Second Industrial Revolution

The Second Industrial Revolution, sometimes called the Technological Revolution, refers to the period of accelerated industrial, scientific, and organizational change that ran roughly from the early 1870s to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Where the First Industrial Revolution had been built on coal, steam, iron, and textiles in Britain, the second wave was characterized by steel, electricity, petroleum, chemicals, and the internal combustion engine, and its centers of gravity were the United States and Germany as much as Britain.

Key technological breakthroughs included the Bessemer process (patented 1856) and later open-hearth methods that made cheap mass-produced steel possible; the spread of electrical power generation and distribution following the work of figures such as Edison, Tesla, and Westinghouse; synthetic dyes and fertilizers from the German chemical industry; the telephone, telegraph networks, and wireless; and the assembly-line manufacture of automobiles, exemplified by Ford's Model T (1908).

Equally important were organizational innovations: the modern corporation, vertically integrated firms, scientific management (Taylorism), and large industrial cartels and trusts such as Standard Oil and the German I.G. chemical combines. Railroads, steamships, and refrigeration knitted together a genuinely global economy, often described as the first wave of globalization.

For political researchers the period matters because it reshaped international politics. Rapid German and American industrial growth eroded British economic primacy, fueled naval arms races, and intensified competition for colonies, raw materials, and markets — dynamics frequently cited as background causes of the First World War. It also produced the modern industrial working class, mass political parties, trade unions, and the first welfare-state experiments (Bismarck's social insurance laws of 1883–1889). The technologies and corporate forms developed in this era underpin most twentieth-century debates about capitalism, imperialism, and state regulation.