Industrial Revolution in the United States history

Manufacture is the process of physically transforming raw materials, semifinished goods, or subassemblies into product(s) with higher value. The Industrial Revolution in America saw activities traditionally performed in or close to the home migrate to shops, mills, and factories employing specialized workers and selling output commercially.

This entailed the application of new manufacturing processes and ultimately the development of new products, and was fostered by technical change in the transportation and communication sectors, in the extractive sectors producing raw materials (agriculture, fisheries, forestry, and mining), and by the growth and increased density of population. All of these factors, along with the availability of improved techniques within manufacture itself, affected the economic viability of specialized industrial production and the forms it took. So too did war, tariff policy, and the development of a financial infrastructure capable of facilitating the assemblage of large amounts of capital.

Most of the American economy during the colonial period consisted of subsistence agriculture. Overlaid upon this were commercial agricultural activities specific to particular regions (grain in the middle colonies, tobacco in the Chesapeake, and rice and indigo in the South), shipbuilding, fishing, and maritime trade. Most manufacturing was done at home and, if not at home, tended to be small-scale and located in the countryside. Aside from shipbuilding, the colonial period witnessed commercial manufacturing activity in the tanning of leather, milling of lumber, smelting of iron ore and forging of iron products, and grinding of grain. Most of this activity served local markets. High-value items were typically imported, usually from England.

Although British navigation laws, which governed trade within the Empire, were biased against the development of colonial industry, their architects intended the colonies to serve as a source of intermediate goods. Thus, some early-stage manufacture was actually fostered by the system. The refining and further manufacture of iron products was discouraged in the colonies and banned outright after 1750, but smelting was not so encumbered. This was partly a matter of weight: It was prohibitively expensive to ship unsmelted iron ore as opposed to pig iron to England.

The big money in the colonial period lay in export activities: sending tobacco, dried fish, naval stores, and ships to Europe, trading guns and rum for slaves on the West African coast, and provisioning the colonies with manufactures from England and the sugar islands of the Caribbean with slaves, foodstuffs, horses, and lumber. The vast bulk of imports to the colonies came from England, and most of these were manufactured goods. At the time of the American Declaration of Independence, the radical transformation of the textile and iron industries generally identified as the Industrial Revolution in England was only just beginning, with many of the necessary preconditions, technological and other, already established. Still, the English were far ahead of the Americans and, even adding in the cost of transportation, could deliver finished textile and iron goods to the colonies more cheaply than the colonies could make such goods themselves.

During the Revolutionary War, trade with Europe was disrupted, creating pressures for selfsufficiency that provided some protection and stimulus to American manufactures. As a consequence of the peace settlement of 1783, the newly independent states again had access to cheap imports of British manufactured goods, a boon for consumers but bad news for importcompeting domestic industries. The return of world war in 1793 (Britain and France were engaged in hostilities almost continuously through 1815) created bonanza opportunities for U.S. maritime interests. As a neutral party, U.S. vessels could trade with combatants on both sides of the struggle.

This mutually advantageous arrangement began to break down in 1805 with Britain’s Essex decision and Napoleon’s retaliation with the Berlin decree; soon more than a thousand U.S. ships had been seized by the warring parties, who claimed the ships were in violation of their newly declared and more restrictive rules. Wary of being drawn further into conflict with the European combatants, Jefferson initiated passage of the Embargo Act in 1807, prohibiting U.S. ships from trading in all foreign ports. Disastrous for U.S. shipping, the legislation created hothouse conditions for U.S. manufacturing, providing the equivalent of almost unlimited protection. The number of textile mills in the country jumped sixfold in the space of a year.

With the return of peace in 1815, U.S. industry again faced a flood of cheap imports from England. Tariff protection then provided some substitute for the protection for American manufacturing that war had previously offered. Under a tariff umbrella, the U.S. textile industry became the first, and prior to the Civil War the only, industry to shift into large factories employing power-driven machinery to serve national markets. Centered initially in New England, the industry benefited from the immigration of mechanics such as Samuel Slater who carried with them designs for some of the water frames they had worked with in England. The American Francis Lowell, who designed a power-driven loom, also benefited from firsthand exposure to English designs.

Harnessing the new spinning machines and power looms in integrated water power–driven mills, the first large-scale factories in the United States arose on greenfields along the Merrimac River in Manchester, New Hampshire, in Lowell and Lawrence, Massachusetts, and along the Connecticut River in western Massachusetts. Until the 1840s, when large-scale Irish immigration began, much of the workforce consisted of unmarried Yankee farmgirls housed in company operated dormitories.

For the boot and shoe industry in antebellum New England, cheap imports and therefore the tariff were lesser issues. The sector nevertheless underwent substantial change, transitioning from a form of organization in which workers assembled in small shops overseen by bosses, although most continued to work with hand rather than power-driven tools until after the Civil War. Nevertheless, boots and shoes were the other major industry, along with textiles, that developed a clear national orientation before 1860, supplying cheap footwear, for example, to southern slave plantations.

