6.5 Technological Innovation

• Natural resources: iron ore around Lake Superior, coal in Pennsylvania and Appalachia, oil in western Pennsylvania (the first commercial well was drilled at Titusville in 1859), timber and copper.
• Labor: millions of immigrants and rural Americans needed jobs.
• Capital: investors, banks and wartime fortunes paid for new factories.
• A national market: railroads connected the whole country, so a factory in Chicago could sell in Boston or San Francisco.
• Friendly government: high protective tariffs, land grants and courts that favored business.

The Bessemer process, developed in the 1850s by Henry Bessemer in England (and around the same time by William Kelly in the U.S.), blasts air through molten iron to burn off impurities, turning it into steel quickly and cheaply. Later the open-hearth process made even better steel. By about 1890 the U.S. made more steel than Britain.

Cheap steel built stronger rails, bridges like the Brooklyn Bridge (1883), skyscrapers and machines. Railroads became the first truly big businesses and were the biggest customers for steel. They pushed standardization too: in 1883 the major railroads adopted standard time zones, and in 1886 Southern lines switched to the standard track width used elsewhere.

The telegraph, already in use before the war, carried news and prices instantly across the country, and an undersea cable linked the U.S. and Europe in 1866. Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone in 1876, and business offices quickly adopted it. The typewriter opened office jobs to many young women.

Thomas Edison set up an 'invention factory' at Menlo Park, New Jersey, a lab where teams of researchers developed products. He produced a practical incandescent light bulb in 1879, and his Pearl Street Station in New York (1882) was among the first central power plants. George Westinghouse promoted alternating current, which could carry electricity over longer distances. Electric motors and streetcars soon transformed factories and cities.

Gustavus Swift used refrigerated railcars to ship butchered meat from Chicago's packing plants to Eastern cities. Fresh meat became cheaper, and local butchers lost business. Canned food, ready-made clothing and mass-produced goods filled stores.

Mail-order catalogs from Montgomery Ward and later Sears let rural families buy factory goods by mail. Department stores in cities sold to the growing middle class (6.10).

Technology also changed work. Machines replaced many skilled craftsmen with semi-skilled operators who repeated simple tasks. This is a key reason workers organized (6.7).

Historians call this wave of change, based on steel, chemicals, oil and electricity, the Second Industrial Revolution. The first one, in the early 1800s, was based on textiles, steam and canals (4.5). The difference is scale: the second created giant national companies and the modern consumer economy.