By the mid-nineteenth century, industrialization had taken a firm hold in Britain, the northern United States, and much of northern Europe. Britain was still the most industrialized nation on earth, but Germany and the United States were rapidly gaining ground. As workers and their families poured into industrial centers in search of work, conditions in industrial cities grew grim. Unplanned and unregulated growth combined with industrial pollution to produce crowded and unhealthy working-class neighborhoods. For individuals who were new to factory work, almost as challenging as the industrial urban environment was the adjustment to industrial labor itself. Men, women, and children who were accustomed to the informality and relative slow pace of the rural economy and the artisanal shop found them themselves subjected to rigid industrial discipline. In time, urban conditions would improve and industrial workers would fight for, and win, greater control of their working lives. In the 1830s and 1840s, however, such gains were far in the future.