According to the author, the term “Industrial Revolution”

Directions:  Read the passage and answer the question based on the contents of the passage.
Passage2
Each generation sees the Industrial Revolution from a different standpoint. Indeed, it has so many aspects, its manifestations at different times and in different places have varied so much that by the judicious selection of facts it is easy to represent it in very conflicting ways.
Modern historians have shown how slow was the coming of the machine and the factory, and have stressed the fact that the so-called revolution in the eighteenth century was almost confined to cotton and iron; that the date of an invention and its effective use in industry are two very different things; that in 1830 the great majority of workers were still outside the factory system; that some of the evils of transition “and notably the misfortunes of the hand-loom weavers“ were increased because the new methods took so long to establish themselves. By tracking back origins on one hand, and by correcting false notions of the great rapidity of the change on the other, they have corrected the over-insistence on those critical  years, so dear to text-books, between 1760 and 1830. But there is no doubt at all that the time did seem epoch-making to those who lived in it, and in fact was epoch-making.
One might suppose the term revolution as applied to industrial change would have been suggested by the French Revolution. And so it was. Blanqui, the French economist, is said to have been the first to speak of the tindustrial revolution in the early nineteenth century, to show that he thought economic change in England as revolutionary as political change in  France: France had had a political revolution, England an economic one. The idea was developed by Marx, but the term did not come in to general use till Toynbee used it in lectures given in 1881, which were published as The Industrial Revolution of the Eighteenth Century in England.

But before events in France had suggested the analogy, people were fond of saying that there had been a revolution in this or that industry. There was an exhilarating sense of a growing command over Nature, and of vast possibilities of capturing the markets of the world. The inventions had supplied the country’s needs so dramatically that it seemed as if Providence had concerned itself to make England the workshop of the world. The inventions came, of course, as the answer to repeated experiment, directed to definite ends; but achievement surpassed expectation. While in the fifties the Society of Arts offered prizes for a machine which would spin six threads at once, the jenny, after improvements, could spin a hundred; while the mule and the waterframe were yet more marvelous. The magazines paid great attention to new machines and processes, and the Press as a whole was eloquent and high-flown. It worked to death the epithets ‘incredible’,‘unexampled’, ‘amazing’, ‘unparalleled’, and the like. As early as 1767 an enthusiast said of improved roads and the first canals, ‘there never was a more astonishing revolution than this’. The sober Encyclopedia Britannica averred that ‘the discoveries and improvements’ of the age ‘diffuse a glory over this country unattainable by conquest or  dominion’. In 1784 it was  said, alas, optimistically, that the new discoveries ‘give the command of the iron trade of the world to Great Britain, and take it for ever, or at least so long as the industry and liberty of Britain remain, from the northern countries and from America, because Britain is the only country hitherto known in which seams of coal… iron ore and lime-stone…are frequently found in the same field and in the neighbourhood of the sea’.

The writer had not visualized the possibilities of steam, but these had particularly captured the imagination of his contemporaries. When Boswell, that prince of interviewers, visited Soho in 1776, where Boulton and Watt were constructing their steam-engines, Boulton, whom he calls the iron chieftain, said to him ‘I sell here what all the world desires, power.’ Insd 1784 the first balloon ascent was made in England, when Lunardi, secretary to the Neapolitan ambassador, was, as he says, ‘the first aerial traveler in the English atmosphere’. He went up, amidst immense excitement, with a cat as passenger, from the Artillery Garden (close to Bedlam, as sceptics  pointed out), landed the cat which had suffered from the cold – at Ware in Hertfordshire. Men’s minds began to dwell on the possibilities of steam and aerial navigation. Erasmus Darwin, in 1792,  described, with unpoetic precision, the actual achievements of steam.

The giant-Power from earth’s remotest caves lifts with strong arm her dark reluctant waves. Here high in air the rising stream he pours To clay built cisterns, or to lead-line towers: Fresh thro’a thousand pipes the wave distils, And thirsty cities drink the exuberant rills. There the vast mill-stone with inebriate whirl on trembling floors his forceful fingers twirl, Feast without blood! And nourish human-kind.

It may be as well to explain that these lines refer to the pumping of water from coal-mines for drainage and from rivers for the purposes of water-supply – this last was done in London from the Thames. Then comes an evident allusion to the Albion mills built in London by Watt in 1786, with the help of Rennie. Fifty pairs of mill-stones were set in motion by two  engines. It created a sensation and it became the fashion to visit it – to Watt’s annoyance: ‘What have Dukes, Lords and Ladies to do with masquerading in a flour mill?’ he wrote to Boulton. Darwin then went on to prophesy:

Soon shall thy arm, UNCONQUER’D STEAM ! afar Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car; Or on wide-waving wings expanded bear The flying-chariot through the fields of air. Fair crews triumphant, leaning from above, Shall wave their fluttering kerchiefs as they move; Or warrior-bands alarm the gaping crowd, And armies shrink beneath the shadowy cloud.

During the eighteenth century it was the beneficent rather than the catastrophic aspects of the changes which captured attention.

We know how cotton and iron enabled England to resist Napoleon and subsidize her allies. But what is often forgotten is the marvelous way in which the growth of industry and trade mitigated disaster during the American War (1775-83) and was the basis of the wonderful recovery which the country made during the ten years’ peace which ollowed. As a modern historian has said,

‘there can be few if any cases of national recovery on record so swift or so complete as this’.