Industrial revolution facts and facts about industrial revolutions.
12 facts on this shelf
Despite the name, the French Bulldog's story starts in England, where lace workers in Nottingham kept toy-sized bulldogs. When many of those workers moved to France during the Industrial Revolution, they brought the dogs along, and the breed was refined into the Frenchie in France.
The Industrial Revolution began in Britain around 1760, when new machines and factories transformed how goods were made and how people lived.
In 1769, James Watt patented a separate condenser that made steam engines far more efficient, and the "watt" unit of power is named after him.
James Watt came up with the term "horsepower" to help sell steam engines by comparing their power to the work of horses.
The spinning jenny, invented by James Hargreaves in the 1760s, let one worker spin multiple threads at once and helped launch the textile factory boom.
The Liverpool and Manchester Railway, which opened in 1830, was the first intercity railway to run passenger trains entirely by steam.
George and Robert Stephenson's locomotive Rocket won the 1829 Rainhill Trials, a competition to find the best engine for the new Liverpool and Manchester Railway.
Eli Whitney's cotton gin, patented in 1794, made cleaning cotton much faster, but it also caused the expansion of slavery in the American South as cotton farming boomed.
Britain's Factory Act of 1833 was one of the first laws to limit child labor, banning children under nine from working in textile mills.
The 1851 census showed that, for the first time, more people in Britain lived in towns and cities than in the countryside, a direct result of industrialization.
During the Industrial Revolution, soot darkened trees in England, and dark-colored peppered moths became more common because they were better camouflaged, a famous example of natural selection.
Thomas Newcomen built the first commercially successful steam engine in 1712 to pump water from mines in England.