The Impact of Industrial Revolutions

The Industrial Revolution of the 19th century transformed lives all over the world. It made life easier and more comfortable for many people, but it also created a new kind of misery as well as an economic divide that would shape our world for generations to come.

As we will see, all major revolutions have their “Pros” and “Cons”. They always begin with overwhelming optimism, but eventually the unintended consequences always seem to rear their ugly heads. However, as a whole, these revolutions have raised the standards of living for virtually all humans on the planet. A good friend recently noted that, “Today, we all live better than any King or Queen just 200 years ago”. Don’t believe it? Just Google medicine and dentistry of the 1800s!

Another note is that not everyone agrees with the definitions of “Industry 1.0” “2.0” and so on. For this article, we focused on the true revolutionary aspects of the periods. From Steam, to Mechanical, to Digital to Artificial Intelligence. We felt there needed to be a clear line of demarcation between periods that are considered…well, revolutionary!

Corporations have been talking about machine learning and the internet of things for over a decade. It’s time to propel our society into the next generation of capitalism. Of course, that next generation of opportunity is Industry 5.0.

In order to really understand the innovations that will lead us into the future, we need to dive into how humans have evolved up until today.

The transition point of the human race really started in the mid to late 1700s during the first Industrial Revolution. Up until that point, humans had gone through a couple of foundational changes.

• The Paleolithic Era – Millions of years – 10,000 BC. These were the hunter-gatherer days when technology was defined by bows, arrows, spears, fires, containers, and huts.
• The Neolithic Era – 10,000BC – 1760. This was the agricultural revolution where we domesticated plants and animals and started to build communities.

During the Neolithic era, humans went through many phases. There were philosophical revolutions, religions, dark ages, renaissances, urbanization, and, of course, the age of enlightenment.

But the late 1700s became the inflection point that changed the human race forever. The first industrial revolution drove the production of goods to new heights. The path to operational efficiency became the golden ticket for manufacturers. Each of the industrial revolutions created a fundamental shift in how businesses functioned.

In this article, we will first take a look at the first 4 phases (Industry 1.0 to Industry 4.0) to get an understanding of how radically each one changed the world: 

• First Industrial Revolution (Mechanization) – defined by mechanical production using water and steam.
• Second Industrial Revolution (Electrification) – defined by mass production through electrical power.
• Third Industrial Revolution (Automation) – defined by automation using computers and electronics.
• Fourth Industrial Revolution (Digitization) – defined by big data, robotics, the internet of things, and modern software. 

And we’ll get a grasp of some of the technologies that have come about as a result: 

• First Industrial Revolution (starting in the 1780s) – The steam engine.
• Second Industrial Revolution (starting in the 1870s) – The telephone, light bulb, combustion engine, airplane, and assembly line.
• Third Industrial Revolution (starting in the 1970s) – The personal computer, internet, and semiconductors.
• Fourth Industrial Revolution (starting in the 2010s) – Machine learning, quantum computing, CRISPR, and artificial intelligence.

To understand our position on the 5th Revolution, it’s necessary to map out the first four, and the ground-breaking technologies that came about as a result. Our argument is that Industry 5.0 cannot be simply an elevation of 4.0 (Digitation), but something far more progressive.

The fourth industrial revolution started around 10 years ago. This phase has really been defined by the enmeshment of the digital, physical, and biological worlds. Biotechnology, social media, and smart devices have propelled the human race into the type of future we saw in The Jetsons and Star Wars.

The original Steam Revolution (1.0) was an era of dramatic social, economic, and technological change. Sometimes called the “Industrial Revolution, we make a clear distinction between the two (Industry 1.0 and Industry 2.0). For this study we refer to the Age of Steam, and the first revolution and mostly associated with the advent of steam power. This differs from the more mechanical revolution that broadened this mechanization to overtake the “made by hand” era completely. This second revolution marked the transition from traditional manufacturing by hand, to full-on mass production including fossil fuel and electricity. This is when we saw the rise of modern machines and factories, and with them came a new era: The Machine Age.

