Urban Growth

According to the 1880 Census data, around 17.4 million Americans above the age of 10 were employed (47% of the total population). Of those, only around 7.7 million worked in agriculture, while the rest were employed in manufacturing & mining, trade & transportation, or professional & personal services. While the number employed specifically in manufacturing & mining was only around 3.8 million, many of the jobs that fell under trade, transportation, and services were created to support the vast network of growing businesses and the steadily increasing urban population. ^[1]

The development of commercial electricity by the close of the century, to complement the steam engines that already existed in many larger factories, permitted more industries to concentrate in cities, away from the previously essential water power. In turn, newly arrived immigrants sought employment in new urban factories. Immigration, urbanization, and industrialization coincided to transform the face of American society from primarily rural to significantly urban. From 1880 to 1920, the number of industrial workers in the nation quadrupled from 2.5 million to over 10 million, while over the same period urban populations doubled, to reach one-half of the country’s total population.

Ideas That Changed the World

In offices, worker productivity benefited from the typewriter, invented in 1867, the cash register, invented in 1879, and the adding machine, invented in 1885. These tools made it easier than ever to keep up with the rapid pace of business growth. Inventions also slowly transformed home life. The vacuum cleaner arrived during this era, as well as the flush toilet. These indoor “water closets” improved public health through the reduction in contamination associated with outhouses and their proximity to water supplies and homes. Tin cans and, later, Clarence Birdseye’s experiments with frozen food, eventually changed how women shopped for, and prepared, food for their families, despite initial health concerns over preserved foods. With the advent of more easily prepared food, women gained valuable time in their daily schedules, a step that partially laid the groundwork for the modern women’s movement. Women who had the means to purchase such items could use their time to seek other employment outside of the home, as well as broaden their knowledge through education and reading. In spite of these advantages for women, the growth of the middle-class, fueled by industrialization and big business bureaucracy, also led to the rise of the so-called “Cult of Domesticity,” where women were expected to maintain a clean, quiet, efficient home in order to reduce stress on their hard-working husbands. This societal shift was only strengthened by the rise of consumerism and advertising.

The Importance of Steel

Perhaps the most important industrial advancement of the era came in the production of steel. Manufacturers and builders preferred steel to iron, due to its increased strength and durability. After the Civil War, two new processes allowed for the creation of furnaces large enough and hot enough to melt the wrought iron needed to produce large quantities of steel at lower prices. The Bessemer Process, named for English inventor Henry Bessemer, and the Open-Hearth Process, changed the way the United States produced steel and, in doing so, led the country into a new industrialized age. As the new material became more available, builders eagerly sought it out, a demand that steel mill owners were happy to meet.

Figure 3. Advertisements of the late nineteenth century promoted the higher quality and lower prices that people could expect from new inventions. Here, a knitting factory promotes the fact that its machines make seamless hose, while still acknowledging the traditional role of women in the garment industry, from grandmothers who used to sew by hand to young women who now used machines.

In 1860, the country produced 13,000 tons of steel. By 1879, American furnaces were producing over one million tons per year; by 1900, this figure had risen to ten million. Just ten years later, the United States was the top steel producer in the world, at over twenty-four million tons annually. As production increased to match the overwhelming demand, the price of steel dropped by over 80%. When quality steel became cheaper and more readily available, other industries relied upon it more heavily as a key to their growth and development, including construction and, later, the automotive industry. As a result, the steel industry rapidly became the cornerstone of the American economy, remaining the primary indicator of industrial growth and stability through the end of World War II.

In 1884, an architect from Chicago named William LeBaron Jenney designed the first “skyscraper” building, which was revolutionary because it used a steel frame to support the walls, roof, and floors. Previous buildings, made from a combination of brick and wooden beams, could not support more than five or six stories. Jenney’s creation, the Home Life Insurance Building, was nine stories high. By 1900, the tallest building in the U.S. was 26 stories tall. The rapid availability of commercial electricity soon allowed even taller buildings to be constructed with elevators, pressurized plumbing, and ventilation systems.

Advancements in Communication

As early as 1774, inventors had been trying to create a system to send messages electronically. In 1837, two separate telegraph systems were patented in the United States, one which used needles to point to letters of the alphabet and one which used a combination of dots and dashes tapped onto paper by a stylus, which was controlled by an electromagnet. The second system, invented by Samuel F.B. Morse and his assistant Alfred Vail, subsequently became the most popular telecommunication device for sending messages using the alphabet of dots and dashes known as Morse Code. In 1851, a conference of European countries officially adopted Morse Code as the method for international communications. The first long-distance overland telegraph line ran from Washington D.C. to Baltimore and in 1844, Morse sent the first message over it in Morse Code which read: “WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT.” By 1861, overland telegraph lines connected the East and West coasts, creating a new era in communications and making such services as the Pony Express obsolete.

Figure 4. Alexander Graham Bell’s patent of the telephone was one of almost 700,000 U.S. patents issued between 1850 and 1900. Although the patent itself was only six pages long, including two pages of illustrations, it proved to be one of the most contested and profitable of the nineteenth century. (credit: U.S. National Archives and Records Administration)

In 1858, British and American crews laid the first transatlantic telegraph cable lines, enabling messages to pass between the United States and Europe in a matter of hours, rather than waiting the few weeks it could take for a letter to arrive by steamship. Although these initial cables worked for barely a month, they generated great interest in developing a more efficient telecommunications industry. Within twenty years, over 100,000 miles of cable crisscrossed the ocean floors, connecting all the continents. Domestically, Western Union, which controlled 80% of the country’s telegraph lines, operated nearly 200,000 miles of telegraph routes from coast to coast. In short, people were connected like never before, able to relay messages in minutes and hours rather than days and weeks.

