Canals and Railways Canals were initially built to transport coal to cities. This was because the bulk and weight of coal made its transport by road much slower and more expensive than by barges on canals. The demand for coal, as industrial energy and for heating and lighting homes in cities, grew constantly. The making of the first English canal, the Worsley Canal ( ) by James Brindley ( - ), had no other purpose than to carry coal from the coal deposits at Worsley (near Manchester) to that city; after the canal was completed the price of coal fell by half.
Canals were usually built by big landowners to increase the value of the mines, quarries or forests on their lands. The confluence of canals created marketing centres in new towns. The city of Birmingham, for example, owed its growth to its position at the heart of a canal system connecting London, the Bristol Channel, and the Mersey and Humber rivers. From to , twenty-five new canal-building projects were begun.
In the period known as the ‘canal-mania’, from to , there were another new projects and over the next years more than , miles of canal were built. The first steam locomotive, Stephenson’s Rocket, appeared in . Railways emerged as a new means of transportation that was available throughout the year, both cheap and fast, to carry passengers and goods. They combined two inventions, the iron track which replaced the wooden track in the 1760s, and haulage along it by steam engine.
The invention of the railways took the entire process of industrialisation to a second stage. In , Richard Trevithick ( - ) had devised an engine called the ‘Puffing Devil’ that pulled trucks around the mine where he worked in Cornwall. In , the railway engineer George Stephenson ( - ) constructed a locomotive, called ‘The Blutcher’, that could pull a weight of tons up a hill at mph. The first railway line connected the cities of Stockton and Darlington in , a distance of miles that was completed in two hours at speeds of up to kph ( mph), and the next railway line connected Liverpool and Manchester in .
Within years, speeds of to miles an hour were usual. In the 1830s, the use of canals revealed several problems. The congestion of vessels made movement slow on certain stretches of canals, and frost, flood or drought limited the time of their use. The railways now appeared as a convenient alternative.
About , miles of railway was opened in Britain between and , most of it in two short bursts. During the ‘little railway mania’ of - , miles of line was built, and during the bigger ‘mania’ of - , another , miles of line was sanctioned. They used vast amounts of coal and iron, employed large numbers of workers and boosted activity in the construction and public works industries. Most of England had been connected by railway by .
T HE I NDUSTRIAL R EVOLUTION T HEMES IN W ORLD H ISTORY