Topics: Industrial Revolution, Steam engine, Factory Pages: 5 (1561 words) Published: February 9, 2013
Jesse Weinstein
Period 4
AP Euro
Mr. Ervin
Industrial Revolution Essay/Outline

Industrial Revolution Essay
The 19th century was full of new innovations and ideas, but not all of these had a positive effect on the people. The industrial revolution caused many people to leave their simple rural homes, and move to the city where they could find a job working at a factory. These factories had terrible working conditions, and low paying wages. The cities where these factories were located were overcrowded, and had many negative effects on the people and the environment. The cities were so condensed together that only the rich could afford to commute by horseback, while the rest of the population was forced to walk. This type of city was known as a “walking city.” Throughout the 19th century Europeans were forced to face many difficulties in their condensed cities. These issues included over crowdedness, horrible working conditions, and poor sanitation. All of these issues were partially fixed, but still to this day are not completely resolved.

The over crowdedness in the cities was a direct cause of the industrial revolution, and people starting to build things in factories by machines, instead of everything being handmade. The people could not compete with the factories and were forced to move to the cities in order to find jobs, which there were very limited of. This over crowdedness caused multiple people to live in a single small apartment and caused disease to spread much quicker. This problem of over population was partially solved with the new invention of public transportation and the electric car. These new inventions allowed people to move out of the crowded cities into smaller less crowded suburbs of the city. They were able to do this because now instead of having to walk to work they can just take an electric car or other form of public transportation to the factory where they were working. This helped the over crowdedness because there were less people that were living in the cities. After people became more spread out in suburbs, disease was not able to spread as fast, and it allowed people to have much nicer houses as well. Although suburbs did help a little with the over crowdedness in the cities, however it did not help at all with the poor working conditions that the workers had to endure.

The poor working conditions in the factories were the cause of factory owners being greed, wanting more money, and the lack of government involvement in those factories. The people who were working the factories got very little pay, because there where thousands of people waiting, willing to take their job for less money if they dared ask for a raise. People of this time also had to work ridiculous hours because there was no limitation on how many hours people were allowed to work. Some people in factories would be forced to work around 12 to 16 hour days. This began to get resolved when the government began to get involved with the factories. The government started to pass laws such as the Factory Act of 1833. This limited the amount of hours a kid from the ages of 9 and 13 could work to 9 hours and the amount of hours a kid from 14 to 18 to 12 hours. This was not that big of a jump for the factories, but it was the first step in getting the government involved in factories. Another law that was passed was the Mines Act of 1842, which prohibited women, girls and boys under 10 to work in the mines. Other laws included minimum wage laws, and other jobs that continued to improve the work place. One other way that the work place was improved was with the creation of unions and strikes. A union is a group of workers that would work together to get more money and benefits. If the unions didn’t like something that the factories were doing, they would go on strike and all quit at once. This forced the factories to give into their demands, because if they didn’t they would have no work force. All of these...
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