NY Regents 10.3: Industrial Revolution

Around 1764, weaver and carpenter James Hargreaves, living near Blackburn in Lancashire, England, invented the spinning jenny — a frame allowing one worker to spin eight threads of cotton…

Glasgow, Scotland — where the Scottish engineer James Watt was based when, in 1769, he was granted his landmark patent for a steam engine with a separate condenser. Watt had struck on the idea a few…

In 1771, Richard Arkwright opened his water-powered cotton spinning mill at Cromford, a village in Derbyshire, England, where the River Derwent rushes off the southern Pennine hills. The mill used…

This event took place at St Peter's Field in Manchester, England — a city sitting in the broad lowland corridor between the Pennine hills to the east and the Irish Sea coast to the west. In 1819…

This event took place in Stockton-on-Tees, in northeastern England, United Kingdom — exactly where the low-lying coastal plain stretches between the Pennine hills to the west and the North Sea to the…

On 15 September 1830, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened as the world's first inter-city steam passenger railway, connecting the port of Liverpool on the Mersey estuary to the…

This event unfolded in London, the capital of the United Kingdom, sitting on the Thames River in southeastern England — the large island off the northwestern coast of continental Europe, separated…

On 29 August 1833, the British Parliament passed the Factory Act, the first effective piece of legislation limiting child labour in textile mills. It banned children under nine from working in…

In 1834, six agricultural labourers from Tolpuddle, a small village in Dorset in the chalk downlands of southern England, were arrested and sentenced to seven years' transportation to Australia for…

This catastrophe struck Ireland — the large island lying in the North Atlantic directly west of Britain, separated from it by the Irish Sea. Beginning in 1845, a potato blight caused total crop…

On 21 February 1848, The Communist Manifesto — written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels — was published in London, then the largest industrial city in the world and a refuge for European political…

Hyde Park, London, in the United Kingdom — sitting on the island of Great Britain, separated from the European continent by the narrow English Channel to the south and the North Sea to the east. In…

On 13 August 1856, Henry Bessemer presented his paper 'The Manufacture of Iron without Fuel' to the British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Cheltenham, a spa town in the…

This event unfolded in Tokyo, the capital of Japan — an island nation curving along the western Pacific, separated from the Asian continent by the Sea of Japan. In 1868, Emperor Meiji was restored to…

On May 10 1869 the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads met at Promontory Summit Utah completing the first transcontinental railroad in the United States. A ceremonial golden spike was driven…

On 17 November 1869, the Suez Canal officially opened at Port Said, the Mediterranean mouth of the new waterway cut across the narrow isthmus of Suez in Egypt. The canal runs 193 kilometres south to…

On 7 March 1876, Alexander Graham Bell was granted US Patent No. 174,465 for 'the method of, and apparatus for, transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically' — the telephone. The experimental…

This is Chicago, Illinois, in the United States — a city sitting on the southwestern edge of Lake Michigan, one of the five Great Lakes that stretch across the interior of North America. In 1886, a…

This event took place in Tokyo, Japan — a city on Honshu, the largest island of an archipelago curving along the Pacific edge of East Asia, separated from the Korean Peninsula by the Korea Strait and…