Age of Technology

The story of industrialization begins not in a factory but in a university repair shop. In 1764, James Watt -- an instrument maker at the University of Glasgow -- was asked to fix a model Newcomen steam engine. While repairing it, he realized the design was fantastically wasteful, losing most of its heat with each stroke. His separate condenser, patented in 1769, made the steam engine three times more efficient -- and suddenly, mechanical power was cheap enough to transform entire industries.

Within decades, steam engines were pumping water from coal mines, powering cotton mills, driving iron foundries, and eventually pulling the world's first locomotives. The transformation was staggering in speed. In 1760, Britain was an agricultural country where most people lived in villages. By 1850, it was the world's first industrial nation -- majority urban, producing more manufactured goods than the rest of the world combined. The "dark Satanic mills" that William Blake described employed children as young as five, working fourteen-hour days in conditions that killed thousands annually from disease, exhaustion, and industrial accidents.

The Industrial Revolution was simultaneously humanity's greatest material achievement and one of its greatest traumas. It generated unprecedented wealth but distributed it with savage inequality. It liberated people from subsistence farming but trapped them in factory discipline. It connected the world through railways and steamships but enabled European colonial empires to dominate the globe. Every modern debate -- about inequality, worker rights, environmental destruction, technological unemployment, globalization -- originates in the questions first posed when Watt's improved engine began to turn.