Of course, these are only predictions. But they are made on the assumption that the Information Revolution will evolve as several earlier technology-based "revolutions" have evolved over the past 500 years, since Gutenberg's printing revolution, around 1455. In particular the assumption is that the Information Revolution will be like the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. And that is indeed exactly how the Information Revolution has been during its first fifty years.
The Information Revolution is now at the point at which the Industrial Revolution was in the early 1820s, about forty years after James Watts improved steam engine (first installed in 1776) was first applied, in 1785, to an industrial operation - the spinning of cotton. And the steam engine was to the first Industrial Revolution what the computer has been to the Information Revolution, Its trigger. Almost everybody today believes that nothing in economic history has ever moved as fast, or had a greater impact than, the Information Revolution. But the Industrial Revolution moved at least as fast in the same time span, and had probably an equal impact if not a greater one.
In short it mechanised the great majority of manufacturing processes, beginning with the production of the most important industrial commodity of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – textiles. Moore’s law asserts that the price of the Information Revolution's basic element, the microchip, drops by 50 percent every eighteen months. The same was true of the products whose manufacture was mechanised by the first Industrial Revolution. The price of cotton textiles fell by 90 percent in the fifty years spanning the start of the eighteenth century. The production of cotton textiles increased at least 150 fold in Britain alone in the same period. And although textiles were the most visible products of its early years, the Industrial Revolution mechanised the production of practically all other major goods, such as paper, glass, leather, and bricks.
Its impact was by no means confined to consumer goods. The production of iron and ironware for example, wire, became mechanised and steam-driven as fast as did that of textiles, with the same effects on cost, price, and output. By the end of Napoleons War the making of guns was steam-driven throughout Europe, Cannons were made ten to twenty times as fast as before, and their cost dropped by more than two thirds.
These forty or fifty years gave rise to the factory and the "working class." Both were still so few in number in the mid-1820s even in England, as to be statistically insignificant. But psychologically they had come to dominate. Before there were factories through out Europe, Alexander Hamilton foresaw an industrialised country in his 1791 ‘Report on Manufacture’s. A decade later, in 1803, a French economist, Jean-Baptiste said that the Industrial Revolution had changed economics by creating the "entrepreneur."
The social consequences went far beyond the factory and working class. As the historian Paul Johnson has pointed out, in ‘A History of Europe’ (1997), it was the explosive growth of the steam-engine-based textile industry that revived slavery. Considered to be practically dead by the Founders of the American Republic, slavery roared back to life as the cotton gin, soon steam-driven, created a huge demand for low-cost labour and made breeding slave’s America's most profitable industry for some decades.
The Industrial Revolution also had a great impact on the family. The nuclear family had long been the unit of production. On the farm and in the artisan's workshop husband, wife, and children worked together. The factory, almost for the first time in history, took worker and work out of the home and moved them into the workplace, leaving family members behind, whether spouses of adult factory workers or, especially in the early stages, parents of child factory workers.
Indeed, the "crisis of the family" did not begin after the Second World War. It began with the Industrial Revolution, and was in fact a stock concern of those who opposed the Industrial Revolution and the factory system. (A good description of the divorce of work and family, and of its effect on both, is Charles Dickens's 1854 novel Hard Times.) But despite all these effects, the Industrial Revolution in its first half-century only mechanised the production of goods that had been in existence all along. It tremendously increased output and tremendously decreased cost. It created both consumers and consumer products. But the products themselves had been around all along. And products made in the new factories differed from traditional products only in that they were uniform, with fewer defects than existed in products made by any but the top craftsmen of earlier periods.
