The phenomenon of the machine was vividly apparent. It is the purpose of this chapter to chart the spread of the machine in a variety of important industries in early nineteenth-century Britain, as a knowledge of the actual extent of mechanisation is a prerequisite to any critical analysis of the ideas and assumptions of the time. Whether the period between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the 1840s was one which saw only the inception of an industrialised economic structure, whether it was a period of flux, or whether it was a society already mechanized on a wide scale, has important implications for the way in which contemporary attitudes are interpreted. On the one hand, ideas might have been related to warnings and hopes, to possibilities for manipulation and to the impossibilities of prediction. On the other hand, such ideas could be interpreted as feelings of despair and regret for lost opportunities of turning back, or at least of changing direction. Even if the latter formulation is the more correct, it is still important to ask in turn whether the apparently irrevocable process of industrialization was marked by a mechanical revolution, or whether it took other forms, and whether it was a rapid or a long-drawn-out process.

For some time it has been fashionable to see the Industrial Revolution as a lengthy process reaching back to the early eighteenth century and continuing into the mid nineteenth century. It has also been fashionable to stress the labour-intensive bias of the Industrial Revolution in Britain.