Bill Bailey Ministries 1726 Curlew Rd Dunedin, Fl. 34698

The Set Up By Bill Bailey Chapter 6  The Industrial Revolution:       Many events took place in the 18th Century that prepared the way for the Industrial Revolution. Prior to this time many crafts were family businesses as was the farming industry. But progress had to winnow its way into the American culture. With the invention of mechanical, electrical, and chemical products and the increase of transportation, America and the world were poised to explode with Industry. America and England were the leaders in the Industrial Revolution, although other countries contributed significantly. Many production processes were invented to make mass production a reality. 1802 saw the invention of the first battery, which went into mass production within a few years. The first canned foods were produced in 1812. In 1813 employment in industry overtakes employment in agriculture in Great Britain for the first time, the first country in the world where this happens.

       The first quarter of the century Faraday demonstrated the electric motor. Trade unions began to be established in England first and then in America. By 1834 Charles Babbage developed his analytic engine, the forerunner of the computer. 1836 Samuel F.B. Morse coded the Morse code and the first message said. "What hath God wrought?" In 1850 the first petroleum product dubbed "gasoline" is put into use as fuel. Pollution is first becoming a problem in England due to the steel industry, 1860 Lenoir invents the first practical two-stroke internal combustion engine, 1866 the first Trans-Atlantic cable is laid and the next year Alfred Nobel invents dynamite. Then inventions seemed to be coming on the scene almost every year, maybe several per year. The American Transcontinental Railroad is finished, increasing transportation coast-to-coast, Bell invents the telephone, Edison the light bulb and phonograph. Some quarter million lamps were in use in the United States by 1885. In Stuttgart, Germany Daimler-Benz develop the first automobile powered by an internal combustion engine, in 1886. Near the end of the 1800's x-rays were discovered and Orville and Wilbur Wright have already started working on their airplane, which flew in 1903.

      America (and many other countries) experienced social and economic change that brought job-seekers to the new factories and businesses. Rapidly declining where the Mom and Pop businesses were a trade was handed down from father to son. Now corporations and business groups owned business and the "bottom-line" was examined with a magnifying glass whereby the employees rights, work conditions, safety and health were subjugated to a lower priority. The water and waterways in the Northeast were the resources needed and the main factor in the buildup of many cities. Many cities that we see today being abandoned. The textile industry literally mushroomed with 1) new inventions, 2) ready and willing work force, and 3) demand by the public for clothes, shoes, home adornments, auto accessories. Another factor was the new power source, Hydro-electric power from dams being constructed and water that flowed day and night, every day of the year, rain or shine.

      In early 1800 James Watt is the designer of an efficient steam engine, which significantly added to the Industrial Revolution. Many new machine tools and processes like die cutting, milling, screw cutting machines, clock-making, scientific instruments were available. By the mid 1800's they were able to measure to an accuracy of one millionth of an inch. At about this same time while evolution was being espoused by Darwin and others, the scientific equipment was used to "date" some of the archeological finds of the day. The newer and improved photographic and printing/reproducing machines made mass production of books, magazines, and periodicals abound. Of course they were used to further spread the theories of evolution. With travel and communication increasing, the new Bible versions were copyrighted, printed, distributed to all the new religions arising amongst the new displaced residence of the new cities.

      They (the people), being separated from extended family (i.e., grandparents, uncles, and aunts) did not continue in the tradition and admonition of the earlier generation, but were taught new beliefs that were different from their parents. The moral values of people changed as the social structure disintegrated. Depression and poverty was very prevalent among the families where even the children were forced by conditions to work in textile factories, brick yards and coal mines. Gas factories, shipyards, match factories, nail industry and many menial service industries employed children as young as 5 years old. Many kids worked 16-hour days. No one was allowed idle time. As the population of cities grew at an alarming rate, tenement apartments were quickly and cheaply constructed. Life was not only cheapened but life expectancy was reduced by the poverty, workload, and poor diet. Alcohol and drug abuse began to rear its ugly head. Try as it might, the church was for the first time starting to fail to be the cohesive agent to bring and keep people together. It did however start its ever-increasing drift toward a social event and a social status. In addition to that, the mixture of all the different ethnic and social groups from Europe in America gave people more choices, one of them being pluralism, or diversification of the beliefs about God. It's a matter of personal choice as to what you will take on your religious plate, one choice being as valid as another. Another idea was universalism, God is universal or He encompasses all of mankind, no one will be left out, everyone goes to heaven.

      Class structure was changing to an elite class of land owners and business owners at the top, doctors, lawyers, trade merchants in the middle class and a great multitude of lower class citizens who could not afford to own a home or automobile. It was not until 1908 that Henry Ford introduced the Model T Ford, making a less expensive automobile available to the lower classes. The steam locomotive did open up the "Wild West" though and lowered the cost of transporting the many goods produced in the factories to the consumers throughout the nation and the world.

      A new political paradigm was brought to light in 1848 when Karl Marx and Friedrick Engels's Communist Manifesto was published. They wanted to bring down the capitalists by convincing the people they were being used by industrialists of the day. It was a simple matter of who owned how much of the pie and who were the movers and shakers in the world. Marx and Engels wanted what the Schwabs and Rockefellers had, power. Friedrich Niezsche, having lived from 1844-1900, wrote many books on philosophy, one being "The Gay Science". I quote him, "God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. -And we- we still have to vanquish his shadow, too." He disliked Christianity as can be shown in most of his writings. It seems as though he did read the Bible, albeit to find errors in it. He, much like Darwin, had early in life pursued theological studies but abandoned them for the broad road of humanism. Another one of his books is, "Thus spake Zarathustra". Niezsche did not agree with Darwin, though they were both opposed to God.

      In 1803 America made the Louisana Purchase, doubling the territory of the country. Many South and Central American countries were either liberated or declared their independence from their mother country, Guatemala, Panama, Mexico, Santo Domingo and New Granada (now Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador) from Spain. The Civil War divided America for the first time since the first settlers came to the new land. Abraham Lincoln was assassinated the same year Lee surrendered to the Northern states, 1865. There are as many conspiracy theories surrounding his death as there are for John F. Kennedy in 1963. Like the pristine bullet (and the lone gunman, according to the Warren report) believed to have done all the damage that fateful day, some say it was simply the racist John Wilkes Booth while others say it was the Jesuits or his own vice president, Johnson, who had been closely associated with Booth. The world lost a remarkable president that day. Within 16 years the same fate fell to President Garfield. In both cases the convicted killers or co-conspirators were executed within a year. Women won the right to vote for the first time anywhere in the world, not in America but in New Zealand, 1893. In 1898, just before the end of the 19th Century, Pierre and Marie Curie discover radium, which has been used for the good of mankind and for an equal amount of evil.

      At the risk of repeating myself I will state that the world and especially America and England have been damaged tremendously by the nature of "progress" in the arena of social and religious convictions. There can be change in any culture and progress is good but it must be done responsibly with forethought in mind, not just for the sake of money, power, dominance, or personal glorification. At many junctures in human history people have invented or discovered something that was way outside their comprehension of impact. Gunpowder is one of the four great inventions credited to ancient China along with paper, printing and the compass. All four are responsible for great changes in our world, gunpowder is one that should have had some future long-range considerations. I'm not sure it didn't but none the less, it has been used for a lot of devastation. You know the Bible doesn't speak of gunpowder per se but it does talk about the wickedness of mankind and their propensity towards evil always. The discovery of germ theory was a milestone in the world but sanitary procedures were laid down in the Bible centuries ago.

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