Origins of the Industrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution, the wave of technological, economic and social changes that helped produce what we know as modern Europe, arose among back-country English cottage craftspeople in the early 1700s and fundamentally restructured industry. First, human hands were replaced by machines in the fashioning of finished products, rendering the word manufacturing(“made by hand technically obsolete. No longer would the weaver sit at a hand loom and painstakingly produce each piece of cloth. Instead, large mechanical looms were invented to do the job faster and more economically. Second, human power gave way to various forms of inanimate power. The machines were driven by water power, the burning of fossil fuels, and later by hydroelectricity and the energy of the atom. Men and women, once the proud producers of fine handmade goods, became tenders of machines. Within a century and a half of its beginnings, this economic revolution had greatly altered industrial activity.
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