Industrialization In The 1800's

With the birth and conception of a new country came many new and exciting innovations in the 1800’s. With advanced clothing due to the invention of the sewing machine, to the first schematics of the automobile, soon the factory replaced the home as the center of production. Standards of living grew as production did and America was soon an upcoming superpower, yet with living conditions horrible and tension between workers and bosses growing there had to be more change.

The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain, and many of the technological innovations were of British origin. By the mid-18th century Britain was the world's leading commercial nation, controlling a global trading empire with colonies in North America and Africa, and

In the early decades of the century, the Erie Canal created a route from the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes, thereby helping stimulate the economy of New York and making New York City a great trading center. Meanwhile, the great river and lake cities of the Midwest were thriving thanks to the reliable transportation afforded by the steamboat. Road transit was also beginning to link parts of the country together. The Cumberland Road, the first national road, was begun in 1811 and eventually became part of Interstate 40. Railroads were of supreme importance to increased trade throughout the United States. By the start of the Civil War, railroads already linked the most important Midwestern cities with the Atlantic coast, fueling the Midwest's industrial growth. With the advent of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 at Promontory, Utah, and the standardization of rail gauges in the 1880s, the railroad quickly became the dominant form of transit for both people and goods. It became a virtuous cycle; as the nation expanded, so did the railroads. By 1916, there would be more than 230,000 miles of rails in the U.S., and passenger traffic would continue to grow until the end of World War II, when two newer transit innovations gained dominance and would fuel new economic and industrial changes: the car and the

Then in 1829 the typewriter was invented by W.S Burt, Which was a major accomplishment for news writers and journalists and allowed news to get out much faster and just added fuel to the fire of the Industrial Revolution. Thomas Edison is credited with inventing the phonograph, which could both record sound and play it back, in 1877. The device converted sound waves into vibrations that in turn were engraved on a metal cylinder using a needle. Edison refined his invention and began marketing it to the public in 1888. But early phonographs were extremely expensive, and wax cylinders were both very fragile and hard to mass produce. By the turn of the 20th century, the cost of photographs and cylinders had dropped considerably and they became more commonplace in American homes. The disc-shaped record we know today was introduced by Emile Berliner in Europe in 1889 and appeared in the U.S. in 1894. In 1925, the first industry standard for playing speeds was set at 78 revolutions per minute, and the record disc became the dominant