Technological Transformations: From Industrial Revolution to Modern Age
Technology in the Modern Age
At the end of the Middle Ages, cities were the main feature of Western life. In 1600, London and Amsterdam had populations over 100,000, and Paris twice that amount. Germans, English, Spanish, and French began to build global empires. In the early eighteenth century, capital resources and banking systems were well-established in Britain to start investing in mass production techniques, satisfying middle-class aspirations. The Industrial Revolution began in England due to necessary technical resources, strong institutional support, and an extensive sales network. Economic changes, including increased wealth distribution, middle-class power growth, declining importance of land as wealth, and opportunistic businesses, contributed to the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain. The first production appeared in 1740, focusing on the textile industry (see Industrial System). Most English wore woolen garments, but within 100 years, cotton displaced rough wool, especially after Eli Whitney’s cotton gin invention in 1793 (U.S.). British inventions like carding machines, John Kay’s flying shuttle, James Hargreaves’s Jenny, and Samuel Crompton’s loom improvements integrated with the steam engine, developed in Britain by Thomas Newcomen, James Watt, and Richard Trevithick, and in the United States by Oliver Evans. In 35 years (1790-1830), over 100,000 mechanical looms were launched in the British Isles. A significant weaving innovation was introduced in France in 1801 by Joseph Jacquard, using punched cards to determine warp thread location. Punch cards inspired mathematician Charles Babbage to design a calculating machine, foreshadowing the computer revolution of the late twentieth century.
New Work Practices
The Industrial Revolution led to a new division of labor model, creating the modern factory, a technological network where workers didn’t need to be craftsmen or have specific knowledge. Factories introduced an impersonal wage-based remuneration process. Due to financial risks in industrial development, factory workers faced constant dismissal threats.
The factory system prevailed despite resistance from English guilds and artisans, who saw a threat to their income and lifestyle. In musket manufacturing, dealers fought against interchangeable parts and mass production. However, the factory system became a basic institution of modern technology, and the labor of men, women, and children became a commodity in the production process.
Final product assembly (e.g., a lawn mower or sewing machine) is an integrated, collective effort. This increasingly specified division of labor defined work in the new industrial society, with its inherent tedium.
Accelerating Innovation
Increasing agricultural productivity and medical science advancements led Western society to have great faith in positive technological change, despite its downsides. Engineering feats like the Suez Canal, the Panama Canal, and the Eiffel Tower (1889) produced pride and astonishment. The telegraph and railroad interconnected major cities. In the late nineteenth century, Thomas Edison’s light bulb began replacing candles and lamps. Within thirty years, all industrialized nations generated electrical power for lighting and other systems.
Inventions like the telephone, radio, automobile, and airplane improved lives and increased societal respect for technology. Mass production with assembly lines for cars and appliances, and seemingly limitless new machines for various tasks, made innovation acceptance a way of life in advanced countries, especially the United States. Industrial societies rapidly transformed through increased mobility, fast communication, and an avalanche of media information.
World War I and the Great Depression forced a readjustment of this rapid technological explosion. Submarines, weapons, armor, and chemical weapons revealed technology’s destructive side. Worldwide unemployment and capitalist institution disasters in the 1930s led to strong criticism of technological progress benefits.
World War II brought the development of a weapon that threatened life on the planet: the atomic bomb. The Manhattan Project, the program to build the first atomic bombs, was the largest and most expensive technological effort in history. This program initiated an era of weapons of mass destruction and large-scale, government-funded scientific projects from major laboratories. A peaceful technology emerging from World War II (computers, transistors, electronics, and miniaturization trends) significantly impacted society (see Microprocessor). These possibilities quickly became reality, resulting in labor substitution by automated systems and rapid, radical changes in working methods and practices.