![Cotton gin EWM 2007](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/Cotton_gin_EWM_2007.jpg)
The technological and industrial history of the United States describes the United States' emergence as one of the most technologically advanced nations in the world. The availability of land and literate labor, the absence of a landed aristocracy, the prestige of entrepreneurship, the diversity of climate and large easily accessed upscale and literate markets all contributed to America's rapid
industrialization
Industrialisation ( alternatively spelled industrialization) is the period of social and economic change that transforms a human group from an agrarian society into an industrial society. This involves an extensive re-organisation of an econo ...
. The availability of capital, development by the free market of navigable rivers and coastal waterways, as well as the abundance of natural resources facilitated the cheap extraction of energy all contributed to America's rapid industrialization. Fast transport by the very large railroad built in the mid-19th century, and the
Interstate Highway System
The Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, commonly known as the Interstate Highway System, is a network of controlled-access highways that forms part of the National Highway System in the United States. Th ...
built in the late 20th century, enlarged the markets and reduced shipping and production costs. The legal system facilitated business operations and guaranteed contracts. Cut off from Europe by the embargo and the British blockade in the
War of 1812
The War of 1812 (18 June 1812 – 17 February 1815) was fought by the United States of America and its indigenous allies against the United Kingdom and its allies in British North America, with limited participation by Spain in Florida. It bega ...
(1807–15), entrepreneurs opened factories in the Northeast that set the stage for rapid industrialization modeled on British innovations.
From its emergence as an independent nation, the United States has encouraged science and innovation. As a result, the United States has been the birthplace of 161 of Britannica's 321 Greatest Inventions, including items such as the
airplane
An airplane or aeroplane (informally plane) is a fixed-wing aircraft that is propelled forward by thrust from a jet engine, propeller, or rocket engine. Airplanes come in a variety of sizes, shapes, and wing configurations. The broad spe ...
,
internet
The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...
,
microchip
An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit (also referred to as an IC, a chip, or a microchip) is a set of electronic circuits on one small flat piece (or "chip") of semiconductor material, usually silicon. Large numbers of tiny ...
,
laser
A laser is a device that emits light through a process of optical amplification based on the stimulated emission of electromagnetic radiation. The word "laser" is an acronym for "light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation". The fir ...
,
cellphone
A mobile phone, cellular phone, cell phone, cellphone, handphone, hand phone or pocket phone, sometimes shortened to simply mobile, cell, or just phone, is a portable telephone that can make and receive calls over a radio frequency link whil ...
,
refrigerator,
email
Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" meant ...
,
microwave
Microwave is a form of electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths ranging from about one meter to one millimeter corresponding to frequencies between 300 MHz and 300 GHz respectively. Different sources define different frequency ran ...
,
personal computer
A personal computer (PC) is a multi-purpose microcomputer whose size, capabilities, and price make it feasible for individual use. Personal computers are intended to be operated directly by an end user, rather than by a computer expert or tec ...
,
liquid-crystal display
A liquid-crystal display (LCD) is a flat-panel display
A flat-panel display (FPD) is an electronic display used to display visual content such as text or images. It is present in consumer, medical, transportation, and industrial equipmen ...
and
light-emitting diode
A light-emitting diode (LED) is a semiconductor device that emits light when current flows through it. Electrons in the semiconductor recombine with electron holes, releasing energy in the form of photons. The color of the light (cor ...
technology,
air conditioning
Air conditioning, often abbreviated as A/C or AC, is the process of removing heat from an enclosed space to achieve a more comfortable interior environment (sometimes referred to as 'comfort cooling') and in some cases also strictly controlling ...
,
assembly line
An assembly line is a manufacturing process (often called a ''progressive assembly'') in which parts (usually interchangeable parts) are added as the semi-finished assembly moves from workstation to workstation where the parts are added in seq ...
,
supermarket
A supermarket is a self-service Retail#Types of outlets, shop offering a wide variety of food, Drink, beverages and Household goods, household products, organized into sections. This kind of store is larger and has a wider selection than earli ...
,
bar code
A barcode or bar code is a method of representing data in a visual, machine-readable form. Initially, barcodes represented data by varying the widths, spacings and sizes of parallel lines. These barcodes, now commonly referred to as linear or o ...
, and
automated teller machine
An automated teller machine (ATM) or cash machine (in British English) is an electronic telecommunications device that enables customers of financial institutions to perform financial transactions, such as cash withdrawals, deposits, fun ...
.
The early technological and industrial development in the United States was facilitated by a unique confluence of geographical, social, and economic factors. The relative lack of workers kept the United States wages generally higher than corresponding British and European workers and provided an incentive to mechanize some tasks. The United States population had some semi-unique advantages in that they were former
British subjects, had high English literacy skills, for that period (over 80% in New England), had strong British institutions, with some minor American modifications, of courts, laws, right to vote, protection of property rights and in many cases personal contacts among the British innovators of the
Industrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes in Great Britain, continental Europe, and the United States, that occurred during the period from around 1760 to about 1820–1840. This transition included going f ...
. They had a good basic structure to build on. Another major advantage, which the British lacked, was no inherited aristocratic institutions. The
eastern seaboard of the United States
The East Coast of the United States, also known as the Eastern Seaboard, the Atlantic Coast, and the Atlantic Seaboard, is the coastline along which the Eastern United States meets the North Atlantic Ocean. The eastern seaboard contains the coa ...
, with a great number of rivers and streams along the Atlantic seaboard, provided many potential sites for constructing textile mills necessary for early industrialization. The technology and information on how to build a textile industry were largely provided by
Samuel Slater
Samuel Slater (June 9, 1768 – April 21, 1835) was an early English-American industrialist known as the "Father of the American Industrial Revolution" (a phrase coined by Andrew Jackson) and the "Father of the American Factory System". In the ...
(1768–1835) who emigrated to New England in 1789. He had studied and worked in British textile mills for a number of years and immigrated to the United States, despite restrictions against it, to try his luck with U.S. manufacturers who were trying to set up a textile industry. He was offered a full partnership if he could succeed—he did. A vast supply of natural resources, the technological knowledge on how to build and power the necessary machines along with a labor supply of mobile workers, often unmarried females, all aided early industrialization. The broad knowledge carried by European migrants of two periods that advanced the societies there, namely the European Industrial Revolution and European
Scientific revolution
The Scientific Revolution was a series of events that marked the emergence of modern science during the early modern period, when developments in mathematics, physics, astronomy, biology (including human anatomy) and chemistry transfo ...
, helped facilitate understanding for the construction and invention of new manufacturing businesses and technologies. A limited government that would allow them to succeed or fail on their own merit helped.
After the close of the
American Revolution
The American Revolution was an ideological and political revolution that occurred in British America between 1765 and 1791. The Americans in the Thirteen Colonies formed independent states that defeated the British in the American Revolut ...
in 1783, the new government continued the strong property rights established under British rule and established a rule of law necessary to protect those property rights. The idea of issuing
patents
A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention."A p ...
was incorporated into Article I, Section 8 of 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
A cotton gin—meaning "cotton engine"—is a machine that quickly and easily separates cotton fibers from their seeds, enabling much greater productivity than manual cotton separation.. Reprinted by McGraw-Hill, New York and London, 1926 (); a ...
by American
Eli Whitney
Eli Whitney Jr. (December 8, 1765January 8, 1825) was an American inventor, widely known for inventing the cotton gin, one of the key inventions of the Industrial Revolution that shaped the economy of the Antebellum South.
Although Whitney hi ...
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 the United States entering the Industrial Revolution was the passage of the
Embargo Act of 1807
The Embargo Act of 1807 was a general trade embargo on all foreign nations that was enacted by the United States Congress. As a successor or replacement law for the 1806 Non-importation Act and passed as the Napoleonic Wars continued, it repr ...
, the
War of 1812
The War of 1812 (18 June 1812 – 17 February 1815) was fought by the United States of America and its indigenous allies against the United Kingdom and its allies in British North America, with limited participation by Spain in Florida. It bega ...
(1812–14) and the
Napoleonic Wars
The Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815) were a series of major global conflicts pitting the French Empire and its allies, led by Napoleon I, against a fluctuating array of European states formed into various coalitions. It produced a period of Fren ...
(1803–15) which cut off supplies of new and cheaper Industrial revolution products from Britain. The lack of access to these goods all provided a strong incentive to learn how to develop the industries and to make their own goods instead of simply buying the goods produced by Britain.
Modern productivity researchers have shown that the period in which the greatest economic and technological progress occurred was between the last half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th. During this period the nation was transformed from an agricultural economy to the foremost industrial power in the world, with more than a third of the global industrial output. This can be illustrated by the index of total industrial production, which increased from 4.29 in 1790 to 1,975.00 in 1913, an increase of 460 times (base year 1850 – 100).
American colonies
gained independence in 1783 just as profound changes in industrial production and coordination were beginning to
shift production from artisans to factories. Growth of the nation's transportation infrastructure with
internal improvements
Internal improvements is the term used historically in the United States for public works from the end of the American Revolution through much of the 19th century, mainly for the creation of a transportation infrastructure: roads, turnpikes, canal ...
and a confluence of technological innovations before the
Civil War
A civil war or intrastate war is a war between organized groups within the same state (or country).
The aim of one side may be to take control of the country or a region, to achieve independence for a region, or to change government policies ...
facilitated an expansion in organization, coordination, and
scale of industrial production. Around the turn of the 20th century, American industry had superseded its European counterparts economically and the nation began to assert its
military power. Although the
Great Depression
The Great Depression (19291939) was an economic shock that impacted most countries across the world. It was a period of economic depression that became evident after a major fall in stock prices in the United States. The economic contagio ...
challenged its
technological momentum, America emerged from it and
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
as one of two global
superpower
A superpower is a state with a dominant position characterized by its extensive ability to exert influence or project power on a global scale. This is done through the combined means of economic, military, technological, political and cultural s ...
s. In the second half of the 20th century, as the United States was drawn into competition with the
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national ...
for
political, economic, and military primacy, the government invested heavily in scientific research and technological development which spawned advances in
spaceflight
Spaceflight (or space flight) is an application of astronautics to fly spacecraft into or through outer space, either with or without humans on board. Most spaceflight is uncrewed and conducted mainly with spacecraft such as satellites in or ...
,
computing
Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and development of both hardware and software. Computing has scientific, e ...
, and
biotechnology
Biotechnology is the integration of natural sciences and engineering sciences in order to achieve the application of organisms, cells, parts thereof and molecular analogues for products and services. The term ''biotechnology'' was first used b ...
.
Science, technology, and industry have not only profoundly shaped America's economic success, but have also contributed to its distinct political institutions, social structure, educational system, and cultural identity.
Pre-European technology
![Monks Mound in July](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2d/Monks_Mound_in_July.JPG)
North America has been inhabited continuously since approximately 4,000 BC. The earliest inhabitants were
nomad
A nomad is a member of a community without fixed habitation who regularly moves to and from the same areas. Such groups include hunter-gatherers, pastoral nomads (owning livestock), tinkers and trader nomads. In the twentieth century, the popu ...
ic, big-game
hunter-gatherer
A traditional hunter-gatherer or forager is a human living an ancestrally derived lifestyle in which most or all food is obtained by foraging, that is, by gathering food from local sources, especially edible wild plants but also insects, fungi, ...
s who crossed the
Bering land bridge
Beringia is defined today as the land and maritime area bounded on the west by the Lena River in Russia; on the east by the Mackenzie River in Canada; on the north by 72 degrees north latitude in the Chukchi Sea; and on the south by the tip of ...
. These first
Native Americans relied upon chipped-stone
spear
A spear is a pole weapon consisting of a shaft, usually of wood, with a pointed head. The head may be simply the sharpened end of the shaft itself, as is the case with fire hardened spears, or it may be made of a more durable material fasten ...
heads, rudimentary
harpoon
A harpoon is a long spear-like instrument and tool used in fishing, whaling, seal hunting, sealing, and other marine hunting to catch and injure large fish or marine mammals such as seals and whales. It accomplishes this task by impaling the t ...
s, and boats clad in animal hides for hunting in the
Arctic
The Arctic ( or ) is a polar regions of Earth, polar region located at the northernmost part of Earth. The Arctic consists of the Arctic Ocean, adjacent seas, and parts of Canada (Yukon, Northwest Territories, Nunavut), Danish Realm (Greenla ...
