The words have sometimes another meaning. They are used to denote any rapid significant technological change, and historians have spoken of an "industrial revolution of the thirteenth century," an "early industrial revolution," the "second industrial revolution." . . .

Finally, the words . . . have still another meaning. They denote the first historical instance of the breakthrough from an agrarian, handicraft economy to one dominated by industry and machine manufacture. Th[is] . . . Industrial Revolution began in England in the eighteenth century, spread from there in unequal fashion to the countries of continental Europe and a few areas overseas, and transformed in the span of scarce two lifetimes the life of Western man, the nature of his society, and his relationship to the other peoples of the world. . . .

The heart of the industrial revolution was an interrelated succession of technological changes. The material advances took place in three areas: (1) there was a substitution of mechanical devices for human skills; (2) inanimate power--in particular, steam--took the place of human and animal strength; (3) there was a marked improvement in the getting and working of raw materials, especially in what are now known as the metallurgical and chemical industries.

Concomitant with these changes in equipment and process went new forms of industrial organization. The size of the productive unit grew: machines and power both required and made possible the concentration of manufacture, and shop and home workroom gave way to mill and factory. At the same time, the factory . . . was a [new] system of production, resting on a characteristic definition of the functions and responsibilities of the different participants in the productive process. On the one side was the employer, who not only hired the labour and marketed the finished product, but supplied the capital equipment and oversaw its use. On the other side there stood the worker, no longer capable of owning and furnishing the means of production and reduced to the status of a hand (the word is significant and symbolizes well this transformation from producer to pure labourer). Binding them were the economic relationship--the "wage nexus"--and the functional one of supervision and discipline. . . .

Factory discipline [too, was new, in that it] required and eventually created a new breed of worker, broken to the inexorable demands of the clock. It also held within itself the seeds of further technological advance, for control of labour implies the possibility of the rationalization of labour. . . . There is a direct chain of innovation . . . [which has led] to the assembly line and transmission belts of today.

In all of this diversity of technological improvement, the unity of the movement is apparent: change begat change. For one thing, many technical improvements were feasible only after advances in associated fields. The steam engine is a classic example of this technological interrelatedness: it was impossible to produce an effective condensing engine until better methods of metal working could turn out accurate cylinders. For another, the gains in productivity and output of a given innovation inevitably exerted pressure on related industrial operations. The demand for coal pushed mines deeper until water seepage became a serious hazard; the answer was the creation of a more efficient pump, the atmospheric steam engine. A cheap supply of coal proved a godsend to the iron industry, which was stifling for lack of fuel. In the meantime, the invention and diffusion of machinery in the textile manufacture and other industries created a new demand for energy, hence for coal and steam engines; and these engines, and the machines themselves, had a voracious appetite for iron, which called for further coal and power. Steam also made possible the factory city, which used unheard-of quantities of iron (hence coal) in its many-storied mills and its water and sewage systems. At the same time, the processing and flow of manufactured commodities required great amounts of chemical substances: alkalis, acids, and dyes, many of them consuming mountains of fuel in the making. And all of these products--irons, textiles, chemicals--depended on large scale-movements of goods on land and on sea, from the sources of the raw materials into the factories and out again to near and distant markets. The opportunity thus created and the possibilities of the new technology combined to produce the railroad and the steamship, which of course added to the demand for iron and fuel while expanding the market for factory products. And so on, in ever-widening circles.

In this sense, the Industrial Revolution marked a major turning point in man's history. To that point, the advances of commerce and industry, however gratifying and impressive, were essentially superficial. . . . It was the Industrial Revolution that initiated a cumulative, self-sustaining advance in technology whose repercussions would be felt in all aspects of economic life. . . .

