The industrial revolution at the Ural mining plants consisted of three major stages:
* Early 19th century - 1830s: the appearance of the first steam engines, the development of blast furnace production, and the introduction of rolling mills.
* 1840-1870s: the development and implementation of more progressive methods of obtaining iron: puddling, kontuaz furnaces, and Lancashire hearth.
* 1880-1910s: introduction of open-hearth and Bessemer methods of steel production, and the complete displacement of water wheels by steam and other engines.
The replacement of wooden bellows with cylindrical blowers in the early 19th century reduced coal consumption by up to 20% and doubled the productivity of blast furnaces. Further development of blast furnace technology was associated with increasing the height of the furnaces, optimizing their profile and increasing the power of the blower motors. Cupola furnaces appeared at factories, and the casting of metals became a separate production. In 1808, serf S. I. Badaev invented a method for producing cast steel, later called Badaevskaya, for which he received his freedom and in 1811 was sent to the Votkinsk Plant to organize production. At the Zlatoust plant since 1828, experiments on the production of cast steel were conducted by P. P. Anosov.
Foreign engineers played a significant role in the development of existing plants and the construction of new ones in the Urals. In the 18th century, up to 600 German metallurgists worked at the factories of the Yekaterinburg Department at various times. At the beginning of the 19th century, 140 craftsmen from Europe were invited to the Izhevsk Arms Factory, and 115 German gunsmiths and steelworkers were invited to the Zlatoust Arms Factory. After the end of the contract, many foreigners remained in the factories as freelance workers.
Administrative changes at the beginning of the 19th century were associated with the approval in 1806 of the Mining Charter, compiled by A. F. Deryabin and later included in part in the Code of Laws of 1832, and the formation of the Mining Department, which was transformed in 1811 into the Department of Mining and Salt Affairs.
In the period from 1801 to 1860, 37 new plants were built in the Urals, including 3 copper smelters. Next to the previously built factories, auxiliary plants were built, which used the wastewater of the main factories and were actually their rolling shops. During the same period, 14 Ural copper smelters were closed due to the refusal of mints' coinage and the transition to paper money. To stabilize the situation, the government in 1834 abolished all taxes from factories, except for tithes. At the same time, the level of copper production at the beginning of the century was reached only in 1826. Since the 1850s, due to the appearance of cheap English, and later — Chilean, North American, and Australian copper on the market, the metallurgical industry of the Southern Urals entered a period of long-term crisis. In 1859, the price of Russian copper in comparison with the level of 1854 had decreased by 50%.
Steam engines were introduced and took root in the Urals slowly. The first steam engines appeared in the Ural factories in the last years of the 18th century. From  1800 to the 1810s, machines often failed and consumed a lot of firewood, which caused their slow spread. In the 1830s, the machines became more reliable, there were machine-building enterprises that designed, assembled, and repaired steam engines. In 1834, the Cherepanovs built the first steam locomotive and the first railway with a length of 853.4 m, designed to deliver ore from the Vysokogorsky mine to the Vysky plant. By 1840, the number of steam engines in the Ural factories reached 73 units. Also in the 1840s, hydraulic turbines became widespread in the Urals, replacing low-performance water wheels.
In the 1840s, the introduction of the Kontuaz method of iron production began at the Ural factories. The Yuryuzan-Ivanovsky plant in 1840 and the Simsky plant in 1842 were the first to switch to it. Subsequently, the Kontuaz forges were built at state-owned factories, and later at private ones. By 1861, 364 Kontuaz forges operated at 37 factories in the Urals. In the 1860s and 1870s, when production was already supplanted by steelmaking, Lancashire forges appeared in the Urals. A more productive puddling process was introduced in the Urals in 1817 in a test mode at the Pozhevsky plant, from 1825 to 1830 at the Nizhniy Tagil plant, and in September 1837 the Votkinsky plant completely switched to puddling. By 1861, among 58 factories, there were 201 puddling furnaces, 34 gas puddling, 153 welding, and 23 gas welding furnaces. Before the widespread use of steel-making processes in 1857, P. M. Obukhov invented a cheap method, called Obukhov, of steel production at the Zlatoust plant.
