History Professor Answers Industrial Revolution Questions

Hi, I'm Jonathan Rees, history professor and researcher.

I'm here to answer your questions from the internet.

This is Industrial Revolution Support.

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With you, with them asks, I'm so gonna fail history

who the fuck is spinning Jenny?

The spinning Jenny is one of the technological innovations

that make it possible

to automate the textile manufacturing process.

There is a thing called the flying shuttle that comes first

and the flying shuttle, the spinning Jenny

and the power loom together make it possible

to automate the process of textile manufacturing

all in a single building and put out sheets

and sheets of fabric rather than have it done

in individual homes and have it take, you know,

hours if not days or weeks.

All of them together make textile manufacturing both cheap

and more effective

and help make the industrial revolution possible

in the British textile industry.

Creators virtual asks.

I wonder if people felt the same level

of panic during the industrial revolution

as they are with AI today.

And it's hard not to think about the Industrial Revolution

is AI begins to appear everywhere.

The thing that I keep coming back

to when I think about the history that predates AI,

is that during the Industrial Revolution,

the machines that made stuff,

made better stuff than the craft workers before them.

Cobblers made terrible shoes.

Factories made cheap, reliable shoes.

The thing about AI that gets me

is that the things that AI does,

at least at this point in its evolution,

aren't nearly as good as the things that they replace.

AI writing for example,

something I have to deal with in class

all the time is terrible writing.

Apparently AI, I'm told, is good at coding,

but nevertheless, there are still coders are employed

because the higher level tasks involved with coding

can't be done by AI.

AI has been tried in fast food restaurant takeout

and it keeps messing up people's orders.

You're not gonna have a real permanent revolution caused

by AI unless it can get better at what it's doing.

Maybe that's gonna happen over time,

maybe it won't, but that's the future.

I'm a historian, I can't handle that.

Dun Magank asks, explain it to me like I'm five.

Why did coal miners bring canaries

into the mines with them?

Canaries go into coal mines

because if the canary drops dead,

they know that there's dangerous gas in the mine

and the miners will drop dead shortly there afterwards.

So, that was a signal to evacuate the mine immediately.

God Body Mani.

Amazon warehouses really remind me

of the industrial revolution

when mother was losing fingers

and I don't know how people be working there for years.

The thing about Amazon warehouses

is that you're regimented by a machine,

and during the Industrial Revolution,

the machines controlled your time and how you work

and what you did all day.

Literally, there were people who would come behind you

while you're working with stopwatches,

and try to measure how long it took you to do

just minute tasks so that they can get you to work

in the one best way possible in order to be more productive.

The thing about the Industrial Revolution and unions

is that if they go in as individuals and say,

this work is very difficult,

somebody is just gonna find someone who's more desperate

than them to do the same job.

If they go in together and say, this work is very difficult

and if you don't make it better,

we're all gonna walk out at the same time,

then at least they have a fighting chance.

Unions starting in the 1880s in the United States

are literally the people who invented the weekend.

They're also the people who are fighting

and will eventually win the eight hour day.

Leisure time opens up for the first time.

And they'll do things like take

the subway to Coney Island on the weekend,

and have at least something that they can look forward

to during their very difficult 40-plus-hour work week.

So, this question is from Quora.

What caused the great smog in London 1952 question mark?

Well, first of all, 1952,

is well after the Industrial revolution,

but a lot of that has to do with automobile smoke,

which comes out of the Industrial Revolution.

The Industrial Revolution, because it depended on coal,

has an absolutely enormous impact

on the future of the planet.

This is where all of the smog starts.

And in the turn of the 20th century,

smog was seen as a sign of progress before it got everywhere

and started really choking our lungs.

My adopted hometown of Pueblo, Colorado used

to put smokey factories on the postcards

that they sold to tourists.

Their slogan at the Chamber of Commerce

was Watch our smoke,

because that was supposed to be the greatest thing

that Pueblo produced.

Burn account_A, asks,

Do you think the industrial revolution of Britain

could happen without colonialism?

Yeah, so that's the Eric Williams argument.

He wrote in the 1940s that the wealth generated

by that was absolutely essential

for having the industrial revolution happen.

I don't think most historians agree with that,

but it was absolutely a factor.

Without that kind of wealth,

Britain wouldn't have been able to industrialize.

But there are other factors as well that make that possible.

Your homicidal ape asks Most important inventions

of the industrial revolution.

I think the thing that I would probably privilege

over all the possible inventions

isn't an actually invention,

it's the assembly line introduced in the Ford Motor Company

in 1913, 1914.

When they used the assembly line

in order to manufacture cars,

people in all sorts of different industries go, oh,

we could do the same thing in principle

in order to manufacture anything.

My favorite museum exhibit

is in the Henry Ford Museum in Detroit,

where they have this thing called the Exploded Model T Ford.

And all the different parts of the Model T,

but they're all slightly separated by each other

and hanging on strings.