. As they dispersed within the continent, they encountered the varied temperate climates in the Pacific northwest, central plains, Appalachian woodlands, and arid Southwest, where they began to make permanent settlements. The peoples living in the Pacific northwest built wooden houses, used
nets and
weirs
A weir or low head dam is a barrier across the width of a river that alters the flow characteristics of water and usually results in a change in the height of the river level. Weirs are also used to control the flow of water for outlets of l ...
to catch fish, and practiced
food preservation
Food preservation includes processes that make food more resistant to microorganism growth and slow the oxidation of fats. This slows down the decomposition and rancidification process. Food preservation may also include processes that inhibit ...
to ensure longevity of their food sources, since substantial agriculture was not developed. Peoples living on the plains remained largely nomadic (some practiced agriculture for parts of the year) and became adept
leather workers as they hunted
buffalo while people living in the arid southwest built
adobe
Adobe ( ; ) is a building material made from earth and organic materials. is Spanish for ''mudbrick''. In some English-speaking regions of Spanish heritage, such as the Southwestern United States, the term is used to refer to any kind of e ...
buildings, fired
pottery
Pottery is the process and the products of forming vessels and other objects with clay and other ceramic materials, which are fired at high temperatures to give them a hard and durable form. Major types include earthenware, stoneware and por ...
, domesticated
cotton
Cotton is a soft, fluffy staple fiber that grows in a boll, or protective case, around the seeds of the cotton plants of the genus ''Gossypium'' in the mallow family Malvaceae. The fiber is almost pure cellulose, and can contain minor perce ...
, and
wove cloth. Tribes in the
eastern woodlands
The Eastern Woodlands is a cultural area of the indigenous people of North America. The Eastern Woodlands extended roughly from the Atlantic Ocean to the eastern Great Plains, and from the Great Lakes region to the Gulf of Mexico, which is now p ...
and
Mississippian Valley developed extensive trade networks, built
pyramid-like mounds, and practiced substantial agriculture while the peoples living in the
Appalachian Mountains
The Appalachian Mountains, often called the Appalachians, (french: Appalaches), are a system of mountains in eastern to northeastern North America. The Appalachians first formed roughly 480 million years ago during the Ordovician Period. They ...
and coastal Atlantic practiced highly sustainable forest agriculture and were expert woodworkers. However, the populations of these peoples were small and their rate of technological change was very low. Indigenous peoples did not
domesticate
Domestication is a sustained multi-generational relationship in which humans assume a significant degree of control over the reproduction and care of another group of organisms to secure a more predictable supply of resources from that group. A ...
animals for
drafting or
husbandry
Animal husbandry is the branch of agriculture concerned with animals that are raised for meat, fibre, milk, or other products. It includes day-to-day care, selective breeding, and the raising of livestock. Husbandry has a long history, starti ...
, develop writing systems, or create
bronze
Bronze is an alloy consisting primarily of copper, commonly with about 12–12.5% tin and often with the addition of other metals (including aluminium, manganese, nickel, or zinc) and sometimes non-metals, such as phosphorus, or metalloids such ...
or
iron
Iron () is a chemical element with symbol Fe (from la, ferrum) and atomic number 26. It is a metal that belongs to the first transition series and group 8 of the periodic table. It is, by mass, the most common element on Earth, right in f ...
-based tools like their European/Asian counterparts.
Colonial era
Agriculture
In the 17th century,
Pilgrims,
Puritans
The Puritans were English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries who sought to purify the Church of England of Roman Catholic practices, maintaining that the Church of England had not been fully reformed and should become more Protestant. P ...
, and
Quakers
Quakers are people who belong to a historically Protestant Christian set of denominations known formally as the Religious Society of Friends. Members of these movements ("theFriends") are generally united by a belief in each human's abil ...
fleeing religious persecution in Europe brought with them
plowshare
In agriculture, a plowshare ( US) or ploughshare ( UK; ) is a component of a plow (or plough). It is the cutting or leading edge of a moldboard which closely follows the coulter (one or more ground-breaking spikes) when plowing.
The plowshar ...
s,
gun
A gun is a ranged weapon designed to use a shooting tube (gun barrel) to launch projectiles. The projectiles are typically solid, but can also be pressurized liquid (e.g. in water guns/cannons, spray guns for painting or pressure washing, p ...
s, and domesticated animals like
cow
Cattle (''Bos taurus'') are large, domesticated, cloven-hooved, herbivores. They are a prominent modern member of the subfamily Bovinae and the most widespread species of the genus ''Bos''. Adult females are referred to as cows and adult ma ...
s and
pig
The pig (''Sus domesticus''), often called swine, hog, or domestic pig when distinguishing from other members of the genus '' Sus'', is an omnivorous, domesticated, even-toed, hoofed mammal. It is variously considered a subspecies of ''Sus ...
s. These immigrants and other European colonists initially farmed subsistence crops like
corn
Maize ( ; ''Zea mays'' subsp. ''mays'', from es, maíz after tnq, mahiz), also known as corn (North American and Australian English), is a cereal grain first domesticated by indigenous peoples in southern Mexico about 10,000 years ago. Th ...
,
wheat
Wheat is a grass widely cultivated for its seed, a cereal grain that is a worldwide staple food. The many species of wheat together make up the genus ''Triticum'' ; the most widely grown is common wheat (''T. aestivum''). The archaeologi ...
,
rye, and
oats
The oat (''Avena sativa''), sometimes called the common oat, is a species of cereal grain grown for its seed, which is known by the same name (usually in the plural, unlike other cereals and pseudocereals). While oats are suitable for human con ...
as well as rendering
potash
Potash () includes various mined and manufactured salts that contain potassium in water-soluble form. and
maple syrup
Maple syrup is a syrup made from the sap of maple trees. In cold climates, these trees store starch in their trunks and roots before winter; the starch is then converted to sugar that rises in the sap in late winter and early spring. Maple tree ...
for trade. Due to the more temperate climate, large-scale
plantations in the American South
A plantation complex in the Southern United States is the built environment (or complex) that was common on agricultural plantations in the American South from the 17th into the 20th century. The complex included everything from the main resid ...
grew labor-intensive cash crops like
sugarcane
Sugarcane or sugar cane is a species of (often hybrid) tall, Perennial plant, perennial grass (in the genus ''Saccharum'', tribe Andropogoneae) that is used for sugar Sugar industry, production. The plants are 2–6 m (6–20 ft) tall with ...
,
rice
Rice is the seed of the grass species ''Oryza sativa'' (Asian rice) or less commonly ''Oryza glaberrima
''Oryza glaberrima'', commonly known as African rice, is one of the two domesticated rice species. It was first domesticated and grown i ...
,
cotton
Cotton is a soft, fluffy staple fiber that grows in a boll, or protective case, around the seeds of the cotton plants of the genus ''Gossypium'' in the mallow family Malvaceae. The fiber is almost pure cellulose, and can contain minor perce ...
, and
tobacco
Tobacco is the common name of several plants in the genus '' Nicotiana'' of the family Solanaceae, and the general term for any product prepared from the cured leaves of these plants. More than 70 species of tobacco are known, but the ...
requiring native and imported African slave labor to maintain. Early American farmers were not self-sufficient; they relied upon other farmers, specialized craftsmen, and merchants to provide tools, process their harvests, and bring them to market.
Artisanship
Colonial artisanship emerged slowly as the market for advanced craftsmanship was small. American artisans developed a more relaxed (less regulated) version of the Old World apprenticeship system for educating and employing the next generation. Despite the fact that
mercantilist
Mercantilism is an economic policy that is designed to maximize the exports and minimize the imports for an economy. It promotes imperialism, colonialism, tariffs and subsidies on traded goods to achieve that goal. The policy aims to reduce ...
, export-heavy economy impaired the emergence of a robust self-sustaining economy, craftsmen and merchants developed a growing interdependence on each other for their trades. In the mid-18th century, attempts by the British to subdue or control the colonies by means of taxation sowed increased discontent among these artisans, who increasingly joined the
Patriot
A patriot is a person with the quality of patriotism.
Patriot may also refer to:
Political and military groups United States
* Patriot (American Revolution), those who supported the cause of independence in the American Revolution
* Patriot m ...
cause.
Silver working
Colonial Virginia
The Colony of Virginia, chartered in 1606 and settled in 1607, was the first enduring English colonial empire, English colony in North America, following failed attempts at settlement on Newfoundland (island), Newfoundland by Sir Humphrey GilbertG ...
provided a potential market of rich
plantations
A plantation is an agricultural estate, generally centered on a plantation house, meant for farming that specializes in cash crops, usually mainly planted with a single crop, with perhaps ancillary areas for vegetables for eating and so on. The ...
. At least 19 silversmiths worked in
Williamsburg between 1699 and 1775. The best-known were James Eddy (1731–1809) and his brother-in-law William Wadill, also an engraver. Most planters, however, purchased English-made silver.
In
Boston
Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...
,
goldsmiths
A goldsmith is a metalworker who specializes in working with gold.
In German, the Goldsmith family name is written Goldschmidt.
Goldsmith may also refer to:
Places
* Goldsmith, Indiana, United States
* Goldsmith, New York, United States, a h ...
and
silversmiths
A silversmith is a metalworker who crafts objects from silver. The terms ''silversmith'' and ''goldsmith'' are not exactly synonyms as the techniques, training, history, and guilds are or were largely the same but the end product may vary great ...
were stratified. The most prosperous were merchant-artisans, with a business outlook and high status. Most craftsmen were laboring artisans who either operated small shops or, more often, did piecework for the merchant artisans. The small market meant there was no steady or well-paid employment; many lived in constant debt.
Colonial silver working was pre-industrial in many ways: many pieces made were "bespoke," or uniquely made for each customer, and emphasized artistry as well as functionality. Silver (and other metal) mines were scarcer in North America than in Europe, and colonial craftsmen had no consistent source of materials with which to work. For each piece of silver they crafted, raw materials had to be collected and often reused from disparate sources, most commonly
Spanish coins. The purity of these sources was not regulated, nor was there an organized
supply chain
In commerce, a supply chain is a network of facilities that procure raw materials, transform them into intermediate goods and then final products to customers through a distribution system. It refers to the network of organizations, people, acti ...
through which to obtain silver. As silver objects were sold by weight, manufacturers who could produce silver objects cheaply by mass had an advantage. Many of these unique, individual aspects to silver working kept artisan practices in place through the late 18th century.
As demand for silver increased and large-scale manufacturing techniques emerged, silver products became much more standardized. For special-order objects that would likely only be made once, silversmiths generally used
lost-wax casting
Lost-wax casting (also called "investment casting", "precision casting", or ''cire perdue'' which has been adopted into English from the French, ) is the process by which a duplicate metal sculpture (often silver, gold, brass, or bronze) i ...
, in which a sculpted object was carved out of wax, an
investment casting
Investment casting is an industrial process based on lost-wax casting, one of the oldest known metal-forming techniques. The term "lost-wax casting" can also refer to modern investment casting processes.
Investment casting has been used in var ...
was made, and the wax was melted away. The molds produced in this manner could only be used once, which made them inconvenient for standard objects like handles and buckles.
Permanent mold casting
Permanent mold casting is a metal casting process that employs reusable molds ("permanent molds"), usually made from metal. The most common process uses gravity to fill the mold, however gas pressure or a vacuum are also used. A variation on the ...
, an industrial casting technique focused on high-volume production, allowed smiths to reuse molds to make exact replicas of the most commonly used items they sold. In creating these molds and developing standardized manufacturing processes, silversmiths could begin delegating some work to
apprentices
Apprenticeship is a system for training a new generation of practitioners of a trade or profession with on-the-job training and often some accompanying study (classroom work and reading). Apprenticeships can also enable practitioners to gain a ...
and
journeymen
A journeyman, journeywoman, or journeyperson is a worker, skilled in a given building trade or craft, who has successfully completed an official apprenticeship qualification. Journeymen are considered competent and authorized to work in that fie ...
. For instance, after 1780,
Paul Revere
Paul Revere (; December 21, 1734 O.S. (January 1, 1735 N.S.)May 10, 1818) was an American silversmith, engraver, early industrialist, Sons of Liberty member, and Patriot and Founding Father. He is best known for his midnight ride to a ...
's sons took on more significant roles in his shop, and his silver pieces often included wooden handles made by carpenters more experienced with woodwork. For even some of the most successful artisans like Revere, artisan was not a profitable enterprise compared to mass-production using iron or bronze casting. Creating products that could be replicated for multiple customers, adopting new business practices and labor policies, and new equipment made manufacturing more ultimately efficient. These changes, in tandem with new techniques and requirements defined by changing social standards, led to the introduction of new manufacturing techniques in Colonial America that preceded and anticipated the industrial revolution.
