This period marked the shift from labor performed by humans and animals to work performed by machine power and from a mostly rural existence to an increasingly urban way of life. A new class of factory owners arose, as did a rising middle class and a new working class of industrial laborers, who demanded a voice in government.

https://www.barrons.com/articles/how-the-industrial-revolution-started-1423887383

1708 C.E.
Newcomen's steam engine

In early steam engines, steam pressure forced a piston up and atmospheric pressure drew the piston back down. Steam engines were used to remove groundwater from the deep coal mines of England. Steam power's importance to the Industrial Revolution grew as it began to be used in shipping, transportation, and manufacturing.

http://physics.weber.edu/carroll/honors-time/Newcomen.htm

Using coal to smelt iron was cheaper and more efficient than previous methods of iron-making; Darby's smelting process helped make coal and iron, both of which England had in abundance, the principal raw materials of the Industrial Age.

https://biography.yourdictionary.com/abraham-darby

The spinning jenny allowed a person to spin as many as 80 threads at once; it was inexpensive to build and small enough to fit in a cottage.

http://www.saburchill.com/history/chapters/IR/010.html

Scottish economist Adam Smith believed that labor brings wealth and that individual self-interest is the best guide for a market economy; he also believed that the "invisible hand" of market forces is superior to state regulation in promoting the social good. His influential book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations expresses these ideas.

http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/documents/1776-1785/adam-smith-from-the-wealth-of-nations-1776-of-colonies.php

1793 C.E.
Whitney's cotton gin

Before American inventor Eli Whitney devised the cotton gin, a skilled worker could remove the seeds from six pounds of cotton per day; Whitney's gin was 50 times faster. This efficiency doubled the yields of raw cotton and increased the demand for land in the southern United States to grow cotton and for slaves to pick the crop.

http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/cotton-gin-patent/

New Lanark was a model village built by Scottish cloth merchant David Dale around his new mill factories that used the new water frame to drive hundreds of spinning machines (as opposed to single looms operated by individual families). Use of the water frame turned cloth manufacturing from a cottage industry to an industrial process. New Lanark's mills made good profits. Dale's son-in-law, Robert Owen, expanded his father-in-law's work by putting into practice the then-revolutionary idea that children should not work before age 10 and establishing a school to educate them. New Lanark was one of the earliest experiments in improving laborers' housing and working conditions.

http://www.aboutscotland.com/water/clydenl.html

Robert Fulton, an American painter turned inventor, designed the first successful steam boat, the Clermont. As steam technology advanced, steam-powered ships, faster than sailing ships, became common. They were limited by the amount of coal needed to fuel their engines.

http://todaynychistory.blogspot.com/2009/08/august-17-1807-robert-fultons-steamboat.html

In the Rainhill Trials, the Rocket, the first working steam-powered locomotive, designed by the English inventor George Stephenson, reached speeds of up to 24 miles per hour. The trials were held by the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Company in order to find the best locomotive to run on a track between the cities of Liverpool and Manchester. Due to its multi-tube boiler which generated more steam and thus greater speed, the Rocket won.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/society_culture/
industrialisation/launch_ani_rocket.shtml

During the decade of the 1830s, the American inventor Samuel Morse developed a relay system of electric telegraph wires for sending messages and invented a language of dots and dashes—Morse Code—that could transmit over the system.

http://lemelson.mit.edu/resources/samuel-morse

German political theorist Karl Marx proposed that factory owners, whom he called capitalists, exploited the labor of the working class; he believed in an inevitable revolution in which workers would gain control of industrial factories and businesses; private ownership and exploitation would disappear, bringing equality and fulfillment in a classless society. The ideas Marx had briefly set forth in the earlier Communist Manifesto were developed more thoroughly in his monumental three-volume Das Kapital, a critique of capitalism.

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/marx-publishes-manifesto

1861 C.E.
Italian unification

For most of its history since the fall of Rome, Italy had been carved into small city-states and kingdoms. Trade problems, outside threats, and internal revolutions led to a series of unification efforts; the success of these efforts resulted in a new constitutional monarchy under Victor Emmanuel II in 1861.

http://www.roangelo.net/valente/garibald.html

In 1869, Zenobe Theophile Gramme, a Belgian inventor, designed the direct-current dynamo (a generator using electromagnets). In 1873, Gramme showed that his dynamo could run in reverse and act as a motor. This set the stage for the development of commercial electric power.

http://www.famousbelgians.net/gramme.htm

Objecting to a German prince's candidacy for the Spanish throne, France declared war on Prussia. In six months, the combined armies of Prussia and the German states defeated the French on their home territory of northern France. When France's Emperor Napoleon III was captured, a bloodless revolution occurred, and France (once again) became a republic. Toward the close of the war the German states unified under Prussia's king, thus founding the German Empire. German unification was largely due to Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Other European states were made uneasy by the new, powerful Germany; this unease was a factor in World Wars I and II.

https://www.britannica.com/event/Franco-German-War

Born in Scotland, brought up in Canada, Alexander Graham Bell settled in Boston. In 1876, he invented an "electrical speech machine"—the first telephone—which made voice transmission over electric wires possible.

http://www.nationalitpa.com/history-of-telephone

American inventor Thomas Edison developed the first practical lightbulb. Electric light eliminated the need for using gas or burning coal or wood to generate light, and enabled Edison to invent systems for commercial electricity. His Edison General Electric Company became today's General Electric.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/theymadeamerica/
whomade/edison_hi.html

Gottlieb Daimler, a German engineer, developed the first small portable internal combustion engine fueled by light oil, considered the forerunner of the modern gasoline engine.

https://www.asme.org/engineering-topics/articles/automotive/gottlieb-daimler

At odds over German domestic policy, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Chancellor Otto von Bismarck were engaged in a power struggle which ended when the Kaiser accepted Bismarck's resignation. Many believed that the Kaiser's dismissal of Bismarck left no one to prevent the foreign policy blunders that precipitated German involvement in World War I.

http://www.allempires.com/article/index.php?q=German
_Foreign_Policy_1890-1914_

Although women in the United States had been granted the right to run for political office since 1788, they were denied the right to vote. In 1893, New Zealand became the first country in the world to grant women the right to vote. Women in Europe and the United States had to wait till the 20th century for the right to vote.

https://www.historynet.com/womens-suffrage-movement

In 1895, Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi successfully transmitted radio signals over a distance of one and a half miles, and in 1896 was granted the world's first patent for a system of wireless telegraphy. By 1901, in order to prove that Earth's curvature did not affect transmission of radio waves, he transmitted trans-Atlantic signals between England's Cornwall and Canada's Newfoundland, a distance of 2,100 miles.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/
laureates/1909/marconi-bio.html