THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION an extract from A Short History of the World BY  H. G. WELLS ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Kindly made available for free to students by Gutenberg.org.  Some business organizations are actively trying to prevent free use of documents by students.    Gutenberg.org needs your support in their quest to make education affordable, and documents with expired copyrights available for free.  Please consider making a donation Gutenberg's cause. Link  (Links to an external site.) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- NOTE TO STUDENTS: [Comments in brackets [like this] are edits by Assistant Professor Engh, SLCC.  [ . . . ] indicates deletions.] THERE is a tendency in many histories to confuse together what we have here called the mechanical revolution, which was an entirely new thing in human experience arising out of the development of organized science, a new step like the invention of agriculture or the discovery of metals, with something else, quite different in its origins, something for which there was already an historical precedent, the social and financial development which is called the industrial revolution . The two processes were going on together, they were constantly reacting upon each other, but they were in root and essence different. There would have been an industrial revolution of sorts if there had been no coal, no steam, no machinery; but in that case it would probably have followed far more closely upon the lines of the social and financial developments of the later years of the Roman Republic. It would have repeated the story of dispossessed free cultivators, gang labor, great estates, great financial fortunes, and a socially destructive financial process. Even the factory method came before power and machinery.  Factories were the product not of machinery, but of the “division of labor.”  Drilled and sweated workers were making such things as millinery cardboard boxes and furniture, and coloring maps and book illustrations and so forth, before even water-wheels had been used for industrial purposes. There were factories in Rome in the days of Augustus. New books, for instance, were dictated to rows of copyists in the factories of the book-sellers. The attentive student of Defoe and of the political pamphlets of Fielding will realize that the idea of herding poor people into establishments to work collectively for their living was already current in Britain before the close of the seventeenth century. There are intimations of it even as early as More’s Utopia (1516). It was a social and not a mechanical development. Up to past the middle of the eighteenth century the social and economic history of western E.

1. THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
an extract from
A Short History of the World
BY
H. G. WELLS
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------
Kindly made available for free to students by Gutenberg.org.
Some business organizations are actively trying to prevent free
use of documents by students. Gutenberg.org needs your
support in their quest to make education affordable, and
documents with expired copyrights available for free. Please
consider making a donation Gutenberg's cause.
Link
(Links to an external site.)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------
----
NOTE TO STUDENTS: [Comments in brackets [like this] are
edits by Assistant Professor Engh, SLCC. [ . . . ] indicates
deletions.]
THERE is a tendency in many histories to confuse together what
we have here called the mechanical revolution, which was an
entirely new thing in human experience arising out of the
development of organized science, a new step like the invention
of agriculture or the discovery of metals, with something else,
quite different in its origins, something for which there was
already an historical precedent, the social and financial
development which is called the
industrial revolution
. The two processes were going on together, they were

2. constantly reacting upon each other, but they were in root and
essence different. There would have been an industrial
revolution of sorts if there had been no coal, no steam, no
machinery; but in that case it would probably have followed far
more closely upon the lines of the social and financial
developments of the later years of the Roman Republic. It
would have repeated the story of dispossessed free cultivators,
gang labor, great estates, great financial fortunes, and a socially
destructive financial process. Even the factory method came
before power and machinery. Factories were the product not of
machinery, but of the “division of labor.” Drilled and sweated
workers were making such things as millinery cardboard boxes
and furniture, and coloring maps and book illustrations and so
forth, before even water-wheels had been used for industrial
purposes. There were factories in Rome in the days of Augustus.
New books, for instance, were dictated to rows of copyists in
the factories of the book-sellers. The attentive student of Defoe
and of the political pamphlets of Fielding will realize that the
idea of herding poor people into establishments to work
collectively for their living was already current in Britain
before the close of the seventeenth century. There are
intimations of it even as early as More’s
Utopia
(1516). It was a social and not a mechanical development.
Up to past the middle of the eighteenth century the social and
economic history of western Europe was in fact retreading the
path along which the Roman state had gone in the last three
centuries
B.C.
But the political dis-unions of Europe, the political convulsions
against monarchy, the recalcitrance of the common folk and
perhaps also the greater accessibility of the western European
intelligence to mechanical ideas and inventions, turned the
process into quite novel directions. Ideas of human solidarity,
thanks to Christianity, were far more widely diffused in the
newer European world, political power was not so concentrated,

