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At the close of the “first” industrial revolution, the world was changing faster than ever before, but especially so in Britain, the birthplace of industry. However, the pace of progress was poised to accelerate further, and the plight of the common person was about to improve in unprecedented and unimaginable ways. The “Second” Industrial Revolution brought progress and prosperity to more parts of the world and showed that other nations could share in its fruits as well.
Before the Second Industrial Revolution
It’s difficult for us today to imagine what life was like before 1870 at the dawn of the Second Industrial Revolution. Electricity had not yet been harnessed. People spent much of their time in the dark or with dimly lit candles or oil lamps. Bedrooms were unheated and many brought hot bricks to bed with them to keep warm. There was no running water, therefore, someone (usually a housewife), was forced to carry water to the home to be used for cleaning and washing. They then had to haul the wastewater back out. The average North Carolina housewife walked some 148 miles a year just carrying water.
Air conditioning, obviously, did not yet exist. But even something as mundane and low-tech as the window screen had not yet been invented. Thus, summers were not only hot, insects flew freely through open windows, landing at the dinner table and on food. Aside from the locomotives and steamships connecting cities and towns, there were few options for travel between the countryside and city, or within the cities and towns themselves; one either had to walk or ride a horse. Romanticized today, the average horse produced between 20-50 lbs of manure and urine every day. Thus, city streets were often soaked in horse urine, stank, and were unsanitary.
Life expectancy was low, in part, because of this generally poor sanitation. Infant mortality remained relatively high, owing to contaminated water and milk. Indeed, early attempts at urban “sanitation” simply dumped wastewater into rivers because, the thinking was, that they were “self-cleansing.” Work was also hard, people worked longer hours than they do today, with lower pay, often in dangerous and unsanitary conditions.
Enter the Second Industrial Revolution
Thus, until about 1870, the Industrial Revolution was something of a contradictory phenomenon. Yes, economic productivity rose and many measures of human capability improved, but many seemed to have worsened as well. As I argued earlier, this could be because it took time for the agrarian socio-economic structure to adapt to a new industrial reality. The First Industrial Revolution was a sea change for humanity, but arguably it was the Second Industrial Revolution that brought the most benefits to everyday people. According to Robert J. Gordon, the innovations of this era can be divided into five “Great Inventions:”
Electricity and its spin-offs
The internal combustion engine
Indoor plumbing and central heating
Innovations involving the rearranging of molecules.
Communication and entertainment devices
It’s not difficult to see how these innovations made our lives better. Electricity and the lightbulb literally lit the darkness, but electricity also enabled electric tools. As noted by Daron Acemoglu & Simon Johnson in Power and Progress, Henry Ford’s first attempt at a mass-produced automobile, the Model N, did not succeed. In part, the failure stemmed from his centrally powered factory. At that time, factories were typically driven by a single power source (often a steam engine) with power transferred mechanically to the various machines using an inflexible and complex system of overhead shafts, pulleys, and leather belts. Electricity and electric tools changed the game. Machines could now be placed anywhere they could “plug in,” making factory layouts far more flexible.
Another key breakthrough was the adoption of “interchangeable parts.” An American innovation, “interchangeable parts” were components that were identical for practical purposes, built to precise standard specifications. Unlike the components of years past, they did not require ‘fitting’ by a craftsman and thus reduced the labor cost of production by as much as 50 percent. The combination of electric tools and interchangeable parts made “Mass production” possible, which was perhaps best embodied by Henry Ford’s next car, the Model T.
To be clear, Henry Ford did not invent the “assembly line.” The concept of bringing a product to workers using a conveyor belt had been used in slaughterhouses for years. Ford merely extended the idea to internal combustion engines and vehicles. The moving assembly line reduced wasted time and effort by shuttling the product-to-be-manufactured to workers who specialized in fixed, rapid, and repetitive tasks. Mass production created a positive feedback loop: lower prices led to higher sales and higher sales led to economies of scale. Ford could purchase steel, wool, and wood in larger quantities and negotiate better rates with suppliers, in turn, allowing him to further lower costs.