The height of the Ural blast furnaces in the 19th century reached 18 meters, which significantly exceeded the height of European furnaces. This advantage made it possible to carry out the blast furnace process on a cold blast with relatively low costs. This led to the later introduction of hot blast in the Urals, although successful experiments on its use were carried out back in the 1830s and 1840s at the Kushvinsky, Lysvensky, Verkh-Isetsky, and other plants. Thanks to the events of the Industrial Revolution in England, the average productivity of blast furnaces in the Ural factories in the second half of the 19th century was already inferior to those in England. So, in 1800, one blast furnace in the Urals produced an average of 91.6 thousand poods of iron, and in 1860, 137 thousand poods. British furnaces produced respectively 65.5 thousand and 426 thousand poods.
Since the middle of the 19th century, rolling production has developed, and steel and iron casting continued to develop. Castings from the Kasli plant have become world-famous. At large factories, rail rolling production was mastered. In 1859, 12.2 million poods of iron were smelted at the factories of the Urals, which was about 2/3 of all iron smelted in Russia.
During the Patriotic War of 1812, many Ural factories were converted to weapons production facilities. The Kamensk plant issued 87,274 poods of artillery pieces during 1810-1813. During the war years, 47 private factories crossed over to manufacturing shells, some of which had never produced such products. Often, production plans were frustrated, and the cast guns did not withstand testing due to haste and unexploited technologies.  The victory in the Patriotic War of 1812 did not allow the authorities to identify these problems. At the same time, the war substantially reduced the demand of the domestic market for metal, which led to inflation and long standstills at factories.
The casting of artillery pieces resumed in 1834. Before the beginning of the Crimean War, from 1834 to 1852, the Ural factories cast 1,542 guns instead of the 3,250 ordered, on average, orders for the production of shells were fulfilled by about 23-25 %. Already during the war, the supply of 60-pounder guns was disrupted due to a gap in testing. During the defense of Sevastopol, 900 Ural guns were unsuitable.
The development of the Ural copper-smelting industry in the 19th century was associated with an increase in the height of furnaces, the use of hot blast and coal. Steam engines began to be used to lift the ore to the surface and pump water out of the mines. Copper production has shifted to the Northern and Southern Urals. In the second half of the 19th century, copper smelting began to decline due to the depletion of deposits and reduced demand from mints.
Since the 1820s, gold and platinum mining has been rapidly developing in the Urals. In 1823, there were 309 mines in the region. 105 poods of gold were mined. In 1842, the largest Ural gold nugget weighing 36.04 kg was found at the Tsarevo-Alexandrovsky mine. Platinum was mined at the mines of the Nizhniy Tagil district of the Demidovs, at the Isov mines of the Verkh-Isetsk district, and at the Krestovozdvizhensk mines. In the 19th century, the Urals produced 93–95% of the world's platinum.
In the 18th century and first half of the 19th century, the use of adolescent and child labor was widespread in the mines and factories of the Urals, sanctioned by a number of legislative acts and reinforced in the Mining Statute of 1842. In the 1850s, children and adolescents accounted for 30 to 50% of all workers in factories, and in mines - from 40 to 85%. At the beginning of the 19th century, women were employed in 17% of factories. In the 1850s, female labor was already more widely used, and the proportion of women was about 10% of the workers. 
By the time of the abolition of serfdom, the Ural metallurgy was in a deep crisis, which was facilitated by a sharp increase in grain prices in 1857 due to crop failures, especially significant in the Northern Urals. Of the 41 mining districts, 13 had a total debt of 8.1 million rubles, which increased to 12.4 million rubles by the end of the 1860s. The transition to freelance labor led to a sharp reduction in the number of workers in factories. If in 1860 there were 8,663 workers at the seven Goroblagodatsky factories, in 1861 — 7,030, then in 1862 the number decreased to 4,671 people, in 1863 - to 3,097, and in 1864 - to 2,839 people. During this period, there were 154 metallurgical plants of various specializations and gold crafts in the Urals, including 24 state-owned, 78 possessory, and 52 manorial ones. Of these, 115 enterprises were located within the Perm Governorate, 26 in the Orenburg Governorate, and 13 in the Vyatka Governorate.
