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Richard Arkwright
Sir Richard Arkwright was an English inventor and a leading entrepreneur during the early Industrial Revolution. He developed several inventions which mechanized the making of yarn and thread for the textile industry. He also helped to create the factory system of manufacture. -
James Watt
He was a Scottish inventor, mechanical engineer, and chemist. He improved on Thomas Newcomen's steam engine with his steam engine in 1776. This was fundamental to the changes brought by the Industrial Revolution. -
Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism, in normative ethics, a tradition stemming from the late 18th- and 19th-century English philosophers and economists Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill according to which an action is right if it tends to promote happiness and wrong if it tends to produce the reverse of happiness—not just the happiness of the performer of the action but also that of everyone affected by it. -
Spinning Jenny
The spinning jenny is a multi-spindle spinning frame, and was one of the key developments in the industrialization of weaving during the early Industrial Revolution. It was invented in 1764 by James Hargreaves England. -
Thomas Malthus
He was an English economist and demographer. He was a famous 18th-century British economist known for the population growth philosophies outlined in his 1798 book "An Essay on the Principle of Population." In it, Malthus theorized that populations would continue expanding until growth is stopped or reversed by disease, famine, war, or calamity. -
Mutual-Aid Societies
"A mutual aid society is an organization formed to provide mutual aid, benefit, and/or insurance among its members. Benefits are not necessarily monetary and may include services and social activities. -
George Stephenson
He was a self-made mechanical engineer, largely credited with building the first railway line and becoming the 'father of the railways'. His rail gauge of 4 ft 8.5 inches became the global standard gauge. He also developed a miners safety lamp. -
Cotton Gin
Eli Whitney patented the cotton gin. This was a machine that revolutionized the production of cotton by greatly speeding up the process of removing seeds from cotton fiber. By the mid-19th century, cotton had become America's leading export. -
Karl Marx
Karl Marx was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist and socialist revolutionary. Born in Trier, Germany, Marx studied law and philosophy at university. He worked primarily in the realm of political philosophy and was a famous advocate for communism. -
Dynamo
A dynamo is an obsolete electrical generator that creates direct current using a commutator. Dynamos were the first electrical generators capable of delivering power for industry. They were also the foundation upon which many other later electric-power conversion devices were based. -
Socialism
Socialism is a range of economic and social systems characterized by social ownership of the means of production and workers' self-management as well as the political theories and movements associated with them. Social ownership can be public, collective or cooperative ownership, or citizen ownership of equity. -
Social Gospel
The Social Gospel was a movement in Protestantism that applied Christian ethics to social problems, especially issues of social justice such as economic inequality, poverty, alcoholism, crime, racial tensions, slums, unclean environment, child labor, lack of unionization, poor schools, and the dangers of war. -
Airplane
The Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur, were two American aviation pioneers generally credited with inventing, building, and flying the world's first successful airplane. They made the first controlled, sustained flight of a powered, heavier-than-air aircraft with the Wright Flyer on December 17, 1903. They layer worked on making a longer sustained airplane. -
Assembly Line
An assembly line is a manufacturing process (often called a progressive assembly) in which parts (usually interchangeable parts) are added as the semi-finished assembly moves from workstation to workstation where the parts are added in sequence until the final assembly is produced. This helped mass produce items, which made the item much cheaper to buy for the average person. Henry Ford introduced this to produce his vehicles. -
Communism
Communism is a philosophical, social, political, and economic ideology and movement whose ultimate goal is the establishment of a communist society, which is a socioeconomic order structured upon the ideas of common ownership of the means of production and the absence of social classes, money, and the state.
