Technological Innovations of the 19th Century

There was an age of innovation and invention between 1865 and 1900. In 1897 alone, there were almost 22,000 patents awarded. Thomas Edison’s revolutionary idea of the electric light bulb catalyzed more inventions of the time. The availability of light after sunset extended the work hours and greatly accelerated the industrialization process. Edison moved into a long wooden shed at Menlo Park, New Jersey and started putting his inventions on display. He envisioned his factory as a place where all kinds of creative work could be pooled and promoted. The Centennial International Exhibition of 1876 was held in Fairmount Park, Philadelphia in the commemoration of 100 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. More than a million visitors attended this centennial. To make room for all of the products exhibited, almost 200 buildings were constructed on the park grounds. This was an enormous exhibition to display the advances of the 19^th century in science, technology, music, art, manufacturing and mining.

Some of the technologies that were displayed are as follows:

• Steam Engine  
• John Bull steam locomotive  
• Automatic screw making machinery

Several consumer items were displayed including:
• Alexander Graham Bell's telephone 
• Remington Typographic Machine /typewriter  
• Heinz Ketchup  
• Wallace-Farmer Electric Dynamo  
• Hires Root Beer  
• Kudzu erosion control plant species

Source:

http://libwww.library.phila.gov/CenCol/

Philadelphia's 1876 Centennial Exhibition. Arcadia Publishing. ISBN 0-7385-3888-4.

Image Link: Opening Day http://www.phawker.com/page/401/

written by....Tasneem K. and Timothy H.

Alexander Graham Bell and the Telephone

      Alexander Graham Bell was born in Scotland in 1843. When he grew older he attended college in London and afterwards he became his father’s assistant where he taught the deaf by using “visible speech”. He was able to use his experience with deaf students and combine it with his education on producing complex sounds to later create the telephone. In 1874 Bell began experimenting with an ear and magnets. He theorized that he could take an electrical current and use it to change intensity as air density varies during sound production. This theory created the telephone. Bell began creating telephones with Thomas Watson. Together, Bell and Watson were able to transmit a music note in 1875 and the first sentence spoken over the phone was between them in 1876.  
     Alexander Bell was granted a patent for the electric speaking telephone and it was time to make the telephone available for the public. Bell presented at many public demonstrations; then finally in 1877 the first telephone was installed in a home. Eventually the Bell Telephone Company was formed and they were able to build the first long distance phone lines. After introducing the telephone to America, Bell traveled to England and France to show them his great new invention. France decided to reward Bell for his invention with ten thousand dollars which he used to create the Volta Laboratory. He used this lab in order to improve the telephone. The telephone was a remarkable invention which created an easy and efficient way to communicate. After Bell’s success with the telephone he continued to work with the deaf before he died in August of 1922.

Source:

"Alexander Graham Bell." Encyclopedia of World Biography. Vol. 2. 2^nd ed. Detroit: Gale, 2004. 129-131. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Gale. University of Texas at Arlington. 23 Sept. 2010 .

written by....Caitlin W.

Thomas A. Edison and the Phonograph

     Thomas A. Edison was an american inventor born in 1847 and during the Technical Revolution one of the great inventors who revolutionaized Communications. Edison worked on trains and railroad stations from a very young age and mastered the telegraph and Morse code by the age of 15.

     Among his many inventions the phonograph is a very important one that was invented with the purpose of playing back recorded telegraph messages through indentations on paper tape, which could later be sent over the telegraph repeatedly. This invention led him to relieve that a telephone message could also be recorded, and by speaking into a mouthpiece the vibrations were recorded onto a metal cilinder that would later play them back. His invention was a succes and was mentioned in several New York newspapers at the time.

     Thanks to this invention The Edison Speaking Phonograph Company was established in 1878, and brought great financial and public succes to Edison. However, he abandoned further research on the machine for many years to work on the incandescente lightbulb and Alexander Graham Bell continued thus winning the acclaimed Volta prize for the Telephone.

