Before the Industrial Revolution could even think of occurring, one thing had to happen. That one thing was the Agricultural Revolution which was set off by the Enclosure Movement. The enclosure movement is what happened when all the peasants that previously common-farmed the land were thrown off it and forced into the cities. Their ancestral land was fenced in and taken over by the gentry, who used it for sheep grazing and large-scale farming. This was made necessary by the increased demand for agricultural products in growing cities, and the shortage of British ability to feed citizens during the Napoleonic Wars.
The major things accomplished by the enclosure movement were:
This explosion of city growth of peasants that had no real skills besides farming set off a need for work, housing, and food for them all. This went on for a decade or so, until English cities became truly horrible to live in. In response, the rich guys found a few uses for the 'peons' as workers in the iron mines, but the shift from farming to mining, wasn't an easy one. Still, since the now large-scale farming was becoming useful, there were plenty of exportable goods. Send the excess food wherever you want, but don't you DARE try to feed our starving countrymen.
Many things were invented at this time, such as:
Steel, iron with certain impurities removed, became invaluable at this time for more and more of the inventions to be built and utilized, but it was costly and slow to make the steel out of the iron, so a cheap and efficient way had to be developed. William Kelly and Henry Bessemer came up with one such process that involved forcing air through the molten iron to burn out carbon an other impurities. This is now known as the Bessemer process, and is remarkably similar to the steel-making technique that the Haya people of southern Africa developed more than 1,500 years ago.
Transportation was also influenced by the Industrial Revolution. Before the Revolution, travel was much the same as in the Middle Ages: roads that were dusty in good weather, muddy in bad, and slow anytime. Better transportation was needed to move the newly developed products and inventions about. New roads, canals, railroads, and steamboats were developed and they really sped up things.
Communications also had an upswing around that time. People from early times recognized the relationship between electricity and magnetism, but didn't know what to do with that knowledge, mostly because no one at the time knew how to make a steady flow of electric current. Then, approximately 1800, Allenssandro Volta built the first battery. Soon after, André Ampère of France figured out the principles governing the magnetic effect of electric currents. This prompted Samuel Morse to put them together and send a current from one end of a wire to a machine at the other end. Each time the electricity hit the machine, it clicked. A system of dots and dashes was formed to be able to pass along messages, making the telegraph.
All the technology of the revolution spread across the continents. It took a few years for everything to come together and actually affect Europe, but once it did, buddy, it took off. It didn't get off the drawing board at first, because Great Britain didn't want to lose its monopoly, so the British government forbade any exports of machines or ideas. Also, the Napoleonic Wars slowed Europe's industrialization. The United States jumped on the ideas like a chicken on a june bug. We had everything needed for development, except for the technology. Sometimes Eurocentricity CAN be a good thing.