3. and the man of energy anxious to get rich turned his mind,
therefore, very willingly from the ideas of the slave and of gang
labor to the idea of mechanical power and the machine.
The mechanical revolution, the process of mechanical invention
and discovery, was a new thing in human experience and it went
on regardless of the social, political, economic and industrial
consequences it might produce. The industrial revolution, on the
other hand, like most other human affairs, was and is more and
more profoundly changed and deflected by the constant
variation in human conditions caused by the mechanical
revolution. And the essential difference between the amassing
of riches, the extinction of small farmers and small business
men, and the phase of big finance in the latter centuries of the
Roman Republic on the one hand, and the very similar
concentration of capital in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries on the other, lies in the profound difference in the
character of labor that the mechanical revolution was bringing
about. The power of the old world was human power;
everything depended ultimately upon the driving power of
human muscle, the muscle of ignorant and subjugated men. A
little animal muscle, supplied by draft oxen, horse traction and
the like, contributed. Where a weight had to be lifted, men
lifted it; where a rock had to be quarried, men chipped it out;
where a field had to be plowed, men and oxen plowed it; the
Roman equivalent of the steamship was the galley with its bank
of sweating rowers. A vast proportion of mankind in the early
civilizations were employed in purely mechanical drudgery. At
its onset, power-driven machinery did not seem to promise any
release from such unintelligent toil. Great gangs of men were
employed in excavating canals, in making railway cuttings and
embankments, and the like. The number of miners increased
enormously. But the extension of facilities and the output of
commodities increased much more. And as the nineteenth
century went on, the plain logic of the new situation asserted
itself more clearly. Human beings were no longer wanted as a
source of mere in-discriminated power. What could be done

4. mechanically by a human being could be done faster and better
by a machine. The human being was needed now only where
choice and intelligence had to be exercised. Human beings were
wanted only as human beings. The drudge, on whom all the
previous civilizations had rested, the creature of mere
obedience, the man whose brains were superfluous, had become
unnecessary to the welfare of mankind.
This was as true of such ancient industries as agriculture and
mining as it was of the newest metallurgical processes. For
plowing, sowing and harvesting, swift machines came forward
to do the work of scores of men. The Roman civilization was
built upon cheap and degraded human beings; modern
civilization is being rebuilt upon cheap mechanical power. For a
hundred years power has been getting cheaper and labor dearer.
If for a generation or so machinery has had to wait its turn in
the mine, it is simply because for a time men were cheaper than
machinery.
Now here was a change-over of quite primary importance in
human affairs. The chief solicitude of the rich and of the ruler
in the old civilization had been to keep up a supply of drudges.
As the nineteenth century went on, it became more and more
plain to the intelligent directive people that the common man
had now to be something better than a drudge. He had to be
educated—if only to secure “industrial efficiency.” He had to
understand what he was about. From the days of the first
Christian propaganda, popular education had been smoldering in
Europe, just as it had smoldered in Asia wherever Islam has set
its foot, because of the necessity of making the believer
understand a little of the belief by which he is saved, and of
enabling him to read a little in the sacred books by which his
belief is conveyed. Christian controversies, with their
competition for adherents, plowed the ground for the harvest of
popular education. In England, for instance, by the thirties and
forties of the nineteenth century, the disputes of the sects and
the necessity of catching adherents young had produced a series
of competing educational organizations for children, the church

