Second Industrial Revolution

The Second Industrial Revolution, also known as the Technological Revolution, was a phase of the larger Industrial Revolution in the period from 1820 to 1914 that saw rapid industrial development in Western Europe (Britain, Germany, France, the Low Countries, Denmark), the United States (Northeast and Great Lakes) and, after 1870, in Japan. It followed on from the First Industrial Revolution that began in Britain in the late 18th century that then spread throughout Western Europe and North America. The concept was introduced by Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution (1915), but David Landes's use of the term in a 1966 essay and in 'The Unbound Prometheus' (1972) standardized scholarly definitions of the term, which was most intensely promoted by American historian Alfred Chandler (1918–2007). However some continue to express reservations about its use.James Hull, "The Second Industrial Revolution: The History of a Concept," Storia Della Storiografia, 1999, Issue 36, pp 81-90

Industry

The factory system centralized production in a separate building funded and directed by specialists (as opposed to work at home). The division of labor made both unskilled and skilled labor more productive, and led to a rapid growth of population in industrial centers. The most important engines of change were iron and steel mills, railways, coal and textile mills. Rapid advances in technology and engineering created a "take-off" in which one advance stimulated two more. Like the first industrial revolution, the second supported population growth and saw most governments (not including Britain) protect their national economies with tariffs. The wide-ranging social impact of both revolutions included the remaking of the working class as new technologies appeared; the creation of a larger, increasingly professional, middle class; the decline of child labor; and the dramatic growth of a consumer-based, material culture.Hull (1996) By 1900, the leaders in industrial production were the U.S. with 24% of the world total, followed by Britain (19%), Germany (13%), Russia (9%) and France (7%). Europe together accounted for 62%. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987) p. 149, based on Paul Bairoch, "International Industrialization Levels from 1750 to 1980," Journal of European Economic History (1982) v. 11

Technology

Landes (2003) stresses the importance of new technologies, especially electricity, the internal combustion engine, new materials and substances, including alloys and chemicals, and communication technologies such as the telegraph and radio. Crucial steel making inventions such as the Bessemer and Siemens open hearth furnace occurred in the decades preceding 1871, producing cheaper steel which allowed cheaper, quicker steam transport. While the first was centered on iron, and steam technologies and textile production, the second revolved around steel, railroads, electricity, and chemicals. Major innovations occurred in the chemical, electrical, petroleum, and steel industries. Specific advancements included the introduction of oil fired steam turbine and internal combustion driven steel ships, the development of the airplane, the practical commercialization of the automobile, mass production of consumer goods, the perfection of canning, mechanical refrigeration and other food preservation techniques, and the invention of the telephone.Smil (2005) Aluminum and synthetic fibers (often called "synthetic silk" prior to the 1920s) required years of refinement to both reduce their price and improve quality and utility. This was achieved by the work of professional scientists, generally on an individual basis prior to 1914 and in commercial research laboratories afterward.

Britain

New products and services were introduced which greatly increased international trade. Improvements in steam engine design and the wide availability of cheap steel meant that slow, sailing ships were replaced with faster steamship, which could handle more trade with smaller crews. The chemical industries also moved to the forefront. Britain invested less in technological research than the U.S. and Germany, which caught up. Michael Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction, and his inventions of electromagnetic rotary devices formed the foundation of electric motor technology. The Bessemer process was the first inexpensive industrial process for the mass-production of steel from molten pig iron. The process named after its inventor Sir Henry Bessemer, revolutionized steel manufacture by decreasing its cost, from £40 per long ton to £6-7 per long ton during its introduction, along with greatly increasing the scale and speed of production of this vital raw material. The process also decreased the labor requirements for steel-making. After the introduction of the Bessemer process, steel and wrought iron became similarly priced, and most manufacturers turned to steel. The availability of cheap steel allowed large bridges to be built and enabled the construction of railroads, skyscrapers, and large ships.{{Cite book | publisher = Offices of "Engineering," | last = Bessemer | first = Sir Henry | title = Sir Henry Bessemer, F.R.S. | date = 1905 }} p172. 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 possible previously. With large amounts of steel it became possible to build much more powerful guns and carriages, tanks, armored fighting vehicles and naval ships. Industrial steel also made possible the building of giant turbines and generators thus making the harnessing of water and steam power possible. The steam turbine invented by Sir Charles Parsons in 1884, has almost completely replaced the reciprocating piston steam engine primarily because of its greater thermal efficiency and higher power-to-weight ratio.http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/444719/Sir-Charles-Algernon-Parsons As the turbine generates rotary motion, it is particularly suited to be used to drive an electrical generator – about 80% of all electricity generation in the world is by use of steam turbines. The introduction of the large scale steel production process perfected by Henry Bessemer, paved the way to mass industrialisation as observed in the 19th-20th centuries. The development of more intricate and efficient machines along with mass production techniques (after 1910) greatly expanded output and lowered production costs. As a result, production often exceeded domestic demand. Among the new conditions, more markedly evident in Britain, the forerunner of Europe's industrial states, were the long-term effects of the severe Long Depression of 1873-1896, which had followed fifteen years of great economic instability. Businesses in practically every industry suffered from lengthy periods of low — and falling — profit rates and price deflation after 1873.

Belgium

Belgium provided an ideal model for showing the value of the railways for speeding the Second Industrial Revolution. After 1830, when it broke away from the Netherlands and became a new nation, it decided to stimulate industry. It planned and funded a simple cross-shaped system that connected the major cities, ports and mining areas, and linked to neighboring countries. Belgium thus became the railway center of the region. The system was very soundly built along British lines, so that profits were low but the infrastructure necessary for rapid industrial growth was put in place.Patrick O’Brien, Railways and the Economic Development of Western Europe, 1830-1914 (1983)

United States

The Gilded Age in America was based on heavy industry such as factories, railroads and coal mining. The iconic event was the opening of the First Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, providing six-day service between the East Coast and San Francisco.Stephen E. Ambrose, Nothing Like It In The World; The men who built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 (2000) During the Gilded Age, American manufacturing production passed Britain and took world leadership. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987) p. 149 Railroad mileage tripled between 1860 and 1880, and tripled again by 1920, opening new areas to commercial farming, creating a truly national marketplace and inspiring a boom in coal mining and steel production. The voracious appetite for capital of the great trunk railroads facilitated the consolidation of the nation's financial market in Wall Street. By 1900, the process of economic concentration had extended into most branches of industry—a few large corporations, called "trusts", dominated in steel, oil, sugar, meatpacking, and the manufacture of agriculture machinery. Other major components of this infrastructure were the new methods for fabricating steel, especially the Bessemer process. The first billion-dollar corporation was United States Steel, formed by financier J. P. Morgan in 1901, who purchased and consolidated steel firms built by Andrew Carnegie and others.Edward C. Kirkland, Industry Comes of Age, Business, Labor, and Public Policy 1860-1897 (1961) Increased mechanization of industry is a major mark of the Gilded Age's search for cheaper ways to create more product. Frederick Winslow Taylor observed that worker efficiency in steel could be improved through the use of machines to make fewer motions in less time. His redesign increased the speed of factory machines and the productivity of factories while undercutting the need for skilled labor. This mechanization made some factories an assemblage of unskilled laborers performing simple and repetitive tasks under the direction of skilled foremen and engineers. Machine shops grew rapidly, and they comprised highly skilled workers and engineers. Both the number of unskilled and skilled workers increased, as their wage rates grewDaniel Hovey Calhoun, The American Civil Engineer: Origins and Conflicts (1960) Engineering colleges were established to feed the enormous demand for expertise. Railroads invented complex bureaucratic systems, using middle managers, and set up explicit career tracks. They hired young men at age 18-21 and promoted them internally until a man reached the status of locomotive engineer, conductor or station agent at age 40 or so. Career tracks were invented for skilled blue collar jobs and for white collar managers, starting in railroads and expanding into finance, manufacturing and trade. Together with rapid growth of small business, a new middle class was rapidly growing, especially in northern cities.Walter Licht, Working for the Railroad: The Organization of Work in the Nineteenth Century (1983) The United States became a world leader in applied technology. From 1860 to 1890, 500,000 patents were issued for new inventions—over ten times the number issued in the previous seventy years. George Westinghouse invented air brakes for trains (making them both safer and faster). Westinghouse aided Nikola Tesla in developing alternating current long distance transmission networks. Theodore Vail established the American Telephone & Telegraph Company. Thomas A. Edison invented a remarkable number of electrical devices, as well as the integrated power plant capable of lighting multiple buildings simultaneously; he founded General Electric corporation. Oil became an important resource, beginning with the Pennsylvania oil fields. Kerosene replaced whale oil and candles for lighting. John D. Rockefeller founded Standard Oil Company to consolidate the oil industry—which mostly produced kerosene before the automobile created a demand for gasoline in the 20th century.Edward C. Kirkland, Industry Comes of Age, Business, Labor, and Public Policy 1860-1897 (1961) At the end of the century, workers experienced the "second industrial revolution," which involved mass production, scientific management, and the rapid development of managerial skills.Licht (1995) The new technology was hard for young people to handle, leading to a sharp drop (1890–1930) in the demand for workers under age 16. This resulted in a dramatic expansion of the high school system.

Influential figures

Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and "Commodore" Cornelius Vanderbilt were among the most influential industrialists during the Gilded Age. Carnegie (1835–1919) was born into a poor Scottish family and came to Pittsburgh as a teenager. In 1870, Carnegie erected his first blast furnace and by 1890 dominated the fast-growing steel industry. He preached the "Gospel of Wealth,"saying the rich had a moral duty to engage in large-scale philanthropy. Carnegie did give away his fortune, creating many institutions such as the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now part of Carnegie Mellon University) to upgrade craftsmen into trained engineers and scientists. Carnegie built hundreds of public libraries and several major research centers and foundations.Joseph Frazier Wall, Andrew Carnegie (1970). Rockefeller built Standard Oil into a national monopoly, then retired from the oil business in 1897 and devoted the next 40 years of his life to giving away his fortune using systematic philanthropy, especially to upgrade education, medicine and race relations.Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (2004) Cornelius Vanderbilt started out as a poor farm boy, then used his sharp wit and lethal business policies to build an empire in steamships and railroading, becoming the wealthiest man in the world in his day.Edward Renehan, Commodore: The Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (2009)

Germany

The German Empire came to rival Britain as Europe's primary industrial nation during this period. Since Germany industrialized later, it was able to model its factories after those of Britain, thus making more efficient use of its capital and avoiding legacy methods in its leap to the envelope of technology. Germany invested more heavily than the British in research, especially in the chemistry, motors and electricity. The German cartel system (known as Konzerne), being significantly concentrated, was able to make more efficient use of capital. Germany was not weighted down with an expensive worldwide empire that needed defense. Following Germany's annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871, it absorbed parts of what had been France's industrial base.Broadberry and O'Rourke (2010) By 1900 the German chemical industry dominated the world market for synthetic dyes. The three major firms BASF, Bayer and Hoechst produced several hundred different dyes, along with the five smaller firms. In 1913 these eight firms produced almost 90 percent of the world supply of dyestuffs and sold about 80 percent of their production abroad. The three major firms had also integrated upstream into the production of essential raw materials and they began to expand into other areas of chemistry such as pharmaceuticals, photographic film, agricultural chemicals and electrochemicals. Top-level decision-making was in the hands of professional salaried managers; leading Chandler to call the German dye companies "the world's first truly managerial industrial enterprises".Chandler (1990) p 474-5 There were many spinoffs from research—such as the pharmaceutical industry, which emerged from chemical research.Carsten Burhop, "Pharmaceutical Research in Wilhelmine Germany: the Case of E. Merck," Business History Review. Volume: 83. Issue: 3. 2009. pp 475+. in ProQuest

Alternative uses

There have been other times that have been called "second industrial revolution". Industrial revolutions may be renumbered by taking earlier developments, such as the rise of medieval technology in the 12th century, or of ancient Chinese technology during the Tang Dynasty, or of ancient Roman technology, as first. "Second industrial revolution" has been used in the popular press and by technologists or industrialists to refer to the changes following the spread of new technology after World War I. Excitement and debate over the dangers and benefits of the Atomic Age were more intense and lasting than those over the Space age but both were predicted to lead to another industrial revolution. At the start of the 21st century the term "second industrial revolution" has been used to describe the anticipated effects of hypothetical molecular nanotechnology systems upon society. In this more recent scenario, the nanofactory would render the majority of today's modern manufacturing processes obsolete, transforming all facets of the modern economy.

Notes

References

Atkeson, Andrew and Patrick J. Kehoe. "Modeling the Transition to a New Economy: Lessons from Two Technological Revolutions," American Economic Review, March 2007, Vol. 97 Issue 1, pp 64–88 in EBSCO
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Broadberry, Stephen, and Kevin H. O'Rourke. The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Europe (2 vol. 2010), covers 1700 to present
Chandler, Jr., Alfred D. Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (1990).
Chant, Colin, ed. Science, Technology and Everyday Life, 1870-1950 (1989) emphasis on Britain
Hull, James O. "From Rostow to Chandler to You: How revolutionary was the second industrial revolution?" Journal of European Economic History, Spring 1996, Vol. 25 Issue 1, pp 191–208
Kornblith, Gary. The Industrial Revolution in America (1997)
Licht, Walter. Industrializing America: The Nineteenth Century (1995)
Mokyr, Joel. The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850 (2010)
Rider, Christine, ed. Encyclopedia of the Age of the Industrial Revolution, 1700-1920 (2 vol. 2007)
Roberts, Wayne. "Toronto Metal Workers and the Second Industrial Revolution, 1889-1914," Labour / Le Travail, Autumn 1980, Vol. 6, pp 49–72
Smil, Vaclav. Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations of 1867-1914 and Their Lasting Impact (20050 350 pp. $35.00

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