The third revolution was the advent of the digital age. While technology and computers existed before the true digital age (we consider it starting in 1969), they were more of an augmentation of previous processes. The digital revolution changed the way we live and do business and went way beyond mechanizing or automating tasks to include operations and outputs no human could perform.

We end the history lesson with Industry 4.0. – The rise of machine learning and artificial intelligence. As much of a jump of digital processing was to computers, AI far eclipses the digital world to create a new society of machine learners.

Finally, we look at Industry 5.0. The need for, and global crisis around sustainability. It’s fundamentally changing business, investment, operations and our personal lives.

All these revolutions were truly global phenomena, touching every corner of the earth and reshaping societies. They jump-started modern capitalism as we know it today. They all set the stage for the following revolutions mostly centered around some game-changing technologies, but all dependent on the previous “revolutions” to set the stages for future progress.

Industry 1.0: The Steam Revolution

There is no good way to track the exact dates of the impact caused by the steam revolution because it took place gradually over time. However, there are markers that can be used to identify the milestones. The first marker is 1698 when Thomas Savery invented the steam pump. The next marker was in 1807 when Robert Fulton’s steamboat made its inaugural voyage up New York’s Hudson River and a third in 1829 when the steam locomotive was unveiled by the B&O Railroad, demonstrating that steam had become a reliable source of power for transportation and industry.

Prior to the steam engine, mechanization depended on human, animal, wind or waterpower. Most mills and pumps were located close to a moving water source (river) and were driven by a water wheel. The downside was that power was regulated by mother nature herself, and that could be very unreliable at times. The invention of the steam engine meant that the power source could now be located virtually anywhere and be much more consistent.

The first steam powered device started with Thomas Savery’s “Miner’s Friend”. The device was designed to pump water out of mines. Savery’s valve/vacuum design was patented all the way back in 1698! However, it wasn’t until Thomas Newcomen invented the first mechanically driven steam engine in 1712 that the piston design was incorporated. Even with this major advance, what we would recognize as a modern steam engine, wasn’t invented until 1778 by James Watt.

Watt’s advancement of the jacketed piston meant not only higher efficiency and power, but the true ability to drive a rotary wheel. This design of transferring piston power into rotational generation set in motion (no pun) every mechanical power advancement in the future. Virtually all mechanization is based on a rotational generator of some type.

As steam engine technology advanced, so did the number of uses. As the engines became smaller and more efficient, they led the way for more advanced machines. Think about metal lathe, this machine could now produce higher quality parts for even larger, more powerful machines. This led to mechanized textile mills, steamboat power and eventually the railroads.

This set the precedent for not only expansion of local factories, but industrial expansion across geographies. Without steamboats and railroads, America would have had a hard time expanding beyond the densely populated Eastern Seaboard.

It was a period of dramatic socio-economic and cultural change. It helped create modern capitalism as we know it today. The revolution began in Great Britain in the late 18th century with the mechanization of the textile industry, but soon spread throughout Europe and North America. Businesses quickly realized that they needed to use this new technology to their advantage if they wanted to stay competitive in this era.

1.0 Unintended Consequences

While the new era of mechanization provided the nation with a new, higher-powered economy, some of the consequences were dire. The new transportation era began with the steamboat and most cargo was food or people. Farmers could now ship goods along the rivers (the superhighways of the 1800s), but this also fed the nation’s internal slave trade, as the Mississippi River brought many unwilling passengers into the mainland from the port of New Orleans.

Workshops also sprang up in the bigger cities and the modern “urban” area was created. While some enjoyed newfound wealth, most were subjected to stifling poverty and intolerable “New World” living conditions on a scale never seen before.

While the steam engine provided an advancement in manufacturing, the general population began to move away from the agrarian economy to the commercialization of a production and manufacturing economy. The tone was now set for the even harsher world that the second industrial revolution would set in motion.

Industry 2.0: The Industrial/Mechanical Revolution

While Industry 1.0 relied on one specific technology, the steam engine, the second revolution would see the rise of a plethora of industries led by steel, oil and electricity.

The second revolution of the late 19th century transformed lives all over the world. Huge factories were built, which meant that people could work indoors and out of the sun. The newfound technology of electricity meant that the workday would start long before sunrise and last long after sunset.

