In the end, virtually no civilisation on Earth

would remain untouched by the changes.

The Industrial Revolution first emerged in the English Midlands.

Its most potent symbol was a new kind of architecture...

..the factory.

This cotton mill, hidden away in the Derbyshire countryside,

was the world's very first fully fledged modern factory.

It was built in the 1770s by the entrepreneur Richard Arkwright

and it was designed around his greatest invention -

the water frame.

A machine that used the power of flowing water to drive looms

that produced cotton yarn cheaper and faster than anybody ever had.

That makes this factory the birthplace of mass production.

Here, industry forced nature

to bow before the ambitions of mankind.

But from now on,

industry would also demand

that human beings submit to the needs of the machine...

..working in shifts around the clock.

Arkwright was so proud of his cotton mill

he had it painted by the artist Joseph Wright of Derby,

in an apparently idyllic, deceptively peaceful landscape.

There's no hint here of the whirling, clanking machines

and the sheer relentless energy of the coming age.

Yet Wright the artist

was intrigued by the changing world around him,

though as much by the new science and technology

as their effects on humanity.

What really fascinated Wright of Derby

was not all the machinery and the hard labour of the Industrial Revolution,

but the ideas that drove it.

And these were the great ideas of the Enlightenment -

a faith in reason and in scientific method,

an unquenchable thirst for knowledge

and an unshakeable belief in progress.

It was this idea -

that science believed it was creating a brave new world -

that lay at the heart of one of Wright's most celebrated paintings.