And the reason love that exhibit so much

is that you can actually picture the assembly line

just by looking at the parts that put it together

because the whole idea of the assembly line

is one person does that one thing,

inserts that one part over and over and over again,

and you can think about that abstract principle

just by looking at a car.

But you could manufacture a washing machine that way.

You could manufacture a camera that way.

It turns out you could manufacture anything that way.

So, I think it's the thing

that had the greatest lasting impact,

even if it's not a specific invention.

XX Gertrude asks, Did mothers work at the same factories

as their children in the 19th century?

I think that question probably

has to do with the British textile industry,

where there are children and women working

in the same factories.

In America, probably the most legendary example

of child labor is young breaker boys working

in the same mines as their fathers.

Different industries require child work

for different purposes.

So, in coal mines for instance,

they're picking through giant slag piles

in order to find usable pieces of coal out of the refuse

of the rest of the mine.

In textile mills,

they're are actually under the looms fixing broken threads.

A lot of the times the argument

was that the small hands made them better

for particular jobs.

And the other argument that justifies child labor

is that, you know, in a free country,

well how can you stop somebody from doing that kind of work,

even if they're a child?

This question is from the political compass Memes subreddit.

Luddites were the OG Tesla Vandalizes.

So, the Luddites were skilled English workers

in the textile industry

whose jobs were threatened by the innovations

of the Industrial Revolution.

In order to show that opposition,

the Luddites broke the machines that threatened their jobs.

What they have in common with the Tesla Vandalizes

is that they're willing to destroy property

in support of their own interests.

The funny thing about the Luddites

is they're named after a guy named Ned Ludd,

who probably didn't exist

and there continues to be strong opposition,

usually union opposition

to all kinds of industrial innovations ever since.

OkGreen7335 asks,

If vast majority

were poor during the industrial revolution,

who was actually buying all the stuff they produced?

The great thing about the industrial revolution

from an economic standpoint

is that when you produce more of something,

the price of it is going to drop.

Henry Ford, famously wanted his Model T cars

to be affordable to the great mass of Americans,

and they were because he could produce them so much cheaper

than any other cars on the market.

Low prices meant that even if you don't have as much money

as the people own the factories,

you can still afford the products

that those factories produced.

Accelerator231 asks, Why was steel so difficult

to mass produce until the Bessemer process?

What were the main stumbling blocks?

Steel is really difficult to make,

but the more you automate it,

the more of it you can make at the same time.

So, if you go back to the late 1700s,

it's really skilled craftsmen

who are basically stirring this giant mush of metal

in order to get something that's usable and strong.

What Bessemer did is he figured out a way

to blow air through it in order to automate

that's some of that process

and make those earlier very expensive skills,

less important.

And the Open Earth process from the 1890s,

simply automates it some more.

I think it's also worth noting that steel's really important

to different aspects of industrialization.

In the United States,

steel rails are an important innovation

that makes the growth of railroads possible

in the late 19th century.

The steel making process is also important

for making skyscrapers.

And when you get to the 20th century,

people make cars out of steel.

So, steel making is just essential

to all these different industries.

Newtonian ask Pounder asks,

Did canals of the Industrial Revolution

experience traffic jams?

Canals where the barges are driven by horses

are really only active between like the 1820s

and the 1850s or '60s,

until railroads steal all their market.

So, canals are just a really narrow period during

the Industrial Revolution.

It's the early 19th century,

both in England and America,

canals are a way to transport the goods

that factories produced to lots of different places

and intermittent technology between horses and railroads.

So, horses are the most important technology

in world history until about 1800,

when you get steamboats

or precursor to railroads.

The really important driver of the industrial revolution

in its markets were railroads.

AusPrideAlways asks,

What was the first modern factory?

If you ask most historians

to name one factory as being most important,

I would say it would be Henry Ford's,

Ford is responsible for the assembly line,

and he was very open about his ideas

so people could tour the factory.

And they looked at the way Ford built cars and they said,

this is a concept that will work

just about everywhere, and in any industry.

So, if we're talking about modern in terms of the factory

that you can manufacture anything that way,

and in fact so many things are manufactured that way,

I would say that Ford's facilities are the most important.

So, this question is from Quora.

Why did the Industrial Revolution lead

to large corporations rather than small scale producers

adopting the technology and continued to exist.

And the reason that that happens

is that once you make money

from the first technological innovations,

if you put the profits from that back into your business,

that's gonna lead to further innovations

that will just make your business that much more successful.

In the United States,

monopolies become a problem in the late 19th century

because so many people are making so much money

in different industries from these technologies

that they control huge sections of that industry

that can eventually set prices.

America comes up with something called

the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890

that's supposed to crack down on those kinds of companies,

but it's not really enforced particularly well

until the 20th century.

Even then it's still just enforced intermittently.

Wealth inequality predates the Industrial Revolution,

but what you get in the Industrial Revolution

for the first time

is something called conspicuous consumption.