5. “National” schools, the dissenting “British” schools, and even
Roman Catholic elementary schools. The second half of the
nineteenth century was a period of rapid advance in popular
education throughout all the Westernized world. There was no
parallel advance in the education of the upper classes—some
advance, no doubt, but nothing to correspond—and so the great
gulf that had divided that world hitherto into the readers and the
non-reading mass became little more than a slightly perceptible
difference in educational level. At the back of this process was
the mechanical revolution, apparently regardless of social
conditions, but really insisting inexorably upon the complete
abolition of a totally illiterate class throughout the world.
The economic revolution of the Roman Republic had never been
clearly apprehended by the common people of Rome. The
ordinary Roman citizen never saw the changes through which he
lived, clearly and comprehensively as we see them. But the
industrial revolution, as it went on towards the end of the
nineteenth century, was more and more distinctly
seen
as one whole process by the common people it was affecting,
because presently they could read and discuss and communicate,
and because they went about and saw things as no commonalty
had ever done before.
Your assignment.
PART A: Ten Vocabulary words. As you read the text above
select 10 vocabulary words (minimum). You select the words
new to you, or words used in a way new to you. List each word
and then a definition that fits the usage of the word. Look up
the definition in an academic dictionary (such as
Oxford
or
Miriam Webster's New Collegiate
, but not Google.) Then write the definition IN YOUR OWN
WORDS. Select as many vocabulary words as needed to fill up
the requirement of 10.

6. PART B: Answer the following questions. Do NOT retype the
question.
Explain the difference between the mechanical revolution and
the industrial revolution.
Explain how factories are older than machines and steam
engines.
How did the ancient Roman factories operate?
What is meant by "Division of Labor"? How does it define a
factory?
How did the industrial revolution influence education?
STYLE GUIDE: All answers for all assignments must be written
as full sentences, do not answer with fragments. All answers
must follow the style guide below:
No First Person (I, me, we, us, our, ours)
No Second Person (you, your)
No Passive Voice
No Cliché's
No Contractions (don't, won't, can't, isn't, and so on)
No Colloquialisms
No Jargon
No Jingoism
No Rhetorical answers
No Dialectal answers
No Fragments
No non-factual answers
PART C：（answer in one or two paragraph）
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION, by Wells: In what way is there
'no going back' after the industrial revolution?
This question suggests, or implies that industrialization is a
one-way event: or that
what has been done cannot be undone
. Think about this for a minute. Is this true? Let us view the
problem in broader terms. We of the 21st century tend to think
of the

7. industrial
revolution as a step in
progress
, implying that
progress
is a more encompassing concept than mere
industrialization
. This would suggest that one could have
progress
of some sort before
industrialization
: but, that one could not have
industrialization
without
progress
of some sort. Indeed, history confirms this. Before
industrialization, came progress in metallurgy. Before
metallurgy, came progress in mining. Before industrialization,
metallurgy and mining came a renaissance. There was in
Europe primitive metallurgy and mining of a sort, enough to
make weapons and armor, for example the Vikings. To the
unsophisticated student a mine is a mine. However, Viking iron
was bog iron, not mined deep in the earth as Romans and
Greeks used to do. Vikings built no mines as far as we know.
That craft had been lost, along with many others. Remember
the sequence: the Vikings came after the fall of civilization.
Renaissance
means rebirth: a rediscovery of ancient knowledge and
learning. We have met this concept before. However, there can
be no rebirth without a death, of sorts. Historians call that
death "the dark ages,” which Edward Gibbon wrote about in his
book "A History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire."
Gibbon wrote eight volumes describing the Fall of Western
Civilization, explaining how civilization undid thousands of
years of progress. Yes, there was a time when things seemed to
go backwards.

