English History

was late 19th century England impressive?

was late 19th century England impressive?

Introduction

Postwar industrial expansion, partly a result of the railroad network, rapidly began to assume gigantic proportions. When Lincoln was elected in 1860, the Republic ranked only fourth among the manufacturing nations of the world. By 1894 it had bounded into first place. Liquid capital, previously scarce, was now becoming abundant. The word millionaire had not been coined until the 1840s, and in 1861 only a handful of individuals were in this class (Hillstrom & Hillstrom, 2006). But the Civil War, partly through profiteering, created immense fortunes; and these accumulations could now be combined with the customary borrowings from foreign capitalists. The amazing natural resources of the nation were now about to be fully exploited, including coal, oil, and iron (Jalan, 2004). For example, the Minnesota-Lake Superior region, which had yielded some iron ore by the 1850s, contributed the rich deposits of the Mesabi Range by the 1890s. This priceless bonanza, where mountains of red-rusted ore could be scooped up by steam shovels, ultimately became a cornerstone of a vast steel empire (Clark, Goss & Kosova, 2003).

Discussion

Unskilled labor, both homegrown and imported, was now cheap and plentiful. Steel, the keystone industry, came to be based largely on the sweat of low-priced immigrant labor, working in two twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week. American ingenuity at the same time played a vital role in the second American industrial revolution. Techniques of mass production, pioneered by Eli Whitney, were being perfected by the captains of industry (Hillstrom & Hillstrom, 2006). American inventiveness flowered luxuriantly in the postwar years: between 1860 and 1890 some 440,000 patents were issued. Business operations were facilitated by such machines as the cash register, the stock ticker, and the typewriter ("literary piano"), which attracted home-confined women to industry. Urbanization was speeded by the refrigerator car, the electric dynamo, and the electric railway, which displaced animal-drawn cars (Clark, Goss & Kosova, 2003).

One of the most ingenious inventions was the telephone, introduced by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876. A teacher of the deaf who was given a dead man's ear to experiment with, he remarked that if he could make the mute talk, he could make iron speak. America was speedily turned into a nation of "telephoniacs," as a gigantic communication network was built on his invention. The social impact of this instrument was further revealed when an additional army of "number please" women was attracted from the home into industry. Telephone boys were at first employed at switchboards, but their profanity shocked patrons (Hillstrom & Hillstrom, 2006).

The most versatile inventor of all was Thomas A. Edison, who as a boy had been considered so dull-witted that he was taken out of school. This "Wizard of the Wires" ran a veritable invention factory in New Jersey. He is perhaps best known for his perfection in 1879 of the electric light, which he unveiled after trying some six thousand filaments. So deaf that he was not easily distracted, he displayed sleepless ...