British Industrial Revolution Inventions Quiz

Answer:

In short, the Industrial Revolution saw a transition from hand production methods to machines, aided by water and steam power and the development of chemical and iron production processes. This resulted in greatly increased output starting in the textile industry, which moved from a home-based production system to a purpose-built mill.

One of the important early inventions was the spinning jenny. A multi-spindle spinning frame, this was developed by James Hargreaves in the mid 1760s. The spinning jenny allowed for the working of 8 spindles at once, which grew to 120 spindles in time, reducing the amount of work required to produce cloth. It helped to increase spinning capacity closer to the output of looms improved by the flying shuttle.

The water frame, patented by Richard Arkwright in 1769, came next. It was a spinning frame powered by water wheel. It produced a stronger harder yarn than the spinning jenny. Unlike the spinning jenny, it was limited to one spindle per frame however the water wheel could power many frames.

Samuel Crompton solved this issue with his spinning mule in 1779, which combined the spinning jenny and the water frame in one machine. Such machines could eventually carry up to 1,320 spindles and were looked after by as few as three people. At one point there were around 5 million mule spindles in Lancashire mills alone.

Anticipating the expiry of Arkwright's patent which would result in the spun cotton supply greatly exceeding weaver capacity, Edmund Cartwright developed a vertical power loom which he patented in 1785. A mechanised loom, this dramatically increased production efficiency. A series of improvements to the design and ancillary equipment were made by over 20 inventors before 1840. A weaver could be expected to look after between 10 and 30 such looms.

The iron industry saw many improvements, such as Henry Cort's puddling process from 1786, which helped turn Britain from an importer of bar iron to a net exporter by the 1790s. The puddling process allowed the conversion of pig iron into bar (wrought) iron, a structural grade of iron, at much reduced cost in a coal-fired reverberatory furnace.

Water and wind supplied most industrial power in the early days. Steam engines were being developed but operated with a piston action suitable for use as pumps. In 1776 James Watt invented the first truly efficient steam engine which transformed the piston action into a rotary motion suitable for industrial applications.

In the agricultural world, Andrew Meikle's threshing machine from 1786 hastened the rural migration to factory work. Threshing is the process for removing the outer husks from grains of wheat and was very labour intensive. Other inventions contributing to the British Agricultural Revolution included Jethro Tull's seed drill (1701) and Joseph Foljambe's iron Rotherham plough (c. 1730).

The steam engine led to the steam locomotive via Richard Trevithick (1803), who developed Watt's design into the "Puffing Devil" steam locomotive. George Stephenson made his own locomotives, but is better known as the "Father of Railways" for his pioneering railway lines from 1825, which Henry Cort's puddled iron process made practical. Stephenson's chosen rail gauge is still used by most railways around the globe. Canals were another important transport medium.

Roman road construction techniques were not bettered for many centuries. Frenchman Pierre-Marie-Jérôme Trésaguet is considered by some as the first to take a scientific approach to the process around 1764. Robert Telford brought this technique to Scotland at the beginning of the 19th century. John McAdam simplified this with his macadam process. Tarmacadam (or tarmac) was developed by Edgar Purnell Hooley in 1902 when motor vehicles appeared and caused a dust problem.

Portland cement is the final invention included in this selection. Joseph Aspdin patented an early version of this in 1824 and his son William continued to make improvements to the formula in the years following. It was named after its similarity to Portland stone, a limestone found on the Isle of Portland in Dorset. Various people were developing their own cements around this time but it was Portland cement which proved to be the winner, providing a strong and durable binding agent for concrete. This supported the rapid development of infrastructure during this period.

The wrong answers are the printing press (German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg, c.1440), the Pascaline mechanical calculator (French mathematician Blaise Pascal, 1642), the vacuum pump (German scientist Otto von Guericke, 1650), vulcanised rubber (American engineer Charles Goodyear, 1844), the incandescent lamp (various such as Joseph Swan, 1850, Thomas Edison, 1878), and the telephone (various such as German scientist Johann Philipp Reis, c.1860, Alexander Graham Bell, 1876).