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James Watt
James Watt was a Scottish inventor, mechanical engineer, and a chemist who helped improve Thomas Newcomen's 1712 steam engine. He helped to improve it by making his own steam engine in 1776. His steam engine brought fundamental changes to the Industrial Revolution. -
Thomas Malthus
Thomas Malthus was an English cleric, scholar, and an influential economist in the fields of political economy and demography. He had a theory that population growth will always tend to outrun the food supply and that betterment of humankind impossible without strict limits on reproduction. Malthus criticized the Poor Laws for leading to inflation rather than improving the well-being of the poor. He supported taxes on grain imports, and his views became influential and very controversial. -
Robert Owen
Robert Owen was a Welsh textile manufacturer, philanthropist and social reformer, and a founder of utopian socialism and the cooperative movement. He strove to improve factory working conditions, promoted experimental socialistic communities, and sought a more collective approach to child rearing, including government control of education. In 1824, he moved to America and put his fortune in an experimental socialistic community at New Harmony, Indiana, as a preliminary for his Utopian society. -
Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism is a family of normative ethical theories that prescribe actions that maximize happiness and well-being for all affected individuals. Utilitarianism is a version of consequentialism, which states that the consequences of any action are the only standard of right and wrong. Proponents of utilitarianism have disagreed on a number of points, such as whether actions should be chosen based on their likely results, or whether agents should conform to rules that maximize utility. -
Socialism
Socialism describes any political or economic theory that says the community, rather than individuals, should own and manage property and natural resources. As a political ideology, socialism arose largely in response to the economic and social consequences of the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution brought economic and social change first to Great Britain, then to the rest of the world. It made it so factory owners became wealthy, while many workers lived in increasing poverty, -
Cotton Gin
The cotton gin is a machine that quickly and easily separates cotton fibers from their seeds, enabling much greater productivity than manual cotton separation. The fibers are then processed into various cotton goods such as calico, while any undamaged cotton is used largely for textiles like clothing. A modern mechanical cotton gin was created by American inventor Eli Whitney in 1793 and patented in 1794. -
Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin was an English naturalist, geologist and biologist, best known for his contributions to the science of evolution. He is known for the theory of Natural selection. He came up with this theory simultaneously with Alfred Wallace which claims there is a change in heritable traits of a population over time. -
Mutual-aid Societies
A mutual aid society is an organization that provides benefits or other help to its members when they are affected by things such as death, sickness, disability, old age, or unemployment. Through monthly membership dues, mutual aid societies dispensed sick benefits and funeral benefits while also serving as a network for jobs; because the earliest groups were organized by men, most also provided support for the widows and orphans of their members. -
Dynamo
A dynamo is an electrical generator that creates direct current using a commutator. Dynamos were the first electrical generators capable of delivering power for industry, and the foundation upon which many other later electric-power conversion devices were based, including the electric motor, the alternating-current alternator, and the rotary converter. Today, the simpler alternator dominates large scale power generation, for efficiency, reliability and cost reasons. -
Communism
In 1848, Marx and Engels offered a new definition of communism and popularized the term in their famous pamphlet The Communist Manifesto. Communism is a specific, yet different form of socialism. Communists agree on the withering away of the state but disagree on the means to this end, reflecting a distinction between a more libertarian approach of communization, revolutionary spontaneity, and workers' self-management, and has a more communist part-driven approach. -
Germ theory
During his experiments in the 1860s, French chemist Louis Pasteur developed modern germ theory. The theory that certain diseases are caused by the invasion of the body by microorganisms, organisms too small to be seen except through a microscope. The French chemist and microbiologist Louis Pasteur, the English surgeon Joseph Lister, and the German physician Robert Koch are given much of the credit for development and acceptance of the theory. -
Social Gospel
The social gospel's origins are often traced to the rise of late 19th-century urban industrialization, immediately following the Civil War. Largely, but not exclusively, rooted in Protestant churches, the social gospel emphasized how Jesus' ethical teachings could remedy the problems caused by “Gilded Age” capitalism. The Social Gospel, influenced the formation of Christian democracy political ideology among Protestants and Catholics in Europe. -
Thomas Edison
Thomas Edison was an American inventor and business man. He developed many devices in fields such as electric power generation, mass communication, sound recording, and motion pictures. Some of is inventions are the light bulb, the phonograph, and the motion picture camera. -
Automobile
Karl Benz patented the three-wheeled Motor Car, known as the "Motorwagen," in 1886. It was the first true, modern automobile. Benz also patented his own throttle system, spark plugs, gear shifters, a water radiator, a carburetor and other fundamentals to the automobile. -
Airplane
The Wright brothers invented and flew the first airplane in 1903, recognized as "the first sustained and controlled heavier-than-air powered flight". Following its limited use in World War I, aircraft technology continued to develop. Airplanes had a presence in all the major battles of World War II.