An animated atlas · 1700–1914

Europe Industrialises

Out of Britain’s coalfields and across a continent, district by district. Play the years, then switch technologies on and off: steam, mills, iron, rails, lathes, wires and more.

Bars: milestones per five years for the technologies switched on.

Map layers

Technologies

Tap a row to show or hide it. Open the arrow to choose specific technologies.

How to use it

Press play to run from 1700 to 1914, or drag the timeline. The speed menu slows playback as far as ×1/32, about seven seconds a year, so you can read each milestone as it lands. The camera follows the action; pinch, double-tap or use + and − to explore, and the target button hands the camera back.
Tap a dot, a line or a glowing district for its story. In Technologies, tap a row to show or hide it, or open it to pick specific technologies, such as only lathes or only main railway lines.

What you are seeing

Glow: industrial districts, brightening from take-off towards maturity. Industry spread region by region, through coalfields, textile valleys and ports, which is why Lancashire, Liège, the Ruhr and Silesia light up long before most of their own countries.
Dots: the first appearance of a technology at a place: an invention, a first working machine, a founding works.
Lines: railways, canals, telegraph and power lines, drawn in the year the route described was open. The railways are a selection of main routes drawn straight between towns, not the whole network.
Dotted arcs: people who carried know-how. Britain banned the emigration of skilled artisans until 1824 and the export of most machinery until 1843. Machines and mechanics went anyway.

Caveats

“Firsts” are often disputed, and a date can mean a patent, a first trial or first commercial use; the notes say which where it matters.
The glow is a stylised model built from take-off dates in the historical literature, not measured output. It shows sequence and geography.
Places are approximate. The faint borders are today’s, shown only to help you find your way.
Off the map to the east, the Urals were Russia’s great charcoal-iron district; in the late 18th century they made Russia one of the world’s largest iron producers.

Sources

Prompted by the map “Spread of the Industrial Revolution in Europe” shared on r/europe.
Milestones compiled from standard histories, including Sidney Pollard’s Peaceful Conquest (1981), David Landes’ The Unbound Prometheus (1969) and Joel Mokyr’s The Lever of Riches (1990). The less certain dates were checked one by one against museum, company and encyclopaedia sources online in October 2026.
Base map: Natural Earth, via the world-atlas package.

All the animations