The new machines also made it possible to produce more than ever before, so there was a new age of consumerism born. Previously our ancestors bought mostly what they needed, now we start to see a transitional shift into an era of purchasing “wants” as opposed to “needs”.

While the first industrial revolution enabled our nation to develop a domestic economy, the second revolution led to the advent of globalism. During this time, we advanced beyond steam-driven factories and locomotives, to cars, planes and the steel-based infrastructure that allowed all of them to thrive.

Steel was the first on the scene, and many future advancements owe their heritage to the alloy. Up until the late 1800s, iron was the metal of choice for tools and machinery mainly because of its abundance and ease to form into various shapes. The downside is that iron contains impurities that lead to faster corrosion and weakness over time. Steel, on the other hand is an alloy that is iron based, without the impurities and it’s not prone to weakening over time.

Steel had been in use as early as the 17th century, but it wasn’t until the Bessemer Process that it became more pure, less expensive, and so widely used. Steel literally built the industrial world we live in today. Roads, bridges, skyscrapers, cars, ships, railroads, all owe their legacy to steel.

Oil (and the ability to refine it into its base elements) was another huge discovery that literally fueled the second industrial revolution. Oils have been around for centuries; mostly animal and plant based. Oil lamps lit the civilizations of Egypt, Greece, and Ancient Rome. However, once we learned how to tap the large, land-based, and deep oil reserves the industry took flight. In 1859, the Pennsylvania Rock Oil company hit a reserve at 60 feet below ground. This is thought to be the first oil recovered by drilling.

A few years later, John D. Rockefeller took the industry by storm by “standardizing” his lamp oil, or at least marketing that point! By 1901 there were 1500 registered oil companies in the United States. Most of these companies were built on a product that is nowhere near as popular today, Kerosine. Kerosine was widely used to light our world. In the days before electrification, kerosine lamps were everywhere. As refining became, well, more refined, a byproduct of Kerosine production was gasoline. Originally seen as waste, gasoline soon became the oil companies’ golden goose.

In parallel to the commercialization of steel and oil, was the harnessing of electricity. Thomas Edison (and even Ben Franklin) typically comes to mind when thinking of electricity, and especially electric light, but one of the true pioneers was Michael Faraday. Faraday was a chemist by trade, but most well-known for his discovery of the relationship between magnetism and electricity. Hence, the science of power conversion and generation was born.

Electric generators first came to light in the 1870s and were all based on Faraday’s electro-magnetism theories. The ability to understand electricity was one thing. The ability to generate it, control it, and in turn distribute it, changed the world. Essentially, motion in a generator creates electricity, and that motion can come from various sources, hydro, wind, combustion engine, virtually anything that can turn a rotor. Think back to Watt’s steam engine that was powerful enough to turn a rotor, as time moves on, that breakthrough will show up time and time again.

All of these inventions/discoveries on their own would have been quite monumental, but it’s the synergies that were created amongst them that really propelled us in the 20th century.

Steel combined with oil and fuel, created the first gasoline powered combustion engine. There was also the element of electricity to fire the fuel within the chamber. This is a perfect example of the combination of technologies to create and even bigger breakthroughs, which during the second revolution took off at a pace never seen before.

Some outputs of these combinations are:

• Automobiles
• Elevators/Skyscrapers
• Telegraph and Telephone
• Planes
• Barges
• Drilling/Mining
• Diesel Locomotives

Electricity itself was a wonder in just the pure form to illuminate a light bulb, but shortly after harnessing the power, other noted scientists discovered the many properties of electrons and through further manipulation of electricity, the study of electronics was born.

Electronics can be traced back to the early 1900s and Fleming’s invention of the vacuum tube. This gave us the ability to really control the flow of electrons down to a tiny amount of current, thus opening the door for a host of electric appliances and devices. Radio, TV, computers all owe their existence to that first tube.

The Industrial Revolution brought about a huge social change as people no longer had to rely on other people as much for their survival, but instead they could rely more on machines and their own skills. Industry 2.0 was a monumental shift away from the individual being totally responsible for their level of prosperity, and now the newly formed society was dependent on its collective self for the advancement of both the individual and the community.

