History 156:

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History 156 America Enters the Machine Age
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• The Yeoman Farmer
• Ideal of the Jeffersonian Republic
• Independent farmer beholden to no boss
• Owned his own land (were some women farmers, but
  not celebrated like the men)
• Did not work for wages Wage Slavery seen as a
  type of dependency and weakness
• To Jefferson, only the independent man could be a
  reliable citizen of a democracy

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Pittsburgh, PA, factories c. 1850
Southern Cotton Fields c. 1850
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Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, 1876
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Memorial Hall
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Agricultural Hall, exterior and interior
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Machinery Hall
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U.S. made cannons on display outside the
Machinery Hall
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• Corliss Steam Engine in the Machinery Hall of
  the Philadelphia Fair, 1876
• 1400 horsepower
• 1.7 million lbs

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American Industrialization

• Antebellum period, U.S. a nation of small farmers
  and shopkeepers scattered over large area
• After the war, nation becomes increasingly
  centralized, urbanized, and interlinked
• Lincoln president of a rural agrarian republic
  Teddy Roosevelt will be president of an urban
  industrial republic

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American Industrialization

• Shift from artisans and local small manufacturing
  to the Factory System
• Make more and more materials of everyday life
• Increasing numbers of Americans work for wages in
  factories
• Exploitation of abundant natural resources of the
  nationespecially the American West
• Discover vast reserves of copper in Montana, for
  example
• 1870 Agricultural production surpasses
  industrial production by 500 million
• By 1900, industrial output has quadrupled and
  surpasses agriculture by 5 billion
• Population booms, doubles between 1865-1901,
  approx. 38 million to 77 million

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Crowded dirty streets of the New York City
ghettoes, c. 1900
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John Gast, American Progress, 1872
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Thomas Edison with early phonograph, 1878
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Thomas Edison at age 14
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Telegraph operators for the Northern Pacific
Railway, c. 1905
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New York City, c. 1880
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Edisons ticker tape invention, 1869
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Edisons Menlo Park, New Jersey, Laboratory, c.
1885
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Original Edison phonograph, 1877
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Edisons 1879 Light bulb
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George Westinghouse
Nikola Tesla with his massive Tesla Coil
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The Edison-backed AC electric chair
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Illustrations of the Edison Kinetoscope
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Pennsylvania Coke Company with Railroads, c. 1880
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Creation U.S. Railroads

• First U.S. trains built in 1830s
• Small, locally operated, inefficient
• Prone to accidents and breakdowns
• Transport very inefficienct All have different
  gauges and demand repeated transfers
• Wide desire for a Transcontinental line
• Far too costly for any existing railroad company
  to build
• Federal government build?
• No, subsidize private companies with land grants

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• U.S. gives private companies 200-400 acres of
  public land for every mile of track built
• Railroads become second largest land holders in
  the American West

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Completion of the Union-Pacific Transcontinental
railroad, 1869
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Union Pacific Locomotive
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Rationalization of American RRs

• One option Government ownership and control
• Instead, allow and essentially encourage private
  consolidationdecrease in competition
• Leads to creation of first modern corporations,
  heavily capitalized by large public stock sales
• Massive consolidation of industry
• 1870 Several hundred railroads
• 1900 Seven railroad corporations
• Demands of efficient operations increasingly
  incorporates Americans in the railroad system
• Workers linked into a bureaucratic hierarchy
• Distant farmers depend on for access to urban
  markets
• All Americans become part of the Railroad time
  zones created in 1883

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Industrialization and Corporations

• Large corporations needed to create industrial
  systems of electricity and railroads
• Americans increasingly incorporated into these
  systems
• Dependent on railroad time
• Farmers need for shipping
• Growing number of people work for big business
• Corporations becoming very powerful, perhaps as
  much so as the Government
• The Big Question Is this a threat to democracy?

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Questions?
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