A synergy between iron and steel, railroads and coal developed at the beginning of the Second Industrial Revolution. Railroads allowed cheap transportation of materials and products, which in turn led to cheap rails to build more roads. Railroads also benefited from cheap coal for their steam locomotives. This synergy led to the laying of 75,000 miles of track in the U.S. in the 1880s, the largest amount anywhere in world history.
Iron The
hot blast technique, in which the hot
flue gas from a blast furnace is used to
preheat combustion air blown into a
blast furnace, was invented and patented by
James Beaumont Neilson in 1828 at
Wilsontown Ironworks in Scotland. Hot blast was the single most important advance in fuel efficiency of the blast furnace as it greatly reduced the fuel consumption for making pig iron, and was one of the most important technologies developed during the
Industrial Revolution. Falling costs for producing
wrought iron coincided with the emergence of the railway in the 1830s. The early technique of hot blast used iron for the regenerative heating medium. Iron caused problems with expansion and contraction, which stressed the iron and caused failure.
Edward Alfred Cowper developed the Cowper stove in 1857. This stove used firebrick as a storage medium, solving the expansion and cracking problem. The Cowper stove was also capable of producing high heat, which resulted in very high throughput of blast furnaces. The Cowper stove is still used in today's blast furnaces. With the greatly reduced cost of producing pig iron with
coke using hot blast, demand grew dramatically and so did the size of blast furnaces. which is low in phosphorus.
Sidney Gilchrist Thomas developed a more sophisticated process to eliminate the
phosphorus from iron. Collaborating with his cousin,
Percy Gilchrist a chemist at the
Blaenavon Ironworks,
Wales, he patented his process in 1878;
Bolckow Vaughan & Co. in
Yorkshire was the first company to use his patented process. His process was especially valuable on the continent of Europe, where the proportion of phosphoric iron was much greater than in England, and both in Belgium and in Germany the name of the inventor became more widely known than in his own country. In America, although non-phosphoric iron largely predominated, an immense interest was taken in the invention. Other important steel products—also made using the open hearth process—were
steel cable, steel rod and sheet steel which enabled large, high-pressure boilers and high-tensile strength steel for machinery which enabled much more powerful engines, gears and axles than were previously possible. With large amounts of steel it became possible to build much more powerful guns and carriages, tanks,
armored fighting vehicles and naval ships.
Rail in 1887 The increase in steel production from the 1860s meant that railways could finally be made from steel at a competitive cost. Being a much more durable material, steel steadily replaced iron as the standard for railway rail, and due to its greater strength, longer lengths of rails could now be rolled.
Wrought iron was soft and contained flaws caused by included
dross. Iron rails could also not support heavy locomotives and were damaged by
hammer blow. The first to make durable
rails of steel rather than
wrought iron was
Robert Forester Mushet at the
Darkhill Ironworks, Gloucestershire in 1857. The first of Mushet's steel rails was sent to
Derby Midland railway station. The rails were laid at part of the station approach where the iron rails had to be renewed at least every six months, and occasionally every three. Six years later, in 1863, the rail seemed as perfect as ever, although some 700 trains had passed over it daily. This provided the basis for the accelerated construction of railways throughout the world in the late nineteenth century. The first commercially available steel rails in the US were manufactured in 1867 at the
Cambria Iron Works in
Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Steel rails lasted over ten times longer than did iron, and with the falling cost of steel, heavier weight rails were used. This allowed the use of more powerful locomotives, which could pull longer trains, and longer rail cars, all of which greatly increased the productivity of railroads. Rail became the dominant form of transport infrastructure throughout the industrialized world, producing a steady decrease in the cost of shipping seen for the rest of the century. His
inventions of
electromagnetic rotary devices were the foundation of the practical use of electricity in technology. In 1881,
Sir Joseph Swan, inventor of the first feasible
incandescent light bulb, supplied about 1,200 Swan incandescent lamps to the
Savoy Theatre in the city of Westminster, London, which was the first theater, and the first public building in the world, to be lit entirely by electricity. Swan's lightbulb had already been used in 1879 to light Mosley Street, in
Newcastle upon Tyne, the first electrical street lighting installation in the world. This set the stage for the electrification of industry and the home. The first large scale central distribution supply plant was opened at
Holborn Viaduct in London in 1882 and later at
Pearl Street Station in New York City. rotating magnetic field of an
AC motor. The three poles are each connected to a separate wire. Each wire carries current 120 degrees apart in phase. Arrows show the resulting magnetic force vectors. Three phase current is used in commerce and industry. The first modern power station in the world was built by the English
electrical engineer Sebastian de Ferranti at
Deptford. Built on an unprecedented scale and pioneering the use of high voltage (10,000V)
alternating current, it generated 800 kilowatts and supplied central London. On its completion in 1891 it supplied high-voltage
AC power that was then "stepped down" with transformers for consumer use on each street.
