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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.
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 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.
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:
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: