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The Toothbrush. Huckleberry Finn. As late as , fully one-half of all Americans still lived and worked on farms, whereas fewer than one in seven—mostly men, except for long-established textile factories in which female employees tended to dominate—were employed in factories. However, the development of commercial electricity by the close of the century, to complement the steam engines that already existed in many larger factories, permitted more industries to concentrate in cities, away from the previously essential water power.
In turn, newly arrived immigrants sought employment in new urban factories. Immigration, urbanization, and industrialization coincided to transform the face of American society from primarily rural to significantly urban.
From to , the number of industrial workers in the nation quadrupled from 2. Advertisements of the late nineteenth century promoted the higher quality and lower prices that people could expect from new inventions.
Here, a knitting factory promotes the fact that its machines make seamless hose, while still acknowledging the traditional role of women in the garment industry, from grandmothers who used to sew by hand to young women who now used machines. In offices, worker productivity benefited from the typewriter, invented in , the cash register, invented in , and the adding machine, invented in These tools made it easier than ever to keep up with the rapid pace of business growth.
Inventions also slowly transformed home life. The vacuum cleaner arrived during this era, as well as the flush toilet. Women who had the means to purchase such items could use their time to seek other employment outside of the home, as well as broaden their knowledge through education and reading.
Such a transformation did not occur overnight, as these inventions also increased expectations for women to remain tied to the home and their domestic chores; slowly, the culture of domesticity changed. Perhaps the most important industrial advancement of the era came in the production of steel. Manufacturers and builders preferred steel to iron, due to its increased strength and durability. After the Civil War, two new processes allowed for the creation of furnaces large enough and hot enough to melt the wrought iron needed to produce large quantities of steel at increasingly cheaper prices.
The Bessemer process, named for English inventor Henry Bessemer, and the open-hearth process, changed the way the United States produced steel and, in doing so, led the country into a new industrialized age. As the new material became more available, builders eagerly sought it out, a demand that steel mill owners were happy to supply.
In , the country produced thirteen thousand tons of steel. By , American furnaces were producing over one million tons per year; by , this figure had risen to ten million. The Second Industrial Revolution , which lasted from the late s to the early s, saw a surge of new technology and inventions that led to dramatic changes in the economy and how people lived and worked in Europe, Great Britain and especially the United States.
Steel mills, chemical plants and massive factories pumped out vast quantities of consumer goods, electric light and power advanced and new forms of transportation and communication connected people more than ever before. Mechanized farm equipment changed how food was produced, and transformed agriculture into a big industry. It also was a period when innovators dared to dream big and take great risks, either by devising new inventions or finding ways to make existing products more efficiently.
As a result, some made enormous fortunes. Trains were invented before the Second Industrial Revolution, but there were frequent accidents because slowing and stopping them was a cumbersome process. Then came George Westinghouse, a largely self-taught engineer who dropped out of college after three months because he was too busy inventing things.
Thomas Edison exhibiting a replica of his first successful incandescent lamp, which gave 16 candlepower of illumination, in contrast to the 50, watt, , candlepower lamp.
Thomas Edison, perhaps the most famous inventor in American history, created many of his numerous innovations , from the phonograph and the movie camera to the alkaline storage battery, during the Second Industrial Revolution. From the first automobile to electric cars: The Daimler AG's history. We want to make our website more user-friendly and continuously improve it. If you continue to use the website, you agree to the use of cookies. What are you looking for? Try different keywords Try it with general keywords.
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