Which Invention Was Most Important in Revolutionizing the Meat Industry

For some of united states of america, the phrase “put your calculators abroad for this test” will always elicit anxiety, but those estimator-free exams give us a taste of what life was similar for Charles Babbage. The English inventor and mathematician, built-in in 1791, was tasked with poring over mathematical tables in search of errors. Such tables were commonly used in fields like astronomy, banking and engineering, and since they were generated by hand, they often contained mistakes. Babbage longed for a figurer of his own. He ultimately would design several.

Of class, Babbage didn’t have mod computer components like transistors at his disposal, so his calculating engines were entirely mechanical. That meant they were astoundingly large, complex and difficult to build (none of Babbage’s machines were created in his lifetime). For instance, Difference Engine No. one could solve polynomials, merely the design chosen for 25,000 separate pieces with a combined weight of effectually fifteen tons (13.6 metric tons) [source: Computer History Museum]. Divergence Engine No. 2, developed between 1847 and 1849, was a more elegant car, with comparable power and near one-3rd the weight of its predecessor [source: Calculator History Museum].

Impressive as those engines were, it was another Babbage design that led many people to consider him the male parent of mod computing. In 1834, Babbage ready out to create a auto that users could program. Similar mod computers, Babbage’due south car could store data for use later on in other calculations and perform logic operations similar if-and so statements, among other capabilities. Babbage never compiled a consummate gear up of designs for the analytical engine every bit he did for his love departure engines, but information technology’s just also; the belittling engine would have been and then massive that it would have required a steam engine just to power information technology [source: Computer History Museum].

Like so many of the inventions during the Industrial Revolution, the pneumatic tire simultaneously “stood on the shoulders of giants” while ushering in a new wave of invention. So although John Dunlop is often credited with bringing this wondrous inflatable tire to market, its invention stretches back (pardon the pun) to 1844, when Charles Goodyear patented a process for the vulcanization of rubber [source: Lemelson-MIT].

Before Goodyear’southward experiments, rubber was a novel product with few practical uses — thank you, largely, to its properties changing drastically with the environment.
Vulcanization, which involved curing rubber with sulfur and lead, created a more stable textile suitable for manufacturing processes. Vulcanization allowed rubber to exist flexible enough to hold its shape in hot or cold weather.

While rubber technology advanced rapidly, another invention of the Industrial Revolution teetered uncertainly. Despite advancements like pedals and steerable wheels, bicycles remained more than of a curiosity than a practical form of transportation throughout most of the 19th century, cheers to their unwieldy, heavy frames and hard, unforgiving wheels. (The wheels had rubber tires on them but they weren’t filled with air, making for a tough ride.)

Dunlop, a veterinarian by trade, spied the flaw as he watched his immature son bounce miserably forth on his tricycle, and he chop-chop got to work on fixing information technology. His early attempts made employ of inflated sail garden hose that Dunlop bonded with liquid rubber. These prototypes proved vastly superior to existing leather and hardened rubber tires. Before long, Dunlop began manufacturing his bicycle tires with the help of the company Due west. Edlin and Co. and, after, as the Dunlop Condom Company. They quickly dominated the market place and, along with other improvements to the bike, caused bicycle production to skyrocket. Not long later, the Dunlop Safety Visitor began manufacturing safety tires for another production of the Industrial Revolution, the automobile [source: Automotive Hall of Fame].

Corking inventions similar the lite seedling dominate the history books, but nosotros’re guessing that anyone facing surgery would nominate anesthesia as their favorite product of the Industrial Revolution. Earlier its invention, the set for a given disquiet was ofttimes far worse than the disquiet itself. One of the greatest challenges to pulling a molar or removing a limb was restraining the patient during the process, and substances like booze and opium did little to improve the experience. Today, of course, nosotros tin thank anesthesia for the fact that few of us take any recollection of painful surgeries at all.

Nitrous oxide and ether had both been discovered by the early 1800s, only both were seen as intoxicants with little practical apply. In fact, traveling shows would accept volunteers inhale nitrous oxide — better known equally laughing gas — in forepart of live audiences to the amusement of everyone involved. During i of these demonstrations, a young dentist named Horace Wells watched an acquaintance inhale the gas and proceed to hurt his leg. When the man returned to his seat, Wells asked if he’d felt any hurting during the incident and, upon hearing that he had not, immediately began plans to use the gas during a dental procedure, volunteering himself every bit the start patient. The post-obit twenty-four hour period, Wells had Gardner Colton, the organizer of the traveling show, administer laughing gas in Wells’ office. The gas worked perfectly, putting Wells out common cold as a colleague extracted his molar [source: Haridas].

