industrial-revolution
4 free lessons tagged industrial-revolution across History. Each one is a short sequence of focused steps with narration and a five-question quiz at the end — take them in any order, no signup required.
The Productivity Paradox: What Changed, and How Slowly
Revised estimates put British growth during the classic Industrial Revolution far lower than the name implies, and real wages barely moved for half a century while output per worker rose sharply. This lesson works through the numbers, explains why a transformative technology can take decades to show up in the statistics, and separates what is measured from what is inferred.
Cotton and the Factory: Why Work Moved Into Buildings
Before the factory, textile work was done in houses by people who set their own hours. This lesson follows the bottleneck that moved between spinning and weaving as each was mechanised, explains the two reasons work was gathered into buildings, and looks at what the Luddites were actually objecting to.
Steam: From a Mine Pump to a General Prime Mover
The steam engine began as a fix for one problem, flooded coal mines, and was so inefficient that it made sense only where fuel was nearly free. This lesson traces how a device that wasted 99.5 percent of its fuel became the first source of power that could be put anywhere, and why each improvement targeted the constraint that limited the last one.
Why Britain First: The Question and the Candidate Answers
Mechanised industry appeared in one place before anywhere else, and explaining that is one of the most contested questions in economic history. This lesson sets out what actually needs explaining, works through the wage-and-coal argument, the useful-knowledge argument and the institutional one, and is explicit about which parts are established and which remain in dispute.