| A | B |
|---|
| Industrial Revolution | The shift, beginning in England during the 18th century, from making goods by hand to making them by machine. |
| enclosure | One of the fenced-in or hedged-in fields created by wealthy British landowners on land that was formerly worked by village farmers (common land). |
| crop rotation | The system of growing a different crop in a field each year to preserve the fertility of the land. |
| industrialization | The development of industries for the machine production of goods. |
| factors of production | The resources - including land, labor, and capital - that are needed to produce goods and services. |
| factory | A large building in which machinery is used to manufacture goods. |
| entrepreneur | A person who organizes, manages, and takes on the risks of a business. |
| Jethro Tull | An English agricultural pioneer who helped bring about the British Agricultural Revolution through his invention of the seed drill a device for sowing seeds effectively. He also advocated the use of horses instead of oxen and invented a horse-drawn Hoe for clearing weeds, and made changes to the design of the plough which are still visible in modern versions. |
| Charles Townsend | A British Whig statesman. Townshend introduced to England the four-field crop rotation. As a result of this, and other agricultural experiments he became known as Turnip Townshend". Although a figure of some fun, his agricultural reforms were extremely important. |
| Robert Bakewell | He was a British agriculturalist, now recognized as one of the most important figures in the British Agricultural Revolution. Bakewell is particularly notable as the first to implement systematic selective breeding of livestock. His advancements not only led to specific improvements in sheep, cattle and horses, but contributed to general knowledge of artificial selection. |
| John Kay | He was the inventor of the flying shuttle, which was a key contribution to the Industrial Revolution. The flying shuttle greatly accelerated the speed at which weaving could be performed by allowing the shuttle carrying the weft to be passed through the warp threads more quickly and over a greater width of cloth. |
| James Hargreaves | A weaver, carpenter and an inventor in Lancashire, England. He is credited with inventing the Spinning Jennifer (shortened to spinning Jenny in 1768) in 1764. He realised that if a number of spindles were placed upright and side by side, several threads might be spun at once. |
| Richard Arkwright | An Englishman who is usually credited for inventing the spinning frame, later renamed the water frame following the transition to water power. Arkwright's achievement was to combine power, machinery, semi-skilled labour, and a new raw material (cotton) to create mass production. |
| Samuel Crompton | An English inventor and pioneer of the spinning industry. About 1779 Samuel Crompton succeeded in producing a machine which spun yarn suitable for use in the manufacture of muslin, and which was known as the muslin wheel which became known as the spinning mule.,  |
| Edmund Cartwright | An English clergyman and inventor of the power loom. In 1789, he patented a loom which served as the model for later inventors to work upon.,  |
| Eli Whitney | An American inventor best known for inventing the cotton gin. This was one of the key inventions of the Industrial Revolution and shaped the economy of the antebellum South. |
| Thomas Newcomen | He created the first practical steam engine for pumping water, the Newcomen steam engine. Consequently, he can be regarded as a forefather of the Industrial Revolution. |
| James Watt | A Scottish inventor and mechanical engineer whose improvements to the Newcomen steam engine were fundamental to the changes brought by the Industrial Revolution in both the Kingdom of Great Britain and the world. His critical insight was to cause the steam to condense in a separate chamber apart from the piston, and to maintain the temperature of the cylinder at the same temperature as the injected steam. |
| Matthew Boulton | An English manufacturer and business partner of Scottish engineer James Watt. In the final quarter of the 18th century the partnership installed hundreds of Boulton & Watt steam engines, which were a great advance on the state of the art, making possible the mechanisation of factories and mills. |
| Robert Fulton | An American engineer and inventor who is widely credited with developing the first commercially successful steamboat. |
| "Clermont" | The first commercially successful steamship of the paddle steamer design, North River Steamboat (later known as the Clermont), operated on the Hudson River (at that time often known as the North River) between New York and Albany. She was neither the first steamboat built nor even the first to be operated in scheduled service, but she was the start of the first long-lasting and financially successful steamboat business. She was created by the wealthy investor and politician Robert Livingston and inventor and entrepreneur Robert Fulton.,  |
| John Loudon McAdam | A Scottish engineer and road-builder. He invented a new process, "macadamisation", for building roads with a smooth hard surface that would be more durable and less muddy than soil-based tracks. |
| Richard Trevithick | A British inventor and mining engineer. His most significant success was the high pressure steam engine and he also built the first full-scale working railway steam locomotive. |
| George Stephenson | An English civil engineer and mechanical engineer who built the first public railway line in the world to use steam locomotives, and he is renowned as being the "Father of Railways". |
| "Rocket" | An early steam locomotive of 0-2-2 wheel arrangement, built in Newcastle at the Forth Street Works of Robert Stephenson and Company in 1829. Rocket's claim to fame is that it was the first "modern" locomotive, drawing together several recent strands of technological improvement, some tried elsewhere and some still experimental, to produce the most advanced locomotive of its day, and the template for most steam locomotives since. In fact, the standard steam locomotive design is often called the "Stephensonian" locomotive.,  |
| Liverpool-Manchester Railway | the world's first inter-city passenger railway in which all the trains were timetabled and were hauled for most of the distance solely by steam locomotives. The line opened on 15 September 1830 and ran between the cities of Liverpool and Manchester in North West England in the United Kingdom. |