Mass production enabled the second “great invention” to reach the market at scale: The internal combustion engine (ICE). ICEs were more compact and more efficient than their steam counterparts, reaching a thermal efficiency of up to 50 percent. They also relied on petroleum fuels which produce fewer pollutants and about ⅓ fewer carbon emissions for a given unit of energy. ICE vehicles made transportation more affordable; the cost of owning a horse for a year was roughly equivalent to the cost of buying one. The automobile may have cost more upfront, but far less over time. The automobile ended rural isolation, allowing farmers access to cities and towns and vice versa. They solved the environmental problem of the day by ending the reign of horses that defecated and urinated all over city streets. They also enabled flight; the Wright Brothers’ first powered flight in 1903 was possible only because of a compact internal combustion engine.
As a consequence of the proliferation of affordable ICEs, the speed and ease of travel greatly improved. Until about 1830, the speed of human travel was limited by “the hoof and the sail,” or about 30 mph, much as it had been throughout most of human history. The speed of travel increased steadily through the 1950s. With the arrival of the jet age, it reached over 500 mph. Unfortunately, travel speeds for the common person have not improved much, if at all, since that time. That could be because we have reached the limits of thermal efficiency, or perhaps, as some have argued, a growing ambivalence toward progress after 1970.
As new technology freed people from toiling in the countryside, those very same innovations pulled that surplus labor into cities. As a consequence, our cities became larger and denser. As we will see, cities adhere to scaling laws whereby inputs, such as infrastructure requirements, grow sublinearly to the population, while outputs, such as innovation and GDP, grow superlinearly. This means two things. First, the growth of cities themselves spurred and accelerated growth and innovation. Second, unfortunately, among those outputs that grow superlinearly, are disease and crime.
The ease at which disease spread in these new urban jungles forced innovators to respond. Instead of dumping wastewater into rivers which facilitates the spread of disease, cities began to design and build indoor plumbing, sewage systems, and water treatment facilities. This largely solved the disease problem plaguing urban establishments. But it had another effect, running water, combined with affordable, mass-produced household appliances, like the washing machine, freed the masses from mundane labor. In 1920, the average American household spent 11.5 hours a week just doing laundry, a figure that collapsed to 1.5 hours by 2014.
The fourth great invention, new ways of controlling and arranging molecules, led to revolutionary new products and materials. These materials included affordable aluminum, which was crucial to enabling flight as steel is too heavy for weight-conscious aircraft. The Haber–Bosch method for nitrogen fixation enabled us to pull nitrogen from our atmosphere to use as fertilizer in the soils of our farms. Without this groundbreaking innovation, most of the Earth’s surface would be under the plow in a feeble attempt to feed the human population.
The last of the five “great inventions” were new communication devices. The First Industrial Revolution saw the emergence of the “Telegraph,” the first electronic means of long-distance communication. Invented by Samuel Morse, it required literacy in a code of dots and dashes translated by trained operators. By 1870 there were already telegraph lines under the Atlantic Ocean, enabling near-instant communication between the United States and Europe.
Radio and telephone differed. Instead of translating our thoughts into code, radio, telephone, and later television, amplified the reach of what we already had: our voices. The radio enabled news and entertainment to be broadcast to a mass audience ready and willing to listen in. For the first time, Americans could hear the President speak as if he were in their living room. Telephone, meanwhile, opened rapid person-to-person communication, and was crucial to improving the logistics and efficiency of business operations.
The Singularity
If you are reading this, you have the time and capability to read. And you probably are doing so on an LCD screen, operated and controlled by microchips, all powered by electricity, possibly from a device you are holding in your hand, connected wirelessly to the internet. Your life, for all of its challenges and difficulties, would be a science-fiction miracle to your ancestors. To them, the things that you can do, even with the phone in the palm of your hand, are borderline sorcery. We owe this to progress, and particularly, to those innovations borne out of the Industrial Era. But ultimately, it would be the next revolution that would bring us into the modern era.
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Great essay! I appreciated the urbanist angle, and the horse "externalities" were particularly vivid.
As to the assembly line first being used in slaughterhouses...wouldn't that make it a disassembly line?
I went to the Science Museum with my grandmother when I was about 7 and she was totally bored by the electricity and machines — until we got to the "How we used to live" section and she just came to life.
"We had that mangle!" she shouted with glee!
My grandmother had no electricity or gas. She had coal delivered to her house for the fire. She still had coal delivered when I was a child. It's amazing how much everything has changed. Thank you for such a wonderful article.