Industrial Revolution

Impact On Industry

Industrial Revolution
Life Before The Industrial Revolution
--Types Of Industry
--Lifestyle Of The People
--Quality Of Life
Beginnings In England
--How It All Started
Spread Of Industry
--Where Did It Spread?
--How Was It Funded?
Major Inventions
Impact On Society
--Lifestyles And Working Conditions
--Quality Of Life
Impact On Movement
--Changes To Transport
Impact On Industry
--How Was Industry Changed?
Impact On Environment
Vocabulary
Bibliography

Knowledge of new innovation was spread by several means. Workers who were trained in the technique might move to another employer or might be poached. A common method was for someone to make a study tour, gathering information where he could. During the whole of the Industrial Revolution and for the century before, all European countries and America engaged in study-touring; some nations, like Sweden and France, even trained civil servants or technicians to undertake it as a matter of state policy. In other countries, notably Britain and America, this practice was carried out by individual manufacturers anxious to improve their own methods. Study tours were common then, as now, as was the keeping of travel diaries. Records made by industrialists and technicians of the period are an incomparable source of information about their methods.

Another means for the spread of innovation was by the network of informal philosophical societies—like the Lunar Society of Birmingham—in which members met to discuss science and often its application to manufacturing. Some of these societies published volumes of proceedings and transactions, and the London-based Royal Society of Arts published an illustrated volume of new inventions, as well as papers about them in its annual Transactions.

There were publications describing technology. Encyclopedias such as Harris's Lexicon technicum (1704) and Dr. Abraham Rees's Cyclopaedia (1802-1819) contain much of value. Cyclopaedia contains an enormous amount of information about the science and technology of the first half of the Industrial Revolution, very well illustrated by fine engravings. Foreign printed sources such as the Descriptions des Arts et Métiers and Diderot's Encyclopédie explained foreign methods with fine engraved plates.