Overview
The technological and industrial history of the United States describes the United States' emergence as one of the largest nations in the world as well as the most technologically powerful nation in the world. The availability of land and labor, the diversity of climate, the ample presence of navigable canals, rivers, and coastal waterways, and the abundance of natural resources facilitating the cheap extraction of energy, fast transport, and the availability of capital all contributed to America's rapid industrialization. Most historians agree that the period in which the greatest economic and technological progress occurred was between the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 20th. During this period the nation was transformed from a primitive agricultural economy to the foremost industrial power in the world, with more than a third of the global industrial output. This can be illustrated by the index of total industrial production, with increased from only 4.29 in 1790 to 1975 in 1913, an increase of 460 times.
American colonies gained independence in 1781 just as profound changes in industrial production and coordination were beginning to shift production from artisans to potters. Growth of the nation's transportation infrastructure and a confluence of technological innovations before the Civil War facilitated an expansion in organization, coordination, and scale of industrial production. Around the turn of the 20th century, American industry had superseded its European counterparts economically and the nation began to assert its military power. Although the Great Depression challenged its technological momentum, America emerged from World War II as one of two global superpowers. In the second half of the 20th century as the United States was drawn into competition with the Soviet Union for political, economic, and military primacy, the government investing heavily in scientific research and technological development which spawned advances in spaceflight, computing, and biotechnology. Science, technology, and industry have not only profoundly shaped America's economic success, but have also contributed to its distinct political institutions, social structure, educational system, and cultural identity. American values of meritocracy, entrepreneurialism, and self-sufficiency are drawn from its legacy of pioneering technical advances.
Pre-European technology and European exploration & settlement
North America has been inhabited continuously since approximately 10,000 BC. The earliest inhabitants were nomadic, big-game hunter-gatherers who crossed the Bering land bridge. These first Native Americans relied upon chipped stone spearheads, rudimentary harpoons, and boats clad in animal-hides for hunting in the Arctic. As they dispersed within the continent, they encountered the varied temperate climates in the Pacific northwest, central plains, Appalachian woodlands, and arid southwest where they began to make permanent settlements. The peoples living in the Pacific northwest built wooden houses, used nets and weirs to catch fish, and practiced food preservation, although substantial agriculture was not developed. Peoples living on the plains remained largely nomadic (some practiced agriculture for parts of the year) and became adept leather workers as they hunted buffalo while people living in the arid southwest built adobe buildings, fired pottery, domesticated cotton, and wove cloth. Tribes in the eastern woodlands and Mississippian Valley developed extensive trade networks, built pyramid-like mounds, and practiced substantial agriculture while the peoples living in the Appalachian Mountains and coastal Atlantic practiced highly sustainable forest agriculture and were expert woodworkers. However, the populations of these peoples were small and their rate of technological change was very low. Indigenous peoples did not domesticate animals for drafting or husbandry, develop writing systems, or create bronze or iron-based tools like their European/Asian counterparts.
The discovery of the "New World" by Europeans explorers in the 15th and 16th centuries and subsequent Columbian Exchange profoundly changed the direction of technological development in North America. State-sponsored explorers like the Spanish Conquistadors arrived in the New World with technology unknown to the native inhabitants - caravels, domesticated horses, iron armour and swords. In the 17th century, Pilgrims, Puritans, Quakers fleeing religious persecution in Europe brought with them plowshares, guns, and domesticated animals like cows and pigs. These immigrants and other European colonists initially farmed subsistence crops like corn, wheat, rye, oats as well as rendering potash and maple syrup for trade. In the more temperate southern climates, large-scale plantations grew labor-intensive cash crops like sugarcane, rice, cotton, and tobacco requiring native and imported African slave labor to maintain. Early American farmers were not self-sufficient; they relied upon other farmers, specialized craftsman, and merchants to provide tools, process their harvests, and bring them to market. American industrialization was facilitated by a unique confluence of geographical, social, and economic factors. The post-Revolution American population remained low relative to its European counterparts and the demand for manual labor created strong incentives to mechanize labor-intensive tasks. The eastern seaboard of the United States, with a great number of rivers and streams along the Atlantic seaboard, provided many potential sites for constructing mills and infrastructure necessary for early industrialization. In addition, the United States' perpetually limited labor supply and vast supply of natural resources removed the primary obstacles to industrialization in European nations.
