The Industrial Revolution in America from power-driven machinery to manufacturing. How outside factors were

Essay by doublespeak March 2004

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The Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution can be described as the application of power-driven machinery to manufacturing.

During the 19th century, new approaches to manufacturing, such as Eli Whitney's interchangeable parts for muskets, took industry out of American households and artisans' workshops and put it, instead, in large semi-mechanized factories. The factory system mad mass production possible - the production of goods in large quantities. This development eliminated costly craftsmen who created one object from start to finish. Consequently, factory manufacturing became the cheapest way to produce goods- and eventually the most profitable. These changes in manufacturing brought about an Industrial Revolution- a massive change in social and economic organization resulting from the replacement of hand tools by machines and the development of large scale industrial revolution.

This industrial revolution actually first began in Great Britain. It was Britain, during the 18th century that inventors first came up with ways to generate power using swiftly flowing streams and burning bountiful supplies of coal.

Inventors then developed power driven machinery and ways to use this machinery to quickly mass- produce goods such as textiles.

Since advances in diet, medicine, and sanitation enabled people to live longer, the country soon had more people than it had jobs- making labor, another important resource, abundantly available and cheap. British merchants built the first factories, and when these factories prospered, their owners had the money to build more factories, invent more labor- saving machines, and industrialize the nation.

Many of the same resources that enabled the British to mechanize industries and develop profitable large scale factory operations were also plentiful in the U.S. : rushing rivers, rich deposits of coal and iron ore, and a steady stream of unskilled immigrants eager to fund work. However, the primary source of income in America after the...