The city of Manchester in the Northwest of England grew spectacularly during the Industrial Revolution. Much of this growth was caused by the construction of canals that connected Manchester directly to the ocean and to many other manufacturing centers in the country. This allowed Manchester to circumvent the city of Liverpool, causing widespread job loss in Liverpool and contributing to a rivalry that still exists to this day. Manchester became, for a time, the biggest industrial port in the world.

The internal combustion engine was developed during the second half of the nineteenth century, and by the dawn of the twentieth century, oil was being refined so that petroleum could be used to fuel the newly created internal combustion engine. This allowed for the invention of cars and improved the speeds of trains and ships.

The Enclosure Movement contributed dramatically to the urbanization of Britain in the eighteenth century. It involved the consolidation of many small landholdings into fewer large farms. This led to an increase in productivity and a decrease in the demand for agricultural labor. This forced much of the population to move to urban centers in search of work.

Steel was the resource that drove the Industrial Revolution (and continues to drive industrialization around the world). It is produced from iron ore that is heated and combined with carbon using coal fires. Bessemer invented a means to do this more cheaply and far more efficiently and in doing so contributed to Britain’s continued dominance of the Industrial Revolution.

Leo Tolstoy and Charles Dickens were part of a group of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century writers who shone a light on the plight of the working class in industrial societies. Their works routinely focused on the day-to-day struggles of the lower class. Oliver Twist and Hard Time, by Charles Dickens, are two famous examples of this type of literature.

Steel is simply iron without impurities, thus making it stronger and more useful in construction and heavy industry. By heating iron ore in a coal fire, the impurities can be removed. The realization of this fact contributed to the rise of heavy industry in the second half of the Industrial Revolution.

The process of curing rubber by mixing it with sulfur and heating it, called “vulcanization,” was developed in the 1830s by Charles Goodyear.

In the eighteenth century, some people began to realize that gas burned from coal could be used to power lights. As the technology was refined and improved in the second half of the eighteenth century, it was argued that it could be used to power street lamps in the big industrial centers of Britain. It was first widely used in London, beginning in the 1830s, and by the 1860s had spread all around Europe.

George Stephenson was an engineer and inventor who built the first railroad to connect two cities, the Liverpool-Manchester railroad. The railroad was completed in the 1830s and contributed to the growth of Manchester (in particular) and Liverpool as two of the industrial centers of the world.

Steam power was already being used in mining, heavy industry, and to power trains when in the 1830s innovators like Isambard Kingdom Brunel turned their attentions to powering ocean going ships. The Great Western Steamship Company was established and in 1838 made the first transatlantic steamship crossing from Bristol to New York. It is important to know that in the first half of the nineteenth century, Bristol was probably the biggest port city in England, but by the second half, it had been replaced by Liverpool and Manchester.