The demonstration of ether’s suitability as an anesthesia for longer operations presently followed (though exactly who nosotros should credit is all the same a thing of debate), and surgery has been slightly less dreadful ever since.

Numerous world-changing inventions came out of the Industrial Revolution. The camera wasn’t one of them. In fact, the camera’s predecessor, known every bit a camera obscura, had been hanging effectually for centuries, with portable versions coming forth in the late 1500s.

Preserving a camera’s images, withal, was a problem, unless you had the fourth dimension to trace and pigment them. Then along came Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. In the 1820s, the Frenchman had the idea to expose newspaper coated in light-sensitive chemicals to the image projected by the camera obscura. Eight hours later, the world had its starting time photo [source: Harding].

Realizing eight hours was an awfully long time to take to pose for a family portrait, Niépce began working with Louis Daguerre to better his design, and it was Daguerre who connected Niépce’s piece of work after his expiry in 1833. Daguerre’s not-and then-cleverly-named daguerreotype generated enthusiasm outset in the French parliament, and then throughout the world. Simply while the daguerreotype produced very detailed images, they couldn’t be replicated.

A contemporary of Daguerre’south, William Henry Fox Talbot, was also working on improving photographic images throughout the 1830s and produced the offset negative, through which light could be shined on photographic paper to create the positive paradigm. Advancements similar Talbot’s came at a rapid footstep, and cameras became capable of taking images of moving objects every bit exposure times dropped. In fact, a photograph of a horse taken in 1877 was used to solve a long-standing argue over whether or non all four of a horse’s feet left the ground during a full gallop (they did) [sources: International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum, Shah]. Then the next time you lot pull out your smartphone to snap a moving picture, take a second to think of the centuries of innovation that fabricated that picture show possible.

Nix can quite replicate the experience of seeing your favorite ring perform alive. Non so long agone, live performances were the only fashion to experience music at all. Thomas Edison changed this forever when, working on a method to transcribe telegraph letters, he got the idea for the phonograph. The idea was unproblematic merely brilliant: A recording needle would press grooves corresponding to sound waves from music or speech into a rotating cylinder coated with tin can, and another needle would trace those grooves to reproduce the source audio.

Unlike Babbage and his decades-long try to see his designs constructed, Edison got his mechanic, John Kruesi, to build the machine and reportedly had a working epitome in his hands only 30 hours later. Edison tested the automobile by speaking “Mary had a little lamb” into the mouthpiece and was elated when the machine played back his words [source: Library of Congress].

But Edison was far from finished with his new cosmos. His early tin-coated cylinders could only be played a scattering of times before they were destroyed, so he ultimately replaced the tin can with wax. Past this fourth dimension, Edison’s phonograph wasn’t the just actor on the market, and over time, people began to abandon his cylinders in favor of records. But the basic mechanism remained intact.

Like the revved-upward V-8 engines and high-speed jet planes that fascinate us at present, steam-powered technology once was cutting-edge, too, and it played a giant role in furthering the Industrial Revolution. Earlier this era, transportation was by equus caballus-and-buggy carriages, and sure industries, like mining, were labor-intensive and inefficient. The cosmos of the start steam engine (and later on the steam-powered locomotive) was nigh to dramatically change all of that.

The origins of the steam engine actually become back to Heron of Alexandria, who in the starting time century C.E. created the aeolipile, a steam turbine that acquired a sphere to circumduct. Heron’s invention was simply a curiosity; it wasn’t used for any purpose. It wasn’t until the tardily 17th and early 18th centuries that various inventors began looking to the aeolipile’s technology to brainstorm patenting steam-powered devices that were far more than than a toy [source: History].

In 1698, Thomas Savery created a pump running on steam power to raise water from mines; in subsequent decades, Thomas Newcomen and Scottish engineer James Watt improved and embellished his device. Watt collaborated with Matthew Boulton to create a steam engine with a rotary motion, which permit steam ability to be used in industries [source: History].

