicly introduced in the same year at the Hannover Fair. In October 2012, the Working Group on Industry 4.0 presented a set of Industry 4.0 implementation recommendations to the German federal government. The workgroup members and partners are recognized as the founding fathers and driving force behind Industry 4.0. On 8 April 2013 at the Hannover Fair, the final report of the Working Group Industry 4.0 was presented. This working group was headed by Siegfried Dais, of Robert Bosch GmbH, and Henning Kagermann, of the German Academy of Science and Engineering.

The discussion of how the shift to Industry 4.0, especially digitization, will affect the labour market is being discussed in Germany under the topic of Work 4.0.

The characteristics of the German government's Industry 4.0 strategy involve the strong customization of products under the conditions of highly flexible (mass-) production. The required automation technology is improved by the introduction of methods of self-optimization, self-configuration, self-diagnosis, cognition and intelligent support of workers in their increasingly complex work. The largest project in Industry 4.0 as of July 2013 is the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) leading-edge cluster "Intelligent Technical Systems Ostwestfalen-Lippe (its OWL)". Another major project is the BMBF project RES-COM, as well as the Cluster of Excellence "Integrative Production Technology for High-Wage Countries". In 2015, the European Commission started the international Horizon 2020 research project CREMA (Providing Cloud-based Rapid Elastic Manufacturing based on the XaaS and Cloud model) as a major initiative to foster the Industry 4.0 topic.

There are four design principles identified as integral to Industry 4.0:

Interconnection - the ability of machines, devices, sensors, and people to connect and communicate with each other via the Internet of things, or the internet of people (IoP)

Information transparency - the transparency afforded by Industry 4.0 technology provides operators with comprehensive information to make decisions. Inter-connectivity allows operators to collect immense amounts of data and information from all points in the manufacturing process, identify key areas that can benefit from improvement to increase functionality

Technical assistance - the technological facility of systems to assist humans in decision-making and problem-solving, and the ability to help humans with difficult or unsafe tasks

Decentralized decisions - the ability of cyber physical systems to make decisions on their own and to perform their tasks as autonomously as possible. Only in the case of exceptions, interference, or conflicting goals, are tasks delegated to a higher level

The Fourth Industrial Revolution consists of many components when looking closely into our society and current digital trends. To understand how extensive these components are, here are some contributing digital technologies as examples:

Mobile devices

Internet of things (IoT) platforms

Location detection technologies (electronic identification)

Advanced human-machine interfaces

Authentication and fraud detection

3D printing

Smart sensors

Big analytics and advanced processes

Multilevel customer interaction and customer profiling

Augmented reality/ wearables

On-demand availability of computer system resources

Data visualization and triggered "live" training

Mainly these technologies can be summarized into four major components, defining the term "Industry 4.0" or "smart factory":

Cyber-physical systems

IoT

On-demand availability of computer system resources

Cognitive computing

The value created in Industrie 4.0, can be relied upon electronic identification, in which the smart manufacturing require set technologies to be incorporated in the manufacturing process to thus be classified as in the development path of Industrie 4.0 and no longer digitisation.

Digitization and integration of vertical and horizontal value chains - Industry 4.0 integrates processes vertically, across the entire organization, including processes in product development, manufacturing, structuring, and service; horizontally, Industry 4.0 includes internal operations from suppliers to customers as well as all key value chain partners.

Digitization of product and services - integrating new methods of data collection and analysis-such as through the expansion of existing products or creation of new digitised products-helps companies to generate data on product use in order to refine products

Digital business models and customer access - customer satisfaction is a perpetual, multi-stage process that requires modification in real-time to adapt to the changing needs of consumers

In essence, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is the trend towards automation and data exchange in manufacturing technologies and processes which include cyber-physical systems (CPS), IoT, industrial internet of things, cloud computing, cognitive computing, and artificial intelligence.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution fosters what has been called a "smart factory". Within modular structured smart factories, cyber-physical systems monitor physical processes, create a virtual copy of the physical world and make decentralized decisions. Over the internet of things, cyber-physical systems communicate and cooperate with each other and with humans in synchronic time both internally and across organizational services offered and used by participants of the value chain.

Industry 4.0 can also provide predictive maintenance, due to the use of technology and the IoT sensors. Predictive maintenance - which can identify maintenance issues in live - allows machine owners to perform cost-effective maintenance and determine it ahead of time before the machinery fails or gets damaged. For example, a company in LA could understand if a piece of equipment in Singapore is running at an abnormal speed or temperature. They could then decide whether or not it needs to be repaired.