Late in the colonial era a few silversmiths expanded operations with manufacturing techniques and changing business practices They hired assistants, subcontracted out piecework and standardized output. One individual in the vanguard of America's shift towards more industrial methods was
Paul Revere
Paul Revere (; December 21, 1734 O.S. (January 1, 1735 N.S.)May 10, 1818) was an American silversmith, engraver, early industrialist, Sons of Liberty member, and Patriot and Founding Father. He is best known for his midnight ride to a ...
, who emphasized the production of increasingly standardized items later in his career with the use of a silver flatting mill, increased numbers of salaried employees, and other advances. Still, traditional methods of artisan remained, and smiths performed a great deal of work by hand. The coexistence of the craft and industrial production styles prior to the industrial revolution is an example of
proto-industrialization
Proto-industrialization is the regional development, alongside commercial agriculture, of rural handicraft production for external markets.
The term was introduced in the early 1970s by economic historians who argued that such developments in par ...
.
Factories and mills
![Allentown](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c2/Allentown.jpg)
In the mid-1780s,
Oliver Evans
Oliver Evans (September 13, 1755 – April 15, 1819) was an American inventor, engineer and businessman born in rural Delaware and later rooted commercially in Philadelphia. He was one of the first Americans building steam engines and an advoca ...
invented an automated flour mill that included a
grain elevator
A grain elevator is a facility designed to stockpile or store grain. In the grain trade, the term "grain elevator" also describes a tower containing a bucket elevator or a pneumatic conveyor, which scoops up grain from a lower level and deposits ...
and
hopper boy
Hopper or hoppers may refer to:
Places
*Hopper, Illinois
* Hopper, West Virginia
* Hopper, a mountain and valley in the Hunza–Nagar District of Pakistan
* Hopper (crater), a crater on Mercury
People with the name
* Hopper (surname)
* Grace Ho ...
. Evans' design eventually displaced the traditional
gristmill
A gristmill (also: grist mill, corn mill, flour mill, feed mill or feedmill) grinds cereal grain into flour and Wheat middlings, middlings. The term can refer to either the Mill (grinding), grinding mechanism or the building that holds it. Grist i ...
s. By the turn of the century, Evans also developed one of the first high-pressure
steam engine
A steam engine is a heat engine that performs mechanical work using steam as its working fluid. The steam engine uses the force produced by steam pressure to push a piston back and forth inside a cylinder. This pushing force can be trans ...
s and began establishing a network of machine workshops to manufacture and repair these popular inventions. In 1789, the widow of
Nathanael Greene
Nathanael Greene (June 19, 1786, sometimes misspelled Nathaniel) was a major general of the Continental Army in the American Revolutionary War. He emerged from the war with a reputation as General George Washington's most talented and dependabl ...
recruited
Eli Whitney
Eli Whitney Jr. (December 8, 1765January 8, 1825) was an American inventor, widely known for inventing the cotton gin, one of the key inventions of the Industrial Revolution that shaped the economy of the Antebellum South.
Although Whitney hi ...
to develop a machine to separate the seeds of short fibered cotton from the fibers. The resulting
cotton gin
A cotton gin—meaning "cotton engine"—is a machine that quickly and easily separates cotton fibers from their seeds, enabling much greater productivity than manual cotton separation.. Reprinted by McGraw-Hill, New York and London, 1926 (); a ...
could be made with basic carpentry skills but reduced the necessary labor by a factor of 50 and generated huge profits for cotton growers in the South. While Whitney did not realize financial success from his invention, he moved on to manufacturing rifles and other armaments under a government contract that could be made with "expedition, uniformity, and exactness"—the foundational ideas for
interchangeable parts
Interchangeable parts are parts ( components) that are identical for practical purposes. They are made to specifications that ensure that they are so nearly identical that they will fit into any assembly of the same type. One such part can freely r ...
. However, Whitney's vision of
interchangeable parts
Interchangeable parts are parts ( components) that are identical for practical purposes. They are made to specifications that ensure that they are so nearly identical that they will fit into any assembly of the same type. One such part can freely r ...
would not be achieved for over two decades with firearms and even longer for other devices.
Between 1800 and 1820, new industrial tools that rapidly increased the quality and efficiency of manufacturing emerged.
Simeon North
Simeon North (July 13, 1765 – August 25, 1852) was a Middletown, Connecticut, gun manufacturer, who developed one of America's first milling machines (possibly the very first) in 1818 and played an important role in the development of interchan ...
suggested using
division of labor
The division of labour is the separation of the tasks in any economic system or organisation so that participants may specialise (specialisation). Individuals, organizations, and nations are endowed with, or acquire specialised capabilities, and ...
to increase the speed with which a complete
pistol
A pistol is a handgun, more specifically one with the chamber integral to its gun barrel, though in common usage the two terms are often used interchangeably. The English word was introduced in , when early handguns were produced in Europe, an ...
could be manufactured which led to the development of a
milling machine
Milling is the process of machining using rotary cutters to remove material by advancing a cutter into a workpiece. This may be done by varying direction on one or several axes, cutter head speed, and pressure. Milling covers a wide variety of d ...
in 1798. In 1819,
Thomas Blanchard created a
lathe
A lathe () is a machine tool that rotates a workpiece about an axis of rotation to perform various operations such as cutting, sanding, knurling, drilling, deformation, facing, and turning, with tools that are applied to the workpiece to c ...
that could reliably cut irregular shapes, like those needed for arms manufacture. By 1822,
Captain John H. Hall
John Hancock Hall (January 4, 1781 – February 26, 1841) was the inventor of the M1819 Hall breech-loading rifle and a mass production innovator.
Early life
Hall was born in 1781 in Portland, Maine. He worked in his father's tannery until setti ...
had developed a system using
machine tool
A machine tool is a machine for handling or machining metal or other rigid materials, usually by cutting, boring, grinding, shearing, or other forms of deformations. Machine tools employ some sort of tool that does the cutting or shaping. All m ...
s, division of labor, and an unskilled workforce to produce a
breech-loading rifle
A breechloader is a firearm in which the user loads the ammunition ( cartridge or shell) via the rear (breech) end of its barrel, as opposed to a muzzleloader, which loads ammunition via the front ( muzzle).
Modern firearms are generally bre ...
—a process that came to be known as "
Armory practice" in the U.S. and the ''
American system of manufacturing
The American system of manufacturing was a set of manufacturing methods that evolved in the 19th century. The two notable features were the extensive use of interchangeable parts and mechanization for production, which resulted in more efficient us ...
'' in England.
![Boston Manufacturing Company](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/35/Boston_Manufacturing_Company.jpg)
The
textile industry
The textile industry is primarily concerned with the design, production and distribution of yarn, cloth and clothing. The raw material may be natural, or synthetic using products of the chemical industry.
Industry process
Cotton manufacturi ...
, which had previously relied upon labor-intensive production methods, was also rife with potential for mechanization. In the late 18th century, the English textile industry had adopted the
spinning jenny
The spinning jenny is a multi-spindle spinning frame, and was one of the key developments in the industrialization of textile manufacturing during the early Industrial Revolution. It was invented in 1764 or 1765 by James Hargreaves in Stanhill ...
,
water frame
The water frame is a spinning frame that is powered by a water-wheel. Water frames in general have existed since Ancient Egypt times. Richard Arkwright, who patented the technology in 1769, designed a model for the production of cotton thread; ...
, and
spinning mule
The spinning mule is a machine used to spin cotton and other fibres. They were used extensively from the late 18th to the early 20th century in the mills of Lancashire and elsewhere. Mules were worked in pairs by a minder, with the help of tw ...
which greatly improved the efficiency and quality of textile manufacture, but were closely guarded by the British government which forbade their export or the emigration of those who were familiar with the technology. The 1787
Beverly Cotton Manufactory
Beverly Cotton Manufactory was the first cotton mill built in America, and the largest cotton mill to be built during its era. It was built hoping for economic success, but reached a downturn due to technical limitations of the then early produ ...
was the first
cotton mill
A cotton mill is a building that houses spinning (textiles), spinning or weaving machinery for the production of yarn or cloth from cotton, an important product during the Industrial Revolution in the development of the factory system.
Althou ...
in the United States, but it relied on horse power.
Samuel Slater
Samuel Slater (June 9, 1768 – April 21, 1835) was an early English-American industrialist known as the "Father of the American Industrial Revolution" (a phrase coined by Andrew Jackson) and the "Father of the American Factory System". In the ...
, an apprentice in one of the largest textile factories in England, immigrated to the United States in 1789 upon learning that American states were paying bounties to British expatriates with a knowledge of textile machinery. With the help of
Moses Brown of Providence, Slater established America's oldest currently existing cotton-spinning mill with a fully mechanized water power system at the
Slater Mill
The Slater Mill is a historic water-powered textile mill complex on the banks of the Blackstone River in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, modeled after cotton spinning mills first established in England. It is the first water-powered cotton spinning mil ...
in
Pawtucket, Rhode Island
Pawtucket is a city in Providence County, Rhode Island, United States. The population was 75,604 at the 2020 census, making the city the fourth-largest in the state. Pawtucket borders Providence and East Providence to the south, Central Falls ...
in 1793.
Hoping to harness the ample power of the
Merrimack River
The Merrimack River (or Merrimac River, an occasional earlier spelling) is a river in the northeastern United States. It rises at the confluence of the Pemigewasset and Winnipesaukee rivers in Franklin, New Hampshire, flows southward into Mas ...
, another group of investors began building the
Middlesex Canal
The Middlesex Canal was a 27-mile (44-kilometer) barge canal connecting the Merrimack River with the port of Boston. When operational it was 30 feet (9.1 m) wide, and 3 feet (0.9 m) deep, with 20 locks, each 80 feet (24 m) long and between 10 and ...
up the
Mystic River
The Mystic River is a riverU.S. Geological Survey. National Hydrography Dataset high-resolution flowline dataThe National Map accessed April 1, 2011 in Massachusetts, in the United States. In Massachusett, means "large estuary," alluding to t ...
, both Mystic Lakes and generally following
stream valleys (near to today's
MA 38) reached the Merrimack in
Chelmsford
Chelmsford () is a city in the City of Chelmsford district in the county of Essex, England. It is the county town of Essex and one of three cities in the county, along with Southend-on-Sea and Colchester. It is located north-east of London a ...
from
Boston Harbor
Boston Harbor is a natural harbor and estuary of Massachusetts Bay, and is located adjacent to the city of Boston, Massachusetts. It is home to the Port of Boston, a major shipping facility in the northeastern United States.
History
Since ...
, establishing limited operations by 1808, and a system of
navigations
Canals or artificial waterways are waterways or engineered channels built for drainage management (e.g. flood control and irrigation) or for conveyancing water transport vehicles (e.g. water taxi). They carry free, calm surface flo ...
and canals reaching past
Manchester
Manchester () is a city in Greater Manchester, England. It had a population of 552,000 in 2021. It is bordered by the Cheshire Plain to the south, the Pennines to the north and east, and the neighbouring city of Salford to the west. The t ...
by mid-1814—and spawning commercial activities, and especially new clothing mills throughout the region. At nearly the same time as the canal was completed,
Francis Cabot Lowell
Francis Cabot Lowell (April 7, 1775 – August 10, 1817) was an American businessman for whom the city of Lowell, Massachusetts, is named. He was instrumental in bringing the Industrial Revolution to the United States.
Early life
Francis Cabot ...
and a consortium of businessmen set up the clothing mills in
Waltham, Massachusetts
Waltham ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, and was an early center for the labor movement as well as a major contributor to the American Industrial Revolution. The original home of the Boston Manufacturing Company, th ...
making use of water power from the
Charles River
The Charles River ( Massachusett: ''Quinobequin)'' (sometimes called the River Charles or simply the Charles) is an river in eastern Massachusetts. It flows northeast from Hopkinton to Boston along a highly meandering route, that doubles b ...
with the concept of housing together production of feedstocks complete consumer processes so raw materials entered, and dyed fabrics or clothing left. For a few decades, it seemed that every
lock
Lock(s) may refer to:
Common meanings
*Lock and key, a mechanical device used to secure items of importance
*Lock (water navigation), a device for boats to transit between different levels of water, as in a canal
Arts and entertainment
* ''Lock ...
along the canal had mills and water wheels. In 1821,
Boston Manufacturing Company
The Boston Manufacturing Company was a business that operated one of the first factories in America. It was organized in 1813 by Francis Cabot Lowell, a wealthy Boston merchant, in partnership with a group of investors later known as The Boston A ...
built a major expansion in East Chelmsford, which was soon incorporated as
Lowell, Massachusetts
Lowell () is a city in Massachusetts, in the United States. Alongside Cambridge, It is one of two traditional seats of Middlesex County. With an estimated population of 115,554 in 2020, it was the fifth most populous city in Massachusetts as of ...
