Adam Hart-Davis Quotes

The essence of the Industrial Revolution was the substitution of competition for the medieval regulations which had previously controlled the production and distribution of wealth.

Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age.

Industrial forces set in motion by steam and electricity have materially changed the structure of our civilization.

...industrialisation took centuries, rather than decades

Industrial Revolution

In Victorian England, laborers were pushed off the farms, replaced by steam power.

So give me the political economist, the sanitary reformer, the engineer; and take your saints and virgins, relics and miracles. The spinning-jenny and the railroad, Cunard's liners and the electric telegraph, are to me, if not to you, signs that we are, on some points at least, in harmony with the universe; that there is a mighty spirit working among us, who cannot be your anarchic and destroying Devil, and therefore may be the Ordering and Creating God.

The Industrial Revolution was another of those extraordinary jumps forward in the story of civilization.

With production alone as the goal, industry in North America was dominated by the assembly line, standardization for mass consumption.

It's the Industrial Revolution and the growth of urban concentrations that led to a sense of anonymity.

The industrial revolution that defined the first half of the 20 century marked the start of modern business, typified by high-volume, large-scale organizations. Mechanization created a culture of business derived from the capabilities and needs of the time.

Instruments, machines, looms will increasingly supplement the strength and skill of men; will augment at the same time the perfection and the precision of manufactures by lessening both the time and the labor needed to produce them

The machines, which mark the triumph of science, become, by reason of the antithetic conditions of the social plexus, instruments which impoverish millions and millions of artisans and free peasants.

The First Industrial Revolution used water and steam power to mechanize production. The Second used electric power to create mass production. The Third used electronics and information technology to automate production.

We like to think of industrialization as being despicable. I don't really know what to make of it. There's something terribly brittle about it.

The Industrial Revolution has two phases: one material, the other social; one concerning the making of things, the other concerning the making of men.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century the industrial-financial revolution began.

The industrial revolution has tended to produce everywhere great urban masses that seem to be increasingly careless of ethical standards.

Whether as victim, demon, or hero, the industrial worker of the past century filled the public imagination in books, movies, news stories, and even popular songs, putting a grimy human face on capitalism while dramatizing the social changes and conflicts it brought.

The era of industrial Britain, where a large section of our workforce provided cheap labour in factories and processing goods, is over.

What are the symbols of American strength, wealth, power and modernity? Certainly not jazz and rock and roll, not chewing-gum or hamburgers, Broadway or Hollywood. It's their skyscrapers. Their Pentagon. Their science. Their technology.

One of the objections most frequently urged against machinery is, that it has a tendency to supersede much of the handlabour which was previously employed; and in fact unless a machine diminished the labour necessary to make an article, it could never come into use.

Luddism is no longer with us, but today we seem to be overtaken by its opposite, the inevitability of technological change coupled with the blind belief in capitalism's ability to provide us with all we need.

The main occupation of society has changed from fighting to business, from military to industrial life.

A premodern society, a preindustrial society, is one where people wake up whenever they want, there’s a lot of work but that isn’t set off from leisure…. A modern society is one where the bells ring at a certain time and we move from one place to another and people just become parts of a machine which has a very well thought out, pre-thought out way of working.