Why the Industrial Revolution Happened Here - Learning Zone

In the 150 years from the beginning of the 18th century,

a revolution transformed the way we think...

..work...

..and play, forever.

This was the Industrial Revolution.

And it started here, in Britain.

Look at this, this is a really impressive piece,

massive piece of sea coal

from the beach at Seaton Carew, in the North East of England.

And that comes from the North Sea out there,

from the seams at the bottom.

Britain is very, very fortunate - much of it is on top of this stuff,

and the seams of it are very close

to the surface and easily worked.

Thanks to that, coal kick-started a revolution in 18th-century Britain,

a revolution that transformed not only the country,

but the world itself.

Until then, wood had been the main source of energy in Britain.

But it was running out, and it was expensive.

Britain needed a new source of fuel - coal.

It increasingly became clear that coal was a much more potent

form of power, providing up to three times more energy than wood.

For the first time in human history, we began to harness

the planet's mineral wealth for fuel and power on a massive scale.

In Britain, coal was abundant and easily mined.

It could also be dug up near the sea, so ships could carry

coal cheaply to the most important market - London.

The demand for coal led to deeper and deeper mines being dug,

but the problem was that the deeper you went,

the more likely it was that the mines would flood.

Whoever could produce an effective way to extract this coal

was going to make a lot of money.

And it was the desire to get rich which drove many of the great inventors, engineers,

businessmen and workers who created the Industrial Revolution.

It motivated practical men, like Devon ironmonger Thomas Newcomen,

to try to solve the problem of flooding mines.

In 1712, he designed an engine which could harness

the power of coal to make steam and drive a water pump.

And this is it -

the world's first commercially successful steam engine.

It did the work of 20 horses

and pumped water from hundreds of feet below the ground.

This made it possible to mine more coal,

drastically altering our use of energy, freeing Britain's

growing industry and firing the Industrial Revolution and beyond.

The Industrial Revolution was created by men who saw opportunities to make money.

One example was James Watt, who redesigned the steam engine

to make it more efficient, transforming the supply of power to British industry.

Part of the reason Watt was able to develop his invention

was because of the intellectual climate in Britain in the 18th century.

There was a prolific exchange of scientific and technological ideas.

Over the previous 100 years, a cascade of scientific breakthroughs

had swept across the country.

For example, Sir Isaac Newton was able to explain the force of gravity

for the first time.

While Robert Boyle showed that air and gas had physical properties.

In Britain, scientific ideas were not censored by the government

or the church, as happened in many European countries.

Britain was a parliamentary monarchy.

That meant that it was Parliament that passed the laws

and Parliament that controlled expenditure.

This helped to ensure political stability,

political stability in which the rule of law was fundamental.

And that encouraged the pursuit of scientific breakthroughs,

as people set up businesses and sought profit.

Political liberty paved the way for the Industrial Revolution.

Men had the freedom to think up all sorts of practical

uses for new scientific discoveries.

Across the country, from the prestigious

Royal Society in London, and in countless provincial coffee houses,

industrialists and scientists, often from very different backgrounds,

met to share their ideas and observations.

In the West Midlands,

the Lunar Society was set up in the 1760s,

so named because its members met at the full moon,

which lit their way home in an era before street lamps.

All these creative men took advantage of the liberal culture

that enabled them to think up and try out astonishing new ideas

and inventions which transformed not just the country, but the world.

The Industrial Revolution led to the invention of the factory

and powered a huge growth in industrial towns, completely

changing Britain's landscape and the way that people lived and worked.

No longer were men, women and children

producing goods piecemeal in their homes.

From now on, they toiled on production lines

in great cathedrals of labour.

The lives of workers were transformed for generations to come.

'Sally Hoban is a historian of the City of Birmingham.'

I've got here a painting

of the manufactory works at Soho. Would you describe this

-as one of the first factories?

-Absolutely. It's a large building,

it would have been a hive of enterprise,

thousands of workers, men, women and children, working in all those

different rooms in the factory. And if you can imagine

the noise and the industry, very much like you can hear

in the background here, it must have been a fantastic place.

I would definitely say that Soho was

one of the very, very first factories in the world.

