AP® European History · Unit 6 · Topic 6.3
Second Wave Industrialization
Second Wave Industrialization, roughly 1870 to 1914, shifted the economy from coal and iron to steel, chemicals, and electricity, and let newer industrializers like Germany and the United States outproduce Britain.
Britain built the first wave on coal, iron, and steam, and had decades of head start. The second wave rested on three newer things: cheap steel, synthetic chemicals, and electrical power. The Bessemer converter made the difference for steel. Pour molten pig iron into the converter, blow cold air up through it, and the carbon and silicon in the iron burn off in minutes, using heat the reaction itself generates. What used to take a skilled puddler all day now took a machine ten minutes, so steel stopped being a rare, expensive metal reserved for tools and swords and became the material you built railroads, ships, and skyscraper frames out of.
Electricity changed what a factory looked like, not just what it could afford. Steam-powered factories ran everything off one central shaft and a maze of belts, so every machine had to sit near that shaft and ran whether it was needed or not. Electrical grids let a factory wire power to any machine anywhere on the floor, run each one independently, and arrange the building around the production process instead of around the steam engine. Chemical industries, built on new science rather than inherited craft, opened entirely new product lines like synthetic dyes and fertilizers.
Germany overtook Britain because it industrialized the second wave from scratch rather than retrofitting the first. German firms built big steel and chemical plants with the newest methods, and German banks financed industry at a scale no single family firm could match, backing expensive machinery and absorbing losses that smaller workshops could not survive. Cartels coordinated prices and output across whole industries. Together, bank capital and cartel coordination squeezed out small independent workshops and concentrated production in a few giant, well-financed firms, which sets up the social tensions over ownership and labor that follow.
Key terms
- Bessemer converter
- A vessel that blows air through molten pig iron to burn off carbon quickly, producing cheap steel in minutes.
- Second Wave Industrialization
- The period from roughly 1870 to 1914 built on steel, chemicals, and electricity rather than coal, iron, and steam alone.
- Cartel
- An agreement among firms in an industry to coordinate prices or output and limit competition between them.
- Electrical grid
- A network distributing electric power to individual machines, replacing a single steam shaft and belt system.
Watch it explained
- How it worksShow me steel output by country from 1870 to 1913 as four racing lines.
- How it worksHow does the Bessemer converter blow air through molten iron and produce cheap steel?
- How it worksWalk me through an electrical grid replacing a factory's central steam shaft and belt drives.
- How it worksHow do chemicals, electricity, and steel each change what a factory can be built to make?
- Going furtherWhat happens to small workshops once banks and cartels finance industry at continental scale?
Check yourself
End of topic.