Industrial Production Crashed During the Cultural Revolution Because

For some of us, the phrase “put your calculators away for this exam” will always elicit anxiety, only those calculator-costless exams requite u.s.a. a taste of what life was like for Charles Babbage. The English inventor and mathematician, born in 1791, was tasked with poring over mathematical tables in search of errors. Such tables were ordinarily used in fields like astronomy, banking and engineering science, and since they were generated by hand, they often independent mistakes. Babbage longed for a figurer of his own. He ultimately would design several.

Of course, Babbage didn’t accept modern 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’southward machines were created in his lifetime). For instance, Deviation Engine No. 1 could solve polynomials, simply the blueprint called for 25,000 separate pieces with a combined weight of effectually 15 tons (13.6 metric tons) [source: Computer History Museum]. Departure Engine No. ii, adult betwixt 1847 and 1849, was a more elegant machine, with comparable ability and about one-third the weight of its predecessor [source: Computer History Museum].

Impressive as those engines were, it was another Babbage blueprint that led many people to consider him the father of modern computing. In 1834, Babbage set out to create a machine that users could program. Similar mod computers, Babbage’s machine could store information for use later in other calculations and perform logic operations similar if-then statements, amidst other capabilities. Babbage never compiled a complete set of designs for the analytical engine as he did for his beloved difference engines, merely it’s but as well; the analytical engine would have been then massive that it would have required a steam engine just to power it [source: Figurer History Museum].

Like then 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. And then 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 prophylactic [source: Lemelson-MIT].

Before Goodyear’s experiments, safe was a novel production with few practical uses — thanks, largely, to its properties changing drastically with the environment.
Vulcanization, which involved curing prophylactic with sulfur and lead, created a more stable cloth suitable for manufacturing processes. Vulcanization allowed safety to be flexible enough to concord its shape in hot or cold weather.

While rubber technology avant-garde rapidly, another invention of the Industrial Revolution teetered uncertainly. Despite advancements similar pedals and steerable wheels, bicycles remained more of a curiosity than a practical class of transportation throughout most of the 19th century, thanks to their unwieldy, heavy frames and hard, unforgiving wheels. (The wheels had safety 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 young son bounce miserably along on his tricycle, and he quickly got to work on fixing it. His early on attempts made use of inflated sheet garden hose that Dunlop bonded with liquid rubber. These prototypes proved vastly superior to existing leather and hardened rubber tires. Earlier long, Dunlop began manufacturing his bicycle tires with the help of the company Due west. Edlin and Co. and, subsequently, as the Dunlop Prophylactic Company. They quickly dominated the marketplace and, along with other improvements to the bicycle, acquired bicycle production to skyrocket. Not long after, the Dunlop Rubber Company began manufacturing rubber tires for another production of the Industrial Revolution, the automobile [source: Automotive Hall of Fame].

Great inventions like the light bulb boss the history books, just we’re guessing that anyone facing surgery would nominate anesthesia as their favorite product of the Industrial Revolution. Earlier its invention, the fix for a given ailment was often far worse than the ailment itself. One of the greatest challenges to pulling a molar or removing a limb was restraining the patient during the process, and substances similar alcohol and opium did picayune to improve the feel. Today, of grade, we can thank anesthesia for the fact that few of u.s. accept whatever recollection of painful surgeries at all.

Nitrous oxide and ether had both been discovered by the early 1800s, but both were seen as intoxicants with trivial practical use. In fact, traveling shows would have volunteers inhale nitrous oxide — improve known as laughing gas — in forepart of alive 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 whatever pain during the incident and, upon hearing that he had not, immediately began plans to utilize the gas during a dental procedure, volunteering himself equally the start patient. The following solar day, Wells had Gardner Colton, the organizer of the traveling show, administer laughing gas in Wells’ office. The gas worked perfectly, putting Wells out cold as a colleague extracted his tooth [source: Haridas].

The demonstration of ether’s suitability as an anesthesia for longer operations soon followed (though exactly who we should credit is still a matter of debate), and surgery has been slightly less dreadful e’er since.

Numerous globe-irresolute inventions came out of the Industrial Revolution. The camera wasn’t 1 of them. In fact, the camera’s predecessor, known as a photographic camera obscura, had been hanging around for centuries, with portable versions coming along in the late 1500s.

Preserving a camera’s images, nevertheless, was a problem, unless you had the time to trace and pigment them. And so along came Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. In the 1820s, the Frenchman had the thought to expose newspaper coated in low-cal-sensitive chemicals to the prototype projected by the camera obscura. Eight hours subsequently, the world had its first photo [source: Harding].

Realizing eight hours was an awfully long fourth dimension to accept to pose for a family unit portrait, Niépce began working with Louis Daguerre to improve his design, and it was Daguerre who continued Niépce’s piece of work later on his death in 1833. Daguerre’s non-and then-cleverly-named daguerreotype generated enthusiasm first in the French parliament, and so throughout the world. But while the daguerreotype produced very detailed images, they couldn’t be replicated.

