Between roughly 1870 and 1914, the texture of human life in industrial countries changed more in a single generation than it had in any previous millennium. Electric light. Telephones. Automobiles. Aeroplanes. Radio. Refrigeration. Petroleum. Synthetic chemistry. Steel-frame skyscrapers. Subway systems. Cinema. A child born in 1870 grew up by candlelight in a horse-drawn world; the same person, in middle age, could ride an elevator, place a long-distance call, and watch a moving picture. The First Industrial Revolution had been about iron, steam, and cotton; the Second was about steel, electricity, and chemistry, and it produced the material conditions of modernity in something like their recognizable form — the world the twentieth century would actually live in.
The Second Industrial Revolution had several distinctive features. It was science-driven in a way the first was not — Edison's Menlo Park lab, the first institution built to invent on schedule; Bayer's and BASF's chemists synthesizing dyes and, in Haber and Bosch's ammonia, the fertilizer that would later feed half the planet; Bell's research operation; the German research university feeding industry through formal training. The enabling commodity was cheap steel: Bessemer's converter (1856) and the open-hearth furnace dropped its price by an order of magnitude, and rails, ships, machines, and skyscraper frames followed. Electricity, distributed over Edison's and Tesla's rival DC and AC grids, did for power what railways had done for goods. The frontier shifted: it was American and German, and the two displaced Britain, whose lead in the first revolution became a handicap of obsolete plant. It produced mass consumer goods (the bicycle, the camera, the sewing machine, the canned and packaged food) and the advertising and department-store retail to sell them. It created the modern corporation — vertically integrated, professionally managed, multinational, and so large it required the managerial revolution of salaried executives — and the modern stock market to finance it. And it produced global inequality on a new scale: by 1900, British real wages were several times those in India, where the gap had been far narrower in 1700 — the Great Divergence opening across a single century, locking in a hierarchy of rich industrial cores and poor resource peripheries that still structures the world economy.
We are arguably living through the Fourth Industrial Revolution — digital computing, AI, biotechnology, automation. The historical pattern is informative: each revolution has produced both massive aggregate gains and massive distributional disruptions, and the political settlements (welfare state, labour rights, antitrust, public education) take decades to catch up with the technology. The trust-busting of the 1900s answered the cartels of the 1880s a generation late. The current debates about AI displacement, platform monopolies, and economic precarity are this revolution's catch-up phase — and the lag suggests the institutions that will tame it have not been invented yet.