The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain in the late 18th to 19th centuries, when equipment powered by unconventional resources gradually displaced manual work. The first indication of this transformation was the automating of England’s textile factories, the advancement of iron-making processes, and the increased coal utilization for heat generation. Around 1850, steam engines were devised as a more economical manner to use coal power, and soon steam turbines were being used to propel locomotives and various types of industrial gear (Rosen 566). These inventions expanded across Europe, the United States, and other countries, affecting society and business profoundly. However, in the two decades following the Civil War, the contamination of the first industrialization wreaked havoc on the atmosphere in many sections of the United States (Rosen 566). Numerous factories emitted nasty, occasionally hazardous, material, aqueous, and gaseous contaminants, as well as noisy, continuous industrial disturbances and shocks into the surrounding atmosphere, water, and landscape (Rosen 566). This paper discusses the various lasting impacts the industrial revolution had on the environment, with a specific focus on the United States of America.
The discharges tarnished the air and water and disrupted environments wherever streams were impounded for fuel, wood or coal was consumed for power manufacturing operations, slaughterhouses, distilleries, workplaces, refineries, quarries, and construction of boilers. Additionally, they generated the nation’s first massive wave of industrial pollution lawsuits (Rosen 566). With these new developments and innovations in technology, the industrial revolution presented challenges and concerns to the environment. Consequently, the environmental concerns had a significant impact on the lives of United States citizens. They altered the way of living and required people to cope with the presented problems.
Some of the ever-present environmental impacts caused by the industrial revolution in the United States are as discussed herein. First, the development of industries for various manufacturing and processing purposes has presented the United States with ever unending noise pollution. The economic revolution’s technological innovations altered normal functioning and generally acceptable enterprise fumes, noise, domestic wastewater, and putrid odor discharges (Rosen 576). Instead, it led to abnormal ecological parameters because they were so much more severe in magnitude and concentration than individuals familiar with (Rosen 576). Nuisance laws have been an essential instrument of the nineteenth-century American legislature’s administrative apparatus in regulating noise pollution.
To date, most scholars who examined early nineteenth-century noise law concluded that the courts essentially disregarded the conventional nuisance theories that had previously offered protection from environmental injuries inflicted by economic ventures. Rosen opines that due to the ongoing tussle between citizens and industrial owners on noise pollution, numerous misdemeanor theories empower state officials to utilize the state’s investigative force to penalize or convict property owners (567). The arrest is made for the entrepreneurs infringing on the rights of many individuals in a neighborhood or to prohibit entrepreneurs from violating those rights. Rosen also addressed additional avenues of redress under the private nuisance principle that citizens in the United States use to present the impacts of noise pollution towards them (567). Individuals have filed lawsuits for remuneration for injury sustained as a result of another property owner’s practices and petitions for prohibitions to prevent companies from proceeding to participate in the functions that cause noise pollution (Rosen 569). Therefore, as the non-traditional nuisance situations demonstrate, the pace of environmental and institutional change has far surpassed the growth of cultural perspectives and conceptions through which individuals have understood the environmental implications of industrial progress.
Second, the shift to industrial manufacturing and production in the United States has produced ceaseless air pollution over the years. In the opening shot of Rebecca Davis’ Life in the Iron Mills, Gatlin asserts that fumes and grime appeared to cause widespread havoc to both living and non-living things (212). They defile non-human existence by polluting the air, accumulating in the water, and attaching to animals and plants as well as human-made constructions such as murky vessels and soot-covered dwellings, as well as people as sooty passers-by, and their emblems of rehabilitation. Smoke was a representation of production prowess and economic achievement for industrialists (Gatlin 203). In 1860, a Cleveland newspaper lauded wheeling as a paradigm for rapid industrialization, observing that active, smoky, dirty, and entrepreneurial wheeling cannot be termed a lovely city because everything was covered in toxic black smoke (Gatlin 203). While some promoters saw smoke as a trivial aesthetic annoyance, others lauded its magnificence.
Furthermore, Gatlin explicitly showed a sequence of hazards that unfairly exposed employees to contamination. For example, smoke from the industries chokes people when they open windows to their households and instantly compromises their clothing and breathing (Gatlin 213). By contrast, the workers inhabiting the neighborhoods and attending the foundries’ coal furnaces breathe air laden with fog, oil, and grime, dangerous for the body (Gatlin 213). Thus, these laborers will be unable to physically and spiritually evade suffocation from air pollution from childhood to mortality.
