AMERICA’S

INDUSTRIAL AGE
(1865-1900)

Botosineanu David
Bucur Vlad
Diblus Stefan
Gilceava Mihai
Gutescu Robert
Istodor Stefan
 An Age of Industry

Technology has changed the world in many

ways, but perhaps no period introduced more
changes than the Second Industrial Revolution.
From the late 19th to early 20th centuries,
cities grew, factories sprawled and people’s
lives became regulated by the clock rather
than the sun.
 An Age of Industry

In 1800 the United States was an

underdeveloped nation of just over 5 million
people. It was a society shaped by
immigration, but immigrants from one country,
Great Britain, made up around half the
population. And with only 10 percent of its
people living in towns and cities, it was
thoroughly agrarian.
An Age of Industry

All this was about to change, and the

change was sudden, explosive, and
deeply disorienting. In the next century,
immigration, capitalism, and machine
technology would reshape the
character, culture, and landscape of
the young nation. In 1900 more than
77 million Americans lived in a
continental empire that was a melting
pot for more than 30 nationalities.
 An Age of Industry

Sixty percent of Americans still worked on farms, but nearly 40 percent

now lived in cities, and the United States had surpassed England as the
leading industrial nation on earth.
 Company Ownership
The basic model of ownership of
industry also underwent a major
“innovation” during the Second Industrial
Revolution. The oligarchical ownership of
companies, if not entire industries by
wealthy individual “business magnates”
that had dominated during the original
Industrial Revolution in the early to mid-
19th century was slowly replaced by
today’s model of wider public distribution
of ownership through the sale of stock to
individual investors and institutions such
as banks and insurance companies.
Child Labor

Perhaps the most tragic negative

aspect of the Second Industrial
Revolution was the growth of
unregulated child labor. To help their
impoverished families, children, often
as young as four years old, were
forced to work long hours for little
pay in factories under unhealthy and
unsafe conditions. By 1900, an
estimated 1.7 million children under
the age of fifteen were working in
American factories.
 Social and Economic Shifts

Within just a few decades, the Second

Industrial Revolution transformed the United
States from a mainly rural agricultural society
to a booming industrial economy centered in
major cities. Since rural areas were now
connected to large urban markets by a well-
developed transportation network,
unavoidable crop failures no longer doomed
them to poverty. At the same time, however,
industrialization and urbanization drastically
reduced the share of the population engaged
in agriculture.
 Social and Economic Shifts
Between 1870 and 1900, almost all industrialized nations enjoyed booming
economies that led to dramatically lower consumer prices, resulting in
greatly improved living conditions.
While it was a period of unprecedented progress and innovation that
propelled some people into vast wealth, it also condemned many to poverty,
creating a deep social chasm between the industrial machine and the
working middle class that fueled it.
 Development of Railroads

Much of the explosion of economic

production in America during the Second
Industrial Revolution has been attributed to
the expansion of the railroads. By the 1860s,
the increased availability and lower cost of
Bessemer process steel finally allowed the
railroads to utilize it in quantity.
 Development of Railroads

Early U.S. railroads had used wrought iron

rails imported from Britain. However, being
soft and often full of impurities, iron rails
could not support heavy locomotives and
required frequent repair and replacement.
 Development of Railroads
As a far more durable and readily available material, steel soon replaced iron
as the standard for railroad rails. Not only did the longer sections of steel rails
allow for tracks to be laid far faster, more powerful locomotives, which could pull
longer trains, which greatly increased the productivity of the railroads.
 Development of Railroads

First used to report the current location of trains, the telegraph further
facilitated the growth of the railroads, as well as financial and commodity
markets by reducing the cost of transmitting information within and between
firms.
 Development of Railroads
During the 1880s, America’s railroads laid more than 75,000 miles of
new track, the most anywhere in history. Between 1865 and 1916, the
transcontinental network of railroads, America’s “magic carpet made
of steel,” expanded from 35,000 miles to over 254,000 miles.
 Development of Railroads

By 1920, rail had become the

dominant means of transportation,
resulting in a steady decrease in the
cost of shipping lasting throughout the
rest of the century. The railroad soon
became the main way by which
companies transported raw materials
to their factories and delivered final
products to consumers.
The Light Bulb

By January 1879, at his laboratory in Menlo

Park, New Jersey, Thomas Edison had built his
first high resistance, incandescent electric light.
It worked by passing electricity through a thin
platinum filament in the glass vacuum bulb,
which delayed the filament from melting
 The Light Bulb
Still, the lamp only burned for a few short
hours. In order to improve the bulb, Edison
needed all the persistence he had learned years
before in his basement laboratory.
The Light Bulb

He tested thousands and thousands of other

materials to use for the filament. He even
thought about using tungsten, which is the
metal used for light bulb filaments now, but he
couldn't work with it given the tools available at
that time.
 Questions

Do you thinki that the industrial

01. age made the human race evolve
faster?

Do you think that most of the

02. inventions from the industrial
age are outdated?
 Bibliography
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Second_Industrial_Revolution

https://
www.thoughtco.com/second-in
dustrial-revolution-overview-518
0514

https://www.bulbs.com/
learning/history.aspx