Page 335 - American Stories, A History of the United States

The essential features of the emerging mode
13.1 of production were gathering a supervised work-
force in a single place, paying cash wages to work-
ers, using interchangeable parts, and manufacturing
BRITISH NORTH AMERICA
13.2 (CANADA) by “continuous process.” Within a factory setting,
a sequence of continuous operations could rapidly
and efficiently assemble standardized parts, manu-
Boston factured separately and in bulk, into a final product.
Great Lakes
Mass production, which involved the division of
Detroit labor into a series of relatively simple and repetitive
New York
Pittsburgh tasks, contrasted sharply with the traditional craft
Philadelphia mode of production, in which a single worker pro-
Chicago
Washington, D.C. duced the entire product out of raw materials.
The transition to mass production often
St. Cincinnati depended on new technology. Just as power looms
Joseph
and spinning machinery had made textile mills
St. Louis possible, new and more reliable machines or indus-
ATLANTIC
OCEAN trial techniques revolutionized other industries.
Charleston Elias Howe’s invention of the sewing machine in
1846 laid the basis for the ready-to-wear clothing
industry and contributed to the mechanization of
shoemaking. During the 1840s, iron manufactur-
ers adopted the British practice of using coal rather
New Orleans than charcoal for smelting and thus produced a
Houston
metal better suited to industrial needs. Charles
Goodyear’s discovery in 1839 of the process for
Gulf of Mexico
vulcanizing rubber made new manufactured items
Railroads available to the American consumer, most notably
in 1850
0 200 400 miles Railroads built the overshoe.
between 1850 Perhaps the greatest triumph of mid-
0 200 400 kilometers and 1860
nineteenth-century American technology was the
development of the world’s most sophisticated
mAP 13.4 RAilRoAdS, 1850 And 1860 During the 1840s and 1850s, railroad and reliable machine tools. Such inventions as the
lines moved rapidly westward. by 1860, more than 30,000 miles of track had been laid.
extraordinarily accurate measuring device known
as the vernier caliper in 1851 and turret lathes in
1854 were signs of an American aptitude for precision toolmaking that was essential
for efficient industrialization.
But progress in industrial technology and organization did not mean the United States
had become an industrial society by 1860. Factory workers remained a small fraction of the
workforce, and agriculture retained first place both as a source of livelihood for individuals
and as a contributor to the gross national product. But farming itself, at least in the North,
was undergoing its own technological revolution. John Deere’s steel plow, invented in
1837 and mass produced by the 1850s, enabled midwestern farmers to cultivate the tough
prairie soils that had resisted cast-iron implements. The mechanical reaper, patented by
Cyrus McCormick in 1834, made harvesting grain much easier. Seed drills, cultivators,
and threshing machines also came into widespread use before 1860. (See Table 13.3).
A dynamic interaction between advances in transportation, industry, and agricul-
ture made the economy of the northern states stronger and more resilient during the
1850s. Railroads offered western farmers better access to eastern markets. After rails
linked Chicago and New York in 1853, most midwestern farm commodities flowed
east–west instead of the north–south direction based on riverborne traffic that had
predominated until then.
Quick Check The mechanization of agriculture also gave additional impetus to industrializa-
What technological developments tion, and its labor-saving features released workers for other economic activities. The
contributed to the new “mass growth of industry and the modernization of agriculture were thus mutually reinforc-
production”?
ing aspects of a single process of economic growth.
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