6.3 Second Wave Industrialization and Its Effects

The first Industrial Revolution ran on coal, iron, steam and cotton. The second added new technologies that often depended on scientific research, not just practical tinkering.

• Steel: Henry Bessemer's converter (patented 1856) blew air through molten iron to burn off impurities, making steel cheap enough for rails, ships, bridges and weapons. Later methods let steelmakers use the phosphorus-rich iron ore of Lorraine.
• Chemicals: synthetic dyes, fertilizers, medicines and explosives. German firms such as BASF and Bayer led the world, backed by university-trained chemists.
• Electricity: dynamos produced power for factories, electric lighting (Thomas Edison and Joseph Swan each made working light bulbs around 1879), electric trams and subways.
• Internal combustion engine: Nikolaus Otto built a practical gas engine in 1876, Karl Benz built a gasoline-powered car in 1886, and Rudolf Diesel developed his engine in the 1890s.
• Communications and transportation: the electric telegraph (in wide use from the 1840s, with a lasting transatlantic cable from 1866), the telephone (1876), Guglielmo Marconi's wireless radio signal across the Atlantic (1901), electric streetcars, bicycles, steamships, and the airplane, which Louis Blériot flew across the English Channel in 1909. Together with the railroads, these links knit each country's regions into one national market and tied Europe into worldwide trade.
• Food: refrigerated railcars and ships, canning and home iceboxes brought cheaper meat, milk and processed foods to city dwellers.

After unification in 1871, Germany combined Ruhr coal, Lorraine iron ore, a large educated workforce, technical schools, research labs and big investment banks. By about 1900 it produced more steel than Britain and dominated chemicals and electrical goods. Firms like Krupp (steel and arms), Siemens and AEG (electrical) became world names.

Britain was still rich, but its older factories and its reliance on coal and textiles made it look slower. This shift in economic power fed the Anglo-German rivalry that you will see again in the naval race before World War I (7.3).

Steel mills and chemical plants cost far more than a cotton mill, so business organization changed. Joint-stock companies with limited liability let many investors buy shares without risking everything they owned. Firms grew through mergers, and in Germany producers formed cartels, agreements among companies to fix prices and split up markets.

A long slump in prices from 1873 to the mid-1890s, sometimes called the Long Depression, pushed many governments back toward protection. Germany adopted tariffs in 1879 and France in 1892, while Britain kept free trade. This is a useful contrast with the free-trade optimism of the mid-century.

Factories now produced standardized goods in huge quantities, and real wages for many workers rose late in the century as prices fell. That created a mass market. Department stores such as the Bon Marché in Paris and later Selfridges in London sold ready-made goods at fixed, marked prices, with window displays designed to make shopping a pleasure. Advertising, brand names and mail-order catalogs spread.

Shoppers could now buy ready-to-wear clothes, canned and packaged foods, and machines that saved household work, such as the sewing machine. Leisure became an industry too. Railways carried working families to seaside resorts, professional football leagues drew big crowds (England's Football League started in 1888), cheap newspapers reached millions, and bicycles gave young people, including women, new freedom. A new lower middle class of clerks, shop assistants, teachers and typists, many of them women, grew with offices and stores.

Industrialization, combined with better harvests from commercial farming and cheap food carried by rail and steamship, supported rapid population growth. Europe's population roughly doubled over the 1800s. Life expectancy rose and infant mortality fell, especially after cities improved sanitation late in the century (6.9).

The Second Industrial Revolution supplied the tools of the New Imperialism (steamships, telegraph cables, machine guns; see 7.6) and the weapons of World War I (artillery, gas, submarines; see 8.2). It also widened the gap between industrial northwestern Europe and the rest of the continent.