11-1 Early Industry and Inventions

 

Ø   New machines and factories changed the way people lived and worked the late 1700s and early 1800s.

 

Ø   The industrial development that began more than 200 years ago continues today.

 

ONE AMERICAN’S STORY

 

In 1789, the Englishman Samuel Slater sailed to the United States under a false name. It was illegal for textile workers like him to leave the country. Britain wanted no other nation to copy its new machines for making thread and cloth. But Slater was going to bring the secret to America. When he got to New York, he wrote a letter to Rhode Island investor Moses Brown.

 

A VOICE FROM THE PAST

 

A few days ago I was informed that you wanted a manager of cotton spinning . . . in which business I flatter myself that I can give the greatest satisfaction, in making machinery, making good yarn, either for stockings or twist, as any that is made in England.

 

Samuel Slater, quoted in Samuel Slater: Father of American Manufactures

 

With Brown’s backing, Slater built the first successful water-powered textile mill in America.

 

 

Free Enterprise and Factories

 

·       The War of 1812 brought great economic changes to the United States.  It sowed the seeds for an Industrial Revolution like the one begun in Britain during the late 18th century. During the Industrial Revolution, factory machines replaced hand tools, and large-scale farming as the main form of work.  For example, before the Industrial Revolution, women spun thread and wove cloth at home using spinning wheels and hand looms. The invention of such machines as the spinning jenny and the power loom made it possible for unskilled workers to produce cloth. These workers, who were often children, could produce more cloth, more quickly.

 

·       The factory System brought many workers and machines together under one roof.  Most factories were built near a source of water to power the machines.  People left their farms and crowded into cities where the factories were.  They worked for wages, on a set schedule. Their way of life changed, and not always for the better.

 

·       Many Americans, such as Thomas Jefferson, did not want the United States to industrialize.  But the War of 1812 led the country in that direction.  Because the British naval blockade kept imported goods from reaching U.S. shores, Americans had to start manufacturing their own goods. The blockade also stopped investors from spending money on shipping and trade, Instead, they invested in new American industries, Taking advantage of the country’s free enterprise system,  American businessmen built their own factories.

 

Factories Come to New England

 

·       New England, one of the first regions where factories were built was a good place to set up factories.  There were several reasons. Factories needed waterpower, and New England had many fast-moving rivers.  For transportation, it also had ships and access to the ocean.  In addition, New England had a willing labor force.  The area’s first factory workers were families who were tired of scraping a living from their stony fields.

 

·       Samuel Slater built his first spinning mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1790.  He hired eight children between the ages of 7 and 12, paying them a low wage.  Later, he built a larger mill and employed whole families.  As Slater influenced others to start mills, his family system of employment spread through Rhode Island, Connecticut and southern Massachusetts.

 

 

The Lowell Mills Hire Women

 

·       In 1813, the American textile industry leaped forward when Francis Cabot Lowell built a factory in Waltham, in eastern Massachusetts.  This factory not only spun raw cotton into yarn, but wove it into cloth on power looms.  Lowell had seen power looms in English mills and had figured out how to build them.  Like Samuel Slater, he had brought secrets to America.

 

·       The Waltham factory was so successful that Lowell and his partners built a new factory town, Lowell, near the Merrimack and Concord rivers.  The Lowell mills, textile mills in the village, employed farm girls who lived in company owned boarding houses. “Lowell girls worked 12 ½ hours a day in deafening noise.

 

 

 

A VOICE FROM THE PAST

 

At first the hours seemed very long . . . and when I went out at night the sound of the mill was in my ears . . . . You know that people learn to sleep with the thunder Niagara [falls] in their ears, and a cotton mill is no worse, though you wonder that we do not have to hold our breath in such a noise.

 

“Letters from Susan,” quoted in the Lowell Offering

 

·       Young women came to Lowell in spite of the noise.  In the early years wages were high, between two and four dollars a week.  Older women supervised the girls, making them follow strict rules and attend church.  Girls read books, went to lectures, and even published a literary magazine. However falling profits meant that wages dropped and working conditions worsened for the Lowell girls.

 

·       The Lowell mills and other early factories ran on water power.  Factories built after the 1830s were run by more powerful steam engines.  Because steam engines used coal and wood, not fast moving water, factories could be built away from rivers and beyond New England.

 

 

 

 

 

A New Way to Manufacture

 

·       New manufacturing methods changed the style of work in other industries besides the textile industry. In 1797, the U.S. government hired the inventor Eli Whitney to make 10,000 muskets for the army.  He was to have the guns ready in two years.  Before this time, guns were made one at a time by gunsmiths, from start to finish.  Each gun differed slightly. If a part broke, a new part had to be created to match the broken one.

 

 

·       Whitney sought a better way to make guns.  In 1801, he went to Washington with a box containing piles of musket parts.  He took a part from each pile and assembled a musket in seconds; He had just demonstrated the use of interchangeable parts, part that are exactly alike.

 

·       Machines that produced exactly matching parts soon became standard in industries.  Interchangeable parts speeded up production, made repairs easy, and allowed the use of lower-paid, less skilled workers.  But the new system also required a new style of management, with inspectors to make sure each piece was uniform.  Workers who were used to more independence disliked such close supervision.

 

Transportation and Communication

 

·       New inventions increased factory production.  They also improved transportation and communication.  Steamboats carried people and goods farther and faster and led to the growth of cities like New Orleans and St. Louis.  Robert Fulton invented a steamboat that could move against the current or a strong wind.

 

·       The Clermont was dubbed “Fulton’s Folly” and described as” looking precisely like a backwoods saw-mill mounted on a scow and set on fire.”  But it made the 300-mile trip from New York to Albany and back in a record 62 hours.  Even Fulton had not expected to travel so quickly.

 

·       In 1811, the first steamship traveled down the Mississippi and Ohio rivers.  But its engine was not powerful enough to return upriver, against the current.  Henry Miller Shreve, a trader on the Mississippi, designed a more powerful engine.  He installed it on a double-decker boat with a paddle wheel in the back.  In 1816, he sailed this boat up the Mississippi and launched a new era of trade and transportation on the river.

 

·       In 1837, Samuel F.B. Morse first demonstrated his telegraph.

 

·        This machine sent long and short pulses of electricity along a wire.  These pulses could be translated into letters of a message.  With the telegraph, it took only seconds to communicate with someone in another city. 

·       In 1844, the first long-distance telegraph line carried news from Baltimore to Washington, D.C., about who had been nominated for president.  Telegraph lines spanned the country by 1861, bringing people closer as a nation.  Both the telegraph and the steamboat brought more national unity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Technology Improves Farming

 

·       Other new inventions increased farm production.  In 1836, the blacksmith John Deere invented a lightweight plow with a steel cutting edge. Older cast-iron plows were designed for the light, sandy soil of New England.  But rich, heavy Midwestern soil clung to the bottom of these plows and slowed farmers down.  Deere’s new plow made preparing ground much less work as a result more farmers began to move to the Midwest.

 

 

 

 

·       The mechanical reaper and the threshing machine were other inventions that improved agriculture.  Cyrus McCormick’s reaper, patented in 1834, cut ripe grain, the threshing machine separated kernels of whet from husks.

 

·       New technologies linked regions and contributed to national unity.  With new farm equipment, Midwestern farmers grew food to feed Northeastern factory works, In turn; Midwestern farmers became a market for Northeastern manufactured goods.  The growth of Northeastern textile mills increased demand for Southern cotton.  This led to the expansion of slavery in the South.