Electrification allowed the final major developments in manufacturing methods of the Second Industrial Revolution, namely the
assembly line and
mass production.
Electrification was called "the most important engineering achievement of the 20th century" by the
National Academy of Engineering. Electric lighting in factories greatly improved working conditions, eliminating the heat and pollution caused by gas lighting, and reducing the fire hazard to the extent that the cost of electricity for lighting was often offset by the reduction in fire insurance premiums.
Frank J. Sprague developed the first successful DC motor in 1886. By 1889 110 electric
street railways were either using his equipment or in planning. The electric street railway became a major infrastructure before 1920. The AC motor (
Induction motor) was developed in the 1890s and soon began to be used in the
electrification of industry. Household electrification did not become common until the 1920s, and then only in cities.
Fluorescent lighting was commercially introduced at the
1939 World's Fair. Electrification also allowed the inexpensive production of
electro-chemicals, such as aluminium, chlorine, sodium hydroxide, and magnesium.
Machine tools The use of
machine tools began with the onset of the
First Industrial Revolution. The increase in
mechanization required more metal parts, which were usually made of
cast iron or
wrought iron—and hand working lacked precision and was a slow and expensive process. One of the first machine tools was
John Wilkinson's boring machine, that bored a precise hole in
James Watt's first steam engine in 1774. Advances in the accuracy of machine tools can be traced to
Henry Maudslay and refined by
Joseph Whitworth. Standardization of screw threads began with
Henry Maudslay around 1800, when the modern
screw-cutting lathe made
interchangeable V-thread machine screws a practical commodity. In 1841,
Joseph Whitworth created a design that, through its adoption by many British railway companies, became the world's first national machine tool standard called
British Standard Whitworth. During the 1840s through 1860s, this standard was often used in the United States and Canada as well, in addition to myriad intra- and inter-company standards. The importance of
machine tools to mass production is shown by the fact that production of the
Ford Model T used 32,000 machine tools, most of which were powered by electricity.
Henry Ford is quoted as saying that mass production would not have been possible without electricity because it allowed placement of machine tools and other equipment in the order of the work flow.
Paper making The first paper making machine was the
Fourdrinier machine, built by Sealy and
Henry Fourdrinier, stationers in London. In 1800,
Matthias Koops, working in London, investigated the idea of using wood to make paper, and began his printing business a year later. However, his enterprise was unsuccessful due to the prohibitive cost at the time. It was in the 1840s that
Charles Fenerty in Nova Scotia and
Friedrich Gottlob Keller in Saxony both invented a successful machine which extracted the fibers from wood (as with rags) and from it, made paper. This started a new era for
paper making, and, together with the invention of the
fountain pen and the mass-produced
pencil of the same period, and in conjunction with the advent of the steam driven rotary
printing press, wood based paper caused a major transformation of the 19th century economy and society in industrialized countries. With the introduction of cheaper paper, schoolbooks, fiction, non-fiction, and newspapers became gradually available by 1900. Cheap wood based paper also allowed keeping personal diaries or writing letters and so, by 1850, the
clerk, or writer, ceased to be a high-status job. By the 1880s chemical processes for paper manufacture were in use, becoming dominant by 1900.
Petroleum The
petroleum industry, both production and
refining, began in 1848 with the first oil works in Scotland. The chemist
James Young set up a tiny business refining the crude oil in 1848. Young found that by slow distillation he could obtain a number of useful liquids from it, one of which he named "paraffine oil" because at low temperatures it congealed into a substance resembling paraffin wax. In 1850 Young built the first truly commercial oil-works and oil refinery in the world at
Bathgate, using oil extracted from locally mined
torbanite, shale, and bituminous coal to manufacture
naphtha and lubricating oils; paraffin for fuel use and solid paraffin were not sold till 1856.
