2.11.15
Industrial Revolution
A massive industrial, economic & social changeIt means we’re working with machines, which are powered
We can make things more quickly-for example, I may be pulling a lever to make the
machine work
It has to do with economics-making money-how we make the money-technology
We change the way we make things
We change the way we work
We change the way we live (I need to work in a factory-I need to live near it-most likely
in a city-due to living in a city, I need to BUY my food-no longer growing it
It can affect family size, due to spending $$$$ on the food-social
We are opening the possibility of work for women, due to the pulling levers, rather than
working as a blacksmith
Remember American System
1. In order to get people to buy American products-a Tariff on imports
2. CREATE NATIONAL BANKS
Get all America to work as a team-put the factories in the North-they’re not using the
land year around, like the South-get cotton from the South
No, in order to get the South to trust the North, all using the same money
3. How do I get my stuff up North?
Internal Improvements-rails, steamboats, roads, canal
National Road= example of a road
Erie Canal= example of a canal (Morris Canal in NJ)
Steamboat= Fulton’s Clermont
Inland Freight Rates
Y axis = costs per ton mile
X axis = years
Wagon rates are high due to slow speed, labor intensive
Canal rates are low and drop-can move things more quickly-due to water transport
Down stream was cheaper due to less labor, and then upstream rates dropped due to
development of steam engine, which cut out a lot of labor
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Canal and railroad rates dropped in the early 1860s due to better tech
Clipper Ships
Fast, long, beautiful- lots of sails
New InventionsYankee ingenuity
What does technology look like in the early 1800s?
Resourcefulness and Experimentation
Americans were willing to try anything
They were first copiers, then innovators
1800s-41 patents approved
1860 4,357
Eli Whitney’s Cotton Gin 1791
It was actually invented by a slave
Designed to remove the seeds form the raw cotton (formerly removed by hand-slow,
tedious)-one slave can remove seeds from 50x more cotton in the same amount of time
Slavery becomes more important due to the increase in sales of cotton production’s
increase with the cotton gin
Eli Whitney’s Gun Factory
Looking at the painting
Why is it near the river-for power to run the machinery
I see no smokestacks, telling me it’s not the later 1800s, when we had coal fired steam
equipment
This building is long and thin due to the crankshaft running from the water through the
building
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Whitney made his money from guns-interchangeable partsIronically, his gun factory is in Connecticut
Oliver Evans
First prototype of the locomotive
First automated flour mill
(once you have perfected the boiler, you can put it on a car, boat, rail vehicle)
John Deere & the steel plow 1837
It cut through the compressed soil, and did not break the plow
His company is still around
If you modernize growing, you have more crops, so you need to pick up the crops
Cyrus McCormick & the Mechanical Reaper 1831
Cuts crops
Samuel FB Morse
1840 telegraph
A series of dots and dashes, to create the alphabet
This communication goes as quickly as electricity-once the wires go up in the 1860s it
sped up messages
Cyrus Field and the Transatlantic Cable, 1858
Allowed us to send messages across the ocean
1880s Malaysian volcano blast sent around the world to newspapers due to cables
Elias Howe & Isaac Singer 1840
Sewing Machine
If you are selling shirts, you can sew more shirts more quickly
“Boom/Bust Cycles 1790-1860
This graph shows us how the economy changes-ups and
downs
Some people feel we should keep it smooth-and some feel the government should keep it
smooth, while others say “government stay out of it”
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When the economy is drooping, we call it a recession, and when it’s deeper, we call it a
depression
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