We take the factory for granted, but it actually starts

-in a specific place and a specific period.

-It does.

-Making of the modern world.

-The making of the modern world.

Now the great and the good made enlightenment tours.

Not just to London, Paris and Rome,

but also to Birmingham.

They came to see and learn how the town's entrepreneurs

were producing a wider range of goods,

more cheaply than ever before.

Mr Harvey sold the finest swords.

Mr Harris boasted of telescopal, or portable toasting forks.

The famous Mr Taylor

was using the latest steam-powered machinery to manufacture

tortoiseshell and mother-of-pearl buttons for the leaders of society.

Of all the treasures manufactured here, it's these delicate

little objects which really capture my imagination.

In the late-18th century,

Birmingham was most noted for objects such as this,

that we call Birmingham toys. By that, we don't mean

the cuddly variety, we mean articles, usually made of metal,

used for personal adornment, so to be carried about the person.

This is absolutely exquisite, this little fish here.

See his reticulated tail? It's really rather wonderful.

It's called a vinaigrette.

And how it works, if you were an 18th-century gentleman

and you were at a business dinner,

or doing some business outside the home, and you were sitting next to

somebody that perhaps didn't smell very nice...

Oh, right, didn't clean their teeth.

Didn't really clean in the 18th century.

..you'd pull this out of your pocket and, when they weren't looking,

open up the top. Can you see there's a perforated

-layer in there?

-Oh, yes.

-Inside there would have been

some sponge soaked in orange oil, so you could very carefully...

have a little sniff and then quickly put the top back on

and back in your pocket before they noticed.

And literally, thousands and thousands of those were made.

In the century from 1700, Birmingham's population exploded,

turning it from a small metal-working town of 7,000 people

to a city nine times the size,

the third largest in the kingdom, after London and Bristol.

A change fuelled by the transformative power

of the Industrial Revolution.

For me, there was one entrepreneur, above all others,

who understood the opportunities presented by this growing

consumer market - Josiah Wedgwood.

He was brought up in a family of potters in North Staffordshire,

and inherited only £20 from his father.

But his genius for creating - and then satisfying -

consumer demand made him one of the richest men in the country.

Wedgwood appreciated that the middle classes could not be

relied upon to understand that they actually necessarily wanted

these new-fangled goods being manufactured across Britain.

Therefore, he had to persuade them to buy them,

indeed, to desire them, in their households.

And to that end, he became one of the fathers of

what we today call advertising and marketing.

For centuries, most families' household goods

were made by local artisans and bought at local markets.

By the start of the 18th century,

shops were beginning to be opened

in London and other large cities.

But Wedgwood, working with his marketing guru, Thomas Bentley,

unveiled a new concept.

They opened the first purpose-built showroom in London's

fashionable West End in 1774.

Wedgwood and Bentley understood that women would be the prime purchasers

for their ceramic wares.

To that end, in their showroom in Greek Street in London,

they had a grand parlour in which the customers would be greeted

and would meet and chat. And then they would be taken

round the showroom, to see the great new products

that were coming through from the factories.

Wedgwood led the way in the shopping revolution.

But for true success, Wedgwood realised his pottery needed to be of

a consistently high standard, and to be known beyond his London showroom.

His break occurred in 1765,

when Deborah Chetwynd, lady in waiting to Queen Charlotte,

and a member of the Staffordshire aristocracy, asked among

the local potters who could make a tea service for the Queen.

It involved a new technique, re-binding gold gilt to glaze.

He believed if he could win the Queen's patronage for his wares,

then all society would follow.

So he spent months experimenting with different

methods of gilding until he was satisfied.

The Queen ordered a set and it became known as Queen's Ware,

one of Wedgwood's most successful products.

Wedgwood understood how to appeal to the social aspirations

of the middle classes.

Now they too could drink tea from the same china as the Queen.

Wedgwood's genius was to understand the power of marketing.

He was instrumental in dreaming up a wealth

of groundbreaking techniques and ideas,

many of which are still used today.

The consumer demand created by the Industrial Revolution

presented both a huge opportunity and a problem for manufacturers.

There was great potential to sell more goods,

but the terrible state of Britain's roads

meant that transporting raw materials and finished products

safely and quickly was virtually impossible.

