Quia



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TELEGRAPH/MORSE CODE

Early Telegraph

First invented in 1774, the telegraph was a bulky and impractical machine that was designed to transmit over twenty-six electrical wires. Samuel Morse reduced that unwieldy bundle of wires into a single one.

Morse Code

Along with the single-wire telegraph, Morse developed his "Morse" code. He would refine it to employ a short signal (the dot) and a long one (the dash) in combinations to spell out messages. After lean, difficult years of lobbying, financial struggle, and technical improvements, Morse secured funding from Congress to build wires across the United States, and received a patent for his invention in 1844.

Following the routes of the quickly-spreading railroads, telegraph wires were strung across the nation and eventually, across the Atlantic Ocean, providing a nearly-instant means of communication between communities for the first time. Newspapers joined forces as the Associated Press, to pool payments for telegraphed news from foreign locales. Railroads used the telegraph to coordinate train schedules and safety signaling. President Abraham Lincoln received battle reports at the White House via telegraph during the Civil War. And ordinary people used it to send important messages to loved ones as they traveled far from home in the decades of America's busiest western expansion.

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SEWING MACHINE

Isaac Singer invented the first practical, commercially-successful sewing. It was the first practical replacement for hand-sewing, and it could sew 900 stitches per minute, a dramatic improvement over an accomplished seamstress's rate of 40 stitches a minute on simple work. While the first Singer machines were relatively expensive and bulky, the inventor soon adopted a mass-production system of interchangeable parts, and worked to reduce the machines in size and weight. From the start, he looked past the commercial market into households, aiming to sell to housewives. After a series of refinements, Singer was able to sell his machines for $10 each, making them accessible symbols of status and self-reliance for the average American family.

Eli Whitney

Cotton Gin

In popular mythology, Eli Whitney has been deemed the "father of American technology," for two innovations: the cotton gin, and the idea of using interchangeable parts.

Young Entrepreneur

Eli Whitney grew up on a Massachusetts farm. After working his way through college at Yale, Whitney moved to South Carolina. There he saw how hard it was to separate the green seeds from short-staple cotton. In just a few days in 1793, he invented a machine that could do the task ten times faster than a slave doing the work by hand. The cotton gin revolutionized agriculture. It also made possible the cotton economy of the American South, perpetuating and increasing the practice of slavery upon which the agricultural system depended.

INTERCHANGEABLE PARTS

Eli Whitney

Manufacturing System

In 1798, Whitney launched a new venture: arms manufacturing. Once again he delivered something necessary and innovative: arms that he claimed he could produce more efficiently with the help of machines. His idea of machine-made, interchangeable parts was the beginning of what would become known as the "American system" of mass production. Although other Americans would create this system in their industries, it was Whitney who popularized the idea and was instrumental in lobbying politicians to pass legislation to standardize arms production.

Diligence, Sobriety, Thrift

Whitney was also one of the first Americans to marry the ideas of republicanism and technological progress. A shrewd employer, Whitney advanced the paternalistic factory system that would characterize the American industrial revolution by linking economic progress with the Puritanical attributes of diligence, sobriety, and thrift.

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Bessemer Steel Process

Bessemer Converter

The squat, egg-shaped Bessemer converter seemed an unlikely candidate to lead a revolution in manufacturing. Yet when it roared to life in a geyser of flame, nothing could be more beautiful or more terrible.

The device invented by Henry Bessemer transformed pig iron into steel, a process previously managed by highly skilled artisans working with small batches. With the Bessemer converter, relatively unskilled men could make vast quantities of steel cheaply. Andrew Carnegie invested heavily in the converters, installing them in his Edgar Thomson Steel Works at Braddock, PA.

In August 1875, the Bessemers at Edgar Thomson made their first blow. Cold air shot through the bottom of the vessels and through the molten iron. The heat increased tremendously, burning out impurities in the iron and forming steel. The process was simple, but the effect was extraordinary.

The Steam Engine

Although Robert Fulton did not invent the steamboat, as is commonly believed, he was instrumental in making steamboat travel a reality.

New Career

Fulton ventured into London society after he painted Benjamin Franklin's portrait. While abroad, Fulton left the arts for a career in canal and shipbuilding. He was interested in the recently-invented steam engine, and thought it could be used to power ships. Fulton's vision was not original, but like Henry Ford, Fulton's genius lay not in invention but in adaptation for the marketplace.

Steamboat Service

To build an efficient, reliable steamboat, Fulton used a special English steam engine. The hilly terrain of New York made water travel faster than land travel, and Fulton's boat was a hit. Within five years, Fulton would be running services on six major rivers plus the Chesapeake Bay, and raking in the profits.

Fulton's innovation left quite a legacy. Steamboat travel was instrumental to the industrial revolution in America, helping manufacturers transport raw materials and finished goods quickly. It also opened up the American continent to exploration, settlement, and exploitation.

TEXTILE MILLS/FACTORIES

In just six years, Francis Cabot Lowell built up an American textile manufacturing industry. On a trip to England at age 36, he was impressed by British textile mills. Like Samuel Slater before him, Lowell was inspired to create his own manufacturing enterprise in the United States.

Integrated Manufacturing

The company built a tall brick mill building next to the Charles River in Waltham, Massachusetts, incorporating various mechanization technologies to convert raw cotton into cloth. Waltham cloth gained immediate popularity.

