The Industrial Revolution
1709 O.S. – 15 Oct 185160 items
engineeringtechnologyFrom Newcomen’s engine to the Crystal Palace
In 1712 a Devon ironmonger set an engine to pump water from a coal pit near Dudley Castle. In 1851 visitors paid six million times to walk through a palace of iron and glass in Hyde Park and look at the machines Britain had built since. In between, water wheels and then steam engines drove the cotton mills of Derbyshire and Lancashire, canals and then railways carried coal to them, and England and Wales became the first nation where more people lived in towns than on the land.
It was built by people as well as machines: children in the mills and down the pits, handloom weavers put out of work, frame-breakers hanged at York, and the crowd cut down at Peterloo. Their story runs through the timeline alongside the inventors’.
Two calendars
Britain kept the Julian calendar until Wednesday 2 September 1752, and the next day was Thursday 14 September. Events before the switch are dated in the Julian calendar, as the people who lived them wrote them, and events after it in the Gregorian. England also began its year on Lady Day, 25 March, until 1752: the engraving that dates Newcomen’s engine “1712” is read that way, so its year runs to March 1713 on the axis.
How it is laid out
Periods: Boulton and Watt at Soho, the canal mania, the wars with France, Robert Owen’s New Lanark, the Luddite unrest, the Rainhill trials, Chartism, the railway mania and the Great Exhibition.
Threads to filter by:
steam,textiles,iron,mining,canals,railways,labourandprotest.The map: mills, pits, works and bridges from Cornwall to Lanarkshire, with the Bridgewater Canal and the first railways drawn as routes.
From this foul drain the greatest stream of human industry flows out to fertilise the whole world. From this filthy sewer pure gold flows. — Alexis de Tocqueville on Manchester, 1835
Items
Abraham Darby smelts iron with coke
Newcomen’s engine near Dudley Castle
Lombe’s silk mill in Derby
- ≈ 11 years, 4 months
John Kay patents the flying shuttle
Huntsman’s crucible steel
Britain’s last Julian day
Britain’s first Gregorian day
The Bridgewater Canal opens
Hargreaves’s spinning jenny
Watt’s walk on Glasgow Green
Watt patents the separate condenser
Wedgwood opens Etruria
Arkwright patents the water frame
Cromford Mill starts spinning
The first Boulton and Watt engines
Crompton’s spinning mule
The Iron Bridge is raised
Cort’s puddling process
Quarry Bank Mill and its apprentices
Cartwright’s power loom
The Combination Acts ban trade unions
Trevithick’s Puffing Devil
The first Factory Act
The Penydarren locomotive
Pontcysyllte Aqueduct opens
The first fare-paying railway passengers
Byron speaks for the frame-breakers
The attack on Rawfolds Mill
The Felling pit explosion
Salamanca runs at Middleton
Luddites hanged at York
Owen opens the Institute for the Formation of Character
The Peterloo massacre
The Stockton and Darlington Railway opens
Menai Suspension Bridge opens
Rocket runs its trial
The Liverpool and Manchester Railway opens
William Huskisson is killed by Rocket
The Great Reform Act
The Slavery Abolition Act
The Factory Act of 1833
Tocqueville in Manchester
The Huskar pit disaster
The Great Western Railway reaches Bristol
The Mines Act
The Rochdale Pioneers open their shop
Engels’s Condition of the Working Class
The Ten Hours Act
Paxton sketches the Crystal Palace
The census counts a nation of towns
The shilling days begin