For more than a thousand years, from B.C. to the 15th century, humans maintained a largely similar life: food from farming and animal husbandry, traveling on horses or carriages, and lighting in the dark with torches or candles. In terms of clothing, humans tamed sheep very early, and Europeans also have a long history of using wool to make clothing. In the late Middle Ages, a large number of textile handicraft workshops appeared in Britain, and the format of the textile industry gradually took shape. In the Age of Discovery, European adventurers and navigators connected the world with a chain of routes. In 1497, the Portuguese Vasco da Gama opened a sea route from Europe to India, bypassing the Cape of Good Hope. Europeans have found that Indians use cotton as a raw material to make cotton cloth, which is soft, comfortable, easy to print and dye, and has the advantages of large output and low cost compared to traditional European textile raw materials wool and flax. Since then, cotton has become the main commodity of European and Indian voyages, and cotton has also entered the British textile industry as a raw material. In addition to the fact that cotton cloth can be given to the inhabitants of European countries, it can also be traded with African rulers to obtain black slaves, and the strong demand of the whole world has pushed cotton cloth and cotton to the status of "white".
In the 18th century, the Industrial Revolution began in the textile industry. In 1733, the Englishman John Kaye improved the shuttle on the loom, inventing the shuttle that could slide, which greatly improved the efficiency of weaving yarn into cotton cloth. In 1765, weaver James Hargreaves invented the Jenny spinning machine by changing the horizontal spindles of the spinning wheel to a row of spindles, which in turn improved the efficiency of yarn production. Soon, the mule machine, which combined the advantages of saving manpower and improving efficiency, was also invented. Under the effect of the mutual promotion of related links, the cotton production process from spinning to weaving was basically mechanized, and a factory born out of a textile workshop was born. Initially powering the machines was hydro, wind or animal power, but these energy sources could not be used in a limited range of applications to meet the increasing demand for mechanized production.
In 1776, the new steam engine invented by the Englishman James Watt began to be used in water pumps. In 1785, the steam engine was introduced to textile factories and became the driving force for textile machines. By 1800, about 500 steam engines had been put into operation, providing steam power for industries such as pumps, textile mills, iron-making furnaces, and flour mills. Under the joint impetus of several inventors, Britain was the first country to carry out the industrial revolution and enter the era of surging steam, as a leading country in the coal mining industry and ironmaking industry.
The Industrial Revolution greatly increased productivity, the population grew rapidly, the division of labor in society was further refined, and many new occupations or identities emerged in society, which in turn brought about a series of chain reactions in the field of character creation. The social status of women has increased, and women have become the main characters in some works. In factories where machines are used, women can earn about the same amount of pay as men. The occupation of factory workers gives women an alternative to taking care of the heavy lifting of the family. At the same time, work outside the family expands women's horizons, inspires women's pursuit of equal rights, and increases their sense of independence from the shackles of feudal concepts. "Jane Eyre", "La Traviata", "Anna Karenina" and other works with women as the main characters were born in this atmosphere.
With the development of science and technology, science fiction and detective themes appeared. The contradiction between the bourgeoisie and the working class became the main contradiction in society. The bourgeoisie owns factories or controls the best resources, and there is no shortage of people who have gained huge wealth as a result. These few wealthy people owned huge amounts of private property, but unlike the knightly class in the Middle Ages, the rich were not endowed with the same political power or armed power. The rich have become objects of admiration and even envy of the common people, and at the same time they can become the targets of criminals or extremists. Criminals use emerging technologies as a means to hide their crimes and escape justice; The police or the crime solver are on the opposite side, trying to debunk the criminal's methods and restore the truth. With this as the main structure, the detective theme ** was born. Among the many detectives**, the most well-known "detective" fictional character is the Sherlock Holmes written by the British writer Conan Doyle. On the other hand, the continuous innovation of technology under the wave of the industrial revolution and the rapid development of scientific knowledge such as geography, physics, and chemistry complement each other. Technology brought drastic changes to the world at that time, and at the same time, it also triggered people's thinking about the future. Science fiction stories, which fused fantasy and technology, also began to appear on the stage of history during this period. In 1818, the British writer Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" was considered the first science fiction **.
In the pre-electronic era, the retention of information content was achieved through mechanical movements, such as writing or drawing on paper using pen and ink; The dissemination of content information is also achieved by mechanical means, such as the transportation of letters by means of transportation. The advent and use of electronic media has almost eliminated the time lag in the dissemination of information, which in turn has changed the way people communicate and even think. The birth of the electronic medium is due to a series of great inventions of great mankind: Faraday, the father of electricity, discovered the law of electromagnetic induction, invented the disc generator and the electric motor; Hertz discovered electromagnetic waves; Morse invented the telegraph and Bell invented **. Since the second half of the 19th century, in just a hundred years, media technologies such as the telegraph, the first gramophone, and film have come out one after another, and the technology of the electric age has turned people's lifestyles and media communication methods upside down.