ABSTRACT
From the second half of the eighteenth century, the world would witness an extraordinary development in terms of scientific and technical knowledge. At the same time, it was then that political revolutions occurred in the United States and France. It would be in Great Britain, whose extremely favorable social and economic conditions, delineated from previous periods—accumulation of capital and labor—were already in place, and where a drastic transformation in the way goods were produced would come into being: a true Industrial Revolution. The use of mineral coal as fuel—as a consequence of wood shortages—would be a key factor in the development of British industrialization. Iron and chemical industries would experience a boost at a time when mining and transportation sectors were growing. Chemistry, at the same time, had experienced a significant advance from this period on, a phenomenon that extended throughout the whole of the nineteenth century due to the expansion of the textile industry.
