Technological Innovation, 1865-1900

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Identify the major technological breakthroughs of the second industrial revolution between 1865 and 1900, including the Bessemer process, the incandescent light bulb, alternating current, the telephone, the refrigerated rail car, and steel-frame skyscraper construction.
• Explain how cheap structural steel, electric power, and refrigerated transport reshaped American manufacturing, urban form, and food distribution during the Gilded Age.
• Account for how the federal patent system and the industrial research laboratory turned individual invention into a repeatable institutional process led by Edison at Menlo Park, Westinghouse at Pittsburgh, and Bell at Boston.
• Use Skill 5.B (Causation) to trace the chain that connects late-century technology to the dramatic expansion of American industrial production described in KC-6.1.I.B.i.
• Account for the rivalry between Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla over direct and alternating current, and explain why Westinghouse and Tesla's alternating-current system became the foundation of the modern American electrical grid.

The CED frames Topic 6.5 with one Key Concept statement, KC-6.1.I.B.i: businesses drew on technological innovations and greater access to natural resources to dramatically increase the production of goods. The compressed sentence does an enormous amount of work. Between 1865 and 1900 the United States passed Britain to become the world's largest manufacturing economy, and the technologies clustered in this lesson are the reason. Cheap Bessemer steel made transcontinental railroads, the high-pressure boiler, and the steel-frame skyscraper economically possible. Electric power lit American streets, ran American factory floors, and unhitched manufacturing from the river-bank water wheel that had defined the first industrial revolution. The internal combustion engine, the telephone, and the refrigerated rail car each restructured how Americans moved goods, information, and themselves. The Gilded Age was an age of inequality and political turbulence, but it was first an age of technological compounding, and the rest of Period 6 is unintelligible without the technical substrate this lesson examines (Theme WXT).

The story begins with steel. Henry Bessemer, an English inventor, patented in the 1850s a converter that blew air through molten pig iron and burned out the carbon and silicon in roughly twenty minutes, producing high-quality steel that would have taken days to produce by older crucible methods. Andrew Carnegie's Edgar Thomson Works at Braddock, Pennsylvania, opened in 1875 and was designed from the foundation to run on the Bessemer process. Steel that had cost more than one hundred dollars a ton in 1870 cost less than twenty dollars a ton by 1890. Cheap steel rebuilt every railroad in the country with steel rail in place of brittle iron, made the Brooklyn Bridge of 1883 and the Eads Bridge at St. Louis of 1874 possible, and supplied the I-beams that allowed Chicago architects William Le Baron Jenney, Louis Sullivan, and Daniel Burnham to lift commercial buildings ten and twelve and finally twenty stories above the street. The Bessemer process is the single most important technological substrate of Period 6, and the rest of the second industrial revolution sits on top of it (KC-6.1.I.B.i).

Electric power was the second great engine. Thomas Edison opened the Menlo Park laboratory in New Jersey in 1876 and ran it as the first industrial research operation in American history, employing full-time engineers, machinists, glassblowers, and chemists who worked in parallel on the problems that paying customers wanted solved. The phonograph followed in 1877; the practical incandescent light bulb followed in 1879; the central generating station that lit lower Manhattan from Pearl Street followed in 1882; and the motion-picture camera followed in 1891. Edison filed for more than one thousand United States patents over his career, more than any other American of the period. George Westinghouse, working with the Serbian-born engineer Nikola Tesla, pushed a competing alternating-current system that could be stepped up to high voltage for long-distance transmission and stepped back down for safe local use. Edison's direct current required a generating station every mile or two and could not economically light a city the size of Buffalo or Chicago. The War of Currents between the two systems, fought between 1888 and 1892 in courtrooms, trade journals, and a notorious series of public-relations stunts, ended when the Westinghouse and Tesla alternating-current system lit the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago and powered the Niagara Falls hydroelectric plant in 1895. The modern American electrical grid is an alternating-current grid because Westinghouse and Tesla won the argument.

The third engine was communication. Alexander Graham Bell filed his telephone patent on the morning of February 14, 1876, hours before his rival Elisha Gray filed a competing caveat at the same Patent Office, and by 1900 the Bell System operated more than eight hundred thousand telephones across the country. The telegraph, which had stitched the country together since the 1840s, was joined by the telephone, the typewriter (1873), and the rotary press, each of which industrialized a different part of the white-collar office that the trust and the railroad had begun to require. The patent system was central. The federal Patent Act of 1790 and its 1836 and 1870 reorganizations granted seventeen-year monopolies that protected the commercial value of new ideas, and a generation of American inventors learned to file patents the way generals plan campaigns. Edison's lawyers filed defensive patents around every promising line of work; Bell's lawyers spent more than a decade defending his telephone patent against six hundred separate infringement suits. The patent and the research lab together were the institutional engine that turned technological innovation into a regular feature of American business (KC-6.1.I.B.i).