     Thomas A. Edison was one of the great american inventors who helped shape life all around the World and thanks to his inventions life periodically changed during the Industrial Revolution.

Sources:

The History of the Edison Cylinder Phonograph  

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/edhtml/edcyldr.html

The Inventions of Thomas Edison

http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/bledison.htm

Antique Edison Phonographs- A Beginners Guide

http://www.intertique.com/EdisonPhonographTutorial.html

Thomas Edison

http://www.officemuseum.com/dictating_machines.htm 

written by....Sara A.

Steel Making, Steam Engine, and Railroads

Steel Making

Steel has played a major part in the construction of America. Steel is a strong metal made with iron and carbon and can be used for almost anything from nails and eyeglass frames to the frames of cars and skyscrapers. Steel was made in the 18th century by layering charcoal and flat iron bars in a chest and setting it in a furnace for a week. During this time the iron took in the carbon from the charcoal. And the steel was formed. As years went by steel making became easier and today can be processed using either the Basic- Oxygen Furnace which takes about 45 minutes or the Electric Arc Furnace.

Steam Engine

"The wonderful progress of the present century is, in a very great degree, due to the invention and improvement of the steam engine, and to the ingenious application of its power to kinds of work that formerly taxed the physical energies of the human race."~Robert H. Thurston

Attempted by many, perfected by one. The steam Engine could be thought of as one of the most important inventions of industrial revolution. The concept behind the steam engine has been around for hundreds of years and all started with the Hero Engine named after the ancient writer Hero, although no one is positive if he was the true inventor of the machine. The man most commonly known for inventing the working steam engine was Thomas Newcomen in 1712. This steam engine has been so successful it is still being used today.

Railroads 

Just like the steam engine the concept for the railroad systems has been around for hundreds of years. It is said that the first forms of railroads were used by ancient Egyptians in the building of the pyramids. However the first record of it was back in 1630 when it was used to transport coals from the mines near New Castle, England. The railroads since then have evolved into one the most well known ways of transportation.

In 1827 Massachusetts became the first state to have a railroad, it was three miles long and went from the granite-quarries to the Neponset River. The second railroad was completed in May of 1827, was 9 miles and extended from the coal mines in Pennsylvania to the Lehigh River. Today the railroads stretches all across America.
 

Sources:

Steel Manufacturing: http://www.bsu.edu/web/acmaassel/steel.html

The Steam Engine: http://campus.udayton.edu/~hume/Steam/steam.htm
Railroads in America: http://www.history.rochester.edu/steam/brown/index.html
Pictures from Google Images


written by....Tiffany B.

Engineers

        Crucial to the process of advancement were Engineers, who mastered the technical aspects of construction and design. Many American engineers were trained in Germany, but others attended such schools as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) or Cornell University, in New York State.

Engineers used a technical process to facilitated the manufacture and marketing of foods and other consumer good. Distributors developed pressure-sealed cans, which enabled them to market agricultural products all over the country. Other innovative techniques were sheet metal, stamping, and electric resistance welding. By 1880, 90 percent of American steel was made by the Bessemer process, which injected air into molten iron to create steel.

Engineers also designed the bicycle (wheels of equal size) they used the American system to make their product affordable to almost anyone who wanted one. This resulted in the new form of transportation and recreation, one that could be enjoyed by both men and women. Later the production techniques that were used to build the bicycle, were also used to build the automobile.

Agriculture business also benefited from engineering innovations as well. Such as the modern irrigation system which was constructed by Native Americans and Mestizos. Than In 1870s Japan began importing American farm implements and inviting US Engineers to construct dams and canals for new steam and water powered gristmills and sawmills. Pg. 390 Pearson Etext.
          William LeBaron Jenney. He designed the ten-story Home Insurance Building in Chicago, the world’s first metal frame skyscraper. The steel skeleton weighed only one third as much as the thick stone walls needed to support a similar masonry building, and the design left room for numerous windows. Urban architecture would never be the same again. Pg. 397 Pearson Etext

William LeBaron Jenney, was born in Fairhaven, Mass in 1832. He served as an engineer officer in the Union Army during the American Civil War. He trained Louis Sullivan, William Holabird, Martin Roche, and Daniel Burnham.

