50 Fun Facts About Industrial Revolution

Which Scottish engineer began rating steam engines in horsepower, showing buyers how many animals each could replace?

James Watt fixed one horsepower at 33,000 foot-pounds of work a minute. The metric unit of power that later displaced it, the watt, was named after him.

Which textile workers wrecked machines in raids across England from 1811 in the name of a legendary apprentice?

Luddites signed their threats 'Ned Ludd', after an apprentice said to have smashed two stocking frames in 1779. Today the word means anyone opposed to new technology.

Which novelist left school at twelve to work in a London boot-blacking factory while his father sat in debtors' prison?

Charles Dickens pasted labels on pots of blacking for six shillings a week. He later wrote Hard Times, his only novel-length treatment of the industrial working class.

Which trade's 'climbing boys', some as young as four, were finally protected by a British law passed in 1875?

Chimney sweeping sent small boys up hot flues as narrow as nine inches square. The 1875 law followed the death of twelve-year-old George Brewster, who stuck fast inside a hospital flue.

Which Quaker chocolate family built the model village of Bournville beside its factory near Birmingham?

Cadbury moved its cocoa works out of central Birmingham to a greenfield site to expand. Because George Cadbury was a temperance Quaker, no pub has ever been built in Bournville.

Which American inventor's 1793 cotton gin made Southern plantations, and slavery, far more profitable?

Eli Whitney's gin could clean about 50 pounds of cotton a day, against about a pound by hand. He still lost much of his profit in legal battles over patent infringement.

Which disease did physician John Snow trace to a contaminated water pump on London's Broad Street in 1854?

Cholera spared the workers at the Broad Street brewery, who drank their daily beer allowance instead of well water. Snow's findings persuaded officials to remove the pump handle.

Which steam locomotive won the 1829 Rainhill Trials at up to 30 mph, the only entrant to finish the course?

Rocket earned its builders a £500 prize. Its lighter rival Novelty, the last challenger to drop out, was considerably faster than the other also-rans.

Which steel magnate, once a bobbin boy in a cotton mill, later gave away almost 90 percent of his fortune?

Andrew Carnegie earned his first wages changing spools of thread twelve hours a day, six days a week. He went on to fund more than 2,500 libraries.

Which English city, home to 108 cotton mills at its 1853 peak, earned the nickname Cottonopolis?

Manchester was a metropolis at the heart of the cotton trade, hence the name. Its mills later shifted to nearby towns while the city turned to warehouses and banking.

Which waterway, mocked as 'Clinton's Folly' while it was being dug, linked the Hudson River to the Great Lakes in 1825?

Erie Canal traffic sped the settlement of the Great Lakes region and the rise of New York. The mockers were aiming at its champion, Governor DeWitt Clinton.

Which former assistant bookkeeper founded Standard Oil in 1870 and went on to control about 90% of America's oil?

John D. Rockefeller sold what rivals dumped in rivers, turning waste into lubricating oil and paraffin wax, and became the richest person in the United States.

Which portrait painter turned inventor sent a phrase from the Book of Numbers along a telegraph wire in 1844?

Samuel Morse sent the words from the Capitol in Washington to Baltimore, along a 38-mile line that Congress had funded with $30,000.

Which inventor's Menlo Park laboratory in New Jersey is now considered the first industrial research laboratory?

Thomas Edison built the lab to create knowledge and then control its application. Nicknamed the Wizard of Menlo Park, he drove his staff to exhaustion.

Which German exile in London studied in the British Museum's reading room while writing Das Kapital?

Karl Marx saw only the first volume into print, in 1867. His collaborator Friedrich Engels completed the other two from the manuscripts.

Which Scottish economist used ten men sharing the work of a pin factory to explain the division of labor in 1776?

Adam Smith made the case in The Wealth of Nations, which also gave the world the 'invisible hand', a phrase the book uses only once.

In which present-day state was the golden spike driven in 1869 to complete America's first transcontinental railroad?

Utah hosted an anticlimax: Leland Stanford swung at the spike and missed, yet the single word 'done' was flashed by telegraph around the country anyway.

