xxx 1750 to 1900 powered by an English steam engine Its success led to steamboats on most large U.S rivers and the Great Lakes In 1800 Englishman Richard Trevithick devised a much smaller, high-pressure steam engine ideal for railroad transportation Locomotives were used for industrial freight hauling in Britain for some years before the first public passenger line between Liverpool and Manchester opened in 1830 A worldwide frenzy of railroad construction ensued With their dedicated trackage and modular assembly, railroads, powered by coal-fired steam engines, were well suited to hauling huge loads of both goods and people Major increases in the fabrication and use of iron and steel provided the sinews of the Industrial Revolution, especially the building of rail tracks Developed in Britain, the Bessemer steel process was widely adopted in the United States and helped steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, a Scottish-born immigrant, become one of the world’s wealthiest men The late 19th century saw the first examples of transport based on internal combustion engines—the automobile, bus, and truck Although the Swiss inventor Nicholas Cugnot is credited with making such a device as early as 1769, European experiments that led to workable internal combustion engines began in the 1860s The Germans Gottlieb Daimler, Wilhelm Maybach, and Carl Benz produced workable prototypes in the 1880s, while France’s Peugeot firm began to perfect auto design in 1890 In 1897 the German Rudolf Diesel produced a new type of engine that now bears his name By the end of the century Americans, too, were making cars, notably the 1893 Duryea Ransom Olds’s first Michigan auto factory opened in 1899, but the United States lagged behind European engineering by a decade Instantaneous communications were essential to the business and technical needs of the Industrial Revolution Weather events, wars, and other crises could easily disrupt, even derail, factory production Charles Wheatstone’s early telegraph of 1837, systematized and improved in 1844 by Samuel F B Morse, made it possible to circulate information much faster than mail systems By 1866 telegraph signals could be reliably sent and received across the Atlantic; by the end of the century, much of the world had access to telegraph communication The Canadian Alexander Graham Bell displayed his telephone at the 1876 U.S Centennial Exposition; within a few years it became an important business tool In 1899 the Italian Guglielmo Marconi sent his first radio signal across the English Channel Both telephone and radio later made the telegraph obsolete Mechanical Geniuses Western science developed dramatically during the heyday of the Industrial Revolution, sparked by “untutored” mechanical geniuses like Thomas Edison, as well as growing cadres of university-trained scientists and engineers Major breakthroughs in chemistry in the later 1700s included Frenchman Antoine Lavoisier’s and Englishman Joseph Priestley’s identification of oxygen and other atmospheric components, and Russian Dmitry Mendeleyev’s development in 1869 of a systematic table of chemical elements In physics, discoveries in thermodynamics were spearheaded by such theorists as William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, who postulated a temperature of absolute zero at which all motion would cease Thermodynamics provided theoretical underpinnings for methods of creating and preserving cold conditions By the 1870s refrigerated train cars were in wide use, preserving and enhancing food products traveling from farms to distant urban areas Some important innovations in biological science, especially as applied to health and medicine, included Swede Carolus Linnaeus’s (Carl von Linne’s) 1753 classification of biological organisms, a system still in use today The discovery of anesthetic agents such as ether and chloroform in the 1830s and 1840s soon radically improved outcomes of painful and invasive surgeries In 1896 Xrays were first used to diagnose human ailments But the two most spectacular breakthroughs in this period would be evolutionary theory and the germ theory of disease Made public in 1858, evolution was an explanation of the diversity and complexity of living organisms, reached almost simultaneously by two English naturalists, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace Both men had relied heavily on the early 19th-century geologic and fossil findings of Charles Lyell In 1859 Darwin published On the Origin of Species in which he postulated natural selection as the mechanism that allowed some species to survive while others disappeared His direct challenge to most religious explanations for the development of human life,