Industrial Revolution

Dictionary of American History | 2003 |

INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION. The industrial revolution can be defined as a drastic transformation both of the processes by which American (and European) society produced goods for human consumption, and of the social attitudes surrounding these processes. The first non-ambiguous use of the term is attributed to the French economist Adolphe Blanqui in 1837, but the idea of a "revolution" in the industrial sphere showed up in various forms in the writings of many French and British intellectuals as early as the 1820s. The expression underlines the depth and speed of the changes observed, and the fact that they seemed to derive from the introduction of machine-based factories. Although in Great Britain the slow process of industrial transformation has led historians there to question the very notion of an "industrial revolution," the speed and radical character of the change that took place in the United States in the nineteenth century largely precludes any such discussion.

An Economic and Social Revolution

The spread of new, powerful machines using new sources of power (water, then coal-generated steam) constituted the most obvious aspect of this process of change. Alexander Hamilton's Report on Manufactures(1791) made explicit reference to "the extension of the use of machinery," especially in the British cotton industry, and in 1812, Tench Coxe, a political economist and career official in the Treasury Department, peppered his Report on the State of Manufactures in the United States with paeans to "laborsaving machinery." Factories built around new machines became a significant element in the urban landscapes of several eastern cities in the 1830s, while railroads brought steam-powered engines into the daily life of rural areas. The new industrial order included productivity increases that made available a wealth of new, nonagricultural goods and activities. Three out of four American male workers accounted for in the census of 1800 worked full time in

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agriculture; by 1900 more than two-thirds of the workforce was employed in the manufacturing and service sectors. Another, less visible evolution was even more momentous: in 1800 virtually all Americans were working in family-sized units of production, based on long-term or permanent (slaves, spouses) relationships and included such nonquantitative characteristics as room and board and "moral" rules of behavior. When wages were paid, their amount was a function of these "moral" customs (some historians even speak of a "moral" economy) and the prosperity of the business as much as of the supply and demand of labor. A century later, wages determined by the labor market were becoming the norm, with little attention paid to "custom" or the moral imperative of "fair wages." Moreover, employers and employees lived increasingly disconnected lives, both socially and spatially. Among many other consequences, this shift eventually led to a reevaluation of "women's work," hitherto left unpaid within the household, and made untenable first slavery, then the segregation with which southern white supremacists hoped to create their own racist version of the labor market. It is thus impossible to overstate the social and political impact of the industrial revolution.

From New Machines to Modern Businesses

While the existence of an industrial revolution is hard to dispute, its chronology and causes are more open to discussion. Technologically, the United States took its first steps toward mass production almost immediately after independence, and had caught up with Great Britain by the 1830s. Following the British lead, American innovation was concentrated in cotton and transportation. In 1793, after fifteen years of experimentation in the Philadelphia and Boston areas, Samuel Slater set up the country's first profitable cotton-spinning factory in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Thomas Jefferson's decision in 1807 to stop trade with Europe, and the subsequent War of 1812 with Great Britain, created a protected environment for American manufacturers, and freed commercial capital. This led to such ventures as the Boston Manufacturing Company, founded under the impulse of Boston merchant Francis Cabot Lowell in 1813 in Waltham, Massachusetts. The company's investors went on to create a whole series of new factories in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1822. Thanks to a combination of immigrant British technicians, patent infringements, industrial espionage, and local innovations, American power looms were on a par

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with the English machines by the end of the 1810s. Moreover, Waltham, which combined under one roof all the processes of textile production, particularly spinning and weaving, was the first wholly integrated textile factory in the world. Still, despite the development of a high-pressure steam engine by inventor Oliver Evans in Philadelphia in 1804, American cotton manufacturers, and American industry in general, lagged in the use of steam. In 1833, Secretary of the Treasury Louis McLane's federal survey of American industry reported few steam engines outside of the Pittsburgh area, whereas James Watt's steam engine, perfected between 1769 and 1784, was used throughout Great Britain by 1800.

