The Second Industrial Revolution

By the 1860s, the first Industrial Revolution had run its course as a transformative shock. Steam engines were no longer new. Cotton mills were no longer wonders. Britain had spent the better part of a century converting coal into wealth and global power, and other nations had taken notice. France, Belgium, the German states, and the northeastern United States were all industrializing, laying rail, building factories, producing textiles. The basic formula was understood: you dig coal out of the ground, you burn it to heat water, the steam drives pistons, and the pistons drive whatever you need driven.

But coal and steam had limits. Steam engines were massive, inefficient, and tethered to their fuel source by supply chains of coal wagons and rail lines. Wrought iron, the structural material of the first industrial age, bent under stress, rusted in weather, and fractured under loads that a growing civilization increasingly demanded it bear. The telegraph could send messages across oceans, but it could not light a room or power a machine on a factory floor. The first Industrial Revolution had given humanity mechanical power. The second would give it something more: control over energy itself.

What happened between roughly 1870 and 1914 was not merely an acceleration of existing trends. It was a phase shift. New materials, new energy sources, new organizational methods, and new scientific understanding converged in a way that rebuilt the physical infrastructure of daily life within a single generation. A person born in 1860 entered a world of horses, candles, and handwritten letters. By the time that person turned fifty, they could ride in an automobile, flip a switch for light, pick up a telephone, and read a newspaper printed on machines running at speeds no hand compositor could match.