—which came to dominate the cloth production and clothing industry for decades.
Slater's Mill was established in the
Blackstone Valley
The Blackstone Valley or Blackstone River Valley is a region of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. It was a major factor in the American Industrial Revolution. It makes up part of the Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor and Nation ...
, which extended into neighboring
, (
Daniel Day's Woolen Mill, 1809 at
Uxbridge
Uxbridge () is a suburban town in west London and the administrative headquarters of the London Borough of Hillingdon. Situated west-northwest of Charing Cross, it is one of the major metropolitan centres identified in the London Plan. Uxbrid ...
), and became one of the earliest industrialized region in the United States, second to the
North Shore of Massachusetts. Slater's business model of independent mills and mill villages (the "
Rhode Island System") began to be replaced by the 1820s by a more efficient system (the "
Waltham System
The Waltham-Lowell system was a labor and production model employed during the rise of the textile industry in the United States, particularly in New England, amid the larger backdrop of rapid expansion of the Industrial Revolution in the early 1 ...
") based upon
Francis Cabot Lowell
Francis Cabot Lowell (April 7, 1775 – August 10, 1817) was an American businessman for whom the city of Lowell, Massachusetts, is named. He was instrumental in bringing the Industrial Revolution to the United States.
Early life
Francis Cabot ...
's replications of British
power looms
A power loom is a mechanized loom, and was one of the key developments in the industrialization of weaving during the early Industrial Revolution. The first power loom was designed in 1786 by Edmund Cartwright and first built that same year. ...
. Slater went on to build several more cotton and wool mills throughout
New England
New England is a region comprising six states in the Northeastern United States: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. It is bordered by the state of New York to the west and by the Canadian provinces ...
, but when faced with a labor shortage, resorted to building housing, shops, and churches for the workers and their families adjacent to his factories. The first
power looms
A power loom is a mechanized loom, and was one of the key developments in the industrialization of weaving during the early Industrial Revolution. The first power loom was designed in 1786 by Edmund Cartwright and first built that same year. ...
for woolens were installed in 1820, at
Uxbridge, Massachusetts
Uxbridge is a town in Worcester County, Massachusetts first colonized in 1662 and incorporated in 1727. It was originally part of the town of Mendon, MA, Mendon, and named for the Marquess of Anglesey, Earl of Uxbridge. The town is located south ...
, by
John Capron
John Willard Capron (February 14, 1797, at Uxbridge, Worcester County, Massachusetts – December 25, 1878, at Uxbridge) was an American military officer in the infantry, state legislator, and textile manufacturer. Famous for being a military unif ...
, of
Cumberland, Rhode Island. These added automated weaving under the same roof, a step which Slater's system outsourced to local farms. Lowell looms were managed by specialized employees, many of the employed were unmarried young women ("
Lowell mill girls"), and owned by a corporation. Unlike the previous forms of labor (
apprenticeship
Apprenticeship is a system for training a new generation of practitioners of a Tradesman, trade or profession with on-the-job training and often some accompanying study (classroom work and reading). Apprenticeships can also enable practitioners ...
, family labor,
slavery
Slavery and enslavement are both the state and the condition of being a slave—someone forbidden to quit one's service for an enslaver, and who is treated by the enslaver as property. Slavery typically involves slaves being made to perf ...
, and
indenture
An indenture is a legal contract that reflects or covers a debt or purchase obligation. It specifically refers to two types of practices: in historical usage, an indentured servant status, and in modern usage, it is an instrument used for commercia ...
), the Lowell system popularized the concept of
wage laborer who sells his labor to an employer under contract—a socio-economic system which persists in many modern countries and industries. The corporation also looked out for the health and well-being of the young women, including their spiritual health, and the hundreds of women employed by it culturally established the pattern of a young woman going off to work for a few years to save money before returning home to school and marriage. It created an independent breed of women uncommon in most of the world.
Turnpikes and canals
Even as the country grew even larger with the admission of
Kentucky
Kentucky ( , ), officially the Commonwealth of Kentucky, is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States and one of the states of the Upper South. It borders Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio to the north; West Virginia and Virginia to ...
,
Tennessee
Tennessee ( , ), officially the State of Tennessee, is a landlocked state in the Southeastern region of the United States. Tennessee is the 36th-largest by area and the 15th-most populous of the 50 states. It is bordered by Kentucky to th ...
, and
Ohio
Ohio () is a state in the Midwestern region of the United States. Of the fifty U.S. states, it is the 34th-largest by area, and with a population of nearly 11.8 million, is the seventh-most populous and tenth-most densely populated. The sta ...
by 1803, the only means of transportation between these landlocked western states and their coastal neighbors was by foot, pack animal, or ship. Recognizing the success of
Roman road
Roman roads ( la, viae Romanae ; singular: ; meaning "Roman way") were physical infrastructure vital to the maintenance and development of the Roman state, and were built from about 300 BC through the expansion and consolidation of the Roman Re ...
s in unifying that empire, political and business leaders in the United States began to construct roads and canals to connect the disparate parts of the nation.
Early
toll road
A toll road, also known as a turnpike or tollway, is a public or private road (almost always a controlled-access highway in the present day) for which a fee (or ''toll'') is assessed for passage. It is a form of road pricing typically implemented ...
s were constructed and owned by
joint-stock companies
A joint-stock company is a business entity in which shares of the company's stock can be bought and sold by shareholders. Each shareholder owns company stock in proportion, evidenced by their shares (certificates of ownership). Shareholders are ...
that sold stock to raise construction capital like
Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania (; ( Pennsylvania Dutch: )), officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a state spanning the Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern, Appalachian, and Great Lakes regions of the United States. It borders Delaware to its southeast, ...
's 1795
Lancaster Turnpike Company. In 1808,
Secretary of the Treasury
The United States secretary of the treasury is the head of the United States Department of the Treasury, and is the chief financial officer of the federal government of the United States. The secretary of the treasury serves as the principal a ...
Albert Gallatin
Abraham Alfonse Albert Gallatin (January 29, 1761 – August 12, 1849) was a Genevan– American politician, diplomat, ethnologist and linguist. Often described as "America's Swiss Founding Father", he was a leading figure in the early years ...
's ''Report on the Subject of Public Roads and Canals'' suggested that the federal government should fund the construction of interstate
turnpikes and
canal
Canals or artificial waterways are waterways or engineered channels built for drainage management (e.g. flood control and irrigation) or for conveyancing water transport vehicles (e.g. water taxi). They carry free, calm surface flow un ...
s. While many
Anti-Federalists
Anti-Federalism was a late-18th century political movement that opposed the creation of a stronger U.S. federal government and which later opposed the ratification of the 1787 Constitution. The previous constitution, called the Articles of Con ...
opposed the federal government assuming such a role, the British blockade in the War of 1812 demonstrated the United States' reliance upon these overland roads for military operations as well as for general commerce. Construction on the
National Road
The National Road (also known as the Cumberland Road) was the first major improved highway in the United States built by the Federal Government of the United States, federal government. Built between 1811 and 1837, the road connected the Pot ...
began in 1815 in
Cumberland, Maryland
Cumberland is a U.S. city in and the county seat of Allegany County, Maryland
Maryland ( ) is a state in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. It shares borders with Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia to its s ...
and reached
Wheeling, Virginia in 1818, but political strife thereafter ultimately prevented its western advance to the
Mississippi River
The Mississippi River is the second-longest river and chief river of the second-largest drainage system in North America, second only to the Hudson Bay drainage system. From its traditional source of Lake Itasca in northern Minnesota, it f ...
. Nevertheless, the road became a primary overland conduit through
Appalachian Mountains
The Appalachian Mountains, often called the Appalachians, (french: Appalaches), are a system of mountains in eastern to northeastern North America. The Appalachians first formed roughly 480 million years ago during the Ordovician Period. They ...
and was the gateway for thousands of antebellum westward-bound settlers.
![Erie Canal, Lock 32](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f9/Erie_Canal%2C_Lock_32.jpg)
Numerous canal companies had also been chartered; but of all the canals projected, only three had been completed when the War of 1812 began: the
Dismal Swamp Canal
The Dismal Swamp Canal is a canal located along the eastern edge of the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia and North Carolina in the United States. Opened in 1805, it is the oldest continually operating man-made canal in the United States. It is par ...
in Virginia, the
Santee Canal
The Santee Canal was one of the earliest canals built in the United States. It was built to provide a direct water route between Charleston and Columbia, the new South Carolina state capital. It was named to the National Register of Historic Plac ...
in South Carolina, and the
Middlesex Canal
The Middlesex Canal was a 27-mile (44-kilometer) barge canal connecting the Merrimack River with the port of Boston. When operational it was 30 feet (9.1 m) wide, and 3 feet (0.9 m) deep, with 20 locks, each 80 feet (24 m) long and between 10 and ...
in Massachusetts. It remained for New York to usher in a new era in internal communication by authorizing in 1817 the construction of the
Erie Canal
The Erie Canal is a historic canal in upstate New York that runs east-west between the Hudson River and Lake Erie. Completed in 1825, the canal was the first navigable waterway connecting the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes, vastly reducing t ...
. This bold bid for Western trade alarmed the merchants of Philadelphia, particularly as the completion of the national road threatened to divert much of their traffic to Baltimore. In 1825, the
Pennsylvania General Assembly
The Pennsylvania General Assembly is the legislature of the U.S. commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The legislature convenes in the State Capitol building in Harrisburg. In colonial times (1682–1776), the legislature was known as the Pennsylvania ...
grappled with the problem by projecting a series of canals which were to connect its great seaport with Pittsburgh on the west and with
Lake Erie
Lake Erie ( "eerie") is the fourth largest lake by surface area of the five Great Lakes in North America and the eleventh-largest globally. It is the southernmost, shallowest, and smallest by volume of the Great Lakes and therefore also has t ...
and the upper
Susquehanna on the north. The
Blackstone Canal, (1823–1828) in
Rhode Island
Rhode Island (, like ''road'') is a U.S. state, state in the New England region of the Northeastern United States. It is the List of U.S. states by area, smallest U.S. state by area and the List of states and territories of the United States ...
and
, and the
Morris Canal
The Morris Canal (1829–1924) was a common carrier anthracite coal canal across northern New Jersey that connected the two industrial canals at Easton, Pennsylvania across the Delaware River from its western terminus at Phillipsburg, New Jers ...
across northern
New Jersey
New Jersey is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern regions of the United States. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York; on the east, southeast, and south by the Atlantic Ocean; on the west by the Delaware ...
(1824–1924) soon followed, along with the
Illinois and Michigan Canal
The Illinois and Michigan Canal connected the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. In Illinois, it ran from the Chicago River in Bridgeport, Chicago to the Illinois River at LaSalle-Peru. The canal crossed the Chicago Por ...
from
Chicago
(''City in a Garden''); I Will
, image_map =
, map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago
, coordinates =
, coordinates_footnotes =
, subdivision_type = Country
, subdivision_name ...
to the
Illinois River
The Illinois River ( mia, Inoka Siipiiwi) is a principal tributary of the Mississippi River and is approximately long. Located in the U.S. state of Illinois, it has a drainage basin of . The Illinois River begins at the confluence of the D ...
(1824–1848).
![Highways USA 1825](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/20/Highways_USA_1825.png)
Like the turnpikes, the early canals were constructed, owned, and operated by private joint-stock companies but later gave way to larger projects funded by the states. The
Erie Canal
The Erie Canal is a historic canal in upstate New York that runs east-west between the Hudson River and Lake Erie. Completed in 1825, the canal was the first navigable waterway connecting the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes, vastly reducing t ...
, proposed by
Governor of New York
The governor of New York is the head of government of the U.S. state of New York. The governor is the head of the executive branch of New York's state government and the commander-in-chief of the state's military forces. The governor has ...
De Witt Clinton
DeWitt Clinton (March 2, 1769February 11, 1828) was an American politician and naturalist. He served as a United States senator, as the mayor of New York City, and as the seventh governor of New York. In this last capacity, he was largely resp ...
