The Industrial Revolution saw many major advancements that helped to improve the day-to-day lives of people the world over. These changes also helped to extend the average lifespan of people, thus making the population grow tremendously. There was, however, no downturn in the amount or scale of warfare during the period of the Industrial Revolution.

Tesla was constantly at odds with his former mentor, Thomas Edison. It is fitting that his most famous invention would do the same. While Edison had pioneered DC, or direct current, as a form of electricity, Tesla championed the idea of AC, or alternating current. At the time Edison's system was by far the more popular and accepted, but today Tesla's AC current is the standard the world relies on.

While all major periods of change in and around this era, the Industrial Revolution is the one that left the most wide reaching mark on this time, and as such is synonymous with the period. The Industrial Revolution reached nearly all the people of the Western world at the time.

The spinning wheel was the precursor to the Spinning Jenny. The primary difference was that a spinning wheel could only spin one spool of thread at any given time, but the spinning jenny could spin several thread spools at once. This significantly accelerated the work process for textile factories.

James Watt is known as the father of the steam engine. As such the steam engine became known as the Watt engine. His design created the first usable and practical steam engines. This design became commonly used in no small part due to the efforts of his business partner Matthew Boulton, who sold the engine as the way of the future.

Richard Trevithick created what was at the time the first ever steam powered locomotive. He was a miner and the son of a miner. He created the steam powered rail car so that it could be used pulling rock and coal up from mines easier and more safely.

If Dante had been alive to witness these factories and the conditions people worked in them, he may have used them for inspiration when writing his famed book "Inferno." The chemicals that people breathed in while working  hour days were borderline deadly. Add this to the extremely low pay and the high risk of being maimed by the machinery and these factories become terrible places to work.

The railroad began to be a ubiquitous sight in most developed nations in the 1800's. The railroad had become the main form of transportation over any great distance thanks to the invention of the steam engine and the ability to lay tracks for trains. While trolleys would be a common sight in cities, they came much later after the end of the Industrial Revolution. The same could be said for automobiles, which did not gain widespread use until well after the turn of the 20th Century.  

Electricity was not a widespread tool at the time in the late 1800's when Europe started the scramble for Africa. This technology would only become widely used decades after the nations of Africa had already been claimed. The other technological advancements helped give Europeans specific advancements over others at the time.

The political, social, and economic landscape of Great Britain in the 19th century created the perfect place for industrial revolution to begin. The language however, had nothing to do with the revolution taking hold. England's status as a united, and relatively isolated position in Europe gave it a great advantage in avoiding the political and economic troubles that slowed progress in many other nations.