Industrial Revolution and its Effects on Science - Literature review Example

Industrial revolution and its effects on Science Industrial Revolution began in England sometime after the middle of the 18th century with a series of inventions like steam engine and powered machinery. It resulted in the replacement of an economy based on manual labour to one dominated by industry and machine manufacture. The effects spread throughout Western Europe and North America, eventually affecting the rest of the world. Science affected the way we live, largely through technology, i.e.

, the use of scientific knowledge for practical purposes. Inventions and innovations Engines and machines, which are the products of science, revolutionized the idea of progress. Scientific research lead to the advent of numerous devices like the telephone, phonograph, elevator, ice machine, gasoline powered cars and light bulbs, to name a few. In the field of entertainment, new technologies such as the radio and moving pictures became popular. The huge improvements in the process of obtaining and working on raw materials affected primarily metallurgy and chemistry.

Applied first in coal mining and textiles, the new techniques, new machines, and new methods rapidly spread into other industrial areas. The application of steam to transportation led to the railroad system, which in turn generated dozens of other technical changes in iron and steel, bridge building, communication and organization ("The Industrial Revolution"). An increase in scientific publications was facilitated by the network of informal societies like the Lunar Society of Birmingham, in which members met to discuss science and its application to manufacturing.

Some of these societies published volumes of proceedings and transactions, new inventions, as well as papers about them. Scientific research post Industrial revolution has also resulted in advancements in chemical and biological warfare as well as in nuclear weaponry.Romantic reaction to Industrial revolution The term Romantic covers most of the music, art and literature of Western civilization from the nineteenth century. Romanticism is an international artistic and philosophical movement that redefined the fundamental ways in which people in Western cultures thought about themselves and about their world (The History Guide, 2004).

The early romantic era coincides with the age of industrial revolution and hence the revolutionary energy which was at the heart of romanticism, transformed the theory and practice of all art and also the perception of the world. The Romantics opted for a life of the heart. Their relativism made them appreciative of diversity in man and in nature. According to them, there were no universal laws which would explain man. The Romantics sought their soul in the science of life, not the science of celestial mechanics.

They moved from planets to plants. Men could learn by experiment or by logical process-but men could learn more in intuitive flashes and feelings, by learning to trust their instincts. The Romantics distrusted calculation and stressed the limitations of scientific knowledge. The Romantics attacked the heartlessness of bourgeois liberalism as well as the nature of urban industrial society. Industrial society brought new problems: soulless individualism, economic egoism, utilitarianism, materialism and the cash nexus.

(The History Guide, 2004) Hence even though the Industrial revolution brought about an explosion of scientific knowledge, the romantics felt that science was inadequate to describe the reality of experience. ReferencesThe Industrial Revolution. (n.d.). Retrieved December 10, 2005, from http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/users/p/pwhmds/indrev.htmlThe History Guide. (2004). The Romantic Era. Retrieved December 10, 2005, from http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/lecture16a.html