What Was The Main Cause Of The Industrial Revolution

Although there are numerous time periods in the history of the world that are widely debated amongst historians and history-enthusiasts alike, no one topic may be brought up as frequently as the Industrial Revolution. A momentous area of disunity in society, separate factions of people believe in various main factors that truly started the largest shift in the economic, social, and technological world as we know it. To ignore the significance that the natural resources of Great Britain played in ushering along this huge shift would be a mistake for all, as the once-undomesticated quantities of coal, agricultural crops, and iron became the driving force behind the world’s greatest economy at the time. As soon as these resources started being …show more content…
Driven by commonsense and an innate desire to obtain a large profit, common men all over the country put on their “inventor hats,” and so began an unprecedented technological boom. Today, inventor Thomas Newcomen is known as one of the pioneers of the Industrial Revolution; his invention (the first atmospheric steam engine) effected the revolution in profound ways. Once the engine was put into use at the mineral mines, the amount of coal and iron that was obtainable more than doubled. Britain was exporting more goods than any other nation could have dreamed of. While entirely altering the world of mineral mining, the machine simultaneously laid ground for absolutely critical inventions during the epoch — such as trains, ships, and commercial machinery (Movie 2). The importance of the steam engine is eloquently disseminated by Phyllis Deane: “In the long term, technical progress in the production of iron and of steam power was to prove crucial in maintaining momentum of British industrialization generational. For it directly reduced the costs of, and enlarged the scope for, large scale mechanized production…” (p. 17). The Newcomen engine