The Industrial Revolution began in England in the early eighteenth century, and developed later in the United States, around the time of the
American Revolution (1775–83). Over a period of about one hundred
years, machines in the United States gradually replaced unaided human
hands in accomplishing the nation’s work. With the use of labor-saving
machines, the nation was able to produce goods on a large scale, build
factories and plants, transport large quantities of raw and manufactured
goods, farm on a much grander scale, and establish corporations and
management systems to accommodate large-scale production. Industry
transformed the United States from a rural farming society into the
wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world.
Industrial Revolution in England
During the seventeenth century, England had a dramatic increase in
population. Its farming economy could not support the large numbers
of people, and the poor were forced to move to the cities to seek work.
The cities desperately needed larger food supplies to feed their growing populations. The answer to the problem appeared in the form of new designs for farm machinery that could do large amounts of work with fewer
laborers.
Machinery was also providing jobs in the cities and towns of
England, where many former farm laborers found work in the textile
(cloth-making) industry. In earlier times, cloth had been spun and
woven in people’s homes, but in 1730 new machines were invented that
sped up the pace of spinning thread and weaving material. Around 1771,
English inventor Richard Arkwright (1732–1792) built a waterwheeloperated mill to power his spinning frame, and this was considered the
world’s first factory. (A factory is a building or group of buildings in
which many people work to manufacture goods, generally with laborsaving machines powered by a central source.)
The steam engine was the vital new power source of the Industrial
Revolution. A steam engine burns wood or other fuel to heat water into
steam, which in turn becomes the power that turns the parts of the engine. Early steam engines were designed to pump water from the English
mines in the seventeenth century. In 1765, Scottish engineer James Watt
(1736–1819) improved the designs. Watt’s new steam engine could be
used to power mills, so factories no longer needed to be near a source of
moving water to power a waterwheel. By the last decade of the eighteenth century, steam engine–powered factories were being built
throughout England. Using steam engines, iron and steel production became a thriving new industry.
Early U.S. textile industry
In 1789, British textile mill supervisor Samuel Slater (1768–1835) secretly memorized the details of the Arkwright spinning factory and emigrated to the United States. Once there, he designed and built the
machinery for a cotton mill in Rhode Island. The mill went into operation in 1793. By 1828, Slater owned three factory compounds in
Massachusetts.
In 1810, Boston businessman Francis Cabot Lowell (1775–1817)
visited England’s textile mills. After returning home, he enlisted the aid
of a skilled mechanic and created a water-powered textile mill. At Lowell
Mills, for the first time in the United States, raw
bales of cotton could be turned into bolts of
cloth under one roof. Lowell’s company went on
to build a complete factory town in Lowell,
Massachusetts. The new, mechanized textile industry prospered and grew, employing thousands of workers, mainly in the Northeast.
Transportation
In the first years of the new nation, the majority
of Americans lived within one hundred miles of
the East Coast, but as the nineteenth century
began, people began to migrate west. Farmers in
the West needed manufactured goods from the
East, and easterners needed the crops from the
West and South. There were few roads, and it
was expensive and time-consuming to transport
goods. Building transportation systems in such a huge territory was a daunting project, but over the next fifty years, roads,
canals, steamboats, and railroads spread throughout the nation.
In 1817, Congress authorized the construction of the National
Road, also called the Cumberland Road, from western Maryland to the
Ohio River at Wheeling, Virginia. It was the first road to run across the
Appalachian Mountains and into the territory known as the Old
Northwest, which was composed of the modern-day states of Ohio,
Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The Old Northwest
Territory produced a large portion of the country’s crops. The National
Road was the largest single road-building project to occur before the
twentieth century.
Most of the country relied not on roads, but on the nation’s rivers to
transport goods. In the first half of the nineteenth century, most of the
produce grown in the Old Northwest Territory was carried to market by
man-powered boats on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. In the 1830s,
steamboats (boats powered by steam engines) crowded the inland waterways of the United States. They expanded trade to towns and cities located along the major waterways. Steamboat construction became a
thriving industry.
Still, many of the best farming districts in the Old Northwest had
no river access. Canals, man-made waterways built for inland transportation, seemed to provide a solution. In 1817, the state of New York approved the funding of the Erie Canal, a 363-mile canal linking Albany
on the Hudson River with Buffalo, New York, on Lake Erie. Upon its
completion in 1825, the Erie Canal was already carrying monumental
traffic. It proved an inexpensive route for shipping goods from the West,
such as lumber and grain, to the New York ports, and for bringing manufactured goods from the Northeast to the West. New towns and industries were quickly established along the canal and on the Great Lakes.
