Editing Industrial Revolution (section)

==Technology==
[[Image:Victorian factory.jpg|thumb|Right|400px|A Victorian Factory, Watch your Hands]]
The big thing of note here is energy. For most of the history of civilization, if humans wanted to do something like move a heavy object from point A to Point B, dig a hole, grind grain, work iron, or whatever else, they had to do it with muscle power, either their own, other peoples' or draft animals like oxen and horses. Later, they worked out how to put wind and flowing water to use with sails, watermills and windmills. These things were useful in their own right and by the 1700s they were used in a wide variety of operations, but both had serious limitations. There are only so many rivers where you can build water-powered mills and even in windy places there are calm days, so they primarily supplemented good hold man/horsepower. A human can produce about 100 watts (joules per second) of motive power continuously, while a horse can provide about 750 watts. In contrast a kilogram of wood produces about 16-21 megajoules of energy when burned and coal has about 30 megajoules, which comes in the form of heat. Steam engines use boiling water to turn that heat into motive force which can operate factory machines, propel ships and locomotives to carry cargo, dig ditches and more. Once they had been refined to a level of practical efficiency, steam engines forever changed the nature of how work got done. First this was done by belts, gears, and rods, and later by electrical power generated by steam (or other sources) turning generators to power electric motors and lights.

One of the key advances of the Industrial Revolution was the assembly line, which allowed rapid construction of goods by giving each worker a single task to be repeated instead of requiring they have specialized knowledge of the whole process. While this idea goes back to at least the Venetian Arsenal in the Middle Ages, it became the standard during this era thanks to breakthroughs in milling, grinding, and lathing metal powered by steam (these machines were also a pre-requisite for the creation of precision instruments, without which you can't even make the machines that make the machines that make the final product). One side effect of making things on an assembly line is that items were broken into interchangeable parts that were replaceable if they broke, where before repairs were specialized work done by craftsmen, if they could be accomplished at all. The assembly line ultimately led to the proliferation of cheap automobiles, which revolutionized the concept of personal transport; the most prominent example was the Ford Model T, which was the first inexpensive mass-market automobile and remains one of the most-sold cars in history. These early cars all had unique controls and the modern, standardized control layout would not be invented until 1916 and would not achieve popularity until after 1922. Likewise, while assembly line techniques blossomed in the late 19th and early 20th century, it wouldn't be until World War II that quality control was tight enough that parts were interchangeable between factories. 

Education also improved and became more universal during this era. By 1800 literacy was near universal in the United States, though this figure may not be counting slaves. Indeed, high literacy was critical to the American Revolution, which made extensive use of mass-printed propaganda like ''[[Wikipedia:Common Sense (pamphlet)|Common Sense]]''. Public education further improved these literacy rates. Democracy would gradually rise in prominence during this period thanks to increased literacy. The abolition of slavery and women's emancipation would also make serious progress during this era as an extension of the rise in literacy.

Photography was invented in the early 1800s and perfected by the 1840s, when Louis Daguerre invented the process he so humbly named after himself. The proliferation of cheap and (relatively) easily reproduced photographic images took the world by storm. Souvenir and formal photographs became a big business, along with the much creepier death photos (since it took a few minutes to capture a photo with the daguerreotype process, some people found it easier to pose a dead person than to get a live one to sit still). Battlefield photographs from the American Civil War brought the brutality of war into the public eye for the first time. Film recording also got its start during the Industrial Revolution, with the first stroboscopic animations appearing in the 1830s and stereoscopic viewers emerging a decade later. The real revolution came when Eadweard Muybridge worked out how to display a series of static photographs as a single moving image, followed swiftly by George Eastman's invention of the first photographic film in 1884 and the development of the first motion picture cameras by Louis LePrince in 1887. Other inventors and pioneers like Emile Reynaud, Ottomar Anschütz, Robert W. Paul, the Lumiere brothers, and Georges Méliès furthered the technology and brought cinema to the masses for the first time. 

Weapons technology advanced by leaps and bounds. At the start of the Industrial Revolution, the average soldier was armed with a smoothbore flintlock musket that could be shot maybe four times a minute and was accurate to a hundred yards at most. Breech-loading rifles came around very shortly into the period, though the complexity of the mechanism made large scale manufacture impossible. Guns became mass produced (and were among the first complex machines with metal mechanisms to be so), but over the early 19th century rifling became standard and switched over to percussion cap firing mechanisms and were complemented by the first mass-produced revolvers. Starting in 1848, muskets began being phased out for breech-loading rifles. Metallic cartridges and smokeless powder would arrive towards the end of this era. Since black powder would rapidly foul any repeating action, smokeless powder was critical to the function of any self-loading firearm. Machine guns made their first appearance in the 1880s with Sir Hiram Maxim's invention of his namesake gun. Self-loading pistols emerged as well. Artillery advanced from simple iron tubes firing iron balls or canister rounds straight ahead to breech-loading steel guns which fired high-explosive shells on predictable ballistic trajectories.

Of course, there was a downside. Industrialization did generate a lot of wealth, but not everyone profited from it. Rural landlords found that their fields were full of surplus farmhands who weren't needed and promptly kicked them off their land to go live in dirty overcrowded cities full of cheaply made apartments into which people were crammed like sardines. To get enough to survive, everyone in a poor family older than six would have to work in hellish, unsafe conditions for 12 hours or more, often operating dangerous machines that could maim or kill an unwary operator in the heat, dark, stink and noise of it all while their bosses [[Wikipedia:Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire|forcibly locked their workers into the building]].

There were various responses to these conditions, some of which were more extreme than others. The best-known of these is the concept of the labor union, which allowed for workers in the same industry to group together and demand better working conditions from their employers. This era also saw the rise of regulations against child labor, improved safety standards and so forth. And of course, there was the enormous amount of pollution and general environmental destruction, whose effects are coming back to bite us in the ass a little over a century later. It was a legendary problem even then; the famed "London fog" that you see in every Victorian-era depiction of the city was caused by every house and business in London burning coal for heat, kicking vast amounts of soot and pollutants into the air and generating thick, toxic smog.