Cable tool drilling was developed in ancient China and was used for drilling brine wells. The salt domes also held natural gas, which some wells produced and which was used for evaporation of the brine. Chinese well drilling technology was introduced to Europe in 1828. Although there were many efforts in the mid-19th century to drill for oil,
Edwin Drake's 1859 well near Titusville, Pennsylvania, is considered the first "modern oil well". Drake's well touched off a major boom in oil production in the United States. Drake learned of cable tool drilling from Chinese laborers in the U. S. The first primary product was kerosene for lamps and heaters. Similar developments around
Baku fed the European market. Kerosene lighting was much more efficient and less expensive than vegetable oils, tallow and whale oil. Although town gas lighting was available in some cities, kerosene produced a brighter light until the invention of the
gas mantle. Both were replaced by electricity for street lighting following the 1890s and for households during the 1920s. Gasoline was an unwanted byproduct of oil refining until automobiles were mass-produced after 1914, and gasoline shortages appeared during World War I. The invention of the
Burton process for
thermal cracking doubled the yield of gasoline, which helped alleviate the shortages. After the discovery of mauveine, many new
aniline dyes appeared (some discovered by Perkin himself), and factories producing them were constructed across Europe. Towards the end of the century, Perkin and other British companies found their research and development efforts increasingly eclipsed by the German chemical industry which became world dominant by 1914.
Maritime technology This era saw the birth of the modern ship as disparate technological advances came together. The
screw propeller was introduced in 1835 by
Francis Pettit Smith who discovered a new way of building propellers by accident. Up to that time, propellers were literally screws, of considerable length. But during the testing of a boat propelled by one, the screw snapped off, leaving a fragment shaped much like a modern boat propeller. The boat moved faster with the broken propeller. The superiority of screw against paddles was taken up by navies. Trials with Smith's
SS Archimedes, the first steam driven screw, led to the famous tug-of-war competition in 1845 between the screw-driven and the paddle steamer ; the former pulling the latter backward at 2.5 knots (4.6 km/h). The first seagoing iron steamboat was built by
Horseley Ironworks and named the
Aaron Manby. It also used an innovative oscillating engine for power. The boat was built at Tipton using temporary bolts, disassembled for transportation to London, and reassembled on the Thames in 1822, this time using permanent rivets. Other technological developments followed, including the invention of the
surface condenser, which allowed boilers to run on purified water rather than salt water, eliminating the need to stop to clean them on long sea journeys. The
Great Western, built by engineer
Isambard Kingdom Brunel, was the longest ship in the world at with a
keel and was the first to prove that transatlantic steamship services were viable. The ship was constructed mainly from wood, but Brunel added bolts and iron diagonal reinforcements to maintain the keel's strength. In addition to its steam-powered
paddle wheels, the ship carried four masts for sails. Brunel followed this up with the
Great Britain, launched in 1843 and considered the first modern ship built of metal rather than wood, powered by an engine rather than wind or oars, and driven by propeller rather than paddle wheel. Brunel's vision and engineering innovations made the building of large-scale, propeller-driven, all-metal steamships a practical reality, but the prevailing economic and industrial conditions meant that it would be several decades before transoceanic steamship travel emerged as a viable industry. Highly efficient
multiple expansion steam engines began being used on ships, allowing them to carry less coal than freight. The revolution in naval design led to the first modern
battleships in the 1870s, evolved from the
ironclad design of the 1860s. The
Devastation-class turret ships were built for the British
Royal Navy as the first class of ocean-going
capital ship that did not carry
sails, and the first whose entire main armament was mounted on top of the hull rather than inside it.
Rubber The
vulcanization of rubber, by American
Charles Goodyear and Englishman
Thomas Hancock in the 1840s paved the way for a growing rubber industry, especially the manufacture of
rubber tires.
John Boyd Dunlop developed the first practical
pneumatic tyre in 1887 in South Belfast.
Willie Hume demonstrated the supremacy of Dunlop's newly invented pneumatic tires in 1889, winning the tyre's first ever races in Ireland and then England. Dunlop's development of the pneumatic tire arrived at a crucial time in the development of
road transport and commercial production began in late 1890.