, was the first canal project undertaken as a public good to be financed at the public risk through the issuance of
bonds. When the project was completed in 1825, the canal linked
Lake Erie
Lake Erie ( "eerie") is the fourth largest lake by surface area of the five Great Lakes in North America and the eleventh-largest globally. It is the southernmost, shallowest, and smallest by volume of the Great Lakes and therefore also has t ...
with the
Hudson River
The Hudson River is a river that flows from north to south primarily through eastern New York. It originates in the Adirondack Mountains of Upstate New York and flows southward through the Hudson Valley to the New York Harbor between N ...
through 83 separate locks and over a distance of . The success of the Erie Canal spawned a boom of other canal-building around the country: over of artificial waterways were constructed between 1816 and 1840. Small towns like
Syracuse, New York
Syracuse ( ) is a City (New York), city in and the county seat of Onondaga County, New York, Onondaga County, New York, United States. It is the fifth-most populous city in the state of New York following New York City, Buffalo, New York, Buffa ...
,
Buffalo, New York
Buffalo is the second-largest city in the U.S. state of New York (behind only New York City) and the seat of Erie County. It is at the eastern end of Lake Erie, at the head of the Niagara River, and is across the Canadian border from South ...
, and
Cleveland, Ohio
Cleveland ( ), officially the City of Cleveland, is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Cuyahoga County. Located in the northeastern part of the state, it is situated along the southern shore of Lake Erie, across the U.S. ...
that lay along major canal routes boomed into major industrial and trade centers, while canal-building pushed some states like
Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania (; ( Pennsylvania Dutch: )), officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a state spanning the Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern, Appalachian, and Great Lakes regions of the United States. It borders Delaware to its southeast, ...
,
Ohio
Ohio () is a state in the Midwestern region of the United States. Of the fifty U.S. states, it is the 34th-largest by area, and with a population of nearly 11.8 million, is the seventh-most populous and tenth-most densely populated. The sta ...
, and
Indiana
Indiana () is a U.S. state in the Midwestern United States. It is the 38th-largest by area and the 17th-most populous of the 50 States. Its capital and largest city is Indianapolis. Indiana was admitted to the United States as the 19th s ...
to the brink of
bankruptcy
Bankruptcy is a legal process through which people or other entities who cannot repay debts to creditors may seek relief from some or all of their debts. In most jurisdictions, bankruptcy is imposed by a court order, often initiated by the debtor ...
.
The magnitude of the transportation problem was such, however, that neither individual states nor private corporations seemed able to meet the demands of an expanding internal trade. As early as 1807,
Albert Gallatin
Abraham Alfonse Albert Gallatin (January 29, 1761 – August 12, 1849) was a Genevan– American politician, diplomat, ethnologist and linguist. Often described as "America's Swiss Founding Father", he was a leading figure in the early years ...
had advocated the construction of a great system of internal waterways to connect East and West, at an estimated cost of $20,000,000 ($ in consumer dollars). But the only contribution of the national government to
internal improvements
Internal improvements is the term used historically in the United States for public works from the end of the American Revolution through much of the 19th century, mainly for the creation of a transportation infrastructure: roads, turnpikes, canal ...
during the Jeffersonian era was an appropriation in 1806 of two percent of the net proceeds of the sales of public lands in Ohio for the construction of a national road, with the consent of the states through which it should pass. By 1818 the road was open to traffic from
Cumberland, Maryland
Cumberland is a U.S. city in and the county seat of Allegany County, Maryland
Maryland ( ) is a state in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. It shares borders with Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia to its s ...
, to
Wheeling, West Virginia
Wheeling is a city in the U.S. state of West Virginia. Located almost entirely in Ohio County, of which it is the county seat, it lies along the Ohio River in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains and also contains a tiny portion extending ...
.
In 1816, with the experiences of the war before him, no well-informed statesman could shut his eyes to the national aspects of the problem. Even President
James Madison
James Madison Jr. (March 16, 1751June 28, 1836) was an American statesman, diplomat, and Founding Father. He served as the fourth president of the United States from 1809 to 1817. Madison is hailed as the "Father of the Constitution" for hi ...
invited the attention of Congress to the need of establishing "a comprehensive system of roads and canals". Soon after Congress met, it took under consideration a bill drafted by
John C. Calhoun which proposed an appropriation of $1,500,000 ($ in consumer dollars) for internal improvements. Because this appropriation was to be met by the moneys paid by the National Bank to the government, the bill was commonly referred to as the "Bonus Bill". But on the day before he left office, President Madison vetoed the bill because it was unconstitutional. The policy of internal improvements by federal aid was thus wrecked on the constitutional scruples of the last of the
Virginia dynasty. Having less regard for consistency, the
United States House of Representatives
The United States House of Representatives, often referred to as the House of Representatives, the U.S. House, or simply the House, is the Lower house, lower chamber of the United States Congress, with the United States Senate, Senate being ...
recorded its conviction, by close votes, that Congress could appropriate money to construct roads and canals, but had not the power to construct them. As yet the only direct aid of the national government to internal improvements consisted of various appropriations, amounting to about $1,500,000 for the
Cumberland Road
The National Road (also known as the Cumberland Road) was the first major improved highway in the United States built by the federal government. Built between 1811 and 1837, the road connected the Potomac and Ohio Rivers and was a main tran ...
.
As the country recovered from financial depression following the
Panic of 1819
The Panic of 1819 was the first widespread and durable financial crisis in the United States that slowed westward expansion in the Cotton Belt and was followed by a general collapse of the American economy that persisted through 1821. The Panic ...
, the question of internal improvements again forged to the front. In 1822, a bill to authorize the collection of tolls on the Cumberland Road had been vetoed by President
James Monroe
James Monroe ( ; April 28, 1758July 4, 1831) was an American statesman, lawyer, diplomat, and Founding Father who served as the fifth president of the United States from 1817 to 1825. A member of the Democratic-Republican Party, Monroe was ...
. In an elaborate essay, Monroe set forth his views on the constitutional aspects of a policy of internal improvements. Congress might appropriate money, he admitted, but it might not undertake the actual construction of national works nor assume jurisdiction over them. For the moment, the drift toward a larger participation of the national government in internal improvements was stayed. Two years later, Congress authorized the President to institute surveys for such roads and canals as he believed to be needed for commerce and military defense. No one pleaded more eloquently for a larger conception of the functions of the national government than
Henry Clay
Henry Clay Sr. (April 12, 1777June 29, 1852) was an American attorney and statesman who represented Kentucky in both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. He was the seventh House speaker as well as the ninth secretary of state, al ...
. He called the attention of his hearers to provisions made for coast surveys and lighthouses on the Atlantic seaboard and deplored the neglect of the interior of the country. Of the other presidential candidates,
Andrew Jackson
Andrew Jackson (March 15, 1767 – June 8, 1845) was an American lawyer, planter, general, and statesman who served as the seventh president of the United States from 1829 to 1837. Before being elected to the presidency, he gained fame as ...
voted in the Senate for the general survey bill; and
John Quincy Adams
John Quincy Adams (; July 11, 1767 – February 23, 1848) was an American statesman, diplomat, lawyer, and diarist who served as the sixth president of the United States, from 1825 to 1829. He previously served as the eighth United States S ...
left no doubt in the public mind that he did not reflect the narrow views of his section on this issue.
William H. Crawford
William Harris Crawford (February 24, 1772 – September 15, 1834) was an American politician and judge during the early 19th century. He served as US Secretary of War and US Secretary of the Treasury before he ran for US president in the 1824 ...
felt the constitutional scruples which were everywhere being voiced in the South, and followed the old expedient of advocating a constitutional amendment to sanction national internal improvements.
In President Adams' first message to Congress, he advocated not only the construction of roads and canals but also the establishment of
observatories
An observatory is a location used for observing terrestrial, marine, or celestial events. Astronomy, climatology/meteorology, geophysical, oceanography and volcanology are examples of disciplines for which observatories have been constructed. His ...
and a national university. President
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson (April 13, 1743 – July 4, 1826) was an American statesman, diplomat, lawyer, architect, philosopher, and Founding Fathers of the United States, Founding Father who served as the third president of the United States from 18 ...
had recommended many of these in 1806 for Congress to consider for creation of necessary amendments to the Constitution. Adams seemed oblivious to the limitations of the Constitution. In much alarm, Jefferson suggested to Madison the desirability of having Virginia adopt a new set of resolutions, bottomed on those of 1798, and directed against the acts for internal improvements. In March 1826, the
Virginia General Assembly
The Virginia General Assembly is the legislative body of the Commonwealth of Virginia, the oldest continuous law-making body in the Western Hemisphere, the first elected legislative assembly in the New World, and was established on July 30, 161 ...
declared that all the principles of the earlier resolutions applied "with full force against the powers assumed by Congress" in passing acts to protect manufacturers and to further internal improvements. That the administration would meet with opposition in Congress was a foregone conclusion.
Steamboats
![Clermont illustration - Robert Fulton - Project Gutenberg eText 15161](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/Clermont_illustration_-_Robert_Fulton_-_Project_Gutenberg_eText_15161.jpg)
Despite the new efficiencies introduced by the turnpikes and canals, travel along these routes was still time-consuming and expensive. The idea of integrating a steam
boiler
A boiler is a closed vessel in which fluid (generally water) is heated. The fluid does not necessarily boil. The heated or vaporized fluid exits the boiler for use in various processes or heating applications, including water heating, central h ...
and propulsion system can be first attributed to
John Fitch and
James Rumsey
James Rumsey (1743 – December 21, 1792) was an American mechanical engineer chiefly known for exhibiting a boat propelled by machinery in 1787 on the Potomac River at Shepherdstown in present-day West Virginia before a crowd of local notables ...
who both filed for patents or state monopolies on
steamboat
A steamboat is a boat that is marine propulsion, propelled primarily by marine steam engine, steam power, typically driving propellers or Paddle steamer, paddlewheels. Steamboats sometimes use the ship prefix, prefix designation SS, S.S. or S/S ...
s in the late 1780s. However, these first steamboats were complicated, heavy, and expensive. It would be almost 20 years until
Robert R. Livingston
Robert Robert Livingston (November 27, 1746 (Old Style November 16) – February 26, 1813) was an American lawyer, politician, and diplomat from New York, as well as a Founding Father of the United States. He was known as "The Chancellor", afte ...
contracted a civil
engineer
Engineers, as practitioners of engineering, are professionals who invent, design, analyze, build and test machines, complex systems, structures, gadgets and materials to fulfill functional objectives and requirements while considering the l ...
named
Robert Fulton
Robert Fulton (November 14, 1765 – February 24, 1815) was an American engineer and inventor who is widely credited with developing the world's first commercially successful steamboat, the (also known as ''Clermont''). In 1807, that steamboat ...
to develop an economical steamboat. Fulton's
paddle steamer
A paddle steamer is a steamship or steamboat powered by a steam engine that drives paddle wheels to propel the craft through the water. In antiquity, paddle wheelers followed the development of poles, oars and sails, where the first uses wer ...
, ''
The North River Steamboat'' (erroneously referred to as the ''Clermont''), made its first trip from New York City north on the Hudson River to
Albany on August 17, 1807. By 1820, steamboat services had been established on all the Atlantic
tidal rivers and
Chesapeake Bay
The Chesapeake Bay ( ) is the largest estuary in the United States. The Bay is located in the Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic region and is primarily separated from the Atlantic Ocean by the Delmarva Peninsula (including the parts: the ...
. The shallow-bottomed boats were also ideally suited for navigating the
Mississippi
Mississippi () is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States, bordered to the north by Tennessee; to the east by Alabama; to the south by the Gulf of Mexico; to the southwest by Louisiana; and to the northwest by Arkansas. Miss ...
and
Ohio River
The Ohio River is a long river in the United States. It is located at the boundary of the Midwestern and Southern United States, flowing southwesterly from western Pennsylvania to its mouth on the Mississippi River at the southern tip of Illino ...
s and the number of boats on these rivers increased from 17 boats to 727 boats between 1817 and 1855. The speed of the steamboats decreased travel times between coastal ports and upstream cities by weeks and costs for transporting goods along these rivers by as much as 90%.
Steamboats profoundly altered the relationships between the
federal government
A federation (also known as a federal state) is a political entity characterized by a union of partially self-governing provinces, states, or other regions under a central federal government (federalism). In a federation, the self-governin ...
,
state governments
A state government is the government that controls a subdivision of a country in a federal form of government, which shares political power with the federal or national government. A state government may have some level of political autonomy, or ...
, and
private property
Private property is a legal designation for the ownership of property by non-governmental legal entities. Private property is distinguishable from public property and personal property, which is owned by a state entity, and from collective or ...
owners. Livingston and Fulton had obtained monopoly rights to operate a steamboat service within the
state of New York
New York, officially the State of New York, is a state in the Northeastern United States. It is often called New York State to distinguish it from its largest city, New York City. With a total area of , New York is the 27th-largest U.S. state ...
