Western Civilization - History Of European Society

Industrialization and the Social and Economic Structure of Europe 421

and finer steel. Steam-powered mills for grinding grains

or sugar freed millers from dependence upon rivers. Ex-

periments applied steam power to transportation, in-

cluding the first steam automobile (1769), steamboat

(1783), and railroad locomotive (1804). The locomotive

was the perfect symbol of the steam revolution because

it was merely a giant steam engine with wheels attached.

The Age of Iron and Coal

Industrialization quickly came to depend upon plentiful

resources of iron, from which the machinery of steam

technology was made, and coal, with which it was

powered. Both iron and coal had been mined in Europe

for centuries, but the scale of this mining was small.

The total European output of pig iron in 1788 was ap-

proximately 200,000 metric tons, of which the British

mined 69,000 tons. Most countries produced so little

iron that they kept no national records of it. Coal min-

ing was a similarly small-scale industry.

Great Britain had the good fortune to possess excep-

tionally rich deposits of both natural resources. When

the steam engine permitted—then demanded—greater

coal mining, Britain exploited those resources (see illus-

tration 22.1) to become the world’s first industrial power

and to establish an enormous lead in industrial might

(see table 22.3). During the French Revolution and the

Napoleonic Wars, the British output of pig iron tripled to

248 metric tons; with peace, the output tripled again by

the early 1830s. In 1850 Britain smelted 2.3 million met-

ric tons of iron, more than one-half of the total supply of

iron in the world (see illustration 22.2). British coal min-

ing similarly overwhelmed the rest of the world. In 1820

the Austrian Empire mined 100,000 tons of coal and the

German states slightly more than 1 million tons; Britain

mined 17.7 million tons. Twenty years later, Austria and

the German states had tripled their output but that was

barely one-tenth of Britain’s 34.2 million tons of coal. By

midcentury, Britain mined more than two-thirds of the

world’s coal. Consequently, the British also generated

more steam power than all of continental Europe com-

bined. The British dominance in coal, iron, and steam

production built an industrial leadership so great that

Britons naturally spoke of their “industrial revolution”

(see map 22.2).

The Machine Age and the Textile Factory

The availability of inexpensive steam power and iron

for machinery led to an age of remarkable inventive-

ness. In the century between 1660 and 1760, the British

government had registered an average of six new

patents per year; applications of steam technology

drove that average to more than two hundred patents

per year in the 1770s, more than five hundred per year

in the 1790s, and nearly five thousand per year by the

1840s. The British inventions of the early industrial age

Illustration 22.1
A Coal Mine during Early Industrialization.Coal was the
primary new power source of industrialization. Pumps driven by
steam engines, such as the Newcomen Engine, made it possible
to tunnel below the water table. Note the use of child and female
labor in much of this mine to cart coal in narrow spaces: It was
usually cheaper to use children than pit-ponies.

The data in this table are national outputs of coal in millions of tons.

Country 1820 1830 1840 1850

Austria .1. 2.5 .9

Belgium a 2.3 3.9 5.8

Britain 17.7 22.8 34.2 50.2

France 1.1 1.8 3.0 4.4

German states 1.3 1.8 3.9 6.9

Source: B. R. Mitchell, European Historical Statistics, 1750–1970

(London: Macmillan, 1975), pp. 360–61.

a. Belgium was not independent in 1820.

TABLE 22.3

European Coal Production, 1820–50