<P> The railways directly or indirectly employed tens of thousands of engineers, mechanics, repairmen and technicians, as well as statisticians and financial planners . They developed new and more efficient and less expensive techniques . Most important, they created a mindset of how technology could be used in many different forms of business . Railways had a major impact on industrialization . By lowering transportation costs, they reduced costs for all industries moving supplies and finished goods, and they increased demand for the production of all the inputs needed for the railroad system itself . By 1880, there were 13,500 locomotives which each carried 97,800 passengers a year, or 31,500 tons of freight . </P> <P> India provides an example of the London - based financiers pouring money and expertise into a very well built system designed for military reasons (after the Mutiny of 1857), and with the hope that it would stimulate industry . The system was overbuilt and much too elaborate and expensive for the small amount of freight traffic it carried . However, it did capture the imagination of the Indians, who saw their railways as the symbol of an industrial modernity--but one that was not realized until a century or so later . </P> <P> Medicine progressed during Queen Victoria's reign . Although nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, had been proposed as an anaesthetic as far back as 1799 by Humphry Davy, it wasn't until 1846 when an American dentist named William Morton started using ether on his patients that anaesthetics became common in the medical profession . In 1847 chloroform was introduced as an anaesthetic by James Young Simpson . Chloroform was favoured by doctors and hospital staff because it is much less flammable than ether, but critics complained that it could cause the patient to have a heart attack . Chloroform gained in popularity in England and Germany after John Snow gave Queen Victoria chloroform for the birth of her eighth child (Prince Leopold). By 1920, chloroform was used in 80 to 95% of all narcoses performed in the UK and German - speaking countries . </P> <P> Anaesthetics made painless dentistry possible . At the same time sugar consumption in the British diet increased, greatly increasing instances of tooth decay . As a result, more and more people were having teeth extracted and needing dentures . This gave rise to "Waterloo Teeth", which were real human teeth set into hand - carved pieces of ivory from hippopotamus or walrus jaws . The teeth were obtained from executed criminals, victims of battlefields, from grave - robbers, and were even bought directly from the desperately impoverished . </P>

Explain the key features that characterised victorian welfare provision