- Define and explain Machines That Changed Work in your own words
- Use key terms such as Factory system accurately
- Apply what you have learned to new examples and questions
- Avoid the common mistakes learners make with this topic
The Industrial Revolution began in Britain and reached across the planet. New machines transformed work, new towns housed the workers, and steamships carried goods to every continent. This chapter follows the story from a Lancashire mill to the far corners of the world.
This lesson focuses on Machines That Changed Work: spinning jenny, power loom and steam engine: the inventions behind the factory age.
Spinning jenny, power loom and steam engine: the inventions behind the factory age.
Key ideas
Machines reorganised human life
Before factories, most goods were made at home or in small workshops, and workers set their own hours. The factory brought hundreds of workers under one roof, timed by the clock and the steam engine. Work became faster and cheaper to organise — but also more disciplined and dangerous.
Reform followed suffering
Reports of children working long hours in mills shocked the public. Parliament passed Factory Acts, starting in 1833, limiting children's hours and later setting safety rules. Change came because evidence of suffering forced politicians to act.
Key term — Factory system: A way of making goods where workers use machines together in one large building, on set hours for wages.
Name two inventions of the Industrial Revolution.
The spinning jenny and the power loom (or the steam engine).
Answer: The spinning jenny and the power loom (or the steam engine).
- Saying steam power started the Industrial Revolution Water power drove the first factories; steam became dominant later. The revolution had several stages, not one starting moment.
- Assuming all workers welcomed machines Many workers feared machines would destroy their jobs — Luddites smashed machines in protest in the 1810s. New technology created winners and losers.
Practice
Children worked very long hours, often twelve or more a day, in dangerous conditions.
It limited the working hours of children in textile mills and introduced inspectors.
Workers in the 1810s who smashed machines they believed were destroying their jobs.
Water wheels, using fast-flowing rivers.
Quick check
Which of these best defines "Factory system"?
Why did Britain's mills depend on the wider world?
- Machines That Changed Work: spinning jenny, power loom and steam engine: the inventions behind the factory age.
- Machines reorganised human life: Before factories, most goods were made at home or in small workshops, and workers set their own hours.
- Child labour: Work done by children, common in early factories and mines until laws restricted it.
- Watch out for: saying steam power started the Industrial Revolution