Four industrial revolutions

The history of mechanical engineering goes back to the time when the man first tried to make machines. The earlier rollers, levers and pulleys are examples of mechanical engineering.

Starting in the mid-1700s in England, inventions sparked the biggest change in human life since tools first had been used in the growing of crops thousands of years earlier. This caused profound changes in the lives of people and in the way society is organized. Technical innovation and social change taken together is called the Industrial Revolution.

These changes, which occurred at the beginning of the twenty-first century, came in two stages. The first stage, called the first Industrial Revolution, lasted from about 1750 until about 1850 largely in England. It was dominated by two developments: the steam engine driven by coal and machines used to make textiles.

The second stage or the second Industrial Revolution lasted from about 1850 until about 1940 and occurred primarily in the United States and continental Europe. It was dominated by two new sources of power: the internal combustion engine and electricity.

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 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 with fewer people. And this change 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.