(1) mechanical power was inadequate as long as man had to depend very largely on muscle power, whether of himself or animals;
(2) communications were inadequate, so that the spread of any innovation was very slow;
(3) technological advances depended entirely on the exploitation of chance discovery or invention.
The pace of social change due to technological advances during the historical period prior to the industrial revolution - although it was irregular and subject to wide local variations - was, of course, vastly greater than that of evolution which has, over millennia, wrought enormous changes in all animal species. But it was, in general, tolerable because it rarely involved revolutionary social or occupational changes within the span of one lifetime. Man, like all other animals, is essentially conservative; he seeks, above all, for stability within his own lifetime. So it was that he slowly built up a social system which was supported upon and legitimised by the traditions of family, religion and of State, all of which combined with a somewhat selective presentation of history to maintain a feeling of continuity and security for the individual members of society. Education rested largely on the tradition of apprenticeship; the child learned from his father or other master a craft or trade, and on completion of this training in early manhood he was provided with a set of skills sufficient to carry him through the whole of his working life. The age-old pattern of society - which, incidentally, entailed, for many, hardships which we would now regard as intolerable - was already showing ominous signs of cracking in the eighteenth century in Europe, mainly because increased communication by sea had both revealed new lands and brought Europeans more into contact with other civilisations which had evolved along slightly different lines from their own. But it was the Industrial Revolution which really triggered the process of dissolution by undermining, in rather less than a century and in succession, all three of the reasons I have already mentioned for containing the rate of material change in our society.
The invention of the steam engine was perhaps the most important feature of the early phase of the industrial revolution, for it put into the hands of man cheap mechanical power on a scale previously undreamed of. Not only did it revolutionise industry, but on land and sea it enormously increased the speed and scale of communications. New industries grew up, new materials of all types were imported into western Europe and from it a stream of machinery and manufactured goods flowed out to other parts of the world. Not only did the European Powers spread their influence over primitive areas such as America and much of Africa, but their aggressive new technology found the old and rather different civilizations of the Orient totally unprepared, and thus an easy prey to commercial and military aggression. The rapidity with which all these things occurred put an almost intolerable strain on existing societies, and unrest associated with the rise of an industrial proletariat was widespread by the middle of the nineteenth century. This, however, was but the beginning, for something new and vitally important to the development of technology happened round about the mid-century - something so important that I feel it could properly be said to have ushered in the Second Industrial Revolution, which has continued until today and whose far-reaching consequences we have not yet, perhaps, fully appreciated.
What we usually call the Industrial Revolution - I would prefer to call it the First Industrial Revolution - had little to do with science. It involved technological advances due to the exploitation of chance discovery or invention, and in this respect was no different from anything that had gone before. Men like Boulton and Watt were essentially inventor-entrepreneurs rather than scientists. Natural science had, it is true, been advancing steadily since the so-called scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, but although its theoretical basis and its corpus of knowledge were growing fast it was, prior to the mid-nineteenth century, mainly a pursuit of the amateur, and its impact on everyday life was small. But around the middle of the last century men of science began to apply the scientific method and the results of scientific research to the solution of industrial problems. Perhaps it is because I am a chemist that I am particularly struck by what happened in chemistry. In this country, for example, the young William Henry Perkin in the year 1856 produced a purple dye - mauveine - in the course of some over-ambitious attempts to synthesise the drug quinine. Perkin was not simply a scientist; he was also by nature an entrepreneur. Before this time the dyeing of fabrics had always been carried out with dyes like indigo, madder, etc., extracted from natural sources, but Perkin realised not only the commercial possibilities of mauveine, which he proceeded to exploit in a small factory at Hounslow, but he and others began deliberately to apply their chemical skills to the fashioning of more synthetic dyes of different colours. Thus were founded the great organic chemical industries of today, for it was from the dyestuff industry that the synthetic drug industry developed, as well as a host of others giving us entirely new materials - plastics, detergents, explosives, fibres and so on. This, indeed, was the birth of what we now know as technology - the application of science and the results of scientific research to the solution of practical problems: industrial, military, agricultural, medical and organisational. It is the new technology which has revolutionised our lives in this century and which has advanced at an ever-increasing speed, fed by, and itself feeding, a similarly advancing science.
I need not endeavour here to enumerate the sensational advances which have been made in almost every aspect of material existence, especially during the past fifty or sixty years, culminating in the staggering feat of man's landing on the Moon and his sending of further probes to other planets in the solar system. It is perhaps pertinent to remark here, however, that the part played by computer technology in space exploration, and the rapidly widening application of computers in industrial, administrative and medical work, may foreshadow yet a third industrial revolution with consequences as far-reaching as those of the second. The impact of these advances has been universal, but it has varied in scale and form in different parts of the world and has tended to increase rather than decrease the material gap between the rich developed countries and the poorer underdeveloped areas. In the growth of this gap the enormous rise in world population, which was an inevitable consequence of the Industrial Revolution and the development of medical science, has played, and continues to play, a major part. It is not now my purpose to discuss the problem of population control; suffice to say that it is a problem of the greatest urgency and one which man must solve if his aspirations to a better life in a world at peace are not to be stifled by sheer growth in his numbers.