Louis Sullivan, Was born in Boston in 1856. He is regarded as the spiritual father of modern American Architecture. He studied for a year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s architectural program, the first in the nation,. He dropped out to practice architecture, he worked with Frank Furness and then with William LeBaron Jenney in Chicago. He felt that he needed more education, he spent another year at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1874. When he returned to America in 1879 he joined Dankmar Adler’s firm in 1879 and two years later he became full partner in Adler and Sullivan. After the Great Fire of 1871 building had been booming. 

Louis Sullivan more than 100 works in collaboration with Dankmar Adler include the Auditorium Building, The Guaranty Building, in Buffalo, New York and Wainwright building, in St. Louis Missouri.

Sources:

http://media-2.web.britannica.com/eb-media/64/10664-004-A698BB7E.jpg

http://media-2.web.britannica.com/eb-media/28/58628-004-867B7058.jpg 

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/302587/William-Le-Baron-Jenney>

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/chicago/peopleevents/p_sullivan.html

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/572949/Louis-Sullivan
 

 written by....David O.

Labor issues and Immigration

During the stages of the Industrial Revolution, immigration to the United States produced more employment as mass production increased. Immigrants earned lower wages during the arrival to America and usually worked in factories as unskilled workers. As the population rose, many immigrants became the dominant working labor force. This led to the decline of skilled jobs in America along with raise in accidents in the factories. The long hours, unskilled workers, and overcrowding in the cities forced workers to produce labor unions in hopes of winning improvements in their jobs.   

With children and women making lower income from factories, they became the main source for employment in factories. Long hours and poor conditions inside the mills, factories, and coal mines endangered thousands of children lives every day. Orphans were often bought and sold to work in factories or whole families stayed in the factories to work in the cotton mills. Women and children in the cotton mills worried about incidents such as hair getting caught into the machines or falling asleep during work. The workplace became so unbearable that child law labor laws were soon pass to protect children from the harsh work hours and dangerous jobs.

Sources:

The Industrial Revolution and the Progressive Era: 1877-1913:http://www.kentlaw.edu/ilhs/curricul.htm#6

The History Place By Lewis Hines:http://www.historyplace.com/unitedstates/childlabor/about.htm

Child Abuse—A History - Abuse During The Industrial Revolution http://www.libraryindex.com/pages/1361/Child-Abuse-History-ABUSE-DURING-INDUSTRIAL-REVOLUTION.html

written by....Arthur H.

Agricultural Production

     The many agricultural improvements during the turn of the 19th century made life a lot easier for a lot of farmers. Tools such as the steel plow made it possible for settlers on the Great Plains to cultivate the hard sod on the prairies of the central United States. Mechanized machinery such as the Reaper, the moldboard plow, disk harrow, grain drill, grain binder, grain header, threshing machine, and later the tractor would allow farmers to produce more efficiently. The time and manpower needed to produce the same amount of crops was drastically reduced by these innovations, and allowed the United States to become a world leader in the production of grain, rice, and other commercial crops. Cash crops were now farmed by small-time farmers, sharecroppers and large commercial farming organizations alike.

     The agricultural innovations of this period included not only farming tools, but the methods used for farming were also improved. New methods of crop rotation, which allowed one crop to replenish the lost nutrients removed by the previous crop, were borrowed from British Agriculturalist Charles Townshend, or local Biotechnologists such as George Washington Carver.

     The first commercially used grain elevator was invented by a merchant named Joseph Dart and an engineer named Robert Dunbar during 1842–43. The elevators were built as a place to offload grain or rice from a vehicle to be stored for later distribution. Automatic arms were added to speed up the process and allowed faster offload speeds from large vehicles such as ships. The elevators led to a number of silos for storage till needed. The storage silos could then be offloaded to ocean-going vessels bound for other countries or down river barges, to land-based carriers such as railroads, or wagons and trucks for shipment cross-country. This greatly increased the rate of grain trade in the US, and also aided in making the US a world supplier of food.

