chapter 10:transportation, communication and...

CHAPTER 10: TRANSPORTATION, COMMUNICATION and

TECHNOLOGY

• Psa_20:7 Some trust in

chariots, and some in horses:

but we will remember the

name of the LORD our God.

Objectives:

o We will study the importance of the Erie Canal for the development of both the West and New York City

o We will examine the influence of burgeoning railroad and telegraph networks on the economic development of the United States

o We will observe transformations taking place in business, industry, labor, and commerce as the full impact of the industrial revolution was felt in the United States.

The Canal Age: o From the 1790s until 1820s,

the so-called turnpike era, Americans had relied largely on roads for internal transportation.

o But in a country as large as the U.S. roads alone and the mostly horse-drawn vehicles that used them were not adequate for the nation’s expanding needs.

The Canal Age:

o America began to turn to other means of transportation.

o The larger rivers, especially the Mississippi and Ohio had been important transportation routes for years.

o Flat barges some taking four months to travel the length of the Mississippi were used.

The Canal Age: o These rivers became

vastly more important by the 1820s as steamboats grew in number and improved in design.

o The riverboats transported agriculture and cargo and even passengers at the fraction of the time of the old barges all the way down to New Orleans.

The Canal Age:

o But river shipping for merchants

also was not entirely satisfactory.

o It would be less expensive to

transport and more merchandise

could be sold if there was a direct

route east and west rather than a

roundabout riverboat route.

The Canal Age:

o The other alternative was

canals.

o By the 1820s the economic

advantages of canals had

generated a booming interest

in expanding the water routes

to the west.

The Canal Age: o Canal building was too expensive for private

enterprise and the job of digging canals fell largely to the states.

o Ambitious state governments of the Northeast took the lead in constructing them.

o New York was the first to act.

o It had the natural advantage of a good land route between the Hudson River and Lake Erie through the only real break in the Appalachian chain.

o With the election of De Witt Clinton as governor the debates on the practicality of building the canal was no more as he pressed forward.

The Canal Age: o The building of the Erie Canal was

the greatest construction project the United States had ever undertaken.

o The Erie Canal was not just an engineering triumph but an immediate financial success as well.

o It opened in October 1825 amid elaborate ceremonies and celebrations.

The Canal Age: o By providing a route to the Great

Lakes, the canal gave New York direct access to Chicago and the growing markets of the West.

o New York could now compete with and increasingly replace New Orleans as a destination for agricultural goods and other products of the West and as a source for manufactured goods to be sold in the region.

The Canal Age: o The system of water transportation and the

primacy of New York extended farther when the states of Ohio and Indiana inspired by the Erie Canal, provided water connections between Lake Erie and the Ohio River.

o These canals helped connect by an inland water route all the way to New York although it was still necessary to transfer cargoes several times between canal lake, and river craft.

o One of the immediate results of these new transportation routes was increased white settlement in the Northwest.

o Canals made it easier for migrants to make the westward journey and to ship their goods back to eastern markets.

The Canal Age:

o Other cities like Boston,

Philadelphia, and Baltimore

were not able to extend the

canal because mountain

ranges were in the way.

The Early Railroads

o Railroads became the primary

transportation system for the

United States and they remained

so until the construction of the

interstate highway system in the

mid-twentieth century.

o Railroads emerged from a

combination of technological and

entrepreneurial innovations.

The Early Railroads o The technological

breakthroughs included:

o the invention of tracks,

o the creation of steam-powered locomotives,

o and the development of the railroad cars that could serve as public carriers of passenger freight.

The Early Railroads o By 1804 both English and American

inventors had experimented with steam engines for propelling land vehicles.

o In 1820, John Stevens ran a locomotive and cars around a circular track on his New Jersey estate.

o And in 1825 the Stockton and Darlington Railroad in England opened a short length of track and became the first line to carry general traffic.

The Early Railroads o The first company to begin actual

operations was the Baltimore and Ohio which opened a thirteen-mile-stretch of track in 1830.

o In New York, the Mohawk and Hudson began running trains along the sixteen miles between Schenectady and Albany in 1831.

o By 1836 more than a thousand miles of track had been laid in eleven states.

The Early Railroads o But there was not yet a true railroad system.

o Even the longest of the lines were comparatively short in the 1830s, and most of them severed simply to connect water routes, not to link one railroad to another.

o But railroads made important advances in the 1830s and 1840s.

o The introduction of heavier iron rails improved the roadbeds.

o Steam locomotives became more flexible and powerful.

o Redesigned passengers cars became more stable, more comfortable and larger.

The Early Railroads o Railroads and canals were soon

competing bitterly.

o For a time the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company blocked railroads and also in New York as well.

o Railroads had so many advantages that when they were able to compete freely with other forms of transportation they almost always prevailed.

The Triumph of Rails: o After 1840, railroads gradually

supplanted canals and all other modes of transportation.

o In 1840, there were 2,818 miles of railroad tracks in the United States.

o By 1850, there was 9,021.

o An unparalleled burst of railroad construction followed in the 1850s, tripling the amount of tracks in just ten years.

The Triumph of Rails: o The most comprehensive and

efficient system was in the Northeast, which had twice as many tracks per square mile as the Northwest and four times as much as the South.

o But the expansion of the rails left no region untouched.

o Railroads were even reaching west of the Mississippi which was spanned at several points by great iron bridges.

The Triumph of Rails: o One line ran from Hannibal to St. Joseph

on the Missouri River and another was under construction between St. Louis and Kansas City.

o An important change in railroad development was the trend toward the consolidation of short lines into longer lines.

o By 1853, four major railroad trunk lines had crossed the Appalachian Mountains to connect the Northeast with the Northwest.