The fourth engine was transportation and food. The refrigerated rail car, perfected by Gustavus Swift in the late 1870s and rapidly adopted by Philip Armour, allowed Chicago meatpackers to ship dressed beef across the country for the first time. By 1890 a beef carcass slaughtered in Chicago at a Monday morning could be unloaded at a Boston market on Wednesday evening. The result was the disassembly line at the Union Stock Yards, a Chicago industrial achievement that Henry Ford would later study and adapt to automobile production, and a national meat market that drove independent local butchers out of business across the country. The same refrigeration technology, paired with the steam engine, gave the United States ocean exports of beef, pork, and dairy that helped build the country's first significant trade surpluses. The internal combustion engine, developed by Nikolaus Otto in Germany in 1876 and refined by Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz in the 1880s, would not produce an American mass automobile until Henry Ford's Model T in 1908. But its first decade, the 1890s, produced enough small American workshop builders (the Duryea brothers in Massachusetts in 1893, Ransom Olds in Michigan in 1897, Henry Ford's first Quadricycle in 1896) to make the gasoline automobile the obvious successor to the horse and the streetcar by the time Period 7 opened.

The visible monument of the second industrial revolution was the city. Chicago's Home Insurance Building of 1885, designed by William Le Baron Jenney, was the first commercial building to use a load-bearing internal steel skeleton in place of masonry walls, and it set off a vertical race that Louis Sullivan and Daniel Burnham turned into the recognizable American skyscraper. Sullivan's Auditorium Building (1889) and Wainwright Building (1891) gave the steel frame an honest exterior expression. Burnham's Flatiron Building (1902) and Daniel Burnham's plan for the 1893 Columbian Exposition projected the new urban form onto a national audience. Electric streetcars and interurban railways replaced horse-drawn streetcars in city after city in the late 1880s, and the Boston subway of 1897 and the New York subway of 1904 followed. The Eastman Kodak roll-film camera of 1888 made photography a middle-class consumer technology, and the sewing machine, perfected by Isaac Singer's company in the 1860s, supplied the ready-made clothing industry that put cheap manufactured suits and dresses into the reach of the working class. The Gilded Age city of 1900, lit by Edison and Westinghouse, framed in Carnegie steel, fed by Swift refrigerated rail cars, photographed by Eastman Kodak cameras, and dressed by Singer sewing machines, was a different built environment than any earlier generation had ever seen (KC-6.1.I.B.i, Theme WXT).

The deeper story is the institutional one. Late-century invention was not the work of lone tinkerers in garrets, even though Americans liked to tell it that way. It was the work of patent-protected corporations that funded full-time research staffs, managed long pipelines of incremental improvements, and treated invention as an ongoing capital expense rather than a stroke of genius. Edison's Menlo Park laboratory was the model; Westinghouse's Pittsburgh research operation, Bell's American Telephone and Telegraph engineering department, General Electric's research laboratory at Schenectady (founded 1900), and DuPont's Wilmington laboratory (founded 1902) were the heirs. The federal patent office, the corporate research budget, and the engineering school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Stevens Institute, and Cornell together produced the regular pipeline of new technology that the United States economy would draw on for the next century. Period 6 invented the modern industrial research lab as much as it invented the light bulb, and the institutional invention is the one with the longer shadow.

The five sources below sample the technological substrate of Period 6 across patents, photographs, and Smithsonian artifacts.

1. (Causation) Trace the causal chain from the Bessemer process to the Chicago skyscraper. At which step does the chain depend most heavily on a federal policy choice, and which one?
2. (Comparison) Compare Edison's direct-current system with the Westinghouse and Tesla alternating-current system. Which features of alternating current proved decisive for long-distance distribution, and what does the outcome of the War of Currents reveal about how technical standards get chosen in a market economy?
3. (Continuity and Change) Compare American invention before 1860 (Eli Whitney's cotton gin, Samuel Morse's telegraph, Cyrus McCormick's reaper) with American invention between 1865 and 1900. Identify one continuity and one significant shift, and account for the role the patent system and the industrial research laboratory played in producing the shift.
4. (Causation) The refrigerated rail car turned Chicago meatpackers into national producers and drove independent local butchers out of business. Account for two ways the technology reshaped the geography of the American food economy and one social cost it imposed on producers and consumers outside Chicago.
5. (Continuity and Change) Consider the late-century cluster of consumer technologies (the telephone, the Eastman Kodak camera, the Singer sewing machine, the electric streetcar). How did each fit into the late-century rise of the urban middle class, and what does that fit suggest about the relationship between industrial technology and social class in Period 6?

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP USH codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, Version 1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.