Pros And Cons Of Industrialization During The Gilded Age

I choose to defend the prompt of my choice in more detail. In the 1870's, as the Civil War receded into memory, the United States became a leading Industrial power. Advances in technology and new access to the immense resources of the North American continent drove American Industrialization. This industrialization brought the growth of new American cities such as Chicago, and the arrival of a flood of immigrants from all over Europe to man the factories. During the Gilded Age, businessmen reaped enormous profits from this new economy. Powerful tycoons formed giant trusts to monopolize the production of goods that were in high demand. Andrew Carnegie built a giant steel empire using vertical integration, a business tactic that increased profits by eliminating middlemen from the production line. Jay Gould grabbed the railroads, and then the resources brought by those railroads. Though industrialization caused many long-term positives, it did cause problems in the short-term. Rich farmers who could afford new machinery grew even richer, while poorer farmers were forced to move to urban areas, unable to compete in the agricultural sector.

The harnessing of electricity is emblematic of this trend. As it relates to the process of innovation, the work of developing electricity as a cheap and widely applicable power source fell increasingly to the newly organized industrial and corporate research labs. The first among these were Thomas Edison's Menlo Park lab in New Jersey (an industrial lab) and the company lab established at GE (a corporate lab) at the turn of the century. Following the trail blazed by Edison, the whole process of innovation came to rely more on specialists, trained scientists, collaboration, and corporate funding-establishing the basic blueprint for cradles of twentieth-century