Quantitative gains in productivity are, of course, only part of the picture. Modern technology produces not only more, faster; it turns out objects that could not have been produced under any circumstances by the craft methods of yesterday. . . . [A]ll the forges in eighteenth-century Christendom could not have produced steel sheets so large, smooth, and homogeneous as those of a modern strip mill. Most important, modern technology has created things that could scarcely have been conceived in the pre-industrial era: the camera, the motor car, the aeroplane, the whole array of electronic devices from the radio to the high-speed computer, the nuclear power plant, and so on almost ad infinitum. Indeed, one of the primary stimuli of modern technology is the free-ranging imagination; the increasing autonomy of pure science and the accumulation of a pool of untapped knowledge, in combination with the ramifying stock of established technique, have given ever wider scope the inventive vision. Finally, to this array of new and better products--introduced, to be sure, at the expense of some of the more artistic results of hand craftmanship--should be added that great range of exotic commodities, once rarities or luxuries, that are now available at reasonable prices thanks to improved transportation. It took the Industrial Revolution to make tea and coffee, the banana of Central America and the pineapple of Hawaii everyday foods. The result has been an enormous increase in the output and variety of goods and services, and this alone has changed man's way of life more than anything since the discovery of fire. . . .

These material advances in turn have provoked and promoted a large complex of economic, social, political, and cultural changes, which have reciprocally influenced the rate and course of technological development. There is, first, the transformation that we know as industrialization. This is the industrial revolution, in the specifically technological sense, plus its economic consequences, in particular the movement of labour and resources from agriculture to industry. The shift reflects the interaction of enduring characteristics of demand with the changing conditions of supply engendered by the industrial revolution. On the demand side, the nature of human wants is such that rises in income increase the appetite for food less than for manufactures. This is not true of people who have been living on the borderline of subsistence; they may use any extra money to eat better. But most Europeans were living above this level on the eve of industrialization; and although they did spend more for food as income went up, their expenditures on manufactures increased even faster. On the supply side, this shift in demand was reinforced by the relatively larger gains in industrial as against agricultural productivity, with a consequent fall in the price of manufactures relative to that of primary products. . . .

Industrialization in turn is at the heart of a larger, more complex process often designated as modernization. This is that combination of changes--in the mode of production and government, in the social and institutional order, in the corpus of knowledge and in attitudes and values--that makes it possible for a society to . . . compete on even terms in the generation of material and cultural wealth, to sustain its independence, and to promote and accommodate to further change. Modernization comprises such developments as urbanization (the concentration of the population in cities that serve as nodes of industrial production, administration, and intellectual and artistic activity); a sharp reduction in both death rates and birth rates from traditional levels (the so-called demographic transition); the establishment of an effective, fairly centralized bureaucratic government; the creation of an educational system capable of training and socializing the children of the society to a level compatible with their capacities and best contemporary knowledge; and of course, the acquisition of the ability and means to use an up-to-date technology. . . .

The one ingredient of modernization that is just about indispensable is technological maturity and the industrialization that goes with it; otherwise one has the trappings without the substance, the pretence without the reality.

It was Europe's good fortune that technological change and industrialization preceded or accompanied pari passu the other components of modernization, so that on the whole she was spared the material and psychic penalties of unbalanced maturation. The instances of discrepancy that come to mind--the effort of Peter [the Great] to force the westernization of a servile society in Russia, the explosion of population in Ireland in a primitive and poor agricultural environment, the urbanization of Mediterranean Europe in the context of a pre-industrial economy--yielded a harvest of death, misery, and enduring resentment.

Even so, industrial Europe had its growing pains, which were moderate only by comparison. . . . For one thing, if mechanization opened new vistas of comfort and prosperity for all men, it also destroyed the livelihood of some and left others to vegetate in the backwaters of the stream of progress. Change is demonic; it creates, but it also destroys, and the victims of the Industrial Revolution were numbered in the hundreds of thousands or even millions. (On the other hand, many of these would have been even worse off without industrialization.) By the same token, the Industrial Revolution tended, especially in its earlier stages, to widen the gap between rich and poor and sharpen the cleavage between employer and employed, thereby opening the door to class conflicts of unprecedented bitterness. . . .

In sum, the Industrial Revolution created a society of greater richness and complexity. Instead of polarizing it into bourgeois minority and an almost all-embracing proletariat, it produced a heterogeneous bourgeoisie whose multitudinous shadings of income, origin, education, and way of life are overridden by a common resistance to inclusion in, or confusion with, the working classes, and by an unquenchable social ambition.

For the essence of the bourgeois is that he is what the sociologists call upwardly mobile; and nothing has ever furnished so many opportunities to rise in the social scale as the Industrial Revolution. . . .

[T]he Industrial Revolution has been like in effect to Eve's tasting of the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge: the world has never been the same.