, but
Thomas Gibbons, who operated a competing
New Jersey
New Jersey is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern regions of the United States. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York; on the east, southeast, and south by the Atlantic Ocean; on the west by the Delaware ...
ferry service, was
enjoin
An injunction is a legal and equitable remedy in the form of a special court order that compels a party to do or refrain from specific acts. ("The court of appeals ... has exclusive jurisdiction to enjoin, set aside, suspend (in whole or in p ...
ed from entering New York waters under the terms of the monopoly. In 1824, the
Supreme Court
A supreme court is the highest court within the hierarchy of courts in most legal jurisdictions. Other descriptions for such courts include court of last resort, apex court, and high (or final) court of appeal. Broadly speaking, the decisions of ...
ruled in ''
Gibbons v. Ogden
''Gibbons v. Ogden'', 22 U.S. (9 Wheat.) 1 (1824), was a landmark decision in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that the power to regulate interstate commerce, which was granted to Congress by the Commerce Clause of the United Sta ...
'' that Congress could regulate commerce and transportation under the
Commerce Clause
The Commerce Clause describes an enumerated power listed in the United States Constitution ( Article I, Section 8, Clause 3). The clause states that the United States Congress shall have power "to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and amon ...
which compelled the state of New York to allow steamboat services from other states.
Because the
physics
Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which r ...
and
metallurgy
Metallurgy is a domain of materials science and engineering that studies the physical and chemical behavior of metallic elements, their inter-metallic compounds, and their mixtures, which are known as alloys.
Metallurgy encompasses both the sc ...
of boilers were poorly understood, steamboats were prone to
boiler explosion
A boiler explosion is a catastrophic failure of a boiler. There are two types of boiler explosions. One type is a failure of the pressure parts of the steam and water sides. There can be many different causes, such as failure of the safety valve ...
s that killed hundreds of people between the 1810s and 1840s. In 1838, legislation was enacted that mandated boiler inspections by
federal agents under the threat of revocation of the operator's navigation licenses and lowered the threshold for
liability in
suits arising from such accidents. While Americans long resisted any government's power to
regulate private property
Private property is a legal designation for the ownership of property by non-governmental legal entities. Private property is distinguishable from public property and personal property, which is owned by a state entity, and from collective or ...
, these new rules demonstrated that many Americans believed that property rights did not override
civil rights
Civil and political rights are a class of rights that protect individuals' freedom from infringement by governments, social organizations, and private individuals. They ensure one's entitlement to participate in the civil and political life of ...
and set the precedent for
future federal safety regulations.
Mining
Civil War
Role of industry & technology in causes, conduct & operations, reconstruction
*
Samuel Colt
Samuel Colt (; July 19, 1814 – January 10, 1862) was an American inventor, industrialist, and businessman who established Colt's Patent Fire-Arms Manufacturing Company (now Colt's Manufacturing Company) and made the mass production of r ...
—Invented the revolver, the first repeating
pistol
A pistol is a handgun, more specifically one with the chamber integral to its gun barrel, though in common usage the two terms are often used interchangeably. The English word was introduced in , when early handguns were produced in Europe, an ...
* John Browning guns
Technological systems and infrastructure
The period after the American Civil War was marked by increasing intense and pervasive industrialization and successive technological advances like the railroad, telegraph & telephone, and internal combustion engine. This facilitated Manifest destiny, America's westward expansion and economic development by connecting the frontier with the industrial, financial, and political centers of the East. Americans increasingly relied upon technological infrastructures like the railroad, electric, and telecommunications systems for economic and social activities.
Railroads
![DeWitt Clinton (locomotive)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/DeWitt_Clinton_%28locomotive%29.jpg)
Between 1820 and 1830, many inventors and entrepreneurs began to apply emerging steamboat technology to engines that could travel on land. The earliest proposal came in 1813 from
Oliver Evans
Oliver Evans (September 13, 1755 – April 15, 1819) was an American inventor, engineer and businessman born in rural Delaware and later rooted commercially in Philadelphia. He was one of the first Americans building steam engines and an advoca ...
' idea of a railway to connect New York and Philadelphia with "carriages drawn by steam engines." Many individuals and companies have a claim to being the first railroad in the United States, but by the mid-1830s several companies were using Steam locomotive, steam-powered locomotives to move train cars on rail tracks. Between 1840 and 1860 the total length of railroad trackage increased from to . The efficiency of railroad to move large, bulk items contributed enabled further drops in cost of transporting goods to market but in so doing undermined the profitability of the earlier turnpikes and canals which began to fold and fall into disrepair. However, the early railroads were poorly integrated; there were hundreds of competing companies using different Rail gauge, gauges for their track requiring cargo to be transshipment, trans-shipped—rather than traveling directly—between cities.
The completion of the First transcontinental railroad in 1869 and its attendant profit and efficiency had the effect of stimulating a period of intense consolidation and technological standardization that would last another 50 years. It was during this time that railroad magnates such as Jay Gould and Cornelius Vanderbilt amassed great power and fortunes from consolidation of smaller rail lines into national corporations. By 1920, of Standard-gauge railway, standard-gauge railroad track had been laid in the United States, all of it owned or controlled by seven organizations. The need to synchronize train schedules and the inefficiencies introduced by every city having its own local time, also led to introduction of Standard time by railway managers in 1883. Railroads began using diesel locomotives in the 1930s, and they completely replaced steam locomotives by the 1950s, which reduced costs and improved reliability.
During the Post–World War II economic expansion many railroads were driven out of business due to competition from airlines and Interstate highways. The rise of the automobile led to the end of Passenger train, passenger train service on most railroads. Trucking industry in the United States, Trucking businesses had become major competitors by the 1930s with the advent of improved paved roads, and after the war they expanded their operations as the interstate highway network grew, and acquired increased market share of cargo, freight business.
In 1970 the Penn Central railroad declared
bankruptcy
Bankruptcy is a legal process through which people or other entities who cannot repay debts to creditors may seek relief from some or all of their debts. In most jurisdictions, bankruptcy is imposed by a court order, often initiated by the debtor ...
, the largest bankruptcy in the US at that time. In response Congress created a government corporation, Amtrak, to take over operation of the passenger lines of Penn Central and other railroads, under the Rail Passenger Service Act. Amtrak began inter-city rail operations in 1971.
In 1980 Congress enacted the Staggers Rail Act to revive Freight transport, freight traffic, by removing restrictive regulations and enabling railroads to be more competitive with the trucking industry. More railroad companies merged and consolidated their lines in order to remain successful. These changes led to the current system of fewer, but profitable, Class I railroads covering larger regions of the United States. To replace the loss of commuter passenger rail service, state and local government agencies established their own commuter rail systems in several metropolitan areas, generally by leasing rail lines from Amtrak or freight railroads. The first rapid transit systems began operation in
Chicago
(''City in a Garden''); I Will
, image_map =
, map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago
, coordinates =
, coordinates_footnotes =
, subdivision_type = Country
, subdivision_name ...
(1892),
Boston
Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...
(1897) and New York City (1904).
Iron and steel-making
![Allegheny Ludlum steel furnace](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/Allegheny_Ludlum_steel_furnace.jpg)
Because
iron
Iron () is a chemical element with symbol Fe (from la, ferrum) and atomic number 26. It is a metal that belongs to the first transition series and group 8 of the periodic table. It is, by mass, the most common element on Earth, right in f ...
occurs in nature commonly as an oxide, it must be smelting, smelted to drive off the oxygen to obtain the metallic form. bloomery, Bloomery forges were prevalent in the colonies and could produce small batches of iron to be blacksmith, smithed for local needs (Horseshoe, horseshoes, axeblades, plowshares) but were unable to scale production for exporting or larger-scale industry (gunmaking, shipbuilding, wheelmaking). Blast furnaces creating cast iron and pig iron emerged on large self-sufficient plantations in the mid-17th century to meet these demands, but production was expensive and labor-intensive: forges, furnaces, and waterwheels had to be constructed, huge swaths of forest had to be cleared and the wood rendered into charcoal, and iron ore and limestone had to be mined and transported. By the end of the 18th century, the threat of deforestation forced the English to use coke (fuel), coke, a fuel derived from coal, to fire their furnaces. This shift precipitated a drop in iron prices since the process no longer required charcoal, the production of which was labor-intensive. This was a practice that was later adopted in the US as well.
Although steel is an alloy of iron and a small amount of carbon, historically steel and iron-making were intended for different products given the high costs of steel over wrought iron. The main difficulty with making steel is that its higher melting point than pig or cast iron was not easily achievable in large-scale production until methods that introduced air or oxygen to oxidize the carbon in the molten pig iron were developed, allowing the direct conversion of molten pig iron to molten steel.
Throughout the 18th and early 19th centuries, the English steelmakers produced blister steel, blister and crucible steel which required specialized equipment like finery forges and puddling furnaces and cost over £50 per long ton. In the 18th century, innovations like steamboats, railroads, and guns increased demand for wrought iron and steel. The Mount Savage Iron Works in Maryland was the largest in the United States in the late 1840s, and the first in the nation to produce Track (rail transport), heavy rails for the construction of railroads.
In the 1850s, American William Kelly (inventor), William Kelly and Englishman Henry Bessemer independently discovered that air blown through the molten iron increases its temperature by oxidizing the carbon and separating additional impurities into the slag. The Kelly-Bessemer process, because it reduces the amount of coke needed for blasting and increases the quality of the finished iron, revolutionized the mass production of high-quality steel and facilitated a drastic drop in steel prices and expansion of its availability.
In 1868, Andrew Carnegie saw an opportunity to integrate new coke-making methods with the recently developed Kelly-Bessemer process to supply steel for railroads. In 1872, he built a steel plant in Braddock, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, Braddock, Pennsylvania at the junction of several major railroad lines. Carnegie earned enormous profits by pioneering vertical integration; he owned the iron ore mines in Minnesota, the transport steamboats on the Great Lakes, the coal mines and coke ovens, and the rail lines delivering the coke and ore to his Pennsylvania mills. By 1900, the Carnegie Steel Company was producing more steel than all of Britain and in 1901 Carnegie sold his business to J.P. Morgan's U.S. Steel earning Carnegie $480 million personally.
Telegraph and telephone
![Model5302Telephone](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/11/Model5302Telephone.jpg)
The ability to quickly transmit information over long distances would prove to have an enormous impact on many diverse fields like journalism, banking, and diplomacy. Between 1837 and 1844, Samuel F.B. Morse and Alfred Vail developed a transmitter that could send "short" or "long" electric currents which would move an electromagnetic receiver to record the signal as Morse Code, dots and dashes. Morse established the first telegraph line (between Baltimore, Maryland, Baltimore and Washington D.C.) in 1844 and by 1849 almost every state east of the Mississippi had telegraph service. Between 1850 and 1865, the telegraph business became progressively more consolidated and the 1866 incorporation of Western Union emerged with a near-monopoly over 22,000 telegraph offices and of cable throughout the country. The telegraph was used to dispatch news from the fronts of the Mexican–American War, coordinate Union (American Civil War), Union troop movements during the Civil War, relay stock and commodity prices and orders between markets on ticker tape, and conduct diplomacy, diplomatic negotiations after the Transatlantic telegraph cable was laid in 1866.
Alexander Graham Bell obtained a patent in 1876 to a device that could transmit and reproduce the sound of a voice over electrical cables. Bell realized the enormous potential for his telephone and formed the Bell Telephone Company which would control the whole system, from manufacturing the telephones to lease, leasing the equipment to customers and telephone company, operators. Between 1877 and 1893 (the term of Bell's patent coverage) the number of phones leased by Bell's company increased from 3,000 to 260,000, although these were largely limited to businesses and government offices that could afford the relatively high rates. After the Bell patents expired, thousands of independent operators became incorporated and their competition for services to middle and low-class households as well as rural farmers drove prices down significantly. By 1920, there were 13 million phones in the United States providing service to 39 percent of all farm households and 34 percent of non-farm households.
Petroleum
![Lucas gusher](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/Lucas_gusher.jpg)
The 1859 discovery of crude oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania, western Pennsylvania set off Pennsylvanian oil rush, an "oil rush" reminiscent of the 1849 California Gold Rush and would prove to be a valuable resource on the eve of the
Civil War
A civil war or intrastate war is a war between organized groups within the same state (or country).
The aim of one side may be to take control of the country or a region, to achieve independence for a region, or to change government policies ...