Alexander Graham Bell and the Telephone

One of the greatest advancements was the telephone, which Alexander Graham Bell patented in 1876. It worked by turning sound waves into an electrical signal, which was transmitted like a telegraph through a wire to another telephone. At first, they were impractical and could not be used over long distances. The first “long-distance” telephone line was built in 1877 and only reached 60 miles. The first phone call from East to West coast did not happen until 1915 and the first transatlantic call between the U.S. and Great Britain was not until 1927. However, Graham’s technology was incredibly valuable and also hotly disputed. While he was not the first to invent the concept, Bell was the first one to capitalize on it; after securing the patent, he worked with financiers and businessmen to create the National Bell Telephone Company. Western Union, which had originally turned down Bell’s machine, went on to commission Thomas Edison to invent an improved version of the telephone.

It is actually Edison’s version that is most like the modern telephone used today. However, Western Union, fearing a costly legal battle they were likely to lose due to Bell’s patent, ultimately sold Edison’s idea to the Bell Company. With the communications industry now largely in their control, along with an agreement from the federal government to permit such control, the Bell Company was transformed into the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, which still exists today as AT&T. By 1880, 50,000 telephones were in use in the United States, including one at the White House. By 1900, that number had increased to 1.35 million, and hundreds of American cities had obtained local service for their citizens. Quickly and inexorably, technology was bringing the country into closer contact, changing forever the rural isolation that characterized vast regions of the country.

Father of American Invention: Thomas Edison

Figure 5. Thomas Alva Edison was the quintessential inventor of the era, with a passion for new ideas and over one thousand patents to his name. Seen here with his incandescent light bulb, which he invented in 1879, Edison produced many inventions that subsequently transformed the country and the world.

Although Thomas Alva Edison is best known for his contributions to the electrical industry, his experimentation went far beyond the light bulb. Edison was quite possibly the greatest inventor of the turn of the century, saying famously that he “hoped to have a minor invention every ten days and a big thing every six months or so.” He registered 1,093 patents over his lifetime and ran a world-famous laboratory, Menlo Park, which housed a rotating group of up to twenty-five scientists from around the globe.

Edison became interested in the telegraph industry as a boy, when he worked aboard trains selling candy and newspapers. He soon began tinkering with telegraph technology and, by 1876, had devoted himself full time to lab work as an inventor. He then proceeded to invent a string of items that are still used today: the phonograph, the mimeograph machine, the motion picture projector, the dictaphone, and the storage battery, all using a factory-oriented assembly line process that made the rapid production of inventions possible.

Edison’s Lights

In September 1878, Edison announced a new and ambitious line of research and development: electric power and lighting. The scientific principles behind dynamos and electric motors—the conversion of mechanical energy to electrical power, and vice versa—were long known, but Edison applied the age’s bureaucratic and commercial ethos to the problem. Far from a lone inventor gripped by inspiration toiling in isolation, Edison advanced the model of commercially minded management of research and development. Edison folded his two identities, business manager and inventor, together. He brought his fully equipped Menlo Park research laboratory and the skilled machinists and scientists he employed to bear on the problem of building an electric power system—and commercializing it.

In 1879, Edison invented the item that led to his greatest fame: the incandescent light bulb. He allegedly explored over six thousand different materials for the filament, before stumbling upon tungsten as the ideal substance. By 1882, with financial backing largely from financier J. P. Morgan, he had created the Edison Electric Illuminating Company, which began supplying electrical current to a small number of customers in New York City. Morgan guided subsequent mergers of Edison’s other enterprises, including a machine works firm and a lamp company, resulting in the creation of the Edison General Electric Company in 1889.

Edison’s Rivalries

The next stage of invention in electric power came about with the contribution of George Westinghouse. Westinghouse was responsible for making electric lighting possible on a national scale. While Edison used “direct current” or DC power, which could only extend two miles from the power source, in 1886, Westinghouse invented “alternating current” or AC power, which allowed for delivery over greater distances due to its wavelike patterns. The Westinghouse Electric Company delivered AC power, which meant that factories, homes, and farms—in short, anything that needed power—could be served, regardless of their proximity to the power source.

A public relations battle called the “War of the Currents” ensued between the Westinghouse and Edison camps. Edison publicly proclaimed that AC power was dangerous and arranged for a series of public stunts in which animals were electrocuted using AC generators. Edison also arranged for a Westinghouse generator to be used in the first execution via electric chair in 1888. Edison hoped that such a smear campaign would result in homeowners becoming reluctant to use AC power in their houses, although he reluctantly adapted to it as its popularity increased.

One of Edison’s more famous rivals was Nikola Tesla, a self-taught inventor from Serbia who immigrated to the U.S. in 1884. Tesla worked for Edison Machine Works for a time, but eventually found investors and opened his own laboratory. His research focused on alternating current induction motors and other types of alternating current devices which used an electrical technology known as “polyphase.” After selling the licenses for some of his designs to Westinghouse Electric for a large sum of money in 1888, he used his newfound wealth to research wireless electrical communication systems, radio remote control technology, and other, more “eccentric” ideas. Although Edison and Tesla started out as colleagues and friends, Tesla’s support for AC electricity and the fact that he sold his patents to Westinghouse infuriated Edison and the two had a falling out. Many of Tesla’s inventions are still an important part of our everyday lives, such as AC induction motors (fans, blenders, cars, pumps), remote controls, neon lights, and certain types of radios.