8. How do you explain the Fall of Rome? Answer: Civilization
can learn, and it can
unlearn
, it can forget or lose knowledge. How does this happen? Well,
consider how people unlearn. A person may learn something
when young, and later forget. It is the same with civilization.
Children learn about science, math, and logic when young.
Biology confirms that all humans begin life as critical thinkers,
a baby wants facts, food, and tolerates no nonsense. Indeed,
neuroscience confirms this; all good brains are wired to think
critically. If they do not think critically, it is because they have
become dysfunctional, from either injury, disease or
miseducation. Typically, a society immerses them in religious
teachings, disciplines them to
think superstitiously
, and before they are admitted to the status of full-fledged
adults, they are fully conditioned to function in an
irrational
society.
The fall of Rome was nothing more than civilization rejecting
reason and critical thinking; in much, the same way an
individual human often does in a superstitious society. That
was Edward Gibbon's theory. How bad was it for civilization?
Answer: they forgot how to make concrete. They lost the arts
of medicine. They rejected the writings of Epicurus,
Democritus, Lucretius, and burned all their books. They shut
down all facilities for adult education, closed the schools of
critical thinking, Aristotle’s Lyceum, Plato’s Academy, The
Garden of Epicurus. Faith is intolerant (by definition). What is
there outside the mind of faith? Lack of faith. We may ask,
"faith in what?" Trying to answer this question will stir up
intolerance immediately because it turns out there are many
faiths. One thing they all share in common is intolerance of
contrary ideas. So intolerant where the faithful citizens of
Alexandria that they burned the world’s greatest achievement,
The Library, and took the head librarian, a woman named

9. Hypatia, skinned her alive until she died in agony.
Link
(Links to an external site.)
Bishop Cyril of Alexandria organized these activities because
it was better to be faithful than to stimulate questions by letting
people read books. Some historians estimate two million scrolls
perished in the flames of intolerance. They rejected the Greek
mathematicians, which caused all the sciences to collapse.
They even rejected the early theory of Evolution proposed by
Anaxagoras. The world became flat! Not round. The average
life expectancy dropped. They stopped bathing, because good
people do not take their clothes off to wash---that was their
thinking. All concepts of hygiene went right out the door.
Plague, disease, famine increased in frequency. They forgot
how to build aqueducts to convey fresh water to urban centers.
They stopped building roads! Isolation was better than liberal
communication afforded by roads. The Imperial Mail Service
collapsed. They forgot how to make glass. Metallurgy became
a lost art. Even their textiles became crude and lifeless. They
lost interest in all art because graven images were condemned.
The light of critical thinking did not revive for 1000 years,
these were the dark ages, an age when everyone was taught not
to ask questions, but to have faith. The historians William &
Ariel Durant (husband and wife) named this period "The Age of
Faith," but most call it the Dark Ages.
Moreover, the fall of Rome is not the only time civilization has
lost its way. When the European explorers (primarily
Portuguese) reached the Orient, they discovered vast complexes
of ruins no one could explain. Who built them? The cities of
Babylon, Assyria, Media, were all rubble. The followers of
Mohammed could offer no explanation. They believed that
everything before the time of Mohammed was utterly irrelevant.
There are other systems of belief that feel similarly. To most
Americans the very idea of "Rome" is mentally associated with
things having to do with Christ. Yet, Christianity had no
influence on Rome until the very end. Most Americans know

10. very little about the Rome of progress, the Rome of History.
Why? Answer, because they assume everything before the time
of Christianity is utterly irrelevant. The "Social Memory" only
goes back as far as convenience permits: as soon as the past
becomes inconvenient or contrary to what they wish us to
believe, they dismiss it. This is not something praiseworthy, it
is a defect in public education. Now remember, to us the
industrial revolution is a thing in the past, 300 years ago.
Could we forget how it happened, and what it means?
We (the modern global civilization) can no longer explain
where electricity comes from. Sure, engineers can, but most
people have no idea. We use stuff we cannot explain. How do
cars work? Who cares? We just drive them. Why are cities
built primarily for cars and not for people? Who cares? We
just do it.
In spite of technology, we seem to retain very little information
concerning where it comes from, how it works, what kind of
thinking creates i
t. These problems, in the way humans think, go very deep.
For example, young couples of today do not ask, "Why should
we have a child?” No. They just have children. Critical
thinkers of the past would view this as strange. Why strange?
Answer: when we read the ancient writings of preindustrial
civilizations (i.e., Rome, Greece) we discover they were
agricultural civilizations. In those societies, a "child" was both
a "mouth to feed" and "insurance for the elderly,” and so getting
pregnant required getting permission, a license with a contract
of liability to ensure the child would be raised and fed and
educated, all the things that went into ancient marriage.
Marriage had nothing to do with 'amour' or love. It was a
license to procreate. This is how the ancients viewed it.
Moreover, their population was remarkably stable. Do we of
the 21st century go into marriage with these ideas in mind? We
have forgotten. Yet these ideas are as old as procreation. Do
we ask, "Where do homeless people come from"? Do we ask,
"Where do underemployed come from"?

11. To the ancients "The State" was part of the world of natural
law, simply "the way things are.” To them nothing should exist
in human society that does not serve human society, or if it did,
they viewed it as a burden on society. The model in the ancient
mind of society was
the wise farmer
. We know this from reading Virgil's poetry in
The Eclogues
and
The Georgics
, some of the most sublime poetry in the world. An even older
example of this thinking is the six-thousand-year-old Sumerian
Epic of Gilgamesh
. To the ancients, "the state" was the government of society,
and it should serve the same purpose as wisdom serves the
farmer. I.e., his or her function was to 'husband their resources'
for the coming spring. By this thinking, civilization would last
for as long as spring follows winter. Ancient man would view
our modern idea that society should build and consume with NO
concept of ‘next spring’ as insane. Is it possible society could
'fall' or become 'insane' in the way in which it occurred
anciently in Rome? Could the progress of industrial society be
undone? Yes, many things can foment a new dark age.
Remember that the original Dark Age happened so
imperceptibly that those involved in it were unaware of it.
They thought faith was better than interrogating nature (i.e.,
critical thinking). Thanks to Edward Gibbon, we see the
consequences. Most of them did not. A few did, and even
wrote about it. The Emperor Julian’s writings are an example.
Yes, civilization can lose its way. There are ways things can go
backwards. Will some future historian look back at us and see
the dawning of another age of intolerance, ignorance,
superstition, a civilization blindly going backward.
The ancients knew about trigonometry, indeed they are the ones
who invented it. From this they invented the science of
ballistics, and pneumatics, and hydraulics, and others, all which

12. enabled them to mine underground, pipe fresh air, pump hot and
cold water through the plumbing of a city, and do many things
we find amazing. So amazing that simpleminded people who
are ignorant of history jump to the ridiculous conclusion that
"aliens from space" were involved, or that "spiritual powers"
are the explanation. The ancients did all there marvelous feats
without anything other than brain power and work. The did all
this 300 years before the Common Era. Yet it was all lost.
Critical thinking informs us that if it happened once it may
happen again. This can easily happen if a society fails to face a
critical threat, which then overwhelms them.
Example: Imagine a society which knows it must store food for
the coming winter, or risk starvation midwinter. They have
survived and prospered in this way for perhaps a thousand
years. Then in this example that society is forced to convert to
a new way of thinking, imported by clever deception or force,
from another part of the world where winter storage schemes
have never been practiced, and are consequently laughed at. The
new rulers think differently and have absolutely no regard for
the "old ways". With the new power in place this society
indulges itself to the full, consuming everything produced, with
no regard for tomorrow.
Midwinter comes, and turns out to be exceedingly long, the food
is gone, and there is no obvious solution, because all those who
knew what to do are followers of the old faith, the old way of
thinking, and are consequently not going to be listened to, but
more likely they are dead (part of the conversion process).
Besides, if it is midwinter then it is too late to conserve food for
midwinter.
This Cycle of learning and forgetting has happened so many
times in world history that some scientists (viz Dr. Stephen
Hawking) suspect that it may indicate a genetic, neural flaw in
human evolution, and may lead to our inability to deal with
threats to our prosperity and even our existence: they point to
climate change, they point to depletion of finite resources, and
point to the threat of thermonuclear annihilation (which is still