Factories and mills
In the mid 1780s, Oliver Evans invented the grain elevator and hopper boy that would eventually replace the traditional gristmills. By the turn of the century, Evans also developed one of the first high-pressure steam engines and began establishing a network of machine workshops to manufacture and repair these popular inventions. In 1789, the widow of Nathanael Greene recruited Eli Whitney to develop a machine to separate the seeds of short fibered cotton from the fibers. The resulting cotton gin could be made with basic carpentry skills but reduced the necessary labor by a factor of 50 and generated huge profits for cotton growers in the South. Samuel Slater, an apprentice in one of the largest textile factories in England, immigrated to the United States in 1789 upon learning that American states were paying bounties to British expatriates with a knowledge of textile machinery. With Moses Brown, Slater established the first textile factory in the US in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Slater's business model of independent mills and mill villages began to be replaced by the 1820s by a more efficient system based upon Francis Cabot Lowell's replications of British power looms. These Lowell looms combined spinning and weaving, were highly mechanized, managed by specialized employees, employed with unmarried young women ("mill girls"), and owned by a corporation. Unlike the previous forms of labor (apprenticeship, familial, or enslaved/indentured), the "Lowell system" popularized the concept of wage laborer who sells his labor to an employer under contract - a socio-economic system which persists in many modern countries and industries.
Turnpikes, canals and railroads
Even as the country grew even larger with the admission of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio by 1803, the only means of transportation between these landlocked western states and their coastal neighbors was by foot, pack animal, or ship. Recognizing the success of Roman roads in unifying that empire, political and business leaders in the United States began to construct roads and canals to connect the disparate parts of the nation. Early toll roads were constructed and owned by joint-stock companies that sold stock to raise construction capital like Pennsylvania's 1795 Lancaster Turnpike Company. Construction on the National Road began in 1815 in Cumberland, Maryland and reached Wheeling, Virginia in 1818, but political strife thereafter ultimately prevented its western advance to the Mississippi River. Nevertheless, the road became a primary overland conduit through Appalachian Mountains and was the gateway for thousands of antebellum westward-bound settlers. Numerous canal companies had also been chartered; but of all the canals projected, only three had been completed when the War of 1812 began: the Dismal Swamp Canal in Virginia, the Santee Canal in South Carolina, and the Middlesex Canal in Massachusetts. It remained for New York to usher in a new era in internal communication by authorizing in 1817 the construction of the Erie Canal. In 1825, the legislature of Pennsylvania grappled with the problem by projecting a series of canals which were to connect its great seaport with Pittsburgh on the west and with Lake Erie and the upper Susquehanna on the north.
Between 1820 and 1830, many inventors and entrepreneurs began to apply emerging steamboat technology to engines that could travel on land. The earliest proposal came in 1813 from Oliver Evans' idea of a railway to connect New York and Philadelphia with carriages drawn by steam engines. The completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869 and its attendant profit and efficiency had the effect of stimulating a period of intense consolidation and technological standardization that would last another 50 years. It was during this time that railroad magnates such as Jay Gould and Cornelius Vanderbilt amassed great power and fortunes from consolidation of smaller rail lines into national corporations. By 1920, 254,000 miles (408,800 km) of standard-gauge railroad track had been laid in the United States, all of it owned or controlled by only seven organizations. The need to synchronize train schedules and the inefficiencies introduced by every city having its own local time, also lead to introduction of Standard time by railway managers in 1883.
Petroleum
The 1859 discovery of crude oil in western Pennsylvania set off an "oil rush" reminiscent the 1849 California Gold Rush and would prove to be a valuable resource on the eve of the Civil War. Because crude oil needs to be distilled to extract usable fuel oils, oil refining quickly became a major industry in the area. However, the rural and mountainous terrain of these Pennsylvania oilfields allowed neither economical in-situ refining nor efficient railroad transportation of extracted oil. Beginning in 1865, the construction of oil pipelines to connect the oilfields with railroads or oil refineries alleviated this geographical bottleneck but also put thousands of coopers and teamsters (who made the barrels and drove the wagons to transport oil) out of business. As the network of oil pipelines expanded, they became more integrated with both the railway and telegraph systems which enabled even greater coordination in production, scheduling, and pricing.
John D. Rockefeller was a forceful driver of consolidation in the American oil industry. Beginning in 1865, he bought refineries, railroads, pipelines, and oilfields and ruthlessly eliminated competition to his Standard Oil. By 1879, he controlled 90% of oil refined in the US. Standard Oil used pipelines to directly connect the Pennsylvanian oilfields with the refineries in New Jersey, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, rather than loading and unloading railroad tank cars, which enabled huge gains in efficiency and profitability. Given the unprecedented scale of Standard Oil's network, the company developed novel methods for managing, financing, and organizing its businesses. Because laws governing corporations limited their ability to do business across state lines, Standard Oil pioneered the use of a central trust that owned and controlled the constituent companies in each state. The use of trusts by other industries to stifle competition and extract monopoly prices lead to the 1890 passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act. In the 1911 case of Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. United States, the Supreme Court ordered the Standard Oil Trust be disbanded into competing companies that would become Exxon (Standard Oil of New Jersey), Mobil (Standard Oil of New York), and Chevron (Standard Oil of California).
