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In the late eighteenth century, the Industrial Revolution made its debut in Great Britain and

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In the late eighteenth century, the Industrial Revolution made its debut in Great Britain and subsequently spread across Europe, North America and the rest of the world. These changes stimulated a major transformation in the way of life, and created a modern society that was no longer rooted in agricultural production but in industrial manufacture. Great Britain was able to emerge as the world’s first industrial nation through a combination of numerous factors such as natural resources, inventions, transport systems, and the population surge. It changed the way people worked and lived, and a revolution was started. As stated by Steven Kreis in Lecture 17, “England proudly proclaimed itself to be the "Workshop of the World," a position that …show more content…

Spinners, which were mostly men and weavers, were mostly women hired to work in factories instead of at home. The first innovation in cotton manufacture was the fly-shuttle. It speeded up the process of weaving cotton threads into cloth. Even with this invention, cotton still had to be stretched out or spun into threads to begin with; this process was done slowly, one thread at a time, by a machine called a spinning wheel. This is where Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, which separated the seeds from the cotton fiber keeping cotton economically viable. Weaving was so much faster with flying shuttles that a yarn shortage soon developed. The spinning wheel at this time turned only a single spindle but inventors started designing machines to replace the spinning wheel. In 1764, James Hargreaves presented to his fellow inventors-the spinning jenny that turned several spindles at the same time. Yarn spun by a jenny was fine but too weak. Richard Arkwright’s Water Frame was invented in 1769, which was powered by water spun more cotton spindles all at once. England’s geography was perfect. England sits on vast quantities of coal, a carbon based mineral. Coal burns better and more efficiently than wood and, if you have lots of coal, it is substantially cheaper. The English figured out that they could replace wood with coal in the melting of metals, including iron, and went about digging coal from the ground.

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