However, in 1807, the maiden run of Robert Fulton's first steamboat, the Clermont, on the Hudson River marked the first commercial application of steam to transportation, a field in which Americans were most active. The first commercial railroad in the United States, the Baltimore and Ohio, was launched in 1828, three years after its first British counterpart. In 1829, the British inventor George Stephenson introduced his Rocket engine; the New Jersey transportation magnate John Stevens bought one two years later and had built three improved (and patent-infringing) copies by 1833. His son, Robert L. Stevens, added his own contribution by creating the modern T-rail. John Stevens also gave technical information to young Matthias Baldwin of Philadelphia, who launched what would become the Baldwin Locomotive Works with his first engine, the Ironsides, built in 1832. With the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, and the ensuing "canal craze," a spate of canal construction extending into the 1840s, all the ingredients of the so-called transportation revolution were in place.

Between the 1820s and the Civil War, American machinery surpassed that of their British competitors, a superiority made public at the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London in 1851. For instance, under the impulse of John Hall, a machinist who began working at the Harpers Ferry federal gun factory in 1820, American gun makers developed a production process precise and mechanized enough to produce standardized, interchangeable gun parts; such an approach would make the fortune of gun maker Samuel Colt in the 1850s. Standardized production was eventually applied to other goods, starting with Isaac Merritt Singer's sewing machines, sold commercially from 1851 on. The biggest advance in communications technology since the railroad greatly improved mail delivery, was the telegraph, an American innovation introduced by Samuel F. B. Morse between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore in 1844. The 1830–1860 period is most important, however, for its organizational innovations. Up to then, cotton manufacturers, steamboat promoters, and railroad administrators alike were less concerned with productivity than with turning a quick profit through monopolies, cartels, and niche markets. Accounting was sloppy at best, making precise cost control impossible. Subcontracting was the rule, as well as piece-work rather than wages. In this environment, technical innovations that sped production could lessen costs for the manufacturer only if piece rates were cut accordingly. This began to occur in American cotton factories from 1828 on (leading to the first modern industrial conflicts in Manayunk and other factories around Philadelphia, six years before the better-known strikes in Lowell and other New England centers in 1834). It was not until the 1840s and 1850s that modern business procedures were introduced. These included the accounting innovations of Louis McLane, at this time president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, and his chief engineer, Benjamin Latrobe, and the organizational overhaul of the Pennsylvania Railroad launched by its president, J. Edgar Thompson, in 1853.

By the Civil War, competent technicians and productivity-minded administrators were revolutionizing one industry after another, a process that became generalized after 1870. Organizers and inventors systematically allied with each other; in Pittsburgh, Alexander L. Holley built for Andrew Carnegie the most modern steel mill in the world, the Edgar Thomson works, which opened in 1875. Sometimes organizer and inventor were one and the same, as in the case of Thomas Edison, who set up an experimental laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, in 1876, developed the first electric lightbulb in 1879, and went on to build what became General Electric. In other fields, the pioneers were superseded by outsiders. Colonel Edwin Drake was the first person to successfully use drilling to extract oil from the earth, which he did in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859, but John D. Rockefeller was the man who succeeded in gaining control over 90 percent of American refineries between 1865 and 1879, creating with Standard Oil the first modern monopoly in America. The systematized search for productivity led to systematized research and development through the combined use of applied research and funding from large corporations, university-based science, and federal subsidies. From oil and electricity to chemistry, the pace of innovation became such that the period has been called a "second industrial revolution" (actually a misnomer, since rates of growth were not significantly higher than in the previous period). Similarly, the search for economies of scale led to giant factories, great concentrations of workers, and widespread urbanization. The search for new outlets for constantly increasing output led to mass consumption and advertisement. And the search for lower costs prompted bloody battles with workers. Compromise in this area was slowly reached; in 1914, Henry Ford introduced the idea that high wages meant efficient workers and useful consumers, and Roosevelt and the New Deal, from 1933 on, set up a social security system giving those same workers a safety net in hard times. Thus, much of the history of the late-nineteenth and the twentieth centuries is the history of the struggle to come to terms with the economic, political, and social consequences of the new forms of organization of human production developed before the Civil War and systematized in the Gilded Age. More generally, the industrial revolution inaugurated trends that perpetuated themselves into the twenty-first century and can properly be described as the matrix of the contemporary world.


By : Arif Hidayat (115060700111108)