Reading. FOUR INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTIONSFOUR INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTIONS Before you start 1. How does the industrial revolution influence human life? Reading 2. Read the text and find answers to the questions below: 1. When does the history of mechanical engineering begin? 2. What were the earliest types of machines? 3. What are the four stages of the development of world industry and what are they characterized by? 4. What period of industrial revolution occurs at present?
The history of mechanical engineering goes back to the time when the man first tried to make machines. We can call the earlier rollers, levers and pulleys, for example, the work of mechanical engineering.
Starting in the mid-1700s in England, a series of inventions sparked the biggest change in human life since tools first had been used in the growing of crops thousands of years earlier. These inventions caused profound changes in the ordinary lives of people and in the way society is organized. The entire process—technical innovation and social change taken together—is called the Industrial Revolution.
These changes, which are still being felt at the beginning of the twenty-first century, came in two stages. The first stage, sometimes called the first Industrial Revolution, lasted from about 1750 until about 1850 and took place largely in England. It was dominated by two developments in technology: the steam engine driven by coal and machines used to make textiles, or cloth.
The second stage, sometimes called the second Industrial Revolution, lasted from about 1850 until about 1940 and occurred primarily in the United States as well as in continental Europe. It was dominated by two new sources of power: the internal combustion engine and electricity.
In addition to the introduction of new sources of power and machinery, the Industrial Revolution resulted in new ways of thinking about work. The process of making things began to be viewed in terms of a system: machines and people functioning together in workplaces, typically in factories as parts of a factory system. Previously, goods had been manufactured by individual craftspeople working at home. The system approach was introduced gradually, starting in the late 1700s and progressing steadily into the twenty-first century. It is difficult to overemphasize how important this change has been. It has affected the way people view their work and the way they view one another, in the workplace, in society, and in government.
The third industrial revolution coincided with the advent of automation — in its inflexible form. In this revolution, the main features were advances in the control of manufacturing processes so that things could be made more cheaply, with greater precision and (often) with fewer people. And this change which occurred around the middle of this century, also featured a new machine that was to greatly influence the world, the electronic computer.
The fourth industrial revolution will be characterized by automated machines that are versatile and programmable and can make different things according to different sets of computer instructions. It will be characterized by flexible, automated machinery, the most interesting example of which are robots.
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