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Essay on The First Industrial Revolution

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Imagine living in a world without electricity, transportation, lights, or modern technology. Envisioning life without the gadgets and gizmos we enjoy today may seem bizarre, but our society remains dependent on the inventions of the turn of the 18th century to feed, clothe and sustain itself. The First Industrial Revolution occurred during the beginning of the 18th century and would merge with the Second Industrial Revolution in 1850. It was a time of great change in America and the world. The previously miniscule GDP, the Gross Domestic Product (Webster, 1), began to shoot skyward with implementation of an array of new inventions, the use of steam power, and the cotton gin, which vastly increased the ability of farmers and manufacturers …show more content…

Yet the population had no room left in the frame of the prevailing system of production to grow or live. Work in the factories was salvation to the people who thronged into plants for no reason other than to improve their standard of living” (Mises , 1). Though living conditions may seem bad during the early Industrial Revolution when compared to now, American society had reached a critical point. The only future for many people, particularly the Irish and German immigrants, was in the budding factories or on the virgin prairie. It would be unfair to not point out that the revolution offered a new life to many people. Working provided failed farmers, immigrants, and women work they could never gotten before. People had an opportunity to work for a better life, creating a chance for social mobility, which existed nowhere else in the world than the Americas.
The First Industrial Revolution was a time of innovation which led to the mass manufacturing of many of the things we now take for granted like tractors, plows, machinery, textiles, and interchangeable parts, without which American society as we know it would have become stagnated by the sod of the prairie. The growing population would have simply been doomed to starvation and peasantry as it had been in medieval Europe.
The changes taking place in the American way of life were closely related to the

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