Flour milling and the reduction of felled trees to lumber were other important water power– driven antebellum industries, although with few exceptions they remained rural and highly localized in terms of the markets they served. The iron industry also remained predominantly rural, based until the 1840s on charcoal smelting and refining as opposed to the coal-fueled industry that had come to dominate England.

Finally, a subsector of manufacturing assembled small parts into such products as clocks, sewing machines, and small arms. Prior to the Civil War, Americans developed proficiency in organizing systems of assembly relying on more or less interchangeable parts, and the “American System of Manufacture” deeply impressed British observers at the 1850 Crystal Palace Exhibition in England. This expertise laid the groundwork for such late 19th- and early 20th-century growth sectors as TYPEWRITERs, bicycles, and automobiles.

The third triad of the Industrial Revolution in England was the use of steam power in mining, manufacture, and transportation. The steam engine, developed initially to deal with the problem of water encroachment in mines located near the ocean and used in early versions to pump water to the upper floors of English country houses, played less of a role initially in U.S. manufacturing than in Britain because of the abundance of exploitable water power on America’s eastern seaboard. But applications in transportation (for which water power was obviously unsuitable) were a different matter, and beginning in 1808, on water, and in the late 1820s, on land, steam-powered vehicles contributed to the movement of goods and people. Americans innovated in the development of high-pressure steam engines, which initially were more dangerous and wasteful of fuel but were particularly suited for moving applications because they could be constructed compactly. Improvements in the internal infrastructure for moving freight made it increasingly feasible for some pioneering manufacturing sectors, in particular textiles and boots and shoes, to supply a national market in the antebellum period.

Although American manufacturing made great progress in the first part of the 19th century, on the eve of the Civil War the textile industry was the only manufacturing sector organized in power-driven factories producing for a national market. Thousands of sawmills and grist mills for grinding flour were, it is true, power-driven, but they produced almost exclusively for local markets. Boots and shoes were manufactured for national markets, but the factories were largely unmechanized, with sewing machines just beginning to appear. Building on advances pioneered in government arsenals, a small sector assembled sewing machines, clocks, and small arms using interchangeable parts, but the key innovations here were organizational, rather than the application of powered machinery that is typically seen as the hallmark of the Industrial Revolution.

Between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of World War 1, American industry decisively entered the 20th century in a variety of ways. In the 18th and the first part of the 19th century, commerce dominated manufacture. By 1910, manufacturing more than held its own. Its share of the labor force and value added had grown at the expense of agriculture. The United States had surpassed Great Britain as a manufacturing powerhouse and now stood first in the world, having also forged ahead of Germany, which had become its closest competitor. A wave of consolidations and MERGERS driven by a hunger for monopoly power complemented tendencies toward larger scale brought about by technological factors alone. Industrial firms became much larger on average, and size became a political as well as an economic issue, spawning largely quixotic attempts to tame it through antitrust policy.

Manufacturing has been declining among workers in the United States, but between roughly 1940 and 1960 the sector employed more than one in four U.S. workers. The second half of the 19th century in the United States witnessed a transformation in parts of U.S. manufacturing that brought it into the modern world, both in turns of the types of technology used and in terms of the organizational structures needed to coordinate and manage them. It laid the groundwork for the efflorescence of American manufacturing in the 1920s, a sector that experienced very high labor productivity growth as it built out the automobile and electrical machinery industries.

Key preconditions for this move into the modern age were the roughly simultaneous mid- 19th-century transformation of technologies for moving both goods and information. The RAILROADS, although far more expensive to construct per mile than canals, moved goods more quickly, were not subject to service outages because of inadequate water flow in the summer, or ice for as much as five months of the winter, and could be built over a much wider range of routes than those for which canals were suitable or economic. The railroad provided fast, reliable, around-the-clock transportation solutions in a way that had never before been possible.

The railroad’s key complementary technology, the TELEGRAPH, also represented a qualitative breakthrough in speed and reliability, in this case in the movement of information. Prior to the telegraph, the speed of moving data was pretty much limited to how rapidly a horse could carry a rider, or how fast a ship could travel. With the telegraph, data could now move orders of magnitude faster, and in a relatively reliable fashion not subject to the vagaries of weather or season.

These two technologies made possible and required for their own operation the development of what business historian Alfred Chandler called Modern Business Enterprise. An MBE was a multidivisional firm administered by a staff of salaried managers. It arose first in the transportation sector as a means of coordinating railway traffic so as to reduce the number of collisions in a largely single-tracked system, and in communication (WESTERN UNION) to coordinate the operation of a national system. Railroad corporations, such as the Pennsylvania Railroad, which at its peak employed more than 100,000 people, dominated the U.S. economy in a way no business organizations have before or since.

U.S. Industry in the Early 19th Century

The railroad and the telegraph enabled the development of mass distribution in the form of the urban department store such as R. H. Macy’s as well as the mail order house such as SEARS, ROEBUCK and Montgomery Ward. Finally, MBE emerged in a few but ultimately important subsectors of manufacturing where the nature of technologies or customer service requirements made it particularly suitable. The pairing of reliable all-weather transportation and communication increased the rate of inventory turnover and made possible high-capacity utilization rates for fixed capital, necessary to make economically feasible the implementation of some of the new technologies in manufacturing, which had substantially higher minimum efficient scales. For the first time large-scale industry began to figure heavily within the economy of the United States.