The determining factor is the pace of change. The correlation of the speed of technological development and, as a result, socio-economic and infrastructural transformations with human life allow us to state a qualitative leap in the speed of development, which marks a transition to a new time era.

Sensors and instrumentation drive the central forces of innovation, not only for Industry 4.0 but also for other "smart " megatrends, such as smart production, smart mobility, smart homes, smart cities, and smart factories.

Smart sensors are devices, which generate the data and allow further functionality from self-monitoring and self-configuration to condition monitoring of complex processes. With the capability of wireless communication, they reduce installation effort to a great extent and help realize a dense array of sensors.

The importance of sensors, measurement science, and smart evaluation for Industry 4.0 has been recognized and acknowledged by various experts and has already led to the statement "Industry 4.0: nothing goes without sensor systems."

However, there are few issues, such as time synchronization error, data loss, and dealing with large amounts of harvested data, which all limit the implementation of full-fledged systems. Moreover, additional limits on these functionalities represents the battery power. One example of the integration of smart sensors in the electronic devices, is the case of smart watches, where sensors receive the data from the movement of the user, process the data and as a result, provide the user with the information about how many steps they have walked in a day and also converts the data into calories burned.

Agriculture and Food Industries

Smart sensors in these two fields are still in the testing stage. These innovative connected sensors collect, interpret and communicate the information available in the plots (leaf area, vegetation index, chlorophyll, hygrometry, temperature, water potential, radiation). Based on this scientific data, the objective is to enable real-time monitoring via a smartphone with a range of advice that optimizes plot management in terms of results, time and costs. On the farm, these sensors can be used to detect crop stages and recommend inputs and treatments at the right time. As well as controlling the level of irrigation.

The food industry requires more and more security and transparency and full documentation is required. This new technology is used as a tracking system as well as the collection of human data as well as product data.

Challenges in implementation of Industry 4.0:

High economic costs

Business model adaptation

Unclear economic benefits/excessive investment

Privacy concerns

Surveillance and distrust

General reluctance to change by stakeholders

Threat of redundancy of the corporate IT department

Loss of many jobs to automatic processes and IT-controlled processes, especially for blue collar workers

Lack of regulation, standards and forms of certifications

IT security issues, which are greatly aggravated by the inherent need to open up those previously closed production shops

Reliability and stability needed for critical machine-to-machine communication (M2M), including very short and stable latency times

Need to maintain the integrity of production processes

Need to avoid any IT snags, as those would cause expensive production outages

Need to protect industrial know-how (contained also in the control files for the industrial automation gear)

Lack of adequate skill-sets to expedite the transition towards a fourth industrial revolution

Low top management commitment

Insufficient qualification of employees

Industry 4.0 inspired Innovation 4.0, a move toward digitization for academia and research and development. In 2017, the £81m Materials Innovation Factory (MIF) at the University of Liverpool opened as a center for computer aided materials science, where robotic formulation, data capture and modeling are being integrated into development practices.

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The Fourth Industrial Revolution (or Industry 4.0) is the ongoing automation of traditional manufacturing and industrial practices, using modern smart technology. Large-scale machine-to-machine communication (M2M) and the internet of things (IoT) are integrated for increased automation, improved communication and self-monitoring, and production of smart machines that can analyze and diagnose issues without the need for human intervention.

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Overall comparison four industrial revolutions

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Overall comparison four industrial revolutions

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The four Industrial Revolutions each changed how people live and work. The First Industrial Revolution in the 1700s moved work from farms to factories, with steam engines and machines leading to city growth but also tough factory jobs. The Second Industrial Revolution in the late 1800s used electricity, steel, and assembly lines to make mass production possible, creating more jobs and stronger labor movements. The Third Industrial Revolution in the late 1900s brought computers, the Internet, and automation, which reduced factory jobs but increased service and technology work. Now, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is happening, with AI, robotics, and the Internet of Things combining the physical, digital, and even biological worlds. It creates new opportunities but also challenges, since some jobs are being replaced by machines while people need to learn new digital skills.

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4min audio component of industrial revolution

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4min audio component of industrial revolution

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The Four Industrial Revolutions Explained In Under 4 Minutes! #industry4 #smartmanufacturing