. Because crude oil needs to be distilled to extract usable fuel oils, oil refining quickly became a major industry in the area. However, the rural and mountainous terrain of these Pennsylvania oilfields allowed neither economical in-situ refining nor efficient railroad transportation of extracted oil. Beginning in 1865, the construction of oil pipelines to connect the oilfields with railroads or oil refineries alleviated this geographical bottleneck but also put thousands of cooper (profession), coopers and teamsters (who made the barrels and drove the wagons to transport oil) out of business. As the network of oil pipelines expanded, they became more integrated with both the railway and telegraph systems which enabled even greater coordination in production, scheduling, and pricing.
John D. Rockefeller was a forceful driver of horizontal integration, consolidation in the Petroleum in the United States, American oil industry. Beginning in 1865, he bought refineries, railroads, pipelines, and oilfields and ruthlessly eliminated competition to his Standard Oil. By 1879, he controlled 90% of oil refined in the US. Standard Oil used pipelines to directly connect the Pennsylvanian oilfields with the refineries in New Jersey, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, rather than loading and unloading railroad tank cars, which enabled huge gains in efficiency and profitability. Given the unprecedented scale of Standard Oil's network, the company developed novel methods for managing, financing, and organizing its businesses. Because laws governing corporations limited their ability to do business across state lines, Standard Oil pioneered the use of a central Trust company, trust that owned and controlled the constituent companies in each state. The use of trusts by other industries to stifle competition and extract monopoly prices led to the 1890 passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act. In the 1911 case of ''Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. United States'', the Supreme Court ordered the Standard Oil Trust be disbanded into competing companies that would become Exxon (Standard Oil of New Jersey), Mobil (Standard Oil of New York), and Chevron Corporation, Chevron (Standard Oil of California).
The demand for petroleum products increased rapidly after the turn of the century as families relied upon kerosene to heat and light their houses, industries relied upon lubricants for machinery, and the ever-more prevalent internal combustion engine demanded gasoline fuel. Between 1880 and 1920, the amount of oil refined annually jumped from 26 million to 442 million. The discovery of large Petroleum reservoir, oil fields in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and California in the early 20th century touched off "oil crazes" and contributed to these states' rapid industrialization. Because these previously agrarian western states lay outside of the various Standard Oil's production and refining networks, cities like Long Beach, California, Dallas, Texas, and Houston, Texas emerged as major centers for refining and managing these new fields under companies like Sunoco, Texaco, and Gulf Oil.
Electricity
![Transmission Towers](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7a/Transmission_Towers.jpg)
Benjamin Franklin pioneered the study of electricity by being the first to describe positive and negative charges, as well as advancing the principle of conservation of charge. Franklin is best known for the apocryphal feat of flying a kite in thunderstorm to prove that lightning is a form of electricity which, in turn, led to the invention of the lightning rod to protect buildings.
Electricity would remain a novelty through the early to mid 19th century but advances in battery storage, generating, and lighting would turn it into a domestic business. By the late 1870s and early 1880 central generating plants supplying power to arc lamps, first in Europe and then in the US, began spreading rapidly, replacing oil and gas for outdoor lighting, systems that ran on very high voltage (3,000–6,000 volt) direct current or alternating current. In 1880, Thomas Edison developed and patented a system for indoor lighting that competed with gas lighting, based on a long-lasting high resistance incandescent light bulb that ran on relatively low voltage (110 volt) direct current. Commercializing this venture was a task far beyond what Edison's small laboratory could handle, requiring the setup of a large investor backed utility that involving companies that would manufacture the whole technological system upon which the "light bulb" would depend—Electric generator, generators (Edison Machine Works, Edison Machine Company), Electrical cable, cables (Edison Electric Tube Company), Power station, generating plants and Electric service panel, electric service (Edison Electric Light Company), Electrical socket, sockets, and Electric bulb, bulbs.
In addition to lighting, electric motors (analogous to generators operating in reverse, or using a current to spin a magnet to perform work) became extremely important to industry. Speed control of early DC motor, DC motors limited their use. Frank J. Sprague developed the first successful DC motor (ca. 1886) by solving the problem of varying speed with load. Within a few years DC motors were used in electric street railways.
In 1888, a Serbian immigrant, Nikola Tesla, a former employee of Edison's, patented an induction motor, AC induction motor and licensed it to the Westinghouse Corporation. Electric motors eventually replaced steam engines in factories around the nation as they required neither complex Mechanical transmission, mechanical transmissions from a central engine nor water sources for Boiler (power generation), steam boilers in order to operate.
Edison's direct current generation dominated the initial years of indoor commercial and residential electric lighting and electric power distribution. However, DC transmission was hampered by the difficulty in changing voltages between industrial generation and residential/commercial consumption and the low voltages used suffered from poor transmission efficiency. The mid-1880s saw the introduction of the transformer, allowing alternating current to be transmitted at high voltage long distances with greater efficiency and then "stepped down" to supply commercial and domestic indoor lighting, resulting in AC going from being the outdoor "arc lighting current" to taking over the domestic lighting utility market Edison's DC system was designed to supply. The rapid spread of AC and haphazard installation of power lines, especially in the city of New York, led to a series of deaths attributed to high voltage AC and an eventual media backlash against the current. Starting in 1888 the Edison company played up the dangers of AC power in their literature and assisted self-appointed anti-AC crusader Harold P. Brown in a parallel goal to limit, to the point of ineffectiveness, the voltages in AC power systems, a market then dominated by Westinghouse Electric. This series of events came to be known as the war of the currents. Brown and Edison's lobbying in state legislatures went nowhere and the Edison company continued to lose market share and profitability to the AC based companies. In 1892 the "war" ended with Thomas Edison losing any remaining control of his own company when it was merged with Westinghouse's chief AC rival, the Thomson-Houston Electric Company, to form General Electric, creating a company that controlled three quarters of the Electricity sector of the United States, US electrical business.
[Mark Essig, ''Edison and the Electric Chair: A Story of Light and Death'', Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2009, page 268] Westinghouse's lead in AC development would allow them to win a contract in 1893 to build an AC based power station at the Niagara Falls but the transmission contract was awarded to General Electric, who would come to dominate the US electrical business for many years afterwards.
As in other industries of the era, these companies achieved greater efficiencies by eventually merging to form Conglomerate (company), conglomerated companies, with over a dozen electric companies in the 1880s merging down to just two, General Electric and Westinghouse. Lighting was immensely popular: between 1882 and 1920 the number of generating plants in the US increased from one in Downtown Manhattan to nearly 4,000. While the earliest generating plants were constructed in the immediate vicinity of consumers, plants generating electricity for long-distance transmissions were in place by 1900. To help finance this great expansion, the utility industry exploited a financial innovation known as the "holding company"; a favorite holding company investment among many was the Electric Bond and Share Company (later much-changed, and known as Ebasco), created by the General Electric company in 1905. The abuse of holding companies, like trusts before it, led to the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, but by 1920, electricity had surpassed petroleum-based lighting sources that had dominated the previous century.
Automobiles
![La city hwys](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/La_city_hwys.jpg)
The technology for creating an automobile emerged in Germany in the 1870 and 1880s: Nicolaus Otto created a four-stroke engine, four-stroke internal combustion engine, Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach modified the Otto engine to run at higher speeds, and Karl Benz pioneered the electric ignition. The Duryea brothers and Hiram Percy Maxim were among the first to construct a "horseless carriage" in the US in the mid-1890s, but these early cars proved to be heavy and expensive.
Henry Ford revolutionized the automobile manufacturing process by employing
interchangeable parts
Interchangeable parts are parts ( components) that are identical for practical purposes. They are made to specifications that ensure that they are so nearly identical that they will fit into any assembly of the same type. One such part can freely r ...
on assembly lines—the beginning of industrial mass production. In 1908, the Ford Motor Company released the Ford Model T which could generate 20 horsepower, was lightweight, and easy to repair. Demand for the car was so great, he had to relocate his assembly plant to Highland Park, Michigan in 1912. The new plant was a model of industrial efficiency for the time: it was well lit and ventilated, employed conveyors to move parts along an assembly line, and workers' stations were orderly arranged along the line. The efficiency of the assembly line allowed Ford to realize great gains in economy and productivity; in 1912, Ford sold 6,000 cars for approximately $900 and by 1916 approximately 577,000 Model T automobiles were sold for $360. Ford was able to scale production rapidly because assembly-line workers were unskilled laborers performing repetitive tasks. Ford hired European immigrants, African-Americans, ex-convicts, and the disabled and paid comparatively high wages, but was quick to dismiss anyone involved in labor unions or Anarchism in the United States, radical Socialism in the United States, political Communist Party USA, associations.
With growth of American automobile usage, urban and rural roads were gradually upgraded for the new traffic. Local automobile clubs formed the American Automobile Association to Lobbying, lobby city, state, and federal governments to widen and pave existing roads and build limited-access highways. Some federal road aid was passed in the 1910s and 20s (resulting in highways like U.S. Route 1 and U.S. Route 66). The coverage and quality of many roads would greatly improve following Depression-era Works Progress Administration investment in road infrastructure. New Automobile sales were temporarily slowed during World War II when wartime rationing and military production lines limited the number of automobiles that could be manufactured—the largest companies like Ford Motor Company, Ford, General Motors, GM, and Chrysler would survive those lean years. After the war, Baby boom, rising family sizes, increasing affluence, and government-subsidized mortgages for veterans fueled a boom in single-family homes. Many were automobile-owners. In 1956, Congress passed the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 which provided funding for the construction of of toll-free expressways throughout the country laying the legislative and infrastructural foundations for the modern American highway system.
Radio communication
![Regency transistor radio](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b4/Regency_transistor_radio.jpg)
Radio in the United States, Radio communication, originally known as "wireless telegraphy", was first developed in the 1890s. The first wireless transmissions were achieved by Guglielmo Marconi in Europe and they were first replicated in the United States in April 1899 by Professor Jerome Green at the University of Notre Dame. The spark-gap transmitters initially employed could only transmit the dots-and-dashes of Morse code. Despite this limitation, in 1905 a small number of U.S. Navy stations inaugurated daily time signal broadcasts. In 1913 the high-powered station NAA (Arlington, Virginia), NAA in Arlington, Virginia began broadcasting daily time signals and weather reports in Morse code which covered much of the eastern United States.
The leading early proponent of radio broadcasting in the United States was Lee de Forest, who employed versions of an arc transmitter
developed by Valdemar Poulsen to make a series of demonstrations beginning in 1907. From the outset de Forest noted the potential for regular entertainment broadcasts, envisioning "the distribution of music from a central station" and that "by using four different forms of wave as many classes of music can be sent out as desired by the different subscribers". In the mid-1910s the development of vacuum tube transmitters provided a significant improvement in the quality and reliability of audio transmissions. Lee de Forest established experimental station Radio 2XG, 2XG in New York City and conducted the first broadcast in 1916. Station KDKA (AM), KDKA in Pittsburgh was the first to offer regularly scheduled broadcasts in 1920.
Early radio receivers were developed in the 1890s and used a coherer, a primitive radio wave detector. Vacuum tube technology led to major improvements in receiving sets, both in detecting the radio signals via Amplifier, amplification and better audio quality. The Audion (triode) vacuum tube, invented by de Forest in 1906, was the first practical amplifying device and revolutionized radio. The advent of radio broadcasting increased the market for radio receivers greatly, and transformed them into a consumer product. By the 1930s, the broadcast receiver had become a common household item, with standardized controls that anyone could use.
The invention of the transistor in 1947 again revolutionized radio technology, making truly portable receivers possible, beginning with transistor radios in the late 1950s.
Effects of industrialization
Agricultural production
![GLEANER L2](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/GLEANER_L2.JPG)
In the 1840s, as more and more western states joined the Union, many poor and middle-class Americans increasingly agitated for free land in these large, undeveloped areas. Early efforts to pass a Homestead Act by George Henry Evans and Horace Greeley were stymied by Southern states who feared that free land would threaten the plantation system. The Homestead Act was passed in 1862 after the opposing Southern states had seceded. The Homestead Act granted 160 acres (65 hectares) to farmers who lived on the land for 5 years or allowed the farmer to purchase the land after 6 months for $1.25 per acre ($3/ha).
