Ch. 17 - Revolutions of Industrialization

• The industrial revolution took place between 1750 and 1900. 
• Transformation of the human relationship with the world -- energy resources derived from coal, oil, gas, and the nucleus of atoms. 
• Industrial revolution began in one place, Western Europe. Great Britain. 
• it is hard to know whether we are the beginning of a movement leading to worldwide industrialization, stuck in the middle of a world permanently divided into rich and poor countries. 
• Human numbers went from 375 million in 1400 to about 1 billion in the early 19th century. 
• Energy crisis in Western Europe, China, and Japan. 
• Wood and charcoal became pricier and scarcer. 
• The massive extraction of nonrenewable raw materials to feed and to fuel industrial machinery --- coal, iron ore, petroleum, guano, and much more -- altered the landscape in many places
• Sewers and industrial waster emptied into rivers, turning them into poisonous cesspools 
• Smoke from coal-fired industries and domestic use polluted the air in urban areas and sharply increased the incidence of respiratory illness. 
• The Industrial Revolution marked a new era in both human history and the history of the planet that scientists increasingly call the Anthropocene or "age of man". The industrial activity left a mark not only on human society but also on the ecological, atmospheric, and geological history of the earth. 
• In Britain, where the Industrial Revolution began, industrial output increased some fiftyfold between 1750-1900 
• Early signs of the technological creativity that spawned the Industrial Revolution appeared in eighteenth-century Britain, where a variety of innovations transformed the cotton textile production. 
• The great breakthrough was the coal-fired steam engine, which provided an inanimate object and almost limitless source of power beyond that of wind, water, or muscle and could be used to drive any number of machines as well as locomotives and oceangoing ships. 
• The second part of the industrial revolution focused on chemicals, electricity, and precision machinery, the telegraph and telephone, rubber, printing, and much more. 
• Between 750 and 1100 C.E., the Islamic world generated major advances in shipbuilding, the use of tides and falling water to generate power, papermaking, textile production, chemical technologies, water mills, clocks, and much more 
• India was the first to turn sugarcane juice into crystallized sugar.