Industrial Revolution Impact

Maud C. Cooke's Social Life or the Manners and Customs of Polite Society: Bicycle Etiquette

When James Watt went to work fixing a steam engine in 1764, he probably had no idea how much that repair job would influence the industrial revolution. The University of Glasgow had asked him to repair a model Newcomen steam engine, but as he was working on it, he was struck by how much fuel it consumed. After experimenting, the Scottish instrument-maker determined that the Newcomen wasted fuel because its cylinder had to be alternately heated and cooled, which consumed a great amount of energy. So he built an engine in which the cylinder stayed hot, thereby cutting fuel consumption by 75 percent. He received a patent on the device in 1769. His first engine was used for pumping water out of mines, and by 1783 Watt's engines had virtually replaced the Newcomen engines. Watt continued to improve his steam engine, adapting it to run many different kinds of machinery. Asa result of his work, steam eventually powered much of the growing industrial revolution.

1804 AD ILLOGAN, CORNWALL, ENGLAND

During much of the last century, it didn't matter if the clocks in New York were set at a somewhat different time than the clocks in Trenton, New Jersey. After all, why would a New Yorker care what time it was in Trenton? That all changed with the coming of the train. For train schedules to make sense, there had to be standard times. This eventually led to the creation of a worldwide system of time zones. But Standard Time was just one of the changes caused by English engineer Richard Trevithick when he built the first steam locomotive in 1804. On his train's first trip, the little one-cylinder locomotive pulled 70 men in five wagons for 10 miles at a slow two-and-a -half miles an hour. It was a small beginning, but a big advance in the steam revolution begun by James Watt. Trevithick's invention caused tremendous social and economic changes. Before the railroads, nations were collections of semi-independent towns and villages, but the trains tied them together and strengthened nationalism. Also, trains lowered the cost of transporting goods, so businesses could sell their products over much larger areas. This led to the growth of huge corporations. Of course, not everybody was pleased with the coming of the trains. The Bavarian College of Physicians in Germany, for example, predicted that the rapid movement of trains would cause brain disease, both for train travelers and onlookers. Though there is no evidence that trains cause brain disease, trains -- like other modern transportation methods -- gave people the ability to quickly move far from home, thereby hurting family and community ties.

The Camera: A Century Late 1826 AD PARIS, FRANCE

Sometimes a great invention doesn't mean coming up with something brand new, but just combining existing technologies in a new way. Take the camera, for example. In the 1600s, artists used a device called a "camera obscura" to draw realistic pictures. This device used a lens to project an image onto a piece of paper, which the artist then traced. Shortly thereafter, in the early 1700s, J.H. Shulze discovered that silver salts darkened when exposed to light. Oddly, nobody said, "Hmmm, I wonder if I could get a picture by putting a plate coated with silver salts at the back of a camera obscura." In fact it took more than a century before somebody tried anything like that, and even then he didn't use silver salts. Joseph Nicphore Nipce noticed that bitumen hardened when exposed to light. So in 1826 he made a plate covered with bitumen and placed it on the back of a darkened box with a lens in front. It worked, but you wouldn't have liked to pose for one of his pictures; the exposure time was about eight hours. Well, once Nipce demonstrated the principle, things quickly got better. In 1839 Parisian Louis Daguerre, who had worked with Nipce, demonstrated a process using silver iodide on a copper plate. This took the exposure time down to about 30 minutes on a sunny day. In Britain that same year, W.H. Fox Talot described how to make a negative on transparent paper coated with silver salts, so you could make as many prints as you wanted. Then, in 1851, Frederick Scott Archer introduced wet plate photography, which was messy and required a lot of equipment, but the exposure only took about half a second. The door to a consumer revolution came in 1853 with the introduction of dry paper -- and later celluloid -- plates. In 1874 George Eastman made photography a mass market item. Speaking of his Kodak camera, Eastman said, "You press the button, we do the rest." In 1907 brothers Auguste and Louis Lumire introduced a process that made color slides, but it wasn't until the 1950s that Agfa introduced color print photography. Another development came in 1946 when Edwin H. Land created instant photography by putting a whole photo processing lab in the camera. He called it a Polaroid camera. Paralleling the development of the still camera was cinematography, or moving pictures. This process involves taking many pictures per second, then displaying them so quickly that the eye blends them together into one smooth movement. In the 1870s English photographer Edward Muybridge developed a complicated arrangement of cameras to quickly take multiple pictures. Then French physiologist, E.J. Marey, developed a single camera that could take multiple pictures and Thomas Edison invented a moving picture projector. Today, in addition to chemical-based films, we also have still and action cameras that record directly onto an electronic medium, such as a videotape.

My 1896 edition of Maud C. Cooke's Social Life or the Manners and Customs of Polite Society has a wonderful chapter on "Bicycle Etiquette." Some excerpts:

"It is distinctly understood in the first place that 'cycling' isthe correct word; the up-to-date woman dares not speak of bicycling nor of wheeling."

"If in town, the early hours of the morning are chosen for a ride through the park. This is on the same principle that it is considered good form for a young woman to drive only in the morning, that is, when she herself is the whip. In the country the rules, both as regards cycling and driving, are not as rigid. The maiden, however, who is a stickler for form, does all her cycling in the hours which come before noon-unless there be a special meet, a bicycle tea, for instance, or a spin by moonlight."

"Neither is it correct for a young woman to ride unaccompanied . The unmarried woman who cycles must be chaperoned by a married lady-as every one rides nowadays, this is an affair easily managed. Neither must the married woman ride alone; failing a male escort, she is followed by a groom or a maid. A woman is very fortunate if among her men or women servents, one knows how to ride a bicycle. Ladies occasionally go to the expense of having a servant trained in the art."

"Very gallant escorts use a towrope when accompanying a lady on a wheeling spin. These are managed in various ways; one consists of an India-rubber door-spring just strong enough to stretch a little with the strain, and about six feet of shade cord . . . A gentle pull that is a bagatelle to a strong rider is of great assistance to a weak one up hill or against a strong wind." "No ordinary woman who rides once or twice a week should go more than ten miles on a trip . . .Very few women have ever been injured in a bicycle who kept to this rule . . .Properly used, a wheel is certainly a promoter of health . . . It gains for women that ideal condition of the flesh so prized by sculptors and artists, namely a firm, solid tissue when the muscles are flexed, and a softness of an infant with muscular relaxation. It develops the entire torso and limbs, it renders one's nerves like steel and is a splendid antidote for headaches."