In the 16th and 17th century, the road system was very bad.

Parishes were responsible

for maintaining the highway within their boundaries.

But the problem was that if you lived in one parish,

say the parish of Stoke over here, and you knew that your neighbours

in the next-door parish, the parish of Leek over here,

just weren't maintaining their roads,

in fact, that they were a potholed nightmare,

why should you maintain your road on your side of the boundary?

All it was going to do was lead to the terrible road on the other side.

The result was an absolute nightmare for travellers.

Once again, Parliament was willing to legislate to support trade.

In 1706, it passed an act which allowed local businessmen

to build and run permanent turnpike roads.

In return, they could charge travellers a toll

for using their road, and some of the money

would then be spent on maintaining it.

Other Turnpike Acts soon followed.

Nowhere was the need more pressing than in North Staffordshire.

Here, the Potteries would become one of Britain's

greatest industrial centres.

But when Wedgwood and his fellow businessmen

first set up their factories,

there were no reliable roads to bring in raw materials.

And mules had to carry fragile ceramics to market in panniers.

Unsurprisingly, a third of the wares were broken along the way,

pushing up the price of the surviving pieces.

In 1763, Josiah Wedgwood brought

a transport revolution to Staffordshire.

Thwarted by the problems of getting his goods

to market, he petitioned Parliament to build a turnpike road from

his potteries at Burslem over there to the Red Bull on the London Road.

This map shows the route that was proposed, a route that was

to join the Potteries to the national road network.

From 1706, the length of turnpike roads

increased from a mere 300 miles to an incredible 15,000 miles

just 70 years later.

Improving the roads increased

the movement of goods and ideas around the country

and reduced journey times,

which further stimulated the economy

and helped drive the Industrial Revolution forward.

The Industrial Revolution in the 18th century had seen

unprecedented improvements to Britain's transport network.

But it was the next great advance in transport technology that

truly enabled Wedgwood and his ilk to expand.

The impact is still in the landscape to this day.

These were the canals, the motorways of the 18th century.

Once again, private entrepreneurs led the way.

Wedgwood had noted that the canal,

built by James Brindley to bring coal from the Manchester coalfields

to the River Mersey, reduced its cost by half.

He thought a canal connecting his potteries in Stoke-on-Trent could

bring clay from the Mersey and flint for glazes from the River Trent.

Andrew Watts is a canal historian.

To bring in the sort of materials that one canal barge

would bring in with one horse and one man

would have taken at least

100 pack horses and mules, in the 18th century.

Wedgwood used his great powers of persuasion

to garner the support of the North Staffordshire MPs and peers

and sent a petition to Parliament to set up a company to build

the Trent and Mersey Canal.

But there was a problem.

The route of the waterway took it through the rolling hills

of Staffordshire.

This difficult terrain demanded that Brindley undertake

one of the greatest engineering feats of the time.

The digging of the Harecastle Tunnel, north of Stoke-on-Trent.

The tunnel is 2,880 yards, from one end to the other,

that's well over a mile-and-a-half, getting on for two miles.

Four times longer than the longest tunnel built

anywhere in the world up to that point.

And how did they build it?

They built it by hand, picks, shovels and blasting powder.

Using very basic surveying equipment, they built it straight.

-How did they get through it?

-They didn't have an engine, of course,

they had to leg through the tunnel. Two men would lie on their backs

on boards on the boats with their feet

on the tunnel wall, and they would walk the boat through.

-Roughly how long would that have taken?

-About two hours.

-Very hard work.

-Yeah.

The Trent and Mersey Canal opened in 1777, five years late.

But within a few decades, narrow boats were carrying

over a quarter-of-a-million tonnes of goods annually through the tunnel.

By greatly reducing the cost of transporting goods

to and from Stoke-on-Trent, the canal helped the Potteries become

one of the great ceramic centres of the world, and in the process

made its shareholders, including Josiah Wedgwood, very rich.

These canals were built across Britain,

linking coasts and navigable rivers

and transforming the profitability of British industry.

If I had to pick a symbol for the early Industrial Revolution,

it would be the canal, which dramatically cut the cost of taking

raw materials to factories and the finished goods on to market.

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