Customer Reviews

What the Industrial Revolution Did for Us

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On page 227 the author states that "if you heated rubber and extracted the sulfur from it, you transformed it into a workable material". In actuality, vulcanization requires the addition of sulfur to rubber, not the removal. A small error in a very interesting book.

This is a book accompanying a television series, so one would not expect anything very profound. The first three of the six chapters are a perfectly readable and lavishly illustrated introduction to the First Industrial Revolution, though there is only one sentence (in the sixth chapter) about Isambard Kingdom Brunel. The other three chapters, on London, medicine and weaponry seem to fit ill with the title of the book. We have something on the growth of London, but one wonders what the extensive description of pleasure gardens has to do with the Industrial Revolution. The only thing that development in medicine "did for us" is Jenner's work on vaccination. Whether that has anything to do with the Industrial Revolution is questionable, and certainly the pages on useless patent medicines and on body snatching can't be said to have done much for us. The description of weaponry (ineffectual rockets and early torpedoes, fortifications like the Martello Towers) likewise have done little for us. Unfortunately, as the note on Further Readings tells us, there seem to be very few general surveys in print of the First Industrial Revolution, but one that is recommended is Phyllis Deane's The First Industrial Revolution, and anyone seriously interested in the subject would do better to consult that work than this one, and Eric Hobsbawm's excellent Industry to Empire is not mentioned in the bibliography at all.

Between 1750 and 1840 the Industrial Revolution changed the lives of British people forever, advancing science and technological discoveries and their application to daily lives. Gavin Weightman is a noted historian and Dan Cruikshank presents the TV series on the topic: together they use the TV show as a starting point and foundation for examining the Industrial Revolution's lasting impact on modern times.