The Industrial Revolution has been portrayed as one of the major events to occur to the economic world in American history. The inventions of many new inventions were created and helped many people perform certain tasks more efficiently and in a shorter time frame. The impact of the Industrial Revolution on the world as a whole was that it changed the world economy into a crazy state, in which people had access to a variety of goods and services offered to them by businesses. The impact that this event had on the worker’s life was not necessarily a good or bad thing, however with new and more efficient technology, workers were able to accomplish certain tasks that would have taken them a much longer time to complete before the start of the Industrial Revolution, and however there were some negative side effects. With such new ideas put into the workplace, many workers were expected to be as efficient as the new ways of producing a product or service, and as a result, their health and safety were often overlooked. For example, the Cotton Gin was created March 14th, 1794 by Eli Whitney even though the new machine provided many benefits reducing labor, this made slaves have to work harder and quicker gathering more cotton to run through the machine making slave work almost double.
The Industrial Revolution began in the late eighteenth century after Samuel Slater brought the idea of turning a place of manual labor into a place of machine labor from Great Britain, the main goal was to create and invent machines that did all the hard and heavy work more efficiently and quicker than human beings. The industrial revolution was a time in life when we went from creating products by hand to creating products in factories using machines. This may sound great, however tending to machines still requires hard labor that all men, women, and children had to go through. The Industrial Revolution was a curse. It caused harsh working conditions, rapid urbanization, and a big increase in the population. This idea ended up working bringing new ideas and inventions to the United States such as the cotton gin, the sewing machine, the steam engine and much more. These products put people out of their jobs because they were working too slow and usually only one person needed to handle the machine. The United States saw an opportunity to enlist young faster workers to do job thus leading to child labor issues.
Children’s labor rates spiked up quite a bit in the late eighteenth century up until the mid-nineteenth century. As soon as children were the age of four, they were forced to work in factories or plantations for as little as four cents an hour working about ten to twelve hours a day. Children were ‘good workers’ for plantations and factories because of their nimble fingers, small figures, and fast work ethics. Children working in factories had to deal with more than just the actual work, they had to deal health hazards, low wages, abusive supervisors, dirty working conditions, and many other factors that made them ill. Some children even had to work in coal mines. They often developed lung disease a long time before the typical human being would if they had to work in coal mines at an older age and with proper safety equipment. Even if children were gasping in the corners for fresh clean air supervisors would harass them, forcing them to provide more coal for the community. Supervisors reduced the breaks from little to none during the work day. After this information became public to the world, the government tried to restrict the number of hours that children worked in these conditions. However, farmers, miners, and supervisors resisted. Some laws were created so that children did not end up dying but child labor was still in action. Children during the Industrial Revolution were one of the main workers and helpers that made the success of this time possible.
In 1820, mid industrial revolution, this part of the industrial revolution was a period of transition and innovation, inevitably brought with it changes. Life for both rich and poor was changed. These years boomed with new inventions and machines sending everyone into a craze. The Industrial Revolution created two social classes: middle class and working class. Middle class met that you were not that rich, but also not that poor and working class meant that you worked in a job that did not pay much. This new idea of new machines was brought to the United States to bring three important new changes: speed, use of steam power, and factory systems. The idea of bringing speed to the United States was a big deal during the industrial revolution; many inventions were created to speed up the process of work by just having one-person look after the machine to make sure that it was functioning correctly. Trains mainly brought the idea of using steam power; the use of coal powered the massive machines transporting items to many different places in a fraction of the time that transporting other goods took before the industrial revolution. Simple machines made work easier and powered the factory system industries. Because children worked at these factories, if a machine ever malfunctioned while they used and monitored the machine they were told to slide under them and fix whatever was not working. This new technology, arguably the greatest part of the Industrial Revolution, can be put into a few different innovations and creators of the inventions; however, the push for new products all started with one. The first product to undergo the ’revolution’ was from the cottage industry to the machine age was the cotton gin. Britain, at the time, had a large wool trade. In 1760, the amount of wool sent out places was almost thirty times that of cotton. Demand for cotton grew with a change in the upper class fashion, and Britain started to allow more cotton production. Soon, not enough cotton could not be made to satisfy the demand Samuel Slater saw this and how many people demanded a higher supply for this and he brought this idea to the United States.
Conclusion
The industrial revolution was a time period of creativity and work. The inventions created allowed new products to be created. Demand for these new products had many pros and cons towards the United States that gave people jobs and many opportunities, while at the same time held people down in poverty. It was almost never the intent of the inventors, scientists, and other brilliant people to cause such a commotion between the working class and the industrial machine, but it was, nonetheless, created. In today’s workplaces management does everything that it can do to protect the worker’s health and well-being. During the industrial revolution workers were basically gambling with their lives putting their selves in risky work conditions. People of all ages who worked in factories, mills, and plantations finally stood together to fight for safer workplaces and decent wages. Standing up for what they believed in was not always a safe thing to do but workers did what they had to do to survive. Nevertheless, the Industrial Revolution brought great opportunities to the United States nation and brought many ideas and inventions that completely changed our whole world, society, and work ethic the way we know it today.