Other inventors wondered if a motorcar running on steam power could be used to transport people, appurtenances and raw materials. This led to the development of the first steam-powered locomotives and boats in the 1830s. The steam-powered locomotive, in particular, dramatically changed life in the U.S. and beyond, as it marked the beginning fourth dimension that goods were transported over land past a machine, not an beast or human. And while steam locomotives were eventually replaced by diesel trains, that didn’t happen until the 1950s [source: WorldWideRails].

Open your kitchen cabinets, and you’re bound to find a particularly useful Industrial Revolution invention. Information technology turns out the same period that brought us steam engines also altered how we shop our nutrient.

In 1795, Frenchman Nicolas Appert was working equally a chef, candymaker and distiller when he heard about a monetary prize being offered to someone who could uncover a way to preserve food for transport. The prize was prompted past the wealth of spoiled food regularly seen by chefs in the French ground forces. Intrigued, Appert spent the next xiv years trying to solve this puzzle [source: Brittanica].

While foods could be preserved via methods such equally drying and fermenting, these methods didn’t preserve flavour and they weren’t 100 percent effective. Reasoning that he should exist able to preserve food like wine, Appert worked on boiling techniques that consisted of adding food to a jar, sealing it, wrapping the jar in sheet and so humid it in h2o to create a vacuum-tight seal. He perfected the process and won the prize. But he never knew exactly why his innovative process worked. That puzzle would later be solved past Louis Pasteur [source: Eschner].

Nevertheless, Appert’s basic concept took concord and today we enjoy canned goods ranging from Spam to SpaghettiOs.

Before the age of smartphones and laptops, people still used technology to communicate — albeit at a slower footstep — with an Industrial Revolution invention called the
electric telegraph.

The telegraph was developed in the 1830s and 1840s past Samuel Morse, in conjunction with other inventors. The group discovered that by transmitting electrical signals over wires connected to a network of stations, their new telegraph could send messages from one location to another over long distances. The messages were “written” using a code of dots and dashes developed by Morse, who assigned a specific pattern to each alphabetic character of the alphabet. The person receiving a telegraph but decoded its Morse lawmaking markings [source: History].

The first message Morse sent in 1844, from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore, indicates his excitement. He transmitted “What hath God wrought?”, expressing he had discovered something big. That he did! Morse’s telegraph allowed people to communicate almost instantaneously without being in the same place [source: United States Senate].

Data sent via telegraph also allowed news media and the authorities to share data more than quickly. The evolution of the telegraph even gave rise to the first wire news service, the Associated Printing. Somewhen, Morse’southward invention also connected America to Europe — an innovative and global feat at the time.

Too the steam engine, this of import invention of the Industrial Age might rank as the most notable where commerce is concerned. Whether it’s the contents of your sock drawer or the nigh stylish article of clothing, advancements in the textile industry during the Industrial Revolution made mass production possible. The spinning jenny had a big office in these developments.

During the 18th century, fabric was beingness produced in England by people working from their homes – part of the popular cottage manufacture system. Cotton wool was an especially popular raw material for textile, and textile workers would spin it into yarn via a spinning wheel — a slow task, every bit spinning wheels could only produce one spool of thread at a time. With fabric in high need, cotton producers were having a hard fourth dimension producing enough cloth via this labor-intensive procedure.

Enter James Hargreaves, a weaver and inventor. In 1764, Hargreaves created a car, the spinning jenny, that could produce 8 spools of thread at a time using just 1 wheel (the word “jenny” is British slang for “engine”). It wasn’t besides long earlier others expanded upon his invention, creating always-bigger machines that could produce as many every bit 50, 80 and even 120 spools of thread at a time. These become too large to fit into people’southward homes, which led to the nascency of the manufacturing plant-based textile manufacture and mass production [sources: BBC, Bellis].

Building the infrastructure to support the Industrial Revolution wasn’t piece of cake. The demand for metals, including iron, spurred industries to come up with more efficient methods for mining and transporting raw materials.

Over the form of a few decades, iron companies supplied an increasing amount of iron to factories and manufacturing companies. To produce the metallic cheaply, mining companies would supply cast fe rather than its expensive counterpart — wrought atomic number 26. In addition, people began to use
metallurgy, or the deeper investigation of materials’ concrete properties, in industrial settings.

Mass producing atomic number 26 drove the mechanization of other inventions during the Industrial Revolution and fifty-fifty today. Without the atomic number 26 manufacture providing assistance in the evolution of the railroad, locomotive transportation may have been too difficult or expensive to pursue at the time.

Originally Published: Jan 12, 2011