The Industrial Revolution

Great Britain around 1750: favourable factors interact and set the Industrial Revolution in motion.The population grows, people move from the countryside to the cities, stock exchanges and banks initiate a new monetary concept. For the first time, stocks and bonds provide the capital for industrial investment: Nowhere else in Europe can the economy develop so freely. The lucrative trilateral trade with the colonies creates a middle class: financially strong and innovative. Entrepreneurs like Richard Arkwright and Samuel Greg invest in new technologies. Factory work, the steam engine and the railway rapidly accelerate economic growth. The factory owners make a profit - the workers are exploited: wage dumping, housing shortage, hunger and mass misery are the flipside of the Industrial Revolution. Social reforms remain the exception.

Richard Arkwright, a barber and wigmaker, revolutionises textile production: in 1769, he applies for a patent for his Waterframe, a spinning machine. For the first time, cotton spindles are no longer operated by hand, but mechanically driven by hydropower, which allows three times as much yarn to be spun in a superior quality. In 1771, together with partners, he founds Cromford Mill - the first factory in the world, where all machines are centrally driven by hydropower. Arkwright's factory system becomes a model for the entire world, including Germany. In Ratingen, German entrepreneur Johann Gottfried Brügelmann proudly names his factory after the English model: Cromford.

At times, about 2,000 people work in Samuel Greg's Quarry Bank Mill factory, more than half of them children, often from the age of 6. They are cheap labour, easy to train and discipline. The children’s work is exhausting and dangerous: they have to clean the floor or reattach torn threads while the machines are running. Monotonous work, excessive working hours – which generates little criticism. The factory owners see themselves as benefactors in taking poor children off the streets and offering them the opportunity to feed themselves. Samuel Greg has a house built especially for his factory children. More than other factory owner, he cares for his child workers, teaching them to read and write.

Spinning and weaving are among the oldest crafts of all, yet truly revolutionary technical innovations do not appear until the mid-18th century. In 1733, the English wool weaver John Kay invents the The Flying Shuttle, which makes the work easier and more productive. England is thirsting for yarn and the answer is The Spinning Jenny. The still manually-operated spinning machine can soon work with eighty spindles simultaneously. In 1769, Richard Arkwright replaces the manual drive of the spindles with hydropower. Other, more powerful spinning machines are developed - and in 1785, the invention of the mechanical loom leads to mass production in the weaving industry. The textile industry becomes the key sector of the Industrial Revolution.

Britain is rich in coal and iron ore - the raw materials of the Industrial Revolution. The "iron age" begins in Coalbrookdale in 1709. The Darby family of entrepreneurs revolutionises iron processing in their ironworks and foundries, developing completely new smelting procedures using coke - much earlier than in the rest of Europe. Coal and iron replace wood as fuel and material – a major prerequisite for the dawning industrial age. The workers in Coalbrookdale supply the iron parts for the new textile machines, cast railway tracks and steam engine boilers. Coalbrookdale becomes world-famous for the Ironbridge over the Severn, from 1779, the first bridge made entirely of iron.

Water, wind and muscle power are no longer sufficient to drive industrial development forward. The mining industry especially needs new forms of energy production in the 18th century. English miners are digging to ever greater depths and have to pump out the mine water. For a long time, engineers have been experimenting with steam power and, at the end of the 1770s, James Watt and Matthew Boulton achieve a breakthrough: the first steam engines to work in the mines of Cornwall and Wales. In 1782, Watt develops the rotary steam engine. Further technical improvements are to follow. Steam power becomes a reliable source of energy and symbol of a new age. For the first time in their history, people are independent of natural energy sources.

Engineer Richard Trevithick brings steam power to the rails: In 1804, his locomotive travels nine miles in a colliery in South Wales - an enormous distance at the time. But there are many obstacles to overcome before the railway is accepted as a means of public transport: Fear of the fire-spewing monster is rampant. In 1830, George Stephenson builds the first railway line between Manchester and Liverpool. England soon has a rail network that ensures fast transport between ports, raw material sites and industrial cities. The railway rapidly accelerates economic growth and makes people mobile to a previously unimaginable degree.

Industrialisation also has its dark side: Through the factory system, people are ruthlessly exploited, without any prospects for life. The entrepreneur Robert Owen seeks to change this and implement his vision of a better world in New Lanark, Scotland, where more than 1,500 people are working in the cotton mills, including many children. Owen reduces working hours and pays fairer wages. Children go to school and do not have to work in the factory until the age of ten. With patience and constant monitoring, Owen imposes his reforms - making New Lanark the largest cotton mill in Scotland. Nevertheless, he finds few followers.