An Extended Second Industrial Revolution.

[Beet]

The second industrial revolution was commonly said to have lasted from 1850 to 1914. I am not sure how the end date is justified, but it appears to be based on the fact that many technologies, such as the airplane and radio, had appeared by that date.

To me this cannot be justified because although the airplane existed in 1914, it was hardly much more than a novelty. While the radio did not have nearly the impact it would eventually have. One might as well say that the first industrial revolution ended in 1800 because the power loom was invented by then. But the power loom did no reach its full maturity until the 1840s. We correctly end date the first industrial revolution only after the technologies that drove it were fully mature. Why not the second?

One reason might be is that at the time the term was coined (the 1960s) the second industrial revolution was not really over and so the people who popularized this term lacked perspective. The technologies of the second industrial revolution, whether telegraph and railroad or radio and airplane, whether photography or television, tend to fall into certain categories: transportation, communication, analog electric devices, the generation of analog images, pre-digital biology and medicine, and chemistry or chemical processes. The space age, jet age, atomic age, and machine age all fall into the same categories. The railroad was a way to travel farther and faster than ever; so was Apollo 11.

In my view, the entire era of 1850-1970 can be categorized as the second industrial revolution. It ended with achievements such as all prime-time television transitioning to color (1966), the moon landing (1969), the introduction of the first widebody airliner with a high-bypass turbofan engine (1970), the maturity of mass vaccination with measles, mumps, rubella, tetanus and polio (late 1960s), and the first heart transplantation (1967). After this, scientific advances along these lines stalled out for a time [space travel became less ambitious; supersonic jet travel never took off; the rate of new vaccines slowed]. Star Trek and Star Wars capture worlds where the advances of the second industrial revolution continue to advance linearly (faster travel, communication) but computer technology remains relatively primitive. The stall-out of the second industrial revolution was recognized in the "age of diminished expectations" that started in the early 1980s.

The third industrial revolution, or the digital era, started just as the second one was ending, similar to how the second started as the first was ending.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Its an interesting perspective, 1914 does not make much sense either though I am not sure about extending it to 1970 either.

[Tartarus Sauce]

I consider the Great Depression to be the bookend of the Second Industrial Revolution, when the seemingly unstoppable escalation of prosperity it generated screeched to a halt and could no longer extract itself from stagnation.  

From an American perspective, I consider the 40 years between 1880-1920 to really be the apotheosis of industrial society as one being continuously awash in disruptive revolutionary technologies. 1840-1860 seem like the awkward beginnings where the new wave of industrial technologies were first getting established, taking several decades to truly grow into their new role as the lifeblood of commerce, and where society as a whole was in many ways still organized around many pre-industrial paradigms. The 1870s was the transition decade where a lot of the miraculous new technologies we associate with the industrial revolution were first formulated, patented, and sold in their earliest forms, but were not yet widely adopted.

By the 1880s and 1890s, these new technologies, like electricity, the telephone, and the automobile were promulgating right as the first wave technologies like railroads (and steam engine trains to go along with them), photography, and the telegraph had cemented themselves as national bedrocks. The hits just kept coming into the early 20th century, particularly the invention of the airplane and dissemination of radio broadcasting. These decades also coincided with massive immigration streams to America to fill the factories sustaining this new mass-production, mass consumption way of life. Magnates and tycoons effectively controlled national politics, playing kingmakers and gatekeeper roles. A seemingly never-ending line of marvelous new inventions were flying off the shelves every year. By the time you get to the 1920s, just about all the industrial technologies had matured and settled into their niches, right at the same time as radio finally took off and only television remained as the missing major analog technology yet to invade our lives. These decades were ones of a truly industrial society.

Post 1930s, nearly all of the massive innovations reliant on utilizing traditional physics and classical mechanics had been exhausted (albeit chemistry would still prove to have a few more tricks up its sleeve) and major breakthroughs instead came from exploring more advanced theoretical avenues, launching us into the atomic+space age. This was emphatically not an extension of the industrial revolution, because the mode of technological transitions and turnovers had shifted. Major discoveries were no longer driven by scrappy backyard tinkerers turned shrewd businessmen, they were driven by teams of scientists working with millions of dollars of government funding.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

I consider the Great Depression to be the bookend of the Second Industrial Revolution, when the seemingly unstoppable escalation of prosperity it generated screeched to a halt and could no longer extract itself from stagnation.  

From an American perspective, I consider the 40 years between 1880-1920 to really be the apotheosis of industrial society as one being continuously awash in disruptive revolutionary technologies. 1840-1860 seem like the awkward beginnings where the new wave of industrial technologies were first getting established, taking several decades to truly grow into their new role as the lifeblood of commerce, and where society as a whole was in many ways still organized around many pre-industrial paradigms. The 1870s was the transition decade where a lot of the miraculous new technologies we associate with the industrial revolution were first formulated, patented, and sold in their earliest forms, but were not yet widely adopted.