Many states rushed to build their own canals, but railroads soon emerged
to compete in the long-distance transportation business.
Steam locomotives had already developed in England when a group
of businessmen in Baltimore, Maryland, decided to launch the first U.S.
railway, the Baltimore and Ohio (B & O) in 1826. By the early 1850s,
several railroads had established lines that allowed them to transport
freight between the Great Lakes region and the East Coast, and new railroad construction projects developed across the eastern United States.
The explosive growth of the railroad industry in the eastern states, coupled with the potential wealth in the country’s western territories, convinced growing numbers of people that a railroad stretching from coast
to coast should be built. The effort was hampered by the American Civil
War (1861–65), but on May 10, 1869, the rail lines of the Central
Pacific and the Union Pacific were finally joined in Utah, completing the
transcontinental railroad.
Farming
In the beginning of the nineteenth century, the vast majority of
Americans were farmers. For the nation to become industrialized, it was
essential that most farmers run commercial farms—farms that produced
large crops to be sold—rather than subsistence farms, which provided
food only for the use of the farmer and his family. The nation’s crops,
particularly wheat and cotton, were needed to feed the working people
in the cities and to provide the factories with materials for manufactured
goods. There was enough farmland to meet the demand for these crops
in the United States, but there were not enough laborers until mechanized farming was introduced.
Eli Whitney (1765–1825) brought mechanized farming to the
United States with his cotton gin. The simple machine cleaned cottonseeds from cotton fibers fifty times faster than a worker could do it by
hand. Soon, southern plantations and farms were supplying huge
amounts of cotton to the new textile mills in the Northeast and to
Europe. Other mechanized farm tools followed, such as the McCormick
reaper and the steel plow.
The efficient new tools actually damaged the financial situations of
many farming families in the 1880s and 1890s. Record crop yields resulted
in lower prices while production costs increased, a combination that threw
many farmers into debt. Farmers’ alliances arose, calling for reform.
Robber barons
The United States’s tremendous industrial and financial growth in the
last decades of the nineteenth century was due in large part to the entrepreneurial boldness and business instincts of a number of industrial and
financial tycoons who came to be known as robber barons. J. P.
Morgan (1837–1913), John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937), Cornelius
Vanderbilt (1794–1877), Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919), James J. Hill (1838–1916), Jay Gould (1836–1892), and others guided their business
interests to levels of profitability that had never been seen before.
The monopolies (exclusive controls over the production of a particular good or service) of the robber barons enabled them to eliminate less
powerful competitors, raise prices, and subsequently realize huge profits
that were pumped back into their businesses. In 1890, the Sherman
Antitrust Act was enacted in an effort to curb the power of the robber
barons. But these men and their huge companies continued to dominate
the U.S. economy.
Life in the city
The rural farm culture of the United States gave way to urban industrial
culture as manufacturing plants multiplied and cities mushroomed in
size. The nation’s urban population rose 400 percent between 1870 and
1910, creating an urbanization of America. Large numbers of farmers
moved to the city after the agricultural depression of the 1870s and
1880s. Joining them were an increasing number of immigrants from
eastern and southern Europe. All were seeking work.
Cities of the late nineteenth century generally grew without planning. Living conditions were often deplorable, with thousands of families forced to reside in slums that were breeding grounds for infectious
diseases. Crime was rampant: In 1881, the homicide rate in the United
States was 25 per million; in 1898, the rate had risen to 107 per million.
Child labor was common as well; in 1900, as many as three million U.S.
children were forced to work full-time to help support their families.
Poverty was hard to escape for urban laborers. Layoffs were common; as
much as 30 percent of the urban work force was out of work for some
period of each year.
By the 1880s and 1890s, the gulf between social classes had dramatically widened. In cities such as New York and Chicago, the fabulously
wealthy built huge, elaborate mansions that overlooked desperately poor
slums. The term “Gilded Age,” coined by writer Samuel Clemens
(1835–1910), came into common usage to describe the corruption and
the false glitter of the era’s wealthy. Reform efforts at the end of the century began a slow process to relieve the worst aspects of the division between the laboring classes and the social elite.