Ready from Within by Cynthia Stokes Brown

Four decades before that, both Russia and Japan gave up their feudal systems to compete in the industrializing world. After the war, industrialization grew explosively and by 1900, the United States had overtaken Britain in manufacturing, producing 24 percent of the world's output. The increasingly urbanized and factory-based North was fighting against the agriculture-based South. The American Civil War (1861–1865) was the first truly industrial war in that factories mass-produced supplies and weapons for the war effort, troops were transported by rail, and the telegraph was used to send remarkably fast communications. Once factories were built, railroad construction in America boomed from the 1830s to 1870s. He couldn't bring any notes or plans from Britain, so he had to set up the factory from memory. That was the year Samuel Slater left Britain for Rhode Island, where he set up the first textile factory on U.S. Industrialization came to the United States in 1789.

By 1900, engines burned 10 times more efficiently than they had a hundred years before. After his patent ran out in 1800, others further improved on his engine.

This steam engine- which would have a long career powering trains, ships and other things-was first used to efficiently pump water out of coal mines. More than fifty years later, James Watt, a Scottish instrument maker, designed a better version. In 1712, Englishman Thomas Newcomen created a coal-powered steam engine capable of pumping water from the mines. Miners tried using horses to pull up buckets of water, but that was too slow. They were so deep in the Earth that they would fill with water as you were digging. These coal mines were not an instant success. They knew those hunks of black stone near the surface of the Earth were flammable, so they dug deeper to see how much there was. So now they needed something else to burn. By the early eighteenth century, people there had cut down most of their trees either to build houses and ships or to burn for heating and cooking. The story of the Industrial Revolution begins on the small island of Great Britain.

Ready from Within by Cynthia Stokes Brown