Electricity and telegraph
Benjamin Franklin pioneered the study of electricity by being the first to describe positive and negative charges, as well as advancing the principle of conservation of charge. In 1831, the Englishman Michael Faraday demonstrated the relationship between electricity and magnetism and devised an electrical generator that used a spinning magnet to create a current. Generators were soon used to power arc lamps in Britain and France, but they generated high temperatures and sparks that prevented widespread adoption.
In 1880, Thomas Alva Edison developed and patented a long-lasting incandescent lamp based upon the previous work of many inventors. Like Bell, Edison immediately set about commercializing his invention through a shrewd business plan involving companies that would manufacture the whole technological system upon which the "light bulb" would depend - generators (Edison Machine Company), cables (Edison Electric Tube Company), generating plants and electric service (Edison Electric Light Company), sockets, and bulbs. As in other industries of the era, these companies achieved greater efficiencies by merging to form a conglomerated General Electric company. Lighting was immensely popular: between 1882 and 1920 the number of generating plants in the US increased from one in downtown Manhattan to nearly 4,000. By 1920, electricity had surpassed petroleum-based lighting sources that had dominated the previous century.
In addition to lighting, electric motors (analogous to generators operating in reverse, or using a current to spin a magnet to perform work) became extremely important to industry. In 1883, a Serbian immigrant, Nikola Tesla, a protégé of Edison's, invented an electric motor which greatly simplified electric motors and licensed the invention to the Westinghouse Corporation. Electric motors quickly replaced steam engines in factories around the nation as they required neither complex mechanical transmissions from a central engine nor water sources for steam boilers in order to operate. Frank Sprague, an electrical engineer who also previously worked for Edison, pioneered the use motors to power electric street carriages in 1888.
Between 1837 and 1844, Samuel F.B. Morse and Alfred Vail developed a transmitter that could send "short" or "long" electric current which would move an electromagnetic receiver to record the signal as dots and dashes. Morse established the first telegraph line (between Baltimore and Washington D.C.) in 1844 and by 1849 almost every state east of the Mississippi had telegraph service. Between 1850 and 1865, the telegraph business became progressively more consolidated and the 1866 incorporation of Western Union emerged with a near-monopoly over 22,000 telegraph offices and 827,000 miles (1,330,900 km) of cable throughout the country. The ability to quickly transmit information over long distances would prove to have an enormous impact on many diverse fields like journalism, banking, and diplomacy.
Automobiles
The technology for creating an automobile emerged in Germany in the 1870 and 1880s: Nicolaus Otto created a four-stroke internal combustion engine, Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach modified the Otto engine to run at higher speeds, and Karl Benz pioneered the electric ignition. The Duryea brothers and Hiram Percy Maxim were among the first to construct a "horseless carriage" in the US in the mid-1890s, but these early cars proved to be heavy and expensive.
Henry Ford revolutionized the automobile manufacturing process by employing interchangeable parts on assembly lines - the beginning of industrial mass production. In 1908, the Ford Motor Company released the Model T which could generate 20 horsepower, was lightweight, and easy to repair. Demand for the car was so great, he had to relocate his assembly plant to Highland Park, Michigan in 1912. The new plant was a model of industrial efficiency for the time: it was well-lit and ventilated, employed conveyors to move parts along an assembly line, and workers' stations were orderly arranged along the line. The efficiency of the assembly line allowed Ford to realize great gains in economy and productivity; in 1912, Ford sold 6,000 cars for approximately $900 and by 1916 approximately 577,000 Model T automobiles were sold for $360. Ford was able to scale production rapidly because assembly-line workers were unskilled laborers performing repetitive tasks. Ford hired European immigrants, African-Americans, ex-convicts, and the disabled and paid comparatively high wages, but was quick to dismiss anyone involved in labor unions or radical political associations.