There was a true social dichotomy as a result, while healthcare and sanitation began to improve, the need also rose at an alarming rate. The new urban lifestyle created some intolerable living conditions. The rise of factories meant that the workers needed to live nearby, hence housing was a reaction to the proliferation of new manufacturing centers, and they were viewed as simply places where the workers would live.

This is before unions and many of the social constructs that protected citizens. Over time, Police, Fire and Sanitation became commonplace departments in the large cities, but only because of the rising need for such social intervention was crucial to prevent utter chaos within these cities.

Medical advances arrived on the scene as well, but only because of the need to combat the devastating diseases, viruses and bacterial infections that came about due to overcrowded, unsanitary living and working conditions.

By establishing this new modern social system, and the advent of a consumer mentality, the world began a seismic economic shift. No longer were we as isolated as an agrarian/artisan society; we were now learning to live amongst the masses and consume products at a rate never seen before.

By shifting to a consumer economy, as well as learning to more efficiently turn raw materials into finished products, Industry 2.0 set the stage for ever faster, and ever-expanding, leapfrogging technologies.

Industry 3.0: The Computer/Digital Transformation

The way in which our current society has become dependent on technology is no secret; but what many people don’t realize is that this dependency has been developing for centuries. In fact, the first machines developed for information processing were developed more than 300 years ago: In 1790, Thomas Jefferson developed a cipher wheel. The cipher wheel allowed a person to encode a message with a set of 10 symbols. To encode the message, the sender would have to know the key which is a word or phrase for each of the symbols on the face of the wheel. This was in fact a “Computer”, albeit a mechanical one, as opposed to the electronic ones in use today.

The third industrial revolution centers around modern computers, and more specifically the shift from analog to digital technology. The move represents using computers for tasks, and using computers to manage data and information. The shift took an even sharper shift with the introduction and adaptation of the Internet.

Digital communications differ from analog in the fact that exact copies of information can be made. Think of it like this – an old copy machine makes “facsimiles” of documents. However, each copy loses some information. If you’ve made copies of copies, you know what I mean. Each subsequent copy is a little blurrier than the original. Digital however, is all a series of ones and zeros. So, exact copies can be made, even if there are millions or billions of ones and zeros in a string of information. As long as each sequence is copied, the result is an exact replica. Because these exact copies can be endless, transmitting them results in no loss of information, no matter how many times it’s used.

In the late 1960s we were welcomed to the digital era. While companies like Fairchild Semiconductor began to flourish in Silicon Valley in the late 1950s, the true digital revolution was accelerated by the invention of the microprocessor. Early transistors were the evolution of vacuum tube functionality and began to overtake tubes in the 1960s as the semiconductor of choice (most don’t realize that vacuum tube technology performed the same function, controlling electrical conductivity through an external signal). What we think of as today’s semiconductors were now made of a solid-state material, silicon. This was a huge leap forward from the process being controlled by beams of electrons shot through a vacuum tube.

Those smaller, lighter, more efficient wafers of silicon gave rise to the integrated circuit, and eventually the microprocessor. While the evolution is a bit muddy, most consider the Intel 4004, released in 1969, as the first commercially viable microprocessor. As more than an integrated circuit designed to perform a singular task, the microprocessor could be “programmed” to perform various and multiple tasks, hence giving rise to the true Digital Age.

Digital was now no longer an abstract concept that we hear about only in the context of Silicon Valley and startups. It began permeating and transforming every aspect of our lives, from how we work, to how we live, to how we play. It changed our fundamental notions about what it means to consume information and interact with other people, as well as influencing how we express ourselves creatively and share ideas.

This revolution led to inventions like the home computer, cell phone, MP3 players, digital camera, computer games and the iPhone. We separate the iPhone from the cell phone because the smartphone is really a pocket computer and represented a monumental leap from a device used to make telephony mobile to a mobile computer that is always connected. In many ways it has replaced the items listed above!

