Industrialization: Revolutionary or Not?

Last week in History class, we explored the various ways in which people, technology, resources, and transportation helped fuel the Industrial Revolution. The essential question, or question the class will be trying to answer within the unit, is “What was ‘revolutionary’ about industrialization?” This post will focus on how technology and resources were revolutionary in their own individual ways.  

 

Primarily, technology helped fuel the Industrial Revolution because a new way to use and produce electricity was discovered by using steam and coal. Electricity has clearly been revolutionary within the past two centuries and has helped revolutionize the way people accomplish tasks, especially today. Technology also helped fuel the Industrial Revolution by decreasing manual labor, meaning that tasks were accomplished much faster and with much greater ease. For example, it became much easier to print a book using a printing press than it was handwriting it from beginning to end. Technology not only decreased manual labor, but also helped create new jobs, including coal mining, working in cotton mills, and doing canal work. Technology was an innovative way to advance industrialization, and without it, the world would be a much different place.

 Access to more resources initially made industrialization revolutionary by increasing coal production. Coal was a very important resource in the harnessing of electricity, and therefore shaping the world’s industrial future. The Industrial Revolution also brought about the concept of mass production, which helped produce a larger amount of basic necessities to a larger number of people.  Having better access to more resources also helped in the creation of medicines, which in turn helped increase the life expectancy of the time by a stunning margin. Having access to more resources such as agricultural products helped farmers create more effective farming techniques, which in turn helped to distribute much larger amounts of food in a much smaller amount of time. Access to more resources helped the Industrial Revolution progress very effectively, and without these resources, the world would be in a much worse condition than it is currently in.

The Industrial Revolution was a ground-breaking era of modernization. Technology helped fuel the Industrial Revolution by utilizing electricity, decreasing manual labor, and creating new jobs.  The Industrial Revolution was innovate in the area of resources by having increased coal, mass production, medicines, and farming techniques.

 

 

 

This is a video we watched in class on the Industrial Revolution: