The Industrial Revolution was major scientific, economic and social transformations that Britain and then Europe witnessed at the end of the 18th century
, as a result of the emergence of technology with the discovery of the steam machine, which profoundly affected the hierarchy of production sectors in terms of their contribution to the economy.
Thus, industry occupied a leading position instead of agriculture, after the former transformed from the traditional manual style to a more modern and more productive style, in which the machine enjoys a central position.
Historic establishment
The first spark of the Industrial Revolution in Britain erupted with the discovery of the steam engine in the sixties of the eighteenth century, which accelerated the boom of the textile and steel industry, the two most important industries of the day.
After that, the phenomenon spread to the rest of Europe and then North America at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
In fact, the industrial revolution remains in the first place a logical culmination of a tremendous scientific development that came as a result of the European Renaissance that took place two centuries before that, and - to a lesser extent - an expected result of the flourishing of traditional industry and global trade, with the accompanying emergence of the need for productive means and tools that enable From responding to the growing need of the global market that the traditional handicraft industry is no longer able to meet.
However, it is necessary to highlight the fact that the development of coal production in Britain - the most important source of energy in the world at the time - opened the eyes of economic actors to explore prospects for employing these capabilities in a more effective way by integrating them into the production base.
The industrial revolution took root first in Britain. The textile industry, coal mining and steel industry flourished, transportation networks expanded and modern bridges appeared, although railways did not appear until the middle of the next century.
On the social level, a working class arose around the industrial areas and industrial crafts appeared, and the new reality began to tangibly change the lifestyles and habits of the people, and the concept of urbanization began to change, and its main criterion became the presence of factories that now distinguish the major cities from the rural ones, which were mostly still living pre-industrial era.
Historians believe that the British Revolution extended from 1770 to 1830, which enabled Britain to achieve a tremendous superiority that made it the first economic and military power in the world until the middle of the twentieth century.
With the beginning of the nineteenth century, the countries of Europe - led by France - knew industrialization, influenced by the British Industrial Revolution. France entered the era of industrialization after the 1789 revolution, specifically during what is known as the "July monarchy" period, i.e. around the year 1830.
At that point, Germany was also - and with it most of the countries of Western Europe - stepping on the same path, and the rays of the new revolution spread to North America.
Germany did not become an industrialized country until the second half of the nineteenth century, lagging behind Switzerland and Belgium, which had been industrialized on an important scale since the 1940s.
Major
Booms The second industrial revolution erupted at the end of the nineteenth century with the discovery by the American researcher Thomas Edison of electricity and the electric lamp, which was widely used as of 1880, and this tremendous transformation was accompanied by the discovery of petroleum and the great boom in the chemical industry that accompanied its production.
The use of electric energy in the industrial field has spread on a large scale at the end of the nineteenth century, and petroleum has begun to replace coal as the main source of energy.
This transformation has resulted in the emergence of new types of metals, most of which are produced during the processes of heating other metals, mixing or chemically dissolving them.
The status of petroleum has been enhanced by the scientific achievements in the direction of the innovation of the explosive engine, which will become a reality at the beginning of the twentieth century, to enter the world the era of the motor vehicle, which constituted a radical transformation in the concept of transportation.
The discovery of electricity also enabled the flourishing of micro-industries whose first manifestations were the explosive engine, and this transformation paved the way for the widespread use of the motorized train after the horse-drawn carriages remained for decades after the start of the first industrial revolution.
After that, scientific achievements followed by inventing ways to intensify sound waves and the emergence of the telephone, radio, television and airplane.
Before the end of World War II, the world knew the nuclear bomb after the United States resorted to it to defeat Japan, dropping two nuclear bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, destroying them.
The use of nuclear energy militarily continued until the 1960s, when other uses for this enormous energy appeared, especially in the field of medicine and precision industries.
As a result, new metals emerged after nuclear energy made it possible to obtain them from other metals, through condensation, heating, and chemical and atomic decomposition.
Thus, silicon, ceramics, and synthetic gum (resin) appeared, which are materials that contributed greatly to a new industrial revolution, the most prominent of which was the telecommunications sector, which witnessed in the last three decades of the twentieth century huge booms that made the world “one village.”
These booms were reinforced after the launch of the space conquest projects and the consequent emergence of satellite television broadcasts, and then the Internet, which began a secret communications network for the US military and then became available for civilian and commercial uses in the early 1990s.
Researchers believe that the world is on the cusp of other breakthroughs that may reach the limits of the new revolution, in light of the ongoing research in the fields of “nanotechnology” and stem cells, which is expected to transfer the world to a new reality in which the concepts of exact sciences are turned upside down.
This belief was confirmed with the announcement - in February 2016 - of the success of European and American experts in observing the gravitational waves that Albert Einstein talked about in his famous theory of "black holes".