The Industrial Revolution: All of It Has to Change Again

Trains represent where we’ve been & where we‘ll go next

We can’t use fossil fuels anymore. We know this. We have to change everything. Do we know what we have to change? To many of us, this is less obvious.

If we look to history for context, we can’t overlook that everything has been changing, technologically, for a couple hundred years. I read Thomas Crump’s 2010 book A Brief History of How the Industrial Revolution Changed the World to think about this some more.

It takes machinery and fuel to transport machinery and fuel. Britain has long used railways for this kind of transport: trains to carry coal. “By the beginning of the nineteenth century,” Crump writes, “a vast network of railways brought coal down from the richest mining area of England to its two main rivers, the Tyne and the Wear.” The biggest was the Tanfield wagonway, with wagons that departed every 45 seconds, carrying “about half of the Tyneside traffic and a third of the total traffic of the north-east coalfields.” Mid-century, “the leading sectors of British industry, such as notably the Lancashire cotton mills, were well integrated into the new transport infrastructure.”

In the US, too, many railways were originally intended to move coal — like Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley Railroad, begun in 1846. The US really came on board with “the industrial revolution” with the steel industry of the 1860s and, later, electricity.