The greatest heritage of the century to succeeding generations was what has come to be called the industrial revolution. Up to the latter half of the 18th century men had paid very little attention to mechanical inventions and their development. The people of western Europe did their farming, made their cloth and continued to do most of the domestic manu factures at least almost in the same way as the ancients had done. It has been said that a peasant, a smith or a weaver of the age of Caesar Augustus had visited France or England 1800 years later he would have recognized the familiar flail, forge, distaff and hand loom of his own day?' (Robinson). All this was to be changed in the course of a single generation, however. A series of machines came to replace hand labor and accomplish ever so much more in vastly shorter time than before. The essen tial processes remained the same, only now by the aid of machinery they were accomplished more rapidly.
In 1767 Hargreaves, an English spinner, in vented what was called the spinning jenny. With this a single workman by the help of a wheel could spin 8 or 10 threads at once and thus do the work done formerly by as many spinners. In 1768 Arkwright invented a machine for rolling threads. Some 10 years later Crompton combined Hargreaves' spinning jenny and Arkwright's roller machine into what was called the spinning mule. With this as many as 200 threads could be spun at once, and when the steam engine came and power was applied a few hands could do the work of hundreds. The gradual improvement of the steam engine by James Watt, who had been called in to repair a model of a steam engine made more than half a century before by an English mechanic named Newcomen, greatly facilitated the development of industry. In
1785 a steam engine was first employed to run spinning machinery, Arkwright adopted it in 1790, and after this such engines became ex tremely common and the factory system re placed the old domestic system of manufacture almost completely.
This so called labor-saving machinery threw many out of employment, though it brought together a great many workmen in the employ of a new class that now developed in the popu lation, the capitalist. John Stuart Mill about the middle of the 19th century, when he could see clearly the result of the industrial revolu tion, declared that all our labor-saving ma chinery in spite of its name had never saved mankind an hour of drudgery, but on the con trary had made it possible for a large number of workmen to work for a few and usually to work long hours in unsanitary, ill-ventilated factories, compelling them to live in crowded slums not far from the factories because their long working day did not allow them the time to go or come farther to their work. The in dustrial revolution worked an immense amount of social harm, led to the employment of women and children for such long hours and under such unsuitable conditions as proved seriously detrimental to health, and it took more than a century before humanity wakened up to the necessity for regulating industry in such a way as to conserve the rights of man.