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Industry 2.0

This is a continuation of a series of posts dedicated to the main industrial revolutions of our era. After giving you the most interesting details on the First, we can now move forward a few years to speak about the next historical milestone with regard to industry: The Second Industrial Revolution.

 

A brief history

The fact is, this new revolution, covering the period between 1850-1870 and the beginning of the First World War in 1914, should not really be considered a separate event, but rather a continuation and a refinement of the advantages arising from the first industrial revolution. Once the military and political conflicts that had plagued Europe and America in the early nineteenth century had largely disappeared, the extraordinary economic, social and technological changes that had taken place at the end of the eighteenth resurfaced. This time they were much stronger and brought about an acceleration of industrial processes that considerably changed the way people lived in practically the whole of the world.

For example, capitalism took root and became established as the main economic model (which led to the consolidation of the middle-classes, and laid the foundations for a future class struggle between them and the working classes), and the first global powers emerged: The United States, Japan and Germany, and very important discoveries and technological and scientific advances were made. There is no doubt that one of the most transcendental changes was the use of electricity as a new form of energy, which we will talk about later, because the economic applications of this brought about a series of really interesting changes.

But undoubtedly one of the crucial features of this second revolution was the overwhelming presence of machines. There was an increasing lack of jobs in agriculture, and the rural population moved to cities (which were also undergoing considerable development and expansion) to find a place in an ever-growing industrial complex. Unfortunately, it was also going to be difficult for them there, because this is when there was an unprecedented boom in the mechanisation of industrial processes, and when the most innovative processes arrived, and they have remained right up to the present: Assembly-line production, which has the objective of significantly increasing productivity in a company. In this regard, two people were significantly important: The American engineers Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henry Ford, who created two systems for industrial organisation that marked an era: Taylorism and Fordism.

 

The main innovations

The Second Industrial Revolution provided us with a series of innovations that were truly disruptive for the time. There is no doubt that it was one of the most prolific eras in the field of technological and scientific discoveries. This was historical space in time that witnessed the novel theories of the German physicist Albert Einstein, the equations of the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, a key factor in the study of electromagnetism, the appearance of dynamite invented by the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the studies of another chemist, this time born in Germany, Adolf von Baeyer, the creator of barbiturates, the discovery of new metals, such as zinc and aluminium, the invention of the cinematograph by the Lumière brothers', and the incredible discoveries with regard to electricity made by one of the visionaries of his time: The Austro-Hungarian engineer Nikola Tesla.

To summarise, the Second Industrial Revolution was a genuine explosion of innovations that would change the world, but we would like to focus on the area that most concerns us: Energy.

 

Energy in the Second Industrial Revolution

The energy supply had not only been increasing as a result of progressive improvements in this field during the First Industrial Revolution (such as Watt's steam engine), but following the discovery of two new sources of energy which were a key factor during this period.

One of them was oil. In 1850, three men, James Young, Edward Meldrum and Edward William Binney, opened the first private oil factory and refinery. There they produced both lubricants and naphtha, i.e. petrol. Six years later, it started to be used as a fuel to the detriment of steam, which led to a number of interesting inventions. Here are two of the most important:

  • The internal combustion engine. In 1860, the Belgian engineer Jean Joseph Etienne Lenoir designed and built the first two-stroke internal combustion engine and, a year later, the four-stroke engine. Although it was in 1876 when his good friend Nicolaus Otto, a German engineer (creator of the first petroleum gas engine), perfected the four-stroke engine and laid the foundations for today's engines. Otto's invention took advantage of the energy released by burning petrol to generate mechanical energy. Over time, this innovation led to the manufacture of the first cars that ran on petrol. The first of these, a three-wheeled single-seater, appeared in 1879 and was produced by Karl Benz.
  • The aeroplane. One of the most revolutionary inventions which undoubtedly enabled humans to fly through the air at high speed. Before powered aeroplanes, Sir George Cayley, father of aerodynamics, had built the first passenger glider in 1853. The first aircraft with an engine (albeit a steam engine) was designed and built by the French engineer Clément Ader: His Éole took off on October 9, 1890 and flew, self-propelled, for fifty metres. Ader continued to make improvements to his planes until seven years later, he managed to fly three hundred metres. However, the most extraordinary feat in the field of aviation was achieved by the pioneering Wright brothers, when on 17 December 1903 they made the first flight with a petrol engine.

As we mentioned in the previous section, the other new source of energy that began to be used was electricity. It represented a true revolution in a number of sectors of society, including communications, and had a very positive impact on a number of industrial processes (e.g. refrigeration) and made the lives of people in cities easier as a result of such things as the first electric lighting systems (designed by the inventor Thomas Alva Edison).

As a result of progress made in the study of electricity, from the second half of the nineteenth century we began to see inventions that radically transformed our world. Here are two of the most important:

  • The telegraph. The electric telegraph actually predates the start of the Second Industrial Revolution, but this is when it began to be very important. The first telegraph was designed and built by the American Samuel Morse in 1837, who also invented the data transmission code that bears his name. Two years later, the first telegraph lines were installed in the United States, France and England. But it was the Italian engineer Guillermo Marconi who developed this concept following the studies he made in electromagnetism, and he designed the first transmission of electric telegraphy signals without using wires. His discoveries also led to the creation of a crucial invention in the coming world wars: The radio, although its invention is officially attributed to Tesla.
  • The telephone. Although many people think that it was developed as a result of the work done by the British scientist Graham Bell, it was actually an Italian, Antonio Meucci, who designed the first electric telephone in 1957 so he could communicate easily with his wife who was suffering from rheumatism and as a result she was almost always bedridden. Meucci's device, called a teletrophone, could send acoustic signals from one device to another using electricity. However, Meucci was never able to register the patent because he did not have enough money. Bell made an in-depth study of his invention, perfected it and patented it in 1876. It slowly began to be used in cities but just a few decades later every household now had its own telephone.

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