An Explosion of Technology!
1793 -- cotton ‘gin – cotton engine (Eli Whitney)
1800 -- precision-made interchangeable parts
1804 – conveyer belt (Oliver Evans)
1834 – mechanical reaper (Cyrus McCormick)
1837 – all steel plow (John Deere)
1844 – Samuel Morse perfected the telegraph & Morse Code -- “What hath God wrought!”
1866 – 1st trans-Atlantic cable laid
1870 – 100,000 miles of telegraph wires crossed the USA, 9 million telegraph messages annually
1900 – more than 900,000 miles of telegraph wires, w/more than 63 million messages sent a year
1896 – Guglielmo Marconi creates wireless telegraph – made possible radio code communication w/out any
cables
1860 – mail took 10 days to get from the East Coast to the Midwest, and weeks to get to the Far West
Mail from Europe could take months
1846 Elias Howe patents first automatic sewing machine
1851 Isaac Singer patents first home automatic sewing machine
1889 1stelectric sewing machine introduced by Singer Sewing Machine Company – created “ready-made”
clothing industry
1862 – mass production of shoes begins b/c of Gordon McKay’s shoe-stitching machinery
Railroads
Creation of uniform time zones
Lower transport costs =d lower production costs
Creation of NATONAL instead of LOCAL markets
1880 – George Pullman develops Pullman sleeping car
Creation of STEEL industry (to replace IRON rails) – steel is stronger, lighter, more flexible
1867 – typewriter invented (Sholes, Soule, and Glidden)
1876 Thomas Edison and his “invention factory” in Menlo Park, NJ – Edison patents over 1,000 new inventions
1877 – Edison patents phonograph
1880 Edison first created viable electric light bulb
1885 George Westinghouse and alternating current & transformers – allowed electricity to be generated
cheaply, reliably, and over long distances
1893 Edison patents motion picture machine
1882 – 1st power plant opens in NYC
1852 Elisha Otis – 1st safe & practical elevator
Made building skyscrapers possible
1885 – 1st skyscraper built (in Chicago, 10 stories high)
1859 – A & P founded – 1st grocery (food) chain store-- allowed store to buy in bulk and lower costs for customers
1930s – 1st supermarket chains open – large, self-service stores where customers can pick their own groceries
off the shelves
1862 – “Buyers’ Palaces” -- 1st department store opens in NYC (Alexander Stewart)
1865 – 1st department store opens in Chicago (Marshall Field’s)
1872 – 1st mail order catalogue store, Montgomery Ward’s
1879 – the 1st “Five and Dime” variety chain stores open (Frank Woolworth’s)
1895 – 2nd mail order catalogue stores (Sears, Roebuck)
1862 – Richard Gatling perfects rapid-fire, revolving machine gun
1876 – Alexander Graham Bell & the “talking telegraph”
1878 – 1st commercial telephone system (New Haven, CT)
1880 – 148 telephone companies in operation
1895 – long distance telephone service starts between NYC and Chicago
1888 – George Eastman invents simple to use Kodak camera
1902 – 1st voice messages transmitted via radio waves (Reginald Fessenden)
1920 – 1st commercial radio stations on-air (Detroit and Pittsburgh)
1902 – RAYON (a synthetic fabric) and artificial silk developed (Arthur D. Little)
1903 – Orville & Wilbur Wright make 1st successful piloted airplane flight
1909 – the Wright brothers begin manufacturing aircraft commercially
1858 – Edwin Drake & the first oil well, though until the internal combustion engine was developed in the late 1880s oil
was seen as a waste product
1883 – gasoline powered car developed by Charles Duryea
1909 – Henry Ford produces an affordable car, the Model T
1925 -- Vladimir Zworykin (Russian born, Americanized citizen) invents the iconoscope – basis of the electronic TV
Camera
1933 Zworykin uses a cathode ray tube & iconoscope to successfully demonstrate television
1939 – NBC schedules regular TV broadcasts, but the schedule is interrupted by WWII until 1946