Despite the growth of American automobile usage, urban and rural roads were poorly equipped for the new traffic. Local automobile clubs formed the American Automobile Association to lobby city, state, and federal governments to widen and pave existing roads and build limited-access highways. While some federal road aid was passed in the 1910s and 20s (resulting in highways like U.S. Route 1 and U.S. Route 66), the coverage and quality of many roads would vary greatly until the Depression-era Works Progress Administration began to invest heavily in road infrastructure. Automobile ownership declined during the Depression as well as World War II when wartime rationing and military production lines limited the number of automobiles that could be manufactured - only the largest companies like Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler survived the lean years. After the war, rising family sizes, increasing affluence, and government-subsidized mortgages for veterans fueled a boom in single-family homes in the outskirts of urban areas. These suburbs were made for automobile-owners: the developments laid beyond existing public transportation systems and they were too widely dispersed to facilitate walking between destinations. Automobile use contributed to enormous amounts of congestion in urban, suburban, and rural areas as newer state-funded toll-roads and older Depression-era roads alike were ill-equipped to handle the intercity and interstate traffic. In 1956, Congress passed the Interstate and National Defense Highway Act which provided funding for the construction of 41,000 miles (66,000 km) of toll-free expressways throughout the country laying the legislative and infrastructural foundations for the modern American highway system.
Effects of industrialization
Agricultural production
Even as America's westward expansion allowed over 400 million acres (1,600,000 km²) of new land to be put under cultivation, between 1870 and 1910 the number of Americans involved in farming or farm labor dropped by a third. New farming techniques and agricultural mechanization facilitated both processes. Cyrus McCormick's mechanical reaper (invented in 1834) allowed farmers to quadruple their harvesting efficiency by replacing hand labor with a mechanical device. John Deere invented the steel plow in 1837, keeping the soil from sticking to the plow and making it easier to farm in the rich prairies of the Midwest. The harvester, self-binder, and combine allowed even greater efficiencies. Railroads allowed harvests to reach markets more quickly and Gustavus Swift's refrigerated railroad car allowed fresh meat and fish to reach distant markets. Food distribution also became more mechanized as companies like Heinz and Campbell distributed previously perishable foods by canning and evaporation. Commercial bakeries, breweries, and meatpackers replaced locally-owned operators and drove demand for raw agricultural goods.
Urbanization
The period between 1865 and 1920 was marked by the increasing concentration of people, political power, and economic activity in urban areas. In 1860, there were nine cities with populations over 100,000 and by 1910 there were fifty. These new large cities were not coastal port cities (like New York, Boston, and Philadelphia) but laid inland along new transportation routes (like Denver, Chicago, and Cleveland). The first twelve presidents of the United States had all been born into farming communities, but between 1865 and 1912 the Presidency was filled by men with backgrounds of representing businesses and cities.
Industrialization and urbanization reinforced each other and urban areas became increasingly congested. As a result of unsanitary living conditions, diseases like cholera, dysentery, and typhoid fever struck urban areas with increasing frequency. Cities responded by paving streets, digging sewers, sanitizing water, constructing housing, and creating public transportation systems.
Cold War and Space Race
American Robert Goddard was one of the first scientists to experiment with rocket propulsion systems. In his small laboratory in Worcester, Massachusetts, Goddard worked with liquid oxygen and gasoline to propel rockets into the atmosphere, and in 1926 successfully fired the world's first liquid-fuel rocket. Expendable rockets provided the means for launching artificial satellites, as well as manned spacecraft. In 1957 the Soviet Union launched the first satellite, Sputnik I, and the United States followed with Explorer I in 1958. The first manned space flights were made in early 1961, first by Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin and then by American astronaut Alan Shepard.
From those first tentative steps, to the 1969 Apollo program landing on the Moon, to today's reusable Space Shuttle, the American space program has brought forth a breathtaking display of applied science. Communications satellites transmit computer data, telephone calls, and radio and television broadcasts. Weather satellites furnish the data necessary to provide early warnings of severe storms.
Computers and networks
For the past 80 years, the United States has been integral in fundamental advances in telecommunications and technology. For example, AT&T's Bell Laboratories spearheaded the American technological revolution with a series of inventions including the light emitting diode (LED), the transistor, the C programming language, and the UNIX. SRI International and Xerox PARC in Silicon Valley helped give birth to the personal computer industry, while ARPA and NASA funded the development of the ARPANET and the Internet.
Advertising
The late 1980s and early 1990s saw the introduction of cable television and particularly MTV. Pioneering the concept of the music video, MTV ushered in a new type of advertising: the consumer tunes in for the advertising message, rather than it being a by-product or afterthought. As cable and satellite television became increasingly prevalent, specialty channels emerged, including channels entirely devoted to advertising, such as QVC, Home Shopping Network, and ShopTV Canada.
Marketing through the Internet opened new frontiers for advertisers and contributed to the "dot-com" boom of the 1990s. Entire corporations operated solely on advertising revenue, offering everything from coupons to free Internet access. At the turn of the 21st century, a number of websites including the search engine Google, started a change in online advertising by emphasizing contextually relevant, unobtrusive ads intended to help, rather than inundate, users. This has led to a plethora of similar efforts and an increasing trend of interactive advertising.
(source: Wikipedia)
