Gabriel Martinez Period. 8 Industrial Revolution

The industrial revolution was an effort to increase the production of human work by using machines. The industrial revolution was an ongoing effort that took many years to finally start showing an effect. The industrial revolution began in Great Britain in the 1700’s with people inventing machines to help increase production in the textile and cloth making industries.

Before the wide use of machines, workers in Great Britain did most of the work at home and used hand powered tools. This was slow and not very profitable. Then factories started to evolve and groups of spinning machines began to work together to rapidly increase production. These mills were located next to rivers to use the power of water to run the machines. These early advancements greatly increased production and income to the factories.

In the early stages of the industrial revolution, the British were extremely protective of their new inventions and hid them from the rest of the world. Their was even a law that forbid workers of the British textile industry from leaving the country and they could not send drawings of the machines to other countries. The American government offered generous rewards anyone who would share the secrets. In the 1789 the birth of the American textile industry began, when a British textile Machinist immigrated to America.

In 1790 he reproduced the textile machinery, in 1793 Slater and his partners created the first water powered textile mill in the United States in Pawtucket. This completely revolutionized the U.S. textile industry and rapidly changed the Economy, by 1814 there was over 200 textile mills in the United States.

Many Americans began to invent machines and products that helped advance the American economy. One of the most important inventions of all time was the creation of interchangeable parts by Eli Whitney. This changed everything because before interchangeable parts every product had parts made specifically for that one thing. And making things like guns and machines was very slow because each product had custom parts. Interchangeable parts changed that it allowed products to have equal parts so that they could be mass produced, this greatly saved time and money.

Eli Whitney had another invention that also had a large impact on the economy, the cotton gin. The cotton gin was extremely important to the evolution of the farming industry because it reduced the time it took to clean the cotton fibers from the cotton seeds. An average worker could only separate one pound of cotton per day. With a water powered Cotton gin, 1000 pounds of cotton could be separated per day.

Invention like the steamboat by Robert Fulton also helped change the economy because they reduced time of travel and allowed goods to be transported faster then ever before. Roads and canals also helped improve the way that goods and people could be moved, they improved time and reduced the distance that used to be traveled. Railroads also helped improve the amount of weight that cold be carried and the time in which they would reach their destination. Trains were the most profitable because they could carry the most weight and were the fastest vehicle available.