Bicycles The modern bicycle was designed by the English engineer
Harry John Lawson in 1876, although it was
John Kemp Starley who produced the first commercially successful safety bicycle a few years later. Its popularity soon grew, causing the
bike boom of the 1890s. Road networks improved greatly in the period, using the
Macadam method pioneered by Scottish engineer
John Loudon McAdam, and hard surfaced roads were built around the time of the bicycle craze of the 1890s. Modern
tarmac was patented by British civil engineer
Edgar Purnell Hooley in 1901.
Automobile German inventor
Karl Benz patented the world's
first automobile in 1886. It featured wire wheels (unlike carriages' wooden ones) with a four-stroke engine of his own design between the rear wheels, with a very advanced coil ignition and evaporative cooling rather than a radiator.
Applied science Applied science opened many opportunities. By the middle of the 19th century, there was a scientific understanding of chemistry and a fundamental understanding of
thermodynamics and by the last quarter of the century both of these sciences were near their present-day basic form. Thermodynamic principles were used in the development of
physical chemistry. Understanding chemistry greatly aided the development of basic inorganic chemical manufacturing and the aniline dye industries. The science of
metallurgy was advanced through the work of
Henry Clifton Sorby and others. Sorby pioneered
metallography, the study of metals under the
microscope, which paved the way for a scientific understanding of metal and the mass-production of steel. In 1863 he used etching with acid to study the microscopic structure of metals and was the first to understand that a small but precise quantity of carbon gave steel its strength. This paved the way for
Henry Bessemer and
Robert Forester Mushet to develop the method for mass-producing steel. Other processes were developed for purifying various elements such as
chromium,
molybdenum,
titanium,
vanadium and
nickel which could be used for making alloys with special properties, especially with steel.
Vanadium steel, for example, is strong and fatigue resistant, and was used in half the automotive steel. Alloy steels were used for ball bearings which were used in large scale bicycle production in the 1880s. Ball and roller bearings also began being used in machinery. Other important alloys are used in high temperatures, such as steam turbine blades, and stainless steels for corrosion resistance. The work of
Justus von Liebig and
August Wilhelm von Hofmann laid the groundwork for modern industrial chemistry. Liebig is considered the "father of the fertilizer industry" for his discovery of
nitrogen as an essential plant nutrient and went on to establish
Liebig's Extract of Meat Company which produced the
Oxo meat extract. Hofmann headed a school of practical chemistry in London, under the style of the
Royal College of Chemistry, introduced modern conventions for
molecular modeling and taught Perkin who discovered the first synthetic dye. The science of
thermodynamics was developed into its modern form by
Sadi Carnot,
William Rankine,
Rudolf Clausius,
William Thomson,
James Clerk Maxwell,
Ludwig Boltzmann and
J. Willard Gibbs. These scientific principles were applied to a variety of industrial concerns, including improving the efficiency of boilers and
steam turbines. The work of
Michael Faraday and others was pivotal in laying the foundations of the modern scientific understanding of electricity. Scottish scientist
James Clerk Maxwell was particularly influential—his discoveries ushered in the era of
modern physics. His most prominent achievement was to formulate a
set of equations that described electricity,
magnetism, and
optics as manifestations of the same
phenomenon, namely the
electromagnetic field. The unification of light and electrical phenomena led to the prediction of the existence of
radio waves and was the basis for the future development of radio technology by
Hughes,
Marconi and others. Maxwell himself developed the first durable
color photograph in 1861 and published the first scientific treatment of
control theory. Control theory is the basis for
process control, which is widely used in
automation, particularly for
process industries, and for controlling ships and airplanes. The discovery of
coprolites in commercial quantities in
East Anglia, led Fisons and
Edward Packard to develop one of the first large-scale commercial fertilizer plants at
Bramford, and
Snape in the 1850s. By the 1870s
superphosphates produced in those factories were being shipped around the world from the port at
Ipswich. The
Birkeland–Eyde process was developed by Norwegian industrialist and scientist
Kristian Birkeland along with his business partner
Sam Eyde in 1903, but was soon replaced by the much more efficient
Haber process, developed by the
Nobel Prize-winning chemists
Carl Bosch of
IG Farben and
Fritz Haber in Germany. The process used molecular nitrogen (N2) and methane (CH4) gas in an economically sustainable synthesis of
ammonia (NH3). The ammonia produced in the Haber process is the main raw material for production of
nitric acid.