Again, we see the synergies of evolving technologies (like the smartphone) as an amalgam of previous digital technologies. Digital technology led to the interconnected network of home and business computers (Internet). Use of the Internet rose at a tremendous rate, from essentially zero in 1990 to over 65% of households in the U.S. connected by 2000.

As we transitioned from an analog economy to a digital economy, the transformation process has come to affect every industry in some way. Industries that were traditionally non-digitized are now seeing the effects of this transformation in their business models and strategies. It’s hard to imagine any business not being connected to the world wide web these days, however there may be a few.

The advantages of this revolution clearly favor businesses and individuals who adopt, and adapt to, change. Those choosing to lag, or not participate surely got left behind. New eras of globalization have emerged, and the business playing fields have been leveled in many cases.

Other consequences may not have been so positive, the workload and rate of change today surpasses anything we knew just 30 years ago. Today, you can get on the subway, open your smartphone, edit a promotional video, send it to colleagues and get feedback before you arrive at your office. That is, if you still even travel to an office! This faster pace has led to a rise in mental health concerns including burnout. As we can stay connected 24/7, some choose to do so, we begin to pay an emotional price.

Also, many claim that we are losing jobs associated with tasks that are now automated. With the upcoming AI revolution, we talk about next, that trend will certainly continue, and pervade occupations that were just a few years ago, considered things that only a human could do.

Like any technology, the original uses are considered positive, but nefarious people will always find reprehensible ways to take advantage of others. With the newfound technical ability to connect, there will also be new avenues for individuals and businesses to be taken advantage of. The term “Fake News” didn’t really exist a few years ago, however, today it has found its way into all our platforms of communication. On top of that, the way digital information can now be altered, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate between the truth and fiction.

Finally, there’s the issue of sustainability that we cover in detail later. The digital revolution has had a huge impact on our ecosystems, even though we sometimes don’t see the destruction first-hand. The enormous amounts of electrical energy needed to digitize our world are increasing at the same rates of the information explosion. A study released stated that by 2040, digital power needs alone would exceed all the power produced globally in 2010!

Industry 3.0 is the idea of using digital technologies in order to revolutionize the industrial sector. Automation will be an industry-wide phenomenon in the near future, but it is not just about machines replacing human labor. Industry 3.0 was more than just digitizing manual tasks; it’s about digitizing all stages of production and the “programming” of computers to perform tasks well beyond any human capabilities.

Industry 4.0: The Rise of IoT and Automation

As we move into the future and society becomes more and more digital, we need to start thinking about how we can shift our production needs to match this shift. Industry 4.0 is a term coined by German advisor Professor Harald Welzer in response to the digital transformation in the manufacturing sector. The thrust of industry 4.0 is the intertwining of the cyber world and the physical – coined cyber-physical convergence.

This convergence will be defined as the current trend of automation and data exchange in manufacturing technologies, we see advances in the Internet of things (IoT), cloud computing, cognitive computing or AI, and the rise of the smart factory, smart city, smart building, smart energy….and so on.

Industry 4.0 is a term for the next generation of manufacturing which takes advantage of cyber-physical systems and Internet of Things (IoT). It combines process optimization, production intelligence, and information technologies with smart automation and autonomous systems to create dramatic improvements in performance while simultaneously reducing costs, time-to-market, and energy consumption.

As with the first three revolutions, the arrival of Industry 4.0 will create fundamental shifts in business, our economy, and our social system. However, the speed and breadth of this forth revolution is unlike anything experienced previously. This current revolution consists of moving technology well beyond the digital age of information and data, to seeing the rise of machine learning and artificial intelligence. In many ways, this is clearing the way for some incredible advances never imagined before.

Industry 4.0 will fundamentally change our business landscapes, our educational institutions, our governments, and our personal lives. Everything from the Internet of Things, self-driving cars, robots/cobots, material science, energy production/storage, 3D printing, and quantum computing will clear the way for a futuristic world, and all coming at us at a breakneck pace.

As with the second and third revolution, this forth will intertwine technologies to create new opportunities, and previously unthinkable synergies. The first three revolutions changed how we did things, the fourth may change who we are!

Automation will go beyond simple task swapping to outpace t