answers: about 1760
context: the Constitution authorizing Congress "to promote the progress of science and useful arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries. The invention of the Cotton Gin by American Eli Whitney made cotton potentially a cheap and readily available resource in the United States for use in the new textile industry. One of the real impetuses for United States entering the Industrial Revolution was the passage of the Embargo Act of 1807, the War of 1812 (1812–14) and the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15) which cut off supplies of new and cheaper </s> Industrial Revolution The Industrial Revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes in the period from about 1760 to sometime between 1820 and 1840. This transition included going from hand production methods to machines, new chemical manufacturing and iron production processes, the increasing use of steam power, the development of machine tools and the rise of the factory system. The Industrial Revolution also led to an unprecedented rise in the rate of population growth. Textiles were the dominant industry of the Industrial Revolution in terms of employment, value of output and capital invested. The textile industry was also the first </s> to the development of several machine tools. They have their origins in the tools developed in the 18th century by makers of clocks and watches and scientific instrument makers to enable them to batch-produce small mechanisms. Before the advent of machine tools, metal was worked manually using the basic hand tools of hammers, files, scrapers, saws and chisels. Consequently, the use of metal machine parts was kept to a minimum. Hand methods of production were very laborious and costly and precision was difficult to achieve. The first large precision machine tool was the cylinder boring machine invented by John Wilkinson
question: when do historians date the start of the industrial revolution