The Industrial Revolutions

In class, we have discussed two industrial revolutions. The original Industrial Revolution featured Great Britain at the forefront; the Second Industrial Revolution saw Germany and the United States equal and quickly surpass Great Britain in power and prestige. In Great Britain, industry was based around the textile industry; it can be said, and should be known, that the Industrial Revolution started as an agricultural movement. Inventions, such as the Jethro Tull, the Cotton Gin, the Seed Drill and the Rotherham Iron Plough, made agriculture more bountiful and productive. Machines, such as the Flying Shuttle, the Water Frame, and the Spinning Jenny, then utilized the excess cotton to produce more yarn and more textile to sell. Britain was separated from the rest of Europe by the Continental System of Napoleon. Remember, the rest of Europe was behind Britain considerably in industrialization by approximately 60 years.

Socially, the Industrial Revolution saw tough urban living conditions. The streets were dirty; crowded rowhouses were made with wood and were fire traps; there was no separation from drinking water and sewage. How did Charles Dickens describe the industrial town in Coketown? Who were the employees within factories? As the picture shows above, children were frequently employed within the coal mines because they were small and easily moved throughout the mines. In the factories, women and children worked because they were cheaper labor.

The Second Industrial Revolution and the second half of the nineteenth century brings forth the industrial power of both the United States and Germany. We had seen during the First Industrial Revolution that the United States had greatly increased the methods of transportation, by digging canals and lying down railroad tracks. With regards to the Second Industrial Revolution, the United States sees the Gilded Age, a term used by Mark Twain, and the rise of the "Robber Barons." Who are these heads of the monopolies in industry and what industries were they leading? For example, Henry Ford was the automobile giant.

In Europe, Great Britain's machinery was getting older and had not been replaced. Because of this, Germany, who focused on metallurgy rather than agriculture, went to the head of the industrial class. With Otto von Bismarck promising "blood and iron," Germany matched British superiority of the seas with their battleships, called dreadnoughts, and their complex railroad system. Furthermore, because Germany had a large army, the improvement in technology greatly improved their potency as a unit.

Other changes occurred during the later half of the 19th century. For one, Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels co-author The Communist Manifesto, which establishes the economic school of thought of equal distribution of goods and no private property. Now, why would this book be important? There were also improvements in science. For chemistry majors, the periodic table of elements was organized by the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev in 1869. The periodic table orders elements by their atomic weight. In physics, Michael Faraday discovered the principle of electromagnetic induction, while Albert Einstein (and Max Planck) describes the theories of relativity. Another scientific difference for the Second Industrial Revolution was the source of power. In the first, coal was used as a primary powering force; the second edition saw the use of oil and more importantly, the cleaner electricity.

As industrialization progressed, so did the adjustments made by governments to improve the living conditions in cities and the working conditions in the factories. Education became more widespread as laws were put into place to limit hours of work for children in factories. Women shifted out of factories into more white-collar, middle-class professions. Women operated phones, worked as secretaries, became teachers with the expansion in education, and, because of the work of Florence Nightingale in British war camps in Crimea, women became the majority of nurses.

Artistically, the latter half of the nineteenth century had two differing moments. One was realism. In literature, one of the most famous realist authors we have read in class, Charles Dickens. In art, names such as Gustave Courbet (seen above with The Burial at Ornans) and Edouard Manet (seen below with A Bar at the Folies Bergere) depict ordinary life scenes. There is little flamboyance; instead, it is truth on canvas. It can be argued that the realists were descendants of the academy painters of neoclassicism.

Manet is a key painter for the transition from the first art movement, realism, to the second art movement, impressionism (which is eerily similar to an early line from Wikipedia, but straight from my art history notes from my freshman year of college -- before Wikipedia). Impressionists did not paint very rigid scenes or people. Edges were blurred, brushstrokes were varied. Impressionist artists focused not on form, but on color. More closely related with Delacroix and the Romanticism paintings than realism. Influenced by further research in the scientific field of optics and the play of light in nature, impressionists painted for what the eye saw, not what was necessarily proper and correct in drawing. Manet was criticized by the realists and the neoclassicists for his painting, The Luncheon on the Grass, because a female figure was nude in a realistic setting.

Manet is generally not considered an impressionist, as there are still lines and more forms are clearly identifiable. The most prolific of the impressionists would be of a similar name, Claude Monet. Known for his water lilies and his landscapes, Monet would spend days working on the same scene at different times of the day, as to trace the changes of light and shadow during the course of the day. A great example of this is his series of paintings at the Rouen Cathedral, of which Columbia University has put a wonderful slide show together for here. Other famous painters include Vincent Van Gogh (Starry Night), Edgar Degas (known for his ballerinas and dance studios), Pierre Renoir, and Alfred Sisley (landscapes, especially snowy ones). One should know both impressionism and realism, their connections to neoclassicism and romanticism, and the differences between them.