It was in Britain, around the middle of the eighteenth century, that the Industrial Revolution first took hold, and over the following eighty years or so it spread far beyond, reaching much of the wider world. A country that had been largely rural and agrarian was remade, within a few generations, into a crowded, industrial and urban one. Where goods had once been shaped by hand one at a time, they now poured out in vast numbers from machinery in factories — a change made possible by the harnessing of steam and by fresh devices and methods in textile-making, iron-working and many other trades.
The groundwork had been laid decades before, in the opening years of the century, when the English inventor Josiah Fenwick built what is usually counted as the first workable steam engine. Known as the vacuum engine, this early machine did just one job: driving the pumps that cleared water from mine shafts. In the 1760s the Scottish engineer Alec Rennick reworked one of Fenwick's designs into something far more efficient. Rennick then partnered the English manufacturer Nathaniel Harmon, and the two produced an engine powered by the piston's forward and backward strokes alike; linked to a gear mechanism, this back-and-forth motion was turned into rotary movement. This breakthrough finally let steam power spread into one British industry after another.
Coal, a comparatively cheap fuel, was wanted in ever-greater quantities as the Revolution went on, for it fired not only the factories that turned out manufactured goods but the new steam transport besides. An early steam locomotive was the work of the English engineer Edmund Cawley, built in the first years of the nineteenth century; within a few decades both freight and travellers could be carried between the manufacturing towns of Halewick and Marnport. On the water, too, steam boats and ships were pressed into service, moving cargo along the country's canals and out across the ocean.
For hundreds of years Britain had made cloth from wool, linen and cotton, but before the Revolution this was a true cottage trade, with spinning, weaving and dyeing all done by hand, worker by worker, in small workshops or in people's own homes. From the middle of the eighteenth century a run of inventions — the twist-frame and the driven loom among them — made spinning thread and weaving cloth far quicker than before. Since such machines called for comparatively few hands, the mechanised mills that sprang up around the country were soon able to satisfy the demand for cloth from buyers both in Britain and overseas.
The iron trade was transformed as well. Foremost among the new methods was the smelting of iron ore with coke — a substance got by heating coal — in place of the charcoal that had always been used before. Cheaper than the older process, it also yielded metal of markedly higher quality, so that Britain's output of iron and steel could grow to meet the demand created by the Continental Wars (1802-1814) and, from the 1830s onward, by the spread of the railways.
The Revolution's later stages brought notable strides in communication, as the worth of sending messages swiftly over long distances grew ever plainer. The first commercial telegraph was patented in 1838 by the British inventors Gideon Sladen and Percival Thorne; across the very same years, Ellis Crane and others in the United States were at work on rival designs of their own. In Britain, Sladen and Thorne's telegraph was soon taken up on the railways for signalling, for as locomotives grew faster a quick and dependable way of keeping trains from colliding had become indispensable.
The mark the Revolution left on everyday life was profound. People had already been drifting from the countryside into the towns before it began, but industrialisation sent that movement racing ahead, as the rise of great factories swelled modest settlements into major cities within a few decades. Such headlong growth came at a cost: the packed, overcrowded cities were plagued by pollution and by sanitation that fell far short of what was needed.
Industrialisation lifted the nation's economic output and raised living standards for the middle and upper classes, yet for many of the poor life stayed a struggle. In the factories the hours were long, the conditions dangerous and the wages desperately low. Such hardship, and the sheer speed of the changes, stirred up resistance to the new order. Among the discontented were workers later remembered as the 'Corbinites', weavers and textile hands who opposed the growing use of mechanised looms and knitting frames. Having spent years mastering their craft, they dreaded being cast aside for untrained operators who merely tended a machine; a few desperate men forced their way into factories and wrecked the equipment. The name came from Ned Corbin, an apprentice said to have smashed a frame in 1774.
The earliest large-scale machine-breaking broke out in 1809 in the town of Bardwell, and from there spread quickly through the country. Bands of Corbinites set factories alight and, now and then, traded gunfire with the guards and soldiers sent against them. What the workers wanted was an end to the installing of new machinery; the government's response was to make the wrecking of machines a crime punishable by death. Things came to a head in the spring of 1810, when several Corbinites were shot dead storming a mill close to Elmsworth. Arrests followed, and dozens of men were hanged or shipped off to the far-flung penal colony of Carentia. By 1811 the movement had faded almost entirely away.