By the 1880s and 1890s, these new technologies, like electricity, the telephone, and the automobile were promulgating right as the first wave technologies like railroads (and steam engine trains to go along with them), photography, and the telegraph had cemented themselves as national bedrocks. The hits just kept coming into the early 20th century, particularly the invention of the airplane and dissemination of radio broadcasting. These decades also coincided with massive immigration streams to America to fill the factories sustaining this new mass-production, mass consumption way of life. Magnates and tycoons effectively controlled national politics, playing kingmakers and gatekeeper roles. A seemingly never-ending line of marvelous new inventions were flying off the shelves every year. By the time you get to the 1920s, just about all the industrial technologies had matured and settled into their niches, right at the same time as radio finally took off and only television remained as the missing major analog technology yet to invade our lives. These decades were ones of a truly industrial society.

Post 1930s, nearly all of the massive innovations reliant on utilizing traditional physics and classical mechanics had been exhausted (albeit chemistry would still prove to have a few more tricks up its sleeve) and major breakthroughs instead came from exploring more advanced theoretical avenues, launching us into the atomic+space age. This was emphatically not an extension of the industrial revolution, because the mode of technological transitions and turnovers had shifted. Major discoveries were no longer driven by scrappy backyard tinkerers turned shrewd businessmen, they were driven by teams of scientists working with millions of dollars of government funding.

Thats a very interesting dividing line to use, certainly better than 1914 or 1970.

[Beet]

Post 1930s, nearly all of the massive innovations reliant on utilizing traditional physics and classical mechanics had been exhausted (albeit chemistry would still prove to have a few more tricks up its sleeve) and major breakthroughs instead came from exploring more advanced theoretical avenues, launching us into the atomic+space age. This was emphatically not an extension of the industrial revolution, because the mode of technological transitions and turnovers had shifted. Major discoveries were no longer driven by scrappy backyard tinkerers turned shrewd businessmen, they were driven by teams of scientists working with millions of dollars of government funding.

Interesting. And to be honest, I can see what you are saying here. But the reason I extend it to 1970, is that many of the technological paths that began during the late 19th and early 20th century did not reach full maturity until then.

Consider the study of the nature of disease and genetics: There is a fairly linear path of steady revolutionary progress from Charles Darwin's evolution and Louis Pasteur's work with fermentation in the 1850s, the germ theory of disease in the 1880s, the discovery of viruses twenty years later, the working out of the mathematics of reproductive genetics, the discovery of penicilin to treat bacteria, the electron microscope (1930s),  the first flu vaccines, the polio vaccine, the double helix structure of DNA in the 1950s, then RNA and rapid expansion of vaccination in the 1960s, before relative stability from the end of the Sixties onwards. By the time Richard Dawkins published The Selfish Gene in 1976, the theoretical foundations of the field were mature.

Medical treatment also underwent revolutionary change that lasted well past the 1930s. It started during the undisputed second industrial revolution with the discovery of blood types which made possible safe blood transfusion. The EEG and EKG were developed from the turn of the century to the 1930s. In the 1930s when Jean Harlow got kidney failure, it was still a death sentence. Twenty years later it no longer was with kidney dialysis. The 1940s also inaugurated the first open-heart surgeries. In 1954 there was the first organ transplant. And by the end of the Sixties there was the first heart transplant. The postwar years also saw rapid advances in chemotherapy and the introduction of the first generation of antidepressants. Consider that as late as the early 1950s when The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath takes place, her boyfriend becomes seriously ill with tuberculosis, which derails his entire life.

Generally, infectious diseases dropped from being about 35% of all U.S. deaths in 1900 to ~5% by 1960; where they have stayed ever since. Heart disease and cancer rose from about 10% to about 50% by 1960; and they have hovered at that level ever since. Of course, medicine is not industry per se, but its impact on life and society is no less; if not greater.

Similarly in aerospace, there is no clear break. There is a fairly linear pace of rapid revolutionary change from experimental aircraft (1900s), wooden-framed biplanes (1910s-20s), monocoque metal planes with cantilevered wings (1930s), trans-Atlantic flight (1940s), narrowbody jets with low-bypass turbofan thrust (1950s), and finally jumbo jets with the Boeing 747. As of 2021, advanced versions of the Boeing 747 are still in use and 15 still remain on order (!) [As is the military B-52 bomber]. These models represented the end of a period of steady revolutionary change that began with the Wright Brothers.