A term invented by the economist Thorstein Veblen

around the turn of the 20th century.

Conspicuous consumption is buying things

and showing them off just to prove how rich you are.

That's a direct result of what they used to call new money,

making lots of money very quickly

and just trying to impress their friends.

So, this next one is from CRR Pit.

Is there any consensus among historians

and why Britain in particular became the birthplace

of the Industrial Revolution?

This is a very hotly debated subject.

The causes of the Industrial Revolution

in Britain are manifold.

There's an argument that the wealth created by slavery

because of the empire makes industrialization possible.

There's an argument that enclosure

is part of this that forces people into the cities

in order to work in these factories.

There are lots of exceptional circumstances

that make it so important

and why it takes so much longer

to appear elsewhere around the world.

Seldom Sensible asks,

How did the Industrial Revolution benefit the common man?

The biggest way the Industrial Revolution benefited

the common man

is that the price of goods dropped considerably.

If you could make something that's more effective

and if you could make it cheaper

because you could make more of it,

people will just simply have more stuff.

Clocks became available to people,

cars became available to people

who are absolutely middle class in the United States.

Good clothing became possible,

clothing that you didn't have to manufacture yourself,

that frees up people's time to do other things

and to experience leisure.

I'm not saying that the costs outweigh the benefits

or that the benefits outweighed the cost

that depended on who you are and where you lived.

This one's from Quora.

How did the first industrial revolution cause people

to change their skill sets?

I think of industrialization

is involving two separate phenomenons.

The first one is the division of labor

where a job is broken up into little pieces.

Instead of having one person do all the pieces at that job,

they just did the same thing over and over again.

The second piece of this is mechanization.

Where a machine is invented in order to do that job.

Division of labor tends to come earlier industrialization,

because it's a necessary step

to creating a machine that can do that job.

So, when the job you once did becomes mechanized,

the people who own your factory say,

well, we don't want you to do that anymore

because we have a machine that will do it better.

Maybe you're gonna be out of work,

maybe they'll let you do another part of the job,

but eventually that job is gonna be mechanized.

There's always has to be workers

in the Industrial Revolution

to at least move different parts around the factory.

But the jobs, as they become more and more mechanized,

they become less skilled and the employers save

an enormous amount on wages.

That's why unions were so necessary to at least regulate,

if not actually stop these kinds of innovations.

Because people realized that they were the only solution,

the only way to fight downward mobility.

In late 19th century America,

doctors invented a disease

that they referred to neurasthenia.

Neurasthenia is basically a way of describing

what we might call nervous exhaustion.

People who are sort of fed up

with the pace of modern life had to retreat to places

and resorts just to slow down and decompress.

They sold like electric caps thinking

that the electric stimulation

will help them get over neurasthenia.

It's not so much a fake disease,

but it's the first measure that industrialization

is impacting people's mental health.

The problem with all the treatment from neurasthenia

is that it's really designed for the middle class,

the people who had money to buy these kinds of things.

Workers themselves just had to put up with it

because they don't put up

with even a very anxiety-producing job

they will starve.

This one is from Rustic Bohemian.

Did leaving the farm and going to work

in a factory really seemed like heaven

to 19th century farmers?

It depends on what the 19th century farmer

was doing and what country they lived in.

In Great Britain, there's a big problem with lack of access

to any land because of something called enclosure.

Enclosure in Great Britain happens

when landowners wanted to keep the land for themselves

so that they can make a profit from it.

And there had been people on those public lands

who were farming and supporting themselves.

So, they're forced to go from the countryside into the city,

and when they're in the city,

they're willing to take difficult jobs in factories

that they wouldn't have been otherwise.

In America, it's more of a draw.

Lowell in Massachusetts is set up as a wonderful place

where not just male workers,

but women could go and have a safe place

where they can work and earn a living

and help their families.

I think it's safe to say

that as industrialization progressed,

it got worse and worse for the workers,

because their work became more regimented

and the pay decreased and the hours increased.

Eleana Little asks,

Wait, how many Industrial Revolutions have we had?

The thing about industrialization

is that because it's a very long process,

there are periods where you get lots of different boosts,

and I think some people sometimes mistake boosts

for an entirely different industrial revolution.

So, in Britain in the 1700s,

a lot of the innovation deals with energy.

So, that might be a first industrial revolution.

In America in the late 1800s,

a lot of the innovation deals with steel making.

That might be a second industrial revolution.

The Henry Ford's assembly line known as mass production

is a revolution that's really ongoing,

perhaps that's the third.

If you're sort of a modern pundit,

you might argue that the internet

is the beginning of a yet another industrial revolution.

I just tend to think of it as one long technological process

with lots of different innovations

that are worth talking about together

rather than a separate thing that can be taken out

of that long window.

This is everything for today.

Thank you for watching.

I hope you'll learn something.

This was Industrial Revolution Support.

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