In 1824, to support the miners, the government established a State Loan Bank. According to the data of 1849, the State Loan Bank pledged the Kanonikolsky, Beloretsky, Voskresensky, Troitsky, Blagoveshchensky, Yuryuzan-Ivanovsky mining districts a total amount of 1,106,995 rubles in silver. In 1851, the Beloretsk Mining District was re-mortgaged to the bank, and in 1852, the Preobrazhensky Plant was mortgaged to private investors in the amount of 300 thousand rubles with the obligation to pay the debt to the bank. In general, the pre-reform level of production at the Ural factories was reached only in 1870. The Government provided support to mining companies in the form of soft loans secured by metals and orders for the construction of railways. The industry was heavily influenced by commercial banks and wealthy entrepreneurs who bought up entire mountain districts. In the 1880s, mining plants began to be incorporated.
In 1870, at the invitation of the Russian government, the Austrian metallurgist P. von Tunner visited an industrial exhibition in St. Petersburg and inspected the Ural metallurgical plants. As a result of this trip, in 1871, he published a book with a description of the factories, in which he noted the technical and organizational backwardness of the metallurgy of the Urals, and the high cost of production. Von Tunner's book eventually became the first systematic description of the Ural mining plants.
The lack of customs regulation of foreign supplies of metals had a negative impact on the development of Ural metallurgy. European metallurgical companies in the 2nd half of the 19th century actively united in syndicates to regulate market prices and control production volumes. The surplus, as a rule, was exported to the Russian markets and sold at low prices. This led to overstocking of markets and lower prices for metals. The amount of unsold metal at the Nizhny Novgorod Fair was 0.9 million poods in 1883, 1.16 million poods in 1884, 1.84 million poods in 1885, and 1.94 million poods in 1886.
In the 1880s and 1890s, 16 metallurgical plants were built in the Urals, including the large Chusovsky (1883) and Nadezhdinsky plants(1896). The old factories underwent significant modernization, including the introduction of mechanical processing plants, the construction of open-hearth shops, power plants, and air heaters. The introduction of hot blast was promoted in the 1860s and 1870s in the factories of the Urals. Rashet blast furnaces equipped with trapping devices for heating the air were used. Despite these successes, since 1896, the Urals has lost the primacy in the share of metal produced to enterprises in Southern Russia. In 1900, the Ural factories smelted 50.1 million poods of iron. The first open-hearth furnaces in the Urals were built in 1871 at Votkinsky and in 1875 at the Perm Cannon Factory. By 1900, there were a total of 42 of the furnace. Bessemerization in the Urals was first introduced at the Nizhnesaldinsky and Katav-Ivanovsky plants. In 1900, 48.9% of the Ural finished ferrous metal was produced by open-hearth and Bessemer methods.
By the end of the 19th century, with the expansion of factories in the Urals, the problems with the depletion of forest resources and environmental pollution intensified.
In 1899, on behalf of S. Yu. Witte, an expedition of scientists headed by D. I. Mendeleev was sent to the Urals, the main task of which was to find out the causes of stagnation in the metallurgical industry. In his report, Mendeleev called the main reasons for the industrial crisis of the Ural metallurgy, off-road conditions, the preserved serf relations between factory owners and peasants, the use of outdated equipment and technologies, the monopoly of large entrepreneurs on ore and forests, and the arbitrariness of local authorities. As a result of the expedition, a plan was drawn up for the development of Ural metallurgy with an increase in the volume of iron smelting to 300 million poods per year, which did not find the support of the authorities.