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Corporations
A corporation is a legal entity that is separate and distinct from its owners. Under the law, corporations possess many of the same rights and responsibilities as individuals. -
Richard Arkwright
in 1767, a breakthrough came when a Lancashire entrepreneur, Richard Arkwright (1732–92), devised a simple but remarkable spinning machine. Replacing the work of human hands, the water frame made it possible to spin cotton yarn more quickly and in greater quantities -
James Watt
James Watt invented the steam engine in 1776. He was an English craftsman who made machines. He noticed that steam had so much strength that it could move very heavy loads if it was harnessed in the right manner. -
Thomas Malthus
Thomas Malthus was an English economist and demographer best known for his theory that population growth will always tend to outrun the food supply and that betterment of humankind is impossible without strict limits on reproduction. -
George Stephenson
George Stephenson is often called the father of the modern railway. As a civil engineer of railway routes and a mechanical engineer of rails and locomotives during the industrial revolution, he transformed transport. Stephenson was self-taught as an engineer. -
Socialism
Socialism is an economic system in which major industries are owned by workers rather than by private businesses. It is different from capitalism, where private actors, like business owners and shareholders, can own the means of production. -
Communism
Communism is a type of government as well as an economic system (a way of creating and sharing wealth). In a Communist system, individual people do not own land, factories, or machinery. -
Cotton Gin
The gin separated the sticky seeds from the fibers in short-staple cotton, which was easy to grow in the deep South but difficult to process. The gin improved the separation of the seeds and fibers but the cotton still needed to be picked by hand. -
Interchangeable Parts
interchangeable parts, identical components that can be substituted one for another, particularly important in the history of manufacturing. -
Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism is one of the best known and most influential moral theories. Like other forms of consequentialism, its core idea is that whether actions are morally right or wrong depends on their effects. More specifically, the only effects of actions that are relevant are the good and bad results that they produce. -
Karl Marx
Karl Marx was a German philosopher during the 19th century. He worked primarily in the realm of political philosophy and was a famous advocate for communism. He cowrote The Communist Manifesto and was the author of Das Kapital, which together formed the basis of Marxism -
Germ Theory
Pasteur's findings significantly challenged the idea of spontaneous generation and he published his germ theory in 1861. Pasteur argued that bacteria were the cause of disease, but he was not able to identify the specific bacteria that caused individual diseases. -
Social Democracy
As a welfare state, social democracy is a specific type of welfare state and policy regime described as being universalist, supportive of collective bargaining, and more supportive of public provision of welfare. -
Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists believe in “survival of the fittest”—the idea that certain people become powerful in society because they are innately better. Social Darwinism has been used to justify imperialism, racism, eugenics and social inequality at various times over the past century -
Assembly Line
is a manufacturing process that allows for finished and almost finished parts to be installed in sequence to automate and reduce the time needed to assemble a finished good.