Industrial Revolution

The development of the Watt governor for steam engines, which adapted the power output of the engine automatically to the load by means of feedback, consolidated the first Industrial Revolution.

— Industrial Revolution

[In eighteenth-century Britain] engineers for the most began as simple workmen, skilful and ambitious but usually illiterate and self-taught. They were either millwrights like Bramah, mechanics like Murdoch and George Stephenson, or smiths like Newcomen and Maudslay.

— Industrial Revolution

The industrial revolution was well underway before the steam-engine came into use for driving machinery. Only two prime-movers—the water wheel and the windmill—were widely available, and with very few exceptions these yielded no more than 10 h.p. and often less.

— Industrial Revolution

The development of science has produced an industrial revolution which has brought different peoples in such close contact with one another through colonization and commerce that no matter how some nations may still look down upon others, no country can harbor the illusion that its career is decided wholly within itself.

— Industrial Revolution

This explosion of human population, especially in the post-Industrial Revolution years of the past two centuries, coupled with the unequal distribution and consumption of wealth on the planet, is the underlying cause of the Sixth Extinction.

— Industrial Revolution

Arguably the third industrial revolution was triggered by the invention of the World Wide Web at CERN.

— Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

— Industrial Revolution

To those who think that all this sounds like science fiction, we point out that yesterday's science fiction is today's fact. The Industrial Revolution has radically altered man's environment and way of life, and it is only to be expected that as technology is increasingly applied to the human body and mind, man himself will be altered as radically as his environment and way of life have been.

— Industrial Revolution

The Modernist reaction to the Enlightenment came in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, whose brutalizing effects revealed that modern life had not become... mathematically perfect...

— Industrial Revolution

There is no machine or mechanism [as compared with the steam engine] in which the little the theorists have done is more useless. It arose, was improved and perfected by working mechanics—and by them only.

— Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution was a watershed in the history of mankind. Three forces – technology, economic organization, and science, in this sequence – each from separate and undistinguished parentage, linked up, inconspicuously at first, to form, hardly a hundred years ago, into a social maelstrom that is still engulfing new and new millions of people, in an irresistible rush.

— Industrial Revolution

Our attention will focus on the institutional context of technological innovation rather than the technology itself. We shall view technology as a social product and shall not be over much interested in the priority claims of individual inventors, for the actual course of work that leads to the conception and use of technology always involves a group that has worked for a considerable period of time on the basic idea before success is achieved.

— Industrial Revolution

The significant thing about the Darbys and coke-iron is not that the first Abraham Darby "invented" a new process but that five generations of the Darby connection were able to perfect it and develop most of its applications.

— Industrial Revolution