Which engineer built the Great Western Railway and the first iron-hulled, propeller-driven ship to cross the Atlantic?

Isambard Brunel once got a half-sovereign stuck in his windpipe during a conjuring trick for his children; he was strapped to a board and turned upside down to jerk it free.

Which American engineer's steamboat carried passengers up the Hudson River from New York City to Albany in 1807?

Robert Fulton's Clermont made the upriver trip in 32 hours. Years earlier he had designed Nautilus, a working submarine, for Napoleon's France.

Which term names the shift of people from farms to cities, seen as London grew fivefold between 1801 and 1891?

Urbanization remade England and Wales: the share of people living in cities of more than 20,000 jumped from 17% in 1801 to 54% in 1891.

Which machine did James Hargreaves invent in the 1760s so that one worker could spin eight spools of yarn at once?

The spinning jenny cut yarn prices so sharply that angry Blackburn spinners broke into Hargreaves's house and smashed his machines, forcing him to flee to Nottingham in 1768.

Which apprentice memorized British textile machinery, sailed to America in 1789 and was called a traitor back home?

Samuel Slater rebuilt the water-powered machines from memory in Rhode Island. Americans later hailed him as the father of the American factory system.

Which Massachusetts mill town recruited farmers' daughters as 'mill girls' and housed them in boarding houses?

Lowell had recruited over 8,000 mill workers by 1840, nearly three-quarters of them women. They ran book clubs and published their own journal, the Lowell Offering.

Which Chicago industry's 'disassembly lines' inspired the moving assembly line that Ford introduced for the Model T?

Meatpacking plants moved carcasses past butchers on a conveyor, and a Ford man visiting Swift's Chicago slaughterhouse took note. Model T build time fell from 12.5 hours to 93 minutes.

Which manufacturing idea did Honoré Blanc show Thomas Jefferson in 1785 using musket locks picked at random from a pile?

Interchangeable parts took decades to master: early 'identical' American muskets were still costly and handmade by skilled workmen. The federal armories had perfected the method by 1853.

Which place's observatory time did the Great Western Railway adopt in 1840, replacing a patchwork of local times?

Greenwich time, later wired along the tracks by telegraph, became the default across Britain as 'railway time'. The law caught up only in 1880.

Thomas Newcomen's atmospheric steam engine of 1712 was used principally for which job across Britain and Europe?

Pumping water from mines was urgent because flooding plagued coal and tin pits alike. Newcomen knew the problem first-hand: as an ironmonger he sold tools to the mining industry.

Which term names the pre-factory system where merchants supplied raw materials for families to work up at home?

Cottage industry was also called the putting-out system, because the merchant 'put out' the materials and came back for the finished goods.

Which French phrase for leaving business alone is said to come from a merchant's reply to finance minister Colbert?

Laissez-faire likely began as 'Laissez-nous faire' ('leave it to us'), the answer when Colbert asked around 1681 how the state could help French merchants.

Which chemist's 1815 safety lamp wrapped its flame in wire gauze so that miners' lights would not ignite firedamp?

Humphry Davy was rewarded with £2,000 worth of silver, while engine-wright George Stephenson, who had built a rival lamp, was accused of stealing the idea.

Joseph Marie Jacquard's loom of 1804 wove complex patterns automatically by reading instructions from a chain of what?

Punched cards could be swapped to change the pattern, an idea that inspired Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, a forerunner of the computer.

Which English inventor patented a converter in 1856 that made cheap steel by blowing air through molten pig iron?

Henry Bessemer was drawn to steel while trying to build better guns, and spent five years hunting for a cheap metal for military ordnance before his converter worked.

Abraham Darby's 1709 breakthrough at Coalbrookdale was smelting iron with which fuel in place of scarce charcoal?

Coke was already used to fuel malting ovens, where it kept coal's sulphur from tainting the beer. Darby had seen it as an apprentice to a maker of malt mills.

The world's first major cast-iron bridge, opened in Shropshire in 1781, spans which English river?

The Severn was a key trade route but a barrier to travel around its deep gorge. With no rulebook for iron, the builders copied carpentry joints such as dovetails.

Which New Lanark mill owner campaigned for a day split equally into eight hours each of labour, recreation and rest?

Robert Owen later sank most of his fortune into New Harmony, Indiana, an experimental socialist community he set up after moving to America in 1824.

Which English cleric argued in a 1798 essay that population growth would always swallow up gains in food production?

Thomas Malthus, an Anglican curate, saw the squeeze as divinely imposed to teach virtuous behavior. The outcry kept him reworking the essay through six editions.

Which Staffordshire potter, grandfather of Charles Darwin, pioneered money-back guarantees and illustrated catalogues?

Josiah Wedgwood also pioneered direct mail, free delivery and buy-one-get-one-free. His daughter Susannah married Robert Darwin and became the naturalist's mother.

Which working-class movement of the 1830s and 1840s petitioned Parliament for votes for all men and secret ballots?

Chartists presented petitions signed by millions of working people. After the movement died out, Britain adopted all but one of its six demands.

Which Birmingham manufacturer told James Boswell that his factory sold what the whole world wanted, namely power?

Matthew Boulton was selling steam engines. He built the Soho Manufactory near Birmingham and later founded the Soho Mint, which he soon adapted to steam power.

Which engineer's steam locomotive made the world's first locomotive-hauled railway journey at a Welsh ironworks in 1804?

Richard Trevithick, born in the mining heartland of Cornwall, also developed the first high-pressure steam engine. In 1808 he built a show locomotive named Catch Me Who Can.

Which country, powered by the coalfields of Wallonia, was the second in the world to undergo an industrial revolution?

Belgium owed much to a transplanted Englishman, John Cockerill, who led its new industry. Four of Wallonia's best-preserved coal-mining sites now share a World Heritage listing.

Which Oxford historian's lectures, published after his death at 30, popularised the term 'Industrial Revolution'?

Arnold Toynbee died in 1883, though French and German writers had used the phrase decades earlier. Toynbee Hall in London's Whitechapel was named in his honour.

Which former Navy pay agent patented a puddling furnace in 1784 that refined pig iron into higher-quality wrought iron?

Henry Cort built on other men's ideas, and his process paid off only in the 1790s, after Welsh ironmasters at Merthyr Tydfil improved it further.

Which reformer, nicknamed the 'Poor Man's Earl', introduced the 1842 law that took women and children out of coal mines?

Lord Shaftesbury is honoured by the fountain at Piccadilly Circus, erected in 1893. Its winged archer is popularly, if mistakenly, known as Eros.

The Swing Riots of 1830, led in name by the fictitious Captain Swing, began with the wrecking of which farm equipment?

Threshing machines displaced the hand flail, and one Kent journalist traced the name 'Swing' to the swinging stick of that very tool.

Which British laws of 1799 and 1800, passed under Pitt the Younger, banned trade unions and collective bargaining?

Combination Acts answered wartime fears that workers would strike to force the government's hand. Sympathy for the workers' plight brought repeal in 1824.

Which poet's verses setting grim mills against a green England are now sung as the hymn Jerusalem?

William Blake wrote the lines in the preface to his epic Milton. They became a hymn only in 1916, when Hubert Parry set them to music.

Which product did the women and girls of Bryant & May's Bow factory make, striking in 1888 over fines and 'phossy jaw'?

Matches were tipped with white phosphorus, which caused the bone disease behind the nickname. The strike succeeded, and a Union of Women Matchmakers formed later that year.

Which building, designed by a duke's head gardener, housed London's Great Exhibition of 1851 in Hyde Park?

Crystal Palace was three times the size of St Paul's Cathedral. Rebuilt in south London after the show, it stood until a fire destroyed it in 1936.

Which American, jailed for debt many times, discovered vulcanization by heating rubber and sulfur on a hot stove?

Charles Goodyear died about $200,000 in debt. The tire company that carries his name was founded almost four decades after his death, by Frank Seiberling.