Industrial Revolution Research Paper

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At the start of the Industrial Revolution, transport in Britain was rudimentary. Goods were transported on river barges but this was a slow and costly exercise. Roads were poorly built and maintained. From 1750 onwards, growing numbers of wealthy merchants and industrialists such as Josiah Wedgwood (ceramics), John Wilkinson (iron) and Matthew Boulton (coin minting) started demanding quicker and cheaper forms of transport to move coal to their factories, ship their products to markets and speed up travel between cities. As a result, roads improved and travel times decreased.

The invention of the steam engine revolutionised manufacturing and transport and had a major impact on people’s everyday lives. Britain was fortunate to have large …show more content…
New modes of transport became available to replace horse-drawn carriages. The growth of coal as an important fuel source gave momentum to canal building. Over 100 canals were dug across Britain from 1760 to 1820, linking the major rivers and creating a transport network for the transportation of food and freight. One of the longest canals was the Liverpool to Leeds canal at 204 kilometres long. Initially, barges pulled by horses walking beside canals transported crops from the country to the city and manufactured goods from the city back to the country. As the high price of coal was mainly due to the costs of transporting it rather than mining it, the new canals caused the price of coal to drop by half. This drop in price provided even faster growth in Britain's cotton mills. As a consequence, cheaper coal transport also dropped the price of cotton weaving, increasing the profits for mill …show more content…
According to Michael Cobb’s definitive work ‘The Railways of Great Britain. A Historical Atlas’, the journey prior to the Industrial Revolution from London to Edinburgh – just over 640 kilometres – took between 10 and 12 days by horse-drawn coach. Travel time had dropped to just under two days by train by 1836. Moreover, travel time had dropped further to around 12 hours by 1850 once all of Britain was linked by rail. According to the Grace's Guide, the leading source of historical information on industry and manufacturing in Britain, the world’s first permanent steam locomotive public railway line "the Stockton and Darlington Railway" (S&DR) was opened in 1825. It brought together two innovations. On the one hand the steam engine used previously to pump water from mines and on the other, the rail-mounted mining trucks pulled up to that time by horses. As for the first railway to link two major cities opened, it opened in 1830 and linked Manchester's cotton industry to the port of Liverpool to transport goods destined for export. Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, the building of rail tracks and strong, iron bridges for new train routes meant that iron production doubled at this
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