Page 520 - US History

510 Chapter 18 | Industrialization and the Rise of Big Business, 1870-1900
18.1 Inventors of the Age
The late nineteenth century was an energetic era of inventions and entrepreneurial spirit. Building upon the mid-century Industrial Revolution in Great Britain, as well as answering the increasing call from Americans for efficiency and comfort, the country found itself in the grip of invention fever, with more people working on their big ideas than ever before. In retrospect, harnessing the power of steam and then electricity in the nineteenth century vastly increased the power of man and machine, thus making other advances possible as the century progressed.
Facing an increasingly complex everyday life, Americans sought the means by which to cope with it. Inventions often provided the answers, even as the inventors themselves remained largely unaware of the life-changing nature of their ideas. To understand the scope of this zeal for creation, consider the U.S. Patent Office, which, in 1790—its first decade of existence—recorded only 276 inventions. By 1860, the office had issued a total of 60,000 patents. But between 1860 and 1890, that number exploded to nearly 450,000, with another 235,000 in the last decade of the century. While many of these patents came to naught, some inventions became lynchpins in the rise of big business and the country’s move towards an industrial-based economy, in which the desire for efficiency, comfort, and abundance could be more fully realized by most Americans.
AN EXPLOSION OF INVENTIVE ENERGY
From corrugated rollers that could crack hard, homestead-grown wheat into flour to refrigerated train
Figure 18.2
By the end of this section, you will be able to:
• Explain how the ideas and products of late nineteenth-century inventors contributed to
the rise of big business
• Explain how the inventions of the late nineteenth century changed everyday American
life
This OpenStax book is available for free at https://cnx.org/content/col11740/1.3