One such sector was steel. Technological innovations, in particular the Bessemer converter and the Siemens-Martin open hearth, made possible drastic reductions in the price of steel, and in conjunction with the exploitation of the railroad and the telegraph by such entrepreneurs as Andrew CARNEGIE, enabled the real price of steel to drop by 90 percent over a three-decade period. In 1850, steel was an expensive alloy suitable only for surgical blades or military swords. By the end of the century it had become a structural material out of which rails, steamships, and ultimately SKYSCRAPERS could be constructed.

A blast furnace smelts iron ore and produces cast or pig iron with about 4 percent carbon content. A blacksmith can easily refine this down to wrought or malleable iron with almost no carbon. If, before the 1850s, one wanted steel (about 2 percent carbon), which combines the plasticity of wrought iron with the rigidity of cast iron, one had to laboriously add back some of the carbon in a fuel and labor intensive process that did not always produce a homogeneous product. The mid-century innovations made it technically possible to produce large batches of homogeneous steel cheaply, but it took entrepreneurs such as Carnegie to figure out how to use the telegraph and the railroad to coordinate raw material deliveries and develop the markets in such a way that a continuous flow of production could be sustained, thus warranting the heavy investment in physical capital that the new techniques required. Integration of smelting, refining, and rolling operations in one facility also saved tremendously on fuel and labor costs and was key to Carnegie’s success.

Cigarettes were another case in point. The Bonsack cigarette making machine could produce thousands of cigarettes per hour. But it took James B. DUKE to exploit the new transport and communications industries, as well as mass market advertising, to coordinate the inflow of tobacco and outflow of cigarettes in a fashion that could keep these machines “fed” and avoid bottlenecks on either the input or the output side.

John D. ROCKEFELLER’s success in building a business based on the refining and distribution of petroleum products was based again on the exploitation of the railroad and telegraph. Here the central engineering dynamic had to do with the economics of refineries, particularly the square-cubed relationship: The materials cost of building a refinery vessel with double the volume are not necessarily twice as much, so a firm that builds and controls larger vessels will be able to outcompete other entrants, provided the output from the refineries can be sold.

Toward the end of the century the assembly techniques that Henry FORD would pioneer in building automobiles were anticipated in the disassembly lines where meatpackers such as Swift and Armour revolutionized the production of dressed beef and pork. Again, these large-scale operations depended critically on the railroad and the telegraph to bring the animals to centralized slaughterhouses and rapidly to move the butchered meat in refrigerated railroad cars to markets.

In spite of these examples of dramatic increase in firm size, the coexistence of largeand small-scale manufacturing remained a feature of the economy at the end of the 19th century, as it does today.

American industry in the 1880s was abandoning its earlier dependence on water power for the more reliable but fuel-hungry steam engine. Although a steam-powered mill did not need to concern itself with lack of rainfall in the summer or freezing in the winter, it imposed essentially the same constraints as did water power on the industrial design of the factory. In either instance power was delivered through systems of rods, gears, and belts to the individual parts of the factory, and the enterprise relied on gas lighting for shift work after sunset.

Thomas EDISON inaugurated the first commercial provision of DC power in 1882 at his Pearl Street station in New York. But the initial market for his incandescent light bulbs and the power to energize them was residential space lighting for the well-to-do. It would be several decades—in some instances well into the 1920s—before electric power in conjunction with small electric motors led to a revolution in factory organization as power was distributed to work stations on an as-needed basis.

The idea of an industrial revolution as a sharp break with the past has come under increasing criticism insofar as it applies to Britain. If we wish to use the term for the United States, we can perhaps speak of a gradual transformation spanning the years from the early national period to those just before the First World War. By 1910 large-scale power-driven factories producing for a national market characterized a number of important manufacturing sectors.

Modern business enterprise had emerged and was well established in transportation, communication, distribution, and, by this point quite dramatically, in manufacturing. Commercial manufacture was no longer a localized, largely rural adjunct to activities performed in the home. And firms were no longer typically small sole proprietorships operating at a relatively leisurely pace. The railroads and the telegraph, supplemented eventually by the telephone, quickened the velocity of raw materials, semifinished goods, and wholesale and retail inventories as they passed among business entities toward their final user. At the commanding heights of American industry, armies of salaried managers and whitecollar clerical and sales workers supported those engaged in basic production. And one had begun to see the routinization of research and development activities, such as those pioneered by Edison in his Menlo Park laboratories.

Although manufacturing today employs no more people than it did in 1950, its output is much higher and more efficient, reflecting continued high rates of productivity growth. Even as U.S. companies continue to transfer some production operations overseas, a U.S. manufacturing sector will persist into the future, its foundations established in the 12 decades following the ratification of the U.S. Constitution.

Industrial Revolution in the United States history

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