A contemporary of Daguerre’southward, William Henry Trick Talbot, was also working on improving photographic images throughout the 1830s and produced the outset negative, through which light could be shined on photographic paper to create the positive prototype. Advancements like Talbot’south came at a rapid pace, and cameras became capable of taking images of moving objects as exposure times dropped. In fact, a photo of a horse taken in 1877 was used to solve a long-standing argue over whether or not all four of a horse’s anxiety left the ground during a total gallop (they did) [sources: International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum, Shah]. So the next time you pull out your smartphone to snap a picture, take a second to think of the centuries of innovation that fabricated that picture possible.

Goose egg can quite replicate the experience of seeing your favorite band perform alive. Non so long agone, live performances were the simply way to feel music at all. Thomas Edison inverse this forever when, working on a method to transcribe telegraph letters, he got the idea for the phonograph. The thought was simple but brilliant: A recording needle would press grooves corresponding to sound waves from music or speech into a rotating cylinder coated with can, and another needle would trace those grooves to reproduce the source audio.

Different Babbage and his decades-long endeavor to see his designs constructed, Edison got his mechanic, John Kruesi, to build the auto and reportedly had a working prototype in his easily only 30 hours later. Edison tested the motorcar by speaking “Mary had a fiddling lamb” into the mouthpiece and was elated when the car played back his words [source: Library of Congress].

Merely Edison was far from finished with his new cosmos. His early on tin-coated cylinders could only exist played a handful of times before they were destroyed, so he ultimately replaced the tin with wax. By this time, Edison’due south phonograph wasn’t the just actor on the marketplace, and over time, people began to abandon his cylinders in favor of records. But the bones mechanism remained intact.

Like the revved-up V-8 engines and loftier-speed jet planes that fascinate us now, steam-powered technology once was cutting-edge, as well, and it played a behemothic role in furthering the Industrial Revolution. Before this era, transportation was by horse-and-buggy carriages, and sure industries, like mining, were labor-intensive and inefficient. The creation of the offset steam engine (and later the steam-powered locomotive) was about to dramatically change all of that.

The origins of the steam engine actually get back to Heron of Alexandria, who in the first century C.East. created the aeolipile, a steam turbine that caused a sphere to revolve. Heron’s invention was only a curiosity; it wasn’t used for whatever purpose. It wasn’t until the late 17th and early 18th centuries that various inventors began looking to the aeolipile’south engineering to begin patenting steam-powered devices that were far more than a toy [source: History].

In 1698, Thomas Savery created a pump running on steam ability 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 power to be used in industries [source: History].

Other inventors wondered if a auto running on steam power could be used to transport people, goods and raw materials. This led to the development of the first steam-powered locomotives and boats in the 1830s. The steam-powered locomotive, in item, dramatically inverse life in the U.South. and beyond, as it marked the first time that appurtenances were transported over state by a automobile, not an animal 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 menstruum that brought us steam engines too contradistinct how we store our food.

In 1795, Frenchman Nicolas Appert was working as a chef, candymaker and distiller when he heard about a budgetary prize existence offered to someone who could uncover a mode to preserve food for transport. The prize was prompted by the wealth of spoiled food regularly seen past chefs in the French army. Intrigued, Appert spent the adjacent 14 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 flavor and they weren’t 100 percent effective. Reasoning that he should be able to preserve food like vino, Appert worked on boiling techniques that consisted of adding food to a jar, sealing it, wrapping the jar in canvas then humid information technology in water 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 by Louis Pasteur [source: Eschner].

Nevertheless, Appert’south basic concept took hold and today we savor canned goods ranging from Spam to SpaghettiOs.

Before the historic period of smartphones and laptops, people still used technology to communicate — albeit at a slower pace — with an Industrial Revolution invention chosen the
electric telegraph.

The telegraph was developed in the 1830s and 1840s by Samuel Morse, in conjunction with other inventors. The group discovered that by transmitting electric signals over wires continued to a network of stations, their new telegraph could send messages from one location to some other over long distances. The letters were “written” using a lawmaking of dots and dashes developed by Morse, who assigned a specific pattern to each letter of the alphabet. The person receiving a telegraph just decoded its Morse code 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’southward telegraph allowed people to communicate about instantaneously without being in the aforementioned place [source: The states Senate].

Information sent via telegraph also allowed news media and the government to share information more chop-chop. The evolution of the telegraph even gave rise to the first wire news service, the Associated Press. Eventually, Morse’s invention too connected America to Europe — an innovative and global feat at the time.

Besides 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 most fashionable clothing, advancements in the textile industry during the Industrial Revolution made mass product possible. The spinning jenny had a big function in these developments.

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

Enter James Hargreaves, a weaver and inventor. In 1764, Hargreaves created a machine, the spinning jenny, that could produce eight spools of thread at a time using but one wheel (the word “jenny” is British slang for “engine”). Information technology wasn’t also long before others expanded upon his invention, creating ever-bigger machines that could produce equally many every bit l, fourscore and even 120 spools of thread at a time. These get too big to fit into people’s homes, which led to the birth of the factory-based textile manufacture and mass product [sources: BBC, Bellis].

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

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

Mass producing iron drove the mechanization of other inventions during the Industrial Revolution and fifty-fifty today. Without the fe industry providing assistance in the development of the railroad, locomotive transportation may have been too hard or expensive to pursue at the fourth dimension.

Originally Published: Jan 12, 2011