     Inventions such as the Steel Windmill, which used the wind to power a pump to draw water from the ground, was also a much needed invention in the dry Great Plains area of the country. The droughts that plagued the central US farming population often meant entire crops would be destroyed. Before the invention of the Windmill, farmers were at the mercy of the weather, and often moved back east to Illinois or Missouri rather than take a risk on the dry Great Plains.

Sources:

1. Hultstrand, Fred. 189-? Old breaking plows used in pioneer days. Fred Hultstrand History in Pictures Collection, NDIRS-NDSU, North Dakota. Photograph. Gift; Verwest, Donna Jean 1969. http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award97/ndfahtml/ngphome.html Sept. 29, 2010.

2. Hultstrand, Fred. 1908. Fred Hultstrand plowing with the big plow, Fairdale, North Dakota, 1908 : using a four bottom plow and eight horses. Fred Hultstrand History in Pictures Collection, NDIRS-NDSU, North Dakota. Photograph. Gift; Verwest, Donna Jean 1969. http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award97/ndfahtml/ngphome.html Sept. 29, 2010.

3. Pazandak, F.A. 1910. Jack Anderson's Minneapolis steamer pulling John Deere plow in virgin sod : Fullerton, North Dakota. F.A. Pazandak Photograph Collection, NDIRS-NDSU, Fargo. Gift; Rumelhart, Elaine P. 1983. http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award97/ndfahtml/ngphome.html Sept. 29, 2010.

4. Hultstrand, Fred. 1909. Four binders cutting grain on Anders Hultstrand farm : Fairdale, North Dakota, 1909. Fred Hultstrand History in Pictures Collection, NDIRS-NDSU, North Dakota. Photograph. Gift; Verwest, Donna Jean 1969. http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award97/ndfahtml/ngphome.html Sept. 29, 2010.

written by....Nathan C.

Urbanization

During the latter half of the 19^th century, America experienced rapid urbanization. Earlier a very small population was based in urban cities, and most of the population was rural, but several factors led to urbanization which had an impact on society. The industrial revolution changed the face of the country from an agricultural country to a commercial industrial powerhouse. As industries developed, many agricultural machinery was formed which required less labor on the farms which caused a lot of population to shift from the rural farms to urban areas.

In large cities, shopping for luxury goods became a pass time experience for the rich and wealthy, elaborate shops “palaces of consumption,” made shopping an exciting experience for the customers. This experience was only an urban phenomenon, however mass merchandising reached into the rural areas with the advent of the mail-order catalog. (page 389 – Created Equal)

Montgomery Ward started the world’s first mail-order catalog business in 1872. Before the mail-order catalog customers were forced to buy what they would get at the general stores, which was limited. The first mail-order catalog in had 162 items, which included novelties like hoop skirts, grain bags, etc. By 1883 this catalog had grown into 240 pages long containing thousands of items. One of Ward’s earliest rival was Richard Sears. Together with Alvah Roebuck Sears, Roebuck & Co. was created in 1892 and they mailed their first catalog in 1893. This business started out as a watch business but later included products extending from clothing to housing. Sears had become so huge that time that it was alone responsible for 1% of United States Gross National Product. Another famous entrepreneur was Hammacher Schlemmer. He used to a run a hardware store in New York and the first mail-order catalog was sent by him in 1881. In the early 1900’s there were no service stations so the catalog used to offer a Motorist Touring Kit so that drivers could fix their flat tires and other small repairs. Other companies which were formed included J.C Penny, Abercrombie and Fitch, Collin Street Bakery and many more. However many of these did not provide mail-order catalog till the early to mid 20^th century. With the introduction of several other companies providing mail-order catalogs, the mail-order catalog rose to become a $100 billion industry.

Source:

Cherry, Robin. Catalog: an illustrated history of mail-order shopping. Illustrated. Princeton Architectural Press, 2008. 

written by....Kevin K.