Additionally, Sellers noted that manufacturing illness examiners invented a primitive but effective method of identifying out-of-the-way companies during her 1916 research of the war industries for the governmental Bureau of Labor Statistics (55). She discovered that industries manufacturing picric acid or nitrocellulose discharged enormous orange and yellow masses into the atmosphere, potentially harming the neighboring area. Today, with the continuous rapid industrialization in the United States, toxic gas emissions into the air have led to acidic rain responsible for the corrosion of iron rooftops. Therefore, Gatlin associates these toxic air pollutants with the ability to adhere to exposed skin, accumulate in sinuses, lungs, eyes, and stomachs (214). Therefore, the air pollution and its repercussions witnessed today in the United States are the aftermaths of the industrial revolution.
Lastly, despite the employment opportunities the processing and production firms established during the industrial revolution created for individuals, researchers have established the adverse health effects these industries have on employees and neighboring citizens. Industrial pollutants’ extensive, acute, and prolonged exposure in the workforce was also visible employees’ health implications (Sellers 57). As a result, Sellers and others like her established the first modern environmental health discipline focused on toxic processes and substances rather than microorganisms by turning industrial practice into a context of public health known as organizational hygiene (55). Additionally, sewage remains a significant portion of the country’s water discharges and a critical element of illness and deaths (Sellers 57). Sellers further indicated that water pollution through the organizations’ toxic emissions had prompted water contamination professionals to focus their research on protective disease factors (57). The focus is attributed to the fact that many citizens were affected by water-borne diseases such as dysentery and hepatitis A.
Other water-borne diseases such as typhoid have also been prevalent as a result of water pollution. Typhoid and other fatal contagious diseases were a significant and persistent occurrence in cities like Massachusetts and throughout the United States (Sellers 60). Lee Kaprow supported the notion that industrial emissions posed a threat to employees’ health and the neighborhoods surrounding such firms by enumerating that General Electric’s disposal of Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs) pollution of the Hudson River was genuine (346). Thus, water was rationed in New York during a dry season to prevent further health risks. PCBs do cause alterations in vertebrates is not merely a social issue (Lee Kaprow 346). The cause of these water-borne infections was linked between environmental bacteria and sickness, in addition to chemical poisoning from industries.
An illustration of deteriorating healthcare conditions of workers is demonstrated in the healthcare institution’s attitude toward employee health in the mid-nineteenth-century New England textile mills. Medical practitioners’ statements on medical problems at the Lowell mills, as well as their arguments before the Massachusetts senate’s review panel scrutinizing these circumstances, demonstrate that they consistently favored the mill owners’ concerns over laborers’ (Lee Kaprow 347). Moreover, such clinicians did not wholly disregard prevalent sickness. Instead, they attributed any manifestations they observed to the employees’ imprudent lifestyle (Lee Kaprow 347). Even when these professionals were compelled to admit that specific millworker requirements for preventative health interventions would improve health, they suggested disregarding these recommendations.
In conclusion, the industrial revolution presented an opportunity for the United States to grow its economy with the vast manufacturing and production activities. However, it brought itself with several negative consequences that have ever since manifested themselves even today. For instance, the revolution has led to various forms of pollution such as air, water, and air within the nation. In addition, the chemical and toxic emissions from these organizations have led to climatic changes. Furthermore, water contamination and chemicals within the firms have posed a health concern for employees and individuals residing in the United States. Therefore, it is prudent for the state to put up measures to regulate the operational activities of these industries to protect the general population from the effects of pollution brought about by the Industrial Revolution.
Works Cited
Gatlin, Jill. “Disturbing Aesthetics: Industrial Pollution, Moral Discourse, and Narrative Form in Rebecca Harding Davis’s “Life in the Iron Mills”. Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 68, no. 2, 2013, pp. 201-233.
Lee Kaprow, Miriam. “Manufacturing Danger: Fear and pollution in Industrial Society.” American Anthropologist, Vol. 87, no. 2, 1985, pp. 342-356.
Rosen, Christine Meisner. “‘Knowing’ Industrial Pollution: Nuisance Law and the Power of Tradition in a Time of Rapid Economic Change, 1840-1864.” Environmental History, Vol. 8, no. 4, 2003, pp. 565-597.
Sellers, Christopher. “Factory as Environment: Industrial Hygiene, Professional Collaboration and the Modern Sciences of Pollution.” Environmental History Review, Vol. 18, no. 1, 1994, pp. 55-83.