Age of revolutions

Between the 18th and 19th centuries the world changes faster than ever before. Steam engines move into factories and onto railway tracks, and many people leave the fields to work in towns: this is the Industrial Revolution. The thinkers of the Enlightenment call for people to use reason and to respect the rights of every person. In America and France revolutions bring down the absolute power of kings, and in the 19th century Italy too becomes a single state. At the end of the century come electric light, the motor car and the cinema.

The era on a line: 25 events

1. 1712 Newcomen's steam engine
2. about 1720 The European Enlightenment
3. 1751 Diderot's Encyclopédie
4. 1769 Watt's steam engine
5. 1776–1783 The American Revolution
6. 1783 The first hot-air balloon flight
7. 1789–1799 The French Revolution
8. 1795 The metric system
9. 1796 Jenner's vaccine
10. 1800 Volta's battery
11. 1804 Napoleon becomes emperor
12. 1815 The Congress of Vienna
13. 1825 The first public steam railway
14. about 1826 Niépce's photograph
15. 1827 Manzoni's The Betrothed
16. 1844 The electric telegraph
17. 1848 The revolutions of 1848
18. 1859 Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species
19. 1860 The Expedition of the Thousand
20. 1861 The unification of Italy
21. about 1864 The labour movement
22. 1877 Compulsory primary school (Coppino law)
23. 1879 A practical electric light bulb
24. 1886 The first modern motor car
25. 1895 The Lumière brothers' cinema

Did you know?

• The first passengers in a hot-air balloon were not people: in September 1783, at Versailles, a sheep, a duck and a cockerel flew and landed safe and sound.
• Before the metre, France had hundreds of different units of measurement, which changed from one town to the next.
• To write The Betrothed in a language everyone could understand, Alessandro Manzoni went to Florence to ‘rinse his clothes in the Arno’, meaning to learn the Italian spoken by educated Florentines.

storiascopio.com/en/era/age-of-revolutions/ · free worksheet, you may photocopy it for your class

1. Put in order: write 1 next to the oldest and 5 next to the most recent.

• The first public steam railway
• Diderot's Encyclopédie
• Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species
• A practical electric light bulb
• The metric system

2. Choose the right answer.

1. Which part did James Watt add to the steam engine to make it more efficient?

   • A sail
   • A separate condenser
   • An electric battery
   • A petrol engine

2. What made the Montgolfier brothers' balloon rise?

   • Flapping wings
   • A pedal-powered propeller
   • A giant spring
   • Hot air

3. How was the metre defined?

   • As the average height of a man
   • As the length of the king's foot
   • As one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator
   • As the width of a door in Paris

4. Which Latin word does the name ‘vaccine’ come from?

   • Vagus
   • Vacuus
   • Vacca
   • Vallis

3. Match each person to what they did: write the right letter.

Storiascopio · texts by Ciro Simone Irmici, written with the help of AI and checked · sources in the online cards