by Sue Osgood

Created on: November 25, 2008

Great Britain of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries gave birth to a series of inventions and improvements in manufacturing methods that would change the day-to-day life of the entire western world. Collectively known as the Industrial Revolution, these changes affected all facets of commerce, redefined the distribution of population, changed the way people moved from one place to another and altered the built environment. Although some of the first improvements wrought by the Industrial Revolution changed textile manufacturing, the whole cloth of building materials and their handling was ultimately remade.

Two developments in the 1760's and 1770's had much to do with the weaving of cloth: James Hargreave's invention of the spinning jenny and Richard Awkright's invention of a water-powered frame to further mechanize spinning. Awkright took his invention further and built a factory where unskilled laborers (and ultimately children) could operate the machinery that spun fibers onto 128 spools at a time. Marvelously efficient, this machinery not only made England a prime producer of cotton fabric (replacing Indian cotton), but also took cloth manufacturing out of the homes of the individual spinners and brought the workers to a central manufacturing location.

Improvements in the steam engine, beginning with James Watt's model in 1775, introduced another option for powering the manufacturing process. Another leap in speeding up production, steam power removed factories another step from individual workers in their rural homes: facilities could then be built independent of a source of water power. As the number of factories increased, so did the demand for equipment to supply them. As early as 1709, Abraham Darby had begun using coke (essentially de-sulphured coal) in the smelting of iron, but improvements continued in iron production throughout the Industrial Revolution, with huge impact on the manufacture of machinery, increasing its durability.

As iron became easier to manufacture and more readily available, engineers found more ways to use it. At the end of the eighteenth century, Thomas Telford designed a 1000-foot long cast iron aqueduct that carried the waters of the Shropshire Union Canal high above a Welsh valley. Considered the engineering marvel of the age, Telford's span was only the beginning. With the invention of the first steam locomotives, a new form of transportation was introduced. As Britain's production of goods increased and as

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