Even as America's westward expansion allowed over 400 million acres (1,600,000 km
2) of new land to be put under cultivation, between 1870 and 1910 the number of Americans involved in farming or farm labor dropped by a third. New farming techniques and agricultural mechanization facilitated both processes. Cyrus McCormick's reaper (invented in 1834) allowed farmers to quadruple their harvesting efficiency by replacing hand labor with a mechanical device. John Deere (inventor), John Deere invented the steel plow in 1837, keeping the soil from sticking to the plow and making it easier to farm in the rich prairies of the Midwest. The harvester, self-binder, and combine allowed even greater efficiencies: wheat farmers in 1866 achieved an average yield of 9.9 bushels per acre but by 1898 yields had increased to 15.3 bushels per acre even as the total area had tripled.
Railroads allowed harvests to reach markets more quickly and Gustavus Franklin Swift's refrigerated railroad car allowed fresh meat and fish to reach distant markets. Food distribution also became more mechanized as companies like Heinz and Campbell distributed previously perishable foods by canning and evaporation. Commercial bakeries, breweries, and meatpackers replaced locally owned operators and drove demand for raw agricultural goods. Despite increasing demand, rising production caused a drop in prices, creating substantial discontent among farmers. Organizations like The National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry, The Grange and Farmers Alliance emerged to demand Free silver, monetary policy that allowed for money supply expansion (as most farmers carried significant debt from planting time to harvest time), railroad regulations, and protective tariffs.
Urbanization
The period between 1865 and 1920 was marked by the increasing concentration of people, political power, and economic activity in urban areas. In 1860, there were nine cities with populations over 100,000 and by 1910 there were fifty. These new large cities were not coastal port cities (like New York, Boston, and Philadelphia) but laid inland along new transportation routes (like Denver, Chicago, and Cleveland). The List of presidents of the United States, first twelve presidents of the United States had all been born into farming communities, but between 1865 and 1912 the presidency was filled by men with backgrounds of representing businesses and cities.
Industrialization and urbanization reinforced each other and urban areas became increasingly congested. As a result of unsanitary living conditions, diseases like cholera, dysentery, and typhoid fever struck urban areas with increasing frequency. Cities responded by paving streets, digging Sanitary sewer, sewers, Water purification, sanitizing water, constructing housing, and creating public transportation systems.
Labor issues and immigration
As the nation deepened its technological base, old-fashioned artisans and craftsmen became "deskilling, deskilled" and replaced by specialized workers and engineers who used machines to replicate in minutes or hours work that would require a journeyman hours or days to complete. Frederick Winslow Taylor, Frederick W. Taylor, recognizing the inefficiencies introduced by some production lines, proposed that by studying the motions and processes necessary to manufacture each component of a product, reorganizing the factory and manufacturing processes around workers, and paying workers piece rates would allow great gains in process efficiency. Scientific management, or "Taylorism" as it came to be known, was soon being applied by progressive city governments to make their urban areas more efficient and by suffragettes to home economics.
Increasing industrialization outpaced the supply of laborers able or willing to work in dangerous, low-paying, and dead-end jobs. However, the demand for low or unskilled jobs drove wages up and attracted waves of Irish, Italian, Polish, Russian, and Jewish immigrants who could earn more in America than in their homelands.
The earliest unions emerged before the Civil War as trade guilds composed of journeyman carpenters, masons, and other artisans who would engage in strikes to demand better hours and pay from their masters. All branches of government generally sought to stop labor from organizing into unions or from organizing strikes.
Banking, trading, and financial services
![NYSE-floor](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/01/NYSE-floor.jpg)
To finance the larger-scale enterprises required during this era, the Stockholder Corporation emerged as the dominant form of business organization. Corporations expanded by combining into trusts, and by creating single firms out of competing firms, known as monopolies.
Banking, investment, insurance, consulting, corporations, speculation, business cycle
Regulation
The Progressive movement and the Progressive Era that emerged from it was in part a reaction to excesses of the new industrial age. "Muckraker, Muckraking" journalists reported on a wide array of social issues, and the reaction of the public lent urgency to reforms that led to increased government regulation, such as the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 (pertaining to railroads), and the Meat Inspection Act and Pure Food and Drug Act (1906).
Military-industrial-academic complex
In the 20th century, the pace of technological developments increasingly became tied into a complex set of interactions between United State Congress, Congress, the industrial manufacturers, university research, and the United States military, military establishment. This set of relations, known more popularly as the "military-industrial complex," emerged because the military's unique technological demands, concentration of funding, large-scale application, and highly centralized control played a dominant role in driving technological innovation. Fundamental advances in medicine, physics, chemistry,
computing
Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and development of both hardware and software. Computing has scientific, e ...
, aviation, material science, naval architecture, and meteorology, among other fields, can be traced back to basic and applied research for military applications. Smokestack America became a nickname applied to traditional manufacturing core of U.S. industry, used to represent particular industries, regions, or towns.
Research universities
![Cornell Arts Quad 1919](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/Cornell_Arts_Quad_1919.jpg)
The Colonial Colleges, first universities in the United States were modeled on the liberal arts, liberal curricula of the University of Oxford, great University of Cambridge, English University of St Andrews, universities and were meant to educate clergymen and lawyers rather than teach vocational education, vocational skills or conduct scientific research. The United States Military Academy, U.S. Military Academy, established in 1811, broke the mold of traditional universities and military academies alike by including practical engineering-related subjects in its earliest curricula. By the middle of the 19th century, polytechnic institutes were being founded in increasing numbers to train students in the scientific and technical skills needed to design, build, and operate increasingly complex machines. In 1824, Stephen van Rensselaer established the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, first American institute granting a bachelor's degree in technical subjects and in the 1850s several Ivy League schools began to offer courses of study in scientific fields.
Congressional legislators, recognizing the increasing importance and prevalence of these eastern polytechnic schools, passed the 1862 Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act providing large grants of land that were to be used toward establishing and funding the educational institutions that would teach courses on military tactics, engineering, and agriculture. Many of the United States' List of land-grant universities, noted public research universities can trace their origins back to land grant colleges. Between 1900 and 1939, enrollments in post-secondary institutes increased from 238,000 to 1,494,000 and higher education had become so available and affordable that a college degree was increasingly required for scientific, engineering, and government jobs that previously only required only vocational or secondary education.
After World War II, the GI Bill caused university enrollments to explode as millions of veterans earned college degrees.
World War I and World War II
![B-29s dropping bombs](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/B-29s_dropping_bombs.jpg)
Great White fleet, Spanish–American War, tanks, machine gun, medicine, chemical weapons,
* Richard Jordan Gatling Gatling gun
* John T. Thompson Tommy gun
The introduction of the airplane to the battlefield was one of the most radical changes in the history of warfare. The Aviation history, history of flight spans hundreds of years and the distinction of building the Early flying machines, first flying machine is complicated, but in December 1903 the Wright Brothers achieved sustained, piloted, and controlled heavier-than-air flight. The Wright brothers had difficulty raising funding from the government and military, but after World War I began in 1914, airplanes quickly assumed great tactical importance for both sides (''see'' Aviation in World War I); the US government appropriated $640 million in 1917 to procure 20,000 airplanes for the war for aerial reconnaissance, dogfighting, and strategic bombing, aerial bombing. After the close of the war in 1918, the US government continued to fund peacetime aeronautical activities like airmail and the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, industrial, university, and military research continued to realize gains in the power, maneuverability, and reliability of airplanes: Charles Lindbergh completed a solo non-stop transatlantic flight in 1927, Wiley Post flew around the world in nine days in 1931, and Howard Hughes shattered flight airspeed records throughout the decade. In the 1930s, airline, passenger airlines boomed as a result of the Kelley Act, state and local governments began constructing airports to attract airlines, and the federal government began to United States government role in civil aviation, regulate air traffic control and NTSB, investigate aviation accidents and incidents.
Cold War and Space Race
![Aldrin Apollo 11 (narrow)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/Aldrin_Apollo_11_%28narrow%29.jpg)
The American physicist Robert Goddard (scientist), Robert Goddard was one of the first scientists to experiment with rocket propulsion systems. In his small laboratory in Worcester, Massachusetts, Goddard worked with liquid oxygen and gasoline to propel rockets into the Earth's atmosphere, atmosphere, and in 1926 successfully fired the world's first liquid-fuel rocket which reached a height of 12.5 meters. Over the next 10 years, Goddard's rockets achieved modest altitudes of nearly two kilometers, and interest in rocketry increased in the United States, Britain, Germany, and the Soviet Union.
At the close of World War II, both the American and Russian forces Operation Paperclip, recruited or smuggled top German scientists like Wernher von Braun back to their respective countries to continue defense-related work.
Expendable rockets provided the means for launching artificial satellites, as well as crewed spacecraft. In 1957 the
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national ...
launched the first satellite, Sputnik I, and the United States followed with Explorer I in 1958. The first crewed space flights were made in early 1961, first by Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin and then by American astronaut Alan Shepard.
From those first tentative steps, to the 1969 Apollo program landing on the Moon, to the reusable Space Shuttle, the American space program has brought forth a breathtaking display of applied science. Communications satellites transmit computer data, telephone calls, and radio and television broadcasts. Weather satellites furnish the data necessary to provide early warnings of severe storms.
Service industry
Health care and biotechnology
![Baden Tower ctv vidman](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/85/Baden_Tower_ctv_vidman.ca.JPG)
As in physics and chemistry, Americans have dominated the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine since World War II. The private sector has been the focal point for biomedical research in the United States, and has played a key role in this achievement. As of 2000, for-profit industry funded 57%, non-profit private organizations funded 7%, and the tax-funded National Institutes of Health funded 36% of medical research in the U.S. Funding by private industry increased 102% from 1994 to 2003.
The National Institutes of Health consists of 24 separate institutes supporting the prevention, detection, diagnosis, and treatment of diseases and disability, disabilities. At any given time, grants from the NIH support the research of about 35,000 principal investigators, working in every US state and several foreign countries. Between 1971 and 1991, mortality from heart disease dropped 41 percent, strokes decreased by 59 percent, and today more than 70 percent of children who get cancer are cured.
Molecular genetics and genomics research have revolutionized biomedical sciences. In the 1980s and 1990s, researchers performed the first trial of gene therapy in humans and are now able to locate, identify, and describe the function of many genes in the human genome.
Research conducted by universities, hospitals, and corporations also contributes to improvement in diagnosis and treatment of disease. NIH funded the basic HIV/AIDS research, research on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (HIV/AIDS), for example. Many of the HIV/AIDS treatment, drugs used to treat this disease have emerged from the laboratories of the American pharmaceutical industry.
News, media, and entertainment
Radio, television, newspapers, movies, music, games
Technology and society
This section discusses technology, scientific studies, engineering, and overall impact.
Computers and information networks
![Firefox2](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/Firefox2.png)
American researchers made fundamental advances in telecommunications and information technology. For example, AT&T's Bell Labs, Bell Laboratories spearheaded the American technological revolution with a series of inventions including the light emitting diode (LED), the transistor, the C (programming language), C programming language, and the UNIX computer operating system. SRI International and Xerox PARC in Silicon Valley helped give birth to the
personal computer
A personal computer (PC) is a multi-purpose microcomputer whose size, capabilities, and price make it feasible for individual use. Personal computers are intended to be operated directly by an end user, rather than by a computer expert or tec ...
industry, while DARPA, ARPA and NASA funded the development of the ARPANET and the Internet. Companies like IBM and Apple Computer developed
personal computer
A personal computer (PC) is a multi-purpose microcomputer whose size, capabilities, and price make it feasible for individual use. Personal computers are intended to be operated directly by an end user, rather than by a computer expert or tec ...
s while Microsoft created operating systems and office productivity software to run on them. With the growth of information on the World Wide Web, search companies like Yahoo! and Google developed technologies to sort and rank web pages based on relevance. The web also has become a site for computer-mediated social interactions and web services like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter are used by millions to communicate. Moore's Law, Miniaturization of computing technology and the increasing pervasiveness and speed of wireless networks had led to substantial adoption of mobile phones and increasingly powerful smartphones based on software platforms like Apple's iOS and Google's Android (operating system), Android.
See also
* Timeline of United States inventions
* Timeline of United States discoveries
* Timeline of electrical and electronic engineering
* List of African American inventors and scientists
* History of medicine in the United States
* Industrial Revolution in the United States
* National Inventors Hall of Fame
* NASA spinoff
* Science and technology in the United States
* United States Patent and Trademark Office
* Yankee ingenuity
References
Sources
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Further reading
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* John Servos, Servos, John W.
''Physical chemistry from Ostwald to Pauling : the making of a science in America'' Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1990.
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External links
Society for the History of TechnologyAmerican Memory from the Library of Congress - Technology & Industry
{{DEFAULTSORT:Technological And Industrial History Of The United States
History of science and technology in the United States,
Industrial history of the United States,
History of the United States by topic