Universal Encyclopedia
What was the Industrial Revolution?
The moment the economic curve broke vertical: factories, cities, and coal turned millennia of stagnation into two centuries of takeoff.
Last updated: October 2026
For nearly all of recorded history, the average human lived on the edge of subsistence — and each generation died roughly as poor as the last. Then, around 1780, in a corner of England, the line of human prosperity bent upward and never came back down. The Industrial Revolution was not an event. It was the escape.