Building of canals dates to ancient times. The Grand Canal in China, "the world's largest artificial waterway and oldest canal still in existence," parts of which were started between the 6th and 4th ...
At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, inland transport was by navigable rivers and roads, with coastal vessels employed to move heavy goods by sea. Railways or wagon ways were used for convey ...
Other developments included more efficient water wheels, based on experiments conducted by the British engineer John Smeaton the beginnings of a machinery industry and the rediscovery of concrete (ba ...
Coal mining in Britain, particularly in South Wales started early. Before the steam engine, pits were often shallow bell pits following a seam of coal along the surface, which were abandoned as the co ...
The British Agricultural Revolution is considered one of the causes of the Industrial Revolution because improved agricultural productivity freed up workers to work in other sectors of the economy.Ind ...
A machine for making a continuous sheet of paper on a loop of wire fabric was patented in 1798 by Nicholas Louis Robert who worked for Saint-Léger Didot family in France. The paper machine is known a ...
A new method of producing glass, known as the cylinder process, was developed in Europe during the early 19th century. In 1832, this process was used by the Chance Brothers to create sheet glass. They ...
Another major industry of the later Industrial Revolution was gas lighting. Though others made a similar innovation elsewhere, the large scale introduction of this was the work of William Murdoch, an ...
In 1824 Joseph Aspdin, a British bricklayer turned builder, patented a chemical process for making portland cement which was an important advance in the building trades. This process involves sinterin ...
The large scale production of chemicals was an important development during the Industrial Revolution. The first of these was the production of sulphuric acid by the lead chamber process invented by t ...
The Industrial Revolution created a demand for metal parts used in machinery. This led to the development of several machine tools for cutting metal parts. They have their origins in the tools develop ...
The development of the stationary steam engine was an important element of the Industrial Revolution; however, for most of the period of the Industrial Revolution, the majority of industrial power was ...
A major change in the metal industries during the era of the Industrial Revolution was the replacement of wood and other bio-fuels with coal. For a given amount of heat, coal required much less labor ...
The commencement of the Industrial Revolution is closely linked to a small number of innovations, beginning in the second half of the 18th century. By the 1830s the following gains had been made in im ...
The earliest use of the term "Industrial Revolution" seems to be a letter of 6 July 1799 by French envoy Louis-Guillaume Otto, announcing that France had entered the race to industrialise. In his 1976 ...
