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A Watt steam engine, the
steam engine that propelled the Industrial Revolution in
Britain and the world
The
Industrial Revolution was a transformation of human life circumstances that occurred in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Britain, the United States, and Western Europe. It was characterized by a complex interplay of changes in
technology,
society,
medicine,
economy,
education, and
culture in which multiple technological innovations replaced human labor with mechanical work, replaced
vegetable sources like
wood with
mineral sources like
coal and
iron, freed mechanical power from being tied to a fixed running water source, and supported the injection of capitalist practices, methods, and principles into what had been an agrarian society.