Mill Girls

Another of Lowell's innovations was in hiring young farm girls to work in the mill. He paid them lower wages than men, but offered benefits that many girls, some as young as 15, were eager to earn. Mill girls lived in clean company boardinghouses with chaperones, were paid cash, and benefitted from religious and educational activities. Waltham boomed as workers flocked to Lowell's novel enterprise.

TRAIN/LOCOMOTIVE

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The visionary who finally got the Transcontinental Railroad project underway was a a West Coast-based designer and builder of railways, Theodore Judah. In the summer of 1860 he picked a route through the wilderness of California's Sierra Nevadas and began looking for investors. A few years later the Central Pacific Railroad with four major private investors and some funding from Congress began the awesome task of laying track through the mountains. In bitter cold and blazing heat, workers built scores of bridges and trestles and drilled thousands of feet of tunnel while advancing 690 miles across some of the roughest terrain in America. Crucial to their success were the efforts of Chinese laborers who risked their lives to blast their way through granite cliffs.

Advancing from the east was the Union Pacific which built westward across plains and deserts, braving blizzards and raids by displaced Native Americans to complete the 1,086-mile journey from Omaha, Nebraska.

When it was completed, the railroad transformed America. It unleashed a tidal wave of growth as immigrants moved west. Thousands of towns materialized in the corridor created by the railway. Transcontinental trains fostered a new agricultural empire by bringing farming machinery to the West, and carrying crops and livestock to the coasts. And the line gave birth to other lines -- three additional transcontinental railroads in 20 years. The railroad also profoundly affected the national psychology, creating a new spirit of optimism and unity.

STEEL PLOW

In 1837, John Deere was a typical blacksmith turning out hayforks, horseshoes, and other essentials for life on the prairie.

Then one day, a broken steel sawmill blade gave him an opportunity. He knew that days in the field were difficult for farmers near his home in Grand Detour, Illinois, because they had to interrupt their work to clean the sticky prairie soil off of their cast-iron plows. He also knew that the soil would slide easily off of a highly polished steel moldboard.

Deere and an associate designed a series of farm plows. In 1837, on his own, John Deere designed the first cast steel plow that greatly assisted the Great Plains farmers. The large plows made for cutting the tough prairie ground were called "grasshopper plows." The plow was made of wrought iron and had a steel share that could cut through sticky soil without clogging. By 1855, John Deere's factory was selling over 10,000 steel plows a year. 

In 1868, John Deere's business was incorporated as Deere & Company, which is still in existence today. 

John Deere became a millionaire selling his steel plows.

MECHANICAL REAPER

Cyrus McCormick took over his father's project of designing a mechanical reaper. Working on his family's Virginia farm, McCormick implemented features of the machine that remain in use today. In 1834, in the face of competition from other inventors, McCormick took out a patent and soon after, began manufacturing the reaper himself.

Midwestern Gamble

The mechanical reaper was an important step in the mechanization of agriculture during the nineteenth century. Before the reaper, the amount of grain that could be cut by hand during the short harvest season limited both food supply and farm sizes. McCormick's reaper would free farm laborers to work in factories in the expanding industrial revolution.

"Work, Work, Work"

McCormick single-mindedly devoted himself to work. In 1848 his factory made 500 reapers; in 1851 it produced a thousand; by 1857 it was turning out 23,000. Continuously introducing improvements, McCormick launched new models every year, as car dealers do today. He offered money-back guarantees and credit to struggling farmers, saying, "It is better that I should wait for the money than that you should wait for the machine that you need." His company would combine with others to become the International Harvester Company two decades after his death.

CLIPPER SHIPS

In the United States, "clipper" referred to the Baltimore clipper, a topsail schooner developed in Chesapeake Bay before the American Revolution. It was lightly armed in the War of 1812, sailing under Letters of Marque and Reprisal, when the type — exemplified by Chasseur, launched at Fells Point, Baltimore in 1814 — became known for her incredible speed.

Clippers, running the British blockade of Baltimore, came to be recognized for speed rather than cargo space. Clippers were built for seasonal trades such as tea, where an early cargo was more valuable, or for passenger routes. The small, fast ships were ideally suited to low-volume, high-profit goods, such as spices, tea, people, and mail. The values could be spectacular.

Competition among the clippers was public and fierce, with their times recorded in the newspapers. The ships had low expected lifetimes and rarely outlasted two decades of use before they were broken up for salvage. Given their speed and maneuverability, clippers frequently mounted cannon or carronade and were often employed in piracy, privateering, smuggling, or interdiction service.

COLT SIX SHOOTER

Multiple Shots

In 1835, Samuel Colt took out his first patent and founded the Patent Arms Company in Paterson, New Jersey. His pistol was different from others; its design allowed several shots to be fired in succession without reloading. A single-shot weapon took 20 seconds to reload -- a dangerous interval, especially for frontiersmen and soldiers fighting Indians who could fire six arrows in that time. Army officers used Colt's weapon in the 1830s, but production defects prevented widespread approval of the firearm. Colt would resolve to improve manufacturing, and by 1848 his guns would be safer.

War-Tested

Colt received a boost in sales during the Texas Revolution and the Mexican American War. His weapons contributed to the U.S. Army's success, and to the resulting westward expansion of American territory. A Texas Ranger, Captain Samuel Walker, wrote Colt a testimonial that read, in part:"Your pistols...[are] the most perfect weapon in the World... to keep the various warlike tribes of Indians and marauding Mexicans in subjection."

His slogans included, "God created men equal, Col. Colt made them equal..."

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