Second Industrial Revolution

The Second Industrial Revolution, also called the Technological Revolution, was an era of fast-moving science, standardisation and mass production, usually dated from about 1870 to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Centred on Britain, Germany and the United States, and reaching France, the Low Countries and Japan, it brought cheap steel, electricity, synthetic chemicals, oil, the telephone and the motor car, along with new ways of organising large businesses.

The first Industrial Revolution, built on textiles, iron and steam, had lost momentum by the mid-nineteenth century. Several earlier advances prepared the next phase: precise machine tools, standard screw threads such as Joseph Whitworth's design of 1841, and new ways of making steel. Henry Bessemer's converter allowed steel to be mass-produced; in 1878 Sidney Gilchrist Thomas and his cousin Percy Gilchrist patented a process that removed phosphorus from iron, which proved especially valuable in Belgium and Germany. The Siemens–Martin open-hearth furnace, first used for steel by Pierre-Émile Martin in 1865, became the leading method by the early twentieth century. Patrick Geddes first used the phrase "second industrial revolution" in 1910, and it was later standardised by the historian David Landes in the 1960s and 1970s.

Cheap steel transformed transport. Robert Mushet made durable steel rails in 1857, and steel rails, which lasted more than ten times as long as iron ones, were sold commercially in the United States from 1867. Americans laid 75,000 miles of track in the 1880s alone, and the First Transcontinental Railroad, completed in 1869, linked the East Coast with San Francisco. At sea, new naval designs led to modern battleships during the 1870s, and a transatlantic telegraph cable was completed in 1866.

Joseph Swan's incandescent lamps lit a street in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1879 and London's Savoy Theatre in 1881. London gained a central power station at Holborn Viaduct in 1882, followed by Pearl Street in New York, and Sebastian de Ferranti's Deptford station of 1891 pioneered high-voltage alternating current. Electric street railways spread from the late 1880s. Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone in 1876, and Guglielmo Marconi commercialised radio, sending the first transatlantic transmission from Cornwall to Newfoundland in 1901.

William Henry Perkin made the first synthetic dye, mauveine, in 1856, but German firms led by BASF, Bayer and Hoechst came to dominate; by 1913 eight German companies made almost 90 per cent of the world's dyestuffs. Edwin Drake's well at Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859 began the American oil boom, with kerosene for lamps as its first major product. Karl Benz patented his motor car in 1886, Rudolf Diesel and Herbert Akroyd Stuart designed diesel engines in the 1890s, and Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch developed a process to make ammonia for fertilisers.

Railways forced companies to develop professional management, and in the United States Frederick Winslow Taylor's "scientific management" applied time-and-motion study to factory work. Henry Ford's company arranged machine tools and conveyors in the order of work to create the assembly line; the price of a Model T fell from $780 in 1910 to $360 in 1916.

Rising output pushed prices down, contributing to business failures in the Long Depression of 1873–1896. The German Empire, which invested more heavily in research than Britain, became its chief industrial rival in Europe. In the United States giant corporations such as Standard Oil came to dominate whole industries, and in 1901 J. P. Morgan formed U.S. Steel, the first billion-dollar corporation. By 1900 Britain still produced 24 per cent of world industrial output, ahead of the United States with 19 per cent and Germany with 13 per cent. Telegraphs and steamships knitted together world trade, and the era also fuelled a new wave of colonial expansion.

Our 1878, 1900 and 1914 maps show the industrial powers of the age, including the German Empire and the British Empire.