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Programme 5

The 2nd Industrial Revolution

By Dr Robert Bud, Head of

Research, Science Museum

Today, the words "dot com"

The earliest surviving example
signal not just a novel of a light bulb
technology but a whole new way
of doing things. A century ago people were also discussing a
transformation in the creation of wealth, technology and
lifestyle. The phrase the "second industrial revolution", was
coined by the Scottish town planner and seer Patrick Geddes
almost as soon as it had happened - in 1915 during the bleak
days of the First World War.
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Geddes saw a new world in which coal and iron were giving The Science Museum
way to electricity and new materials such as aluminium. Cities
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were now becoming light and liveable, rather than the squalid the content of external internet
slums he associated with the 19th century's beginning.
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Geddes was being too simplistic, but something fundamental
had indeed happened.

The 35 years before the First World War had seen the
introduction or invention of many of the technologies which we
have hitherto taken for granted as modern. These include
those based on chemistry, electricity and internal combustion
engine: the radio, the telephone, the cinema, the petrol driven
car, the aeroplane, heroin synthetic aspirin, the electric light
bulb, the domestic refrigerator, air conditioning, vacuum
cleaners, punch card machines for data analysis,
gramophones, machine guns and other new devices whose
impact would take the better part of a century to work
through.

Many of these had been the

result of the use of applied
science more systematic than
ever before. The scientific
exploration of new phenomena,
particularly by chemists and
physicists, the development of
measurement skills, chemical Early radio technology
analysis and advanced
mathematics, the proliferation of professional scientists and
the multiplication of specialised instruments had opened up
new possibilities. The exploitation of these required the
concerted action of many more people with a formal
education. Looking back, it is in this period that we see the
beginning of formal research and development departments
directly geared towards the generation of new knowledge and
the application of scientific research to practical problems.

New means of communication were enabling a global

economy. Britain imported, for example, meat from Australia
and Argentina, wheat from Canada, and oil from Persia and
exported manufactured goods and coal. Increasingly she was
also having to compete in a global marketplace. The United
States had become an even more important manufacturing
nation and Germany had taken the lead in the new industries
of chemicals and electricity. In both the motor car and the
aircraft industries French manufacturers were leaders.

Just as today, there were many who saw the downside in a

technological transformation which was dooming many
traditional lifestyles and replacing a sense of the natural by the
synthetic. The terrifying science fiction novel of H G Wells, The
Island of Dr Moreau made into a major motion picture as
recently as 1996 was published in 1896. The First World War
remains an ambivalent testimony to the power of the new
technologies.

The Science Museum's Making the Modern World gallery opens 28 June 2000.

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