13. with us). Our world will celebrate the 100 year anniversary of
potential nuclear annihilation in 2043, only 27 years away. You
will live to see that anniversary. Many scientists explain the
enduring nature of these dangers by pointing out that all of them
are profitable to business. Dr. Hawking even chided that it
would be an embarrassment to humanity if we ever had to
explain our behavior to an intelligent alien species.
Are we forgetting? How do we forget? Indeed, it is happening
right now in northern Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya,
Algeria, Pakistan, Afghanistan. Forgetting is always happening
in some parts of the world. Do not let that distract you. It is
too easy to let other society's problems draw us away from our
own. Too often we look at other societies and point to their
problems. That is unprofessional and unscientific. To think
critically one should always look first inward. What is our
nation, our state, our town doing that suggests bad thinking, a
forgetting of wisdom right before our very eyes.
For much of my professional career [Professor Engh speaking
here] the thinking of OUR society was "Better to be dead than
red." This saying meant, "it is better to be a dead American (by
thermonuclear war) than to negotiate ANY kind of treaty for
world peace with those communists". I noticed most people
who talked that way had no idea HOW CLOSE WE WERE to
utter annihilation. Today (2016) most people imagine this
threat has GONE AWAY somehow. No, it has not. The religion
of Thermonuclear Patriotism is still very much alive. I know
because I am still involved in
the business
.
We face other threats, but are unwilling to do anything about
them, because the truth is uncomfortable. We imagine this
planet can sustain as many people as are born. We imagine
another billion mouths should be no problem. Some imagine we
must make room for as many babies as are born regardless,
because those baby-souls are up somewhere waiting to be born,
and we would be sinful if we did not multiply and replenish as

14. commanded. Nevertheless, we are ignorant of how we are
actually feeding the current 7 billion. To sustain the current
population we must use a finite resource, phosphorus and
nitrates, for without massive fertilization of crops we would not
have food for the world's population. Most of the phosphates
and nitrates are used up. The business of phosphates and
nitrates is far too profitable as demand increases and supply
decreases, to do anything to curb the human appetite.
Worldwide the best farmland is already tilled, so the world
acreage will not increase, it too is finite. Some say, "let's build
hydroponic farms out in the ocean", but they forget that the
ocean is already playing that roll and the world supply of fish
other protein from the sea is rapidly declining. Besides, the net
benefit of hydroponic protein is less than the net cost of water
and energy used in hydroponics to justify the scheme.
Another difficulty. Rather than curb an appetite for carbon
based energy, which is not very efficient, we use it as if the
supply were infinite. It isn't. The companies and government
agencies and scientific institutions of the world have known this
since 1957 when they dedicated the entire year to the World's
International Geophysical Year.
Another example: Isaac Newton was one of the first to suspect
that earth's climate is not stable, he even proposed that man may
cause the climate to change to a new vector, and suggested that
was the explanation for rising temperatures: but that was in the
17rh century!
It amazes this author that so many people ridicule critical
thinking, or go to great lengths to cast doubts upon science
when it inconveniences their emotional attachment to some
other way of thinking: and yet, whenever we try to have a
discussion about the threats we face, the same people say
"science will find a way to solve the problem," or "industry will
find a way." I hope you live to see this resolved. I hope it is
resolved in such a way that critical thinking permits us to
become a rational species. At the present time we are not a
rational species, we are merely a species capable of producing

15. rational individuals. I hope our solution comes before any of
the threats mentioned overwhelm us. There are many more not
mentioned here. Perhaps the greatest risk comes from the
threats we do not see: but only a critical mind has any chance of
finding them.
The idea that something is watching over humanity, and would
never let catastrophe strike is too appealing, it overwhelms most
people's ability to think critically. Yet our civilization (which is
now global) faces real threats which most people do not wish to
face. We cannot face them until we can turn societies attention
to the problem. How do we do that? How do we forestall the
human tendency to constantly forget the lessons learned? How
do we stop the tendency we have to "go back"?