Engines and turbines The
steam turbine was developed by Sir
Charles Parsons in 1884. His first model was connected to a
dynamo that generated 7.5 kW (10 hp) of electricity. The invention of Parson's steam turbine made cheap and plentiful electricity possible and revolutionized
marine transport and naval warfare. By the time of Parson's death, his turbine had been adopted for all major world power stations. Unlike earlier steam engines, the turbine produced rotary power rather than reciprocating power which required a crank and heavy flywheel. The large number of stages of the turbine allowed for high efficiency and reduced size by 90%. The turbine's first application was in shipping followed by electric generation in 1903. The first widely used
internal combustion engine was the
Otto type of 1876. From the 1880s until electrification it was successful in small shops because small steam engines were inefficient and required too much operator attention. The rapid expansion of telegraph networks took place throughout the century, with the first
undersea telegraph cable being built by
John Watkins Brett between France and England. The
Atlantic Telegraph Company was formed in London in 1856 to undertake construction of a commercial telegraph cable across the Atlantic Ocean. This was successfully completed on 18 July 1866 by the ship
SS Great Eastern, captained by
Sir James Anderson after many mishaps along the way. From the 1850s until 1911, British submarine cable systems dominated the world system. This was set out as a formal strategic goal, which became known as the
All Red Line. The telephone was patented in 1876 by
Alexander Graham Bell, and like the early telegraph, it was used mainly to speed business transactions. As mentioned above, one of the most important scientific advancements in all of history was the unification of light, electricity and magnetism through
Maxwell's electromagnetic theory. A scientific understanding of electricity was necessary for the development of efficient electric generators, motors and transformers.
David Edward Hughes and
Heinrich Hertz both demonstrated and confirmed the phenomenon of electromagnetic waves that had been predicted by Maxwell. He founded
The Wireless Telegraph & Signal Company in Britain in 1897 and in the same year transmitted
Morse code across
Salisbury Plain, sent the first ever wireless communication over open sea and made the first transatlantic transmission in 1901 from
Poldhu, Cornwall to
Signal Hill,
Newfoundland. Marconi built high-powered stations on both sides of the Atlantic and began a commercial service to transmit nightly news summaries to subscribing ships in 1904. The key development of the
vacuum tube by Sir
John Ambrose Fleming in 1904 underpinned the development of modern electronics and radio broadcasting.
Lee De Forest's subsequent invention of the
triode allowed the amplification of electronic signals, which paved the way for radio broadcasting in the 1920s.
Modern business management Railroads are credited with creating the modern
business enterprise by scholars such as Alfred Chandler. Previously, the management of most businesses had consisted of individual owners or groups of partners, some of whom often had little daily hands-on operations involvement. Centralized expertise in the home office was not enough. A railroad required expertise available across the whole length of its trackage, to deal with daily crises, breakdowns and bad weather. A collision in Massachusetts in 1841 led to a call for safety reform. This led to the reorganization of railroads into different departments with clear lines of management authority. When the telegraph became available, companies built telegraph lines along the railroads to keep track of trains. Railroads involved complex operations and employed extremely large amounts of capital and ran a more complicated business compared to anything previous. Consequently, they needed better ways to track costs. For example, to calculate rates they needed to know the cost of a ton-mile of freight. They also needed to keep track of cars, which could go missing for months at a time. This led to what was called "railroad accounting", which was later adopted by steel and other industries, and eventually became modern accounting. Later in the Second Industrial Revolution,
Frederick Winslow Taylor and others in America developed the concept of
scientific management or
Taylorism. Scientific management initially concentrated on reducing the steps taken in performing work (such as bricklaying or shoveling) by using analysis such as
time-and-motion studies, but the concepts evolved into fields such as
industrial engineering,
manufacturing engineering, and
business management that helped to completely restructure the operations of factories, and later entire segments of the economy. Taylor's core principles included: • replacing rule-of-thumb work methods with methods based on a scientific study of the tasks • scientifically selecting, training, and developing each employee rather than passively leaving them to train themselves • providing "detailed instruction and supervision of each worker in the performance of that worker's discrete task" • dividing work nearly equally between managers and workers, such that the managers apply scientific-management principles to planning the work and the workers actually perform the tasks ==Socio-economic impacts==