工业革命前的英格兰(英译汉).docVIP

England before the Industrial Revolution The country was a place where men worked from dawn to dark，and the laborer lived not in the sun，but in poverty and darkness. What aids there were to lighten labor were immemorial，like the mill, which was already ancient in Chaucer’s time. The Industrial Revolution began with such machines；The millwrights were the engineers of the coming age. James Brindley of Staffordshire started his self—made career in l733 by working at mill wheels，at the age of seventeen，having been born poor in a village. Brindley’s improvements were practical：to sharpen and step up the performance of the water wheel as a machine. That was the first multi-purpose machine for the new industries. Bindley worked, for example, to improve the grinding of flints, which were used in the rising pottery industry. Yet there was a bigger movement in the air by l750. Water had become the engineers’ element, and men like Brindley were possessed by it. Water was gushing and fanning out all over the countryside. It was not simply a source of power，it was a new wave of movement. James Brindley was a pioneer in the art of building canals or, as it was then called, ‘navigation. Brindley had begun on his own account, out of interest, to survey the waterways that he travelled as he went about his engineering projects for mills and mines. The Duke of Bridgewater then got him to build a canal to carry coal from the Dukes pits at Worsley to the rising town of Manchester…… Brindley went on to connect Manchester with Liverpool in an even bolder manner, and in all laid out almost four hundred miles of canals in a network all over England. Two things are outstanding in the creation of the English system of canals, and they characterize all the Industrial Revolution. One is that the men who made the revolution were practical men. Like Brindley, they often had little education, and in fact school education as it then was could only dull an inventive mind. The grammar schools legally