The Triumph of Rails:

o Chicago became the rail center of

the West served by fifteen lines

and more than a hundred daily

trains.

o The appearance of the great trunk

lines tended to divert traffic from

the main water routes.

The Triumph of Rails: o Capital to finance the railroad boom

came from many sources.

o Private American investors provided part of the necessary funding, and railroad companies borrowed large sums from abroad.

o But local governments states counties, cities, towns also often contributed capital, because they were eager to have railroads serve them.

The Triumph of Rails: o Railroads obtained substantial additional

assistance from the federal government in the form of public land grants.

o In 1850, Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois and other railroad-minded politicians persuaded congress to grant federal lands to aid the Illinois Central, which was building from Chicago toward the Gulf of Mexico.

o Other States wanted the same.

o Congress allotted over 30 million acres to eleven states to assist railroad construction.

Innovations in Communication and Journalism:

o Critical to railroads was an important innovation in communications: the magnetic telegraph.

o Telegraph lines extended along the tracks, connecting one station with another and aiding the scheduling and routing of trains.

o But the telegraph also permitted instant communication between distant cities tying the nation together.


o At the same time, it helped

reinforce schism between the

North and the South.

o Like railroads, telegraph lines were

far more extensive in the North

than in the South and they helped

similarly to link the North to the

Northwest.


o The telegraph burst into American life in 1844, when Samuel F.B. Morse after several years of experimentation succeeded in transmitting from Baltimore to Washington the news of James K. Polk’s nomination for the presidency.

o The relatively low cost of constructing wire systems made the Morse Telegraph System seem like an ideal answer to the problems of long-distance communication.


o By 1860 more than 50,000 miles of

wires connected most part of the

country; and a year later, the Pacific

telegraph connected New York to

San Francisco.

o Ultimately one organization,

Western Union Telegraph Company

oversaw all the telegraph lines.


o New forms of journalism also drew communities into a common communication system.

o In 1846, Richard Hoe invented the steam cylinder rotary press making it possible to print newspapers rapidly and cheaply.

o The development of the telegraph, together with the introduction of the rotary press made possible much speedier collection and distribution of news than ever before.


o In 1846 newspaper publishers from around the nation formed the Associated Press to promote cooperative news gathering by wire;

o No longer did they have to depend on the cumbersome exchange of newspapers for out-of-town reporters.

o Major metropolitan newspapers began to appear in larger cities in the Northeast.

o All gave serious attention to national and even international events and had substantial circulations beyond the city.


o In the long run, journalism would become an important unifying factor in American life.

o In the 1840s and 1850s, the rise of new journalism helped to feed sectional discord.

o Most of the major magazines and newspapers were in the North, reinforcing the South’s sense of subjugation.

o Southern newspapers tended to have smaller budgets and reported largely local news.

o Few had immediate impact outside their immediate communities.

COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY:

o The Expansion of Business, 1820-

1830s partly because the

population growth and the

transportation revolution.

o But also because of the daring,

imagination and ruthlessness of a

new generation of entrepreneurs.


o One important change came in the

retail distribution of goods.

o In the larger cities, stores

specializing in groceries, dry goods,

hardware and other lines appeared

although residents of smaller towns

depended on general stores that

did not specialize.


o In these less populous areas, many people did much of their business by barter.

o The organization of business was also changing.

o Individuals or limited partnerships continued to operate most businesses, and the dominating figures were still the great merchant capitalists who generally had sole ownership of their enterprises.


o In some larger businesses, however, the individual merchant capitalist was giving way to the corporation.

o Corporations began to develop particularly rapidly in the 1830s when some legal obstacles to their formation were removed.

o Previously a corporation could obtain a charter only by a special act of the state legislature.

o A cumbersome process that stifled corporate growth.


o By the 1830s, however states were beginning to pass general incorporation laws under which a group could secure a charter merely by paying a fee.

o The new laws also permitted a system of limited liability which meant that individual stockholders risked losing only the value of their own investment if a corporation should fail and that they were not liable.

o The rise of these new corporations made possible accumulation of much greater amounts of capital and hence made possible larger manufacturing and business enterprises.


o Investment alone still provided too little capital to meet demands of the most ambitious businesses.

o Such businesses relied heavily on credit and the borrowing often created dangerous instability

o Credit mechanism remained very crude in the early nineteenth century.

o The government alone could issue official currency, but the official currency consisted only of gold and silver (or paper certificates backed literally gold and silver)and there was thus too little of it to support the growing demand of credit.


o Under pressure from corporate promoters, many banks issued large quantities of bank notes, unofficial currency that circulated in such the same way that government currency did but was much less stable.

o But the notes had value only to the degree that the bank could sustain public confidence in their value.

o Some banks issued so many notes that their reserves could not cover them.


o As a result bank failures are frequent,

and bank deposits were often

insecure.

o Difficulty of obtaining credit for

business investment remained,

therefore an impediment to economic

growth.

The Emergence of the Factory:

o The most profound economic development in the mid-nineteenth century America was the rise of the factory.

o Before the War of 1812, most of what manufacturing there was in the United States took place within private households or in small individually operated workshops.

o Men and women built or made by hand or with simple machines such as hand operated looms.


o Gradually improved technology and increasing demand produced fundamental change.

o It came first in the New England textile industry.

o There, entrepreneurs were beginning to use larger and new machines driven by water power that allowed them to bring textile operations together under a single roof.

o This factory system as it came to be known spread rapidly in the 1820s and began to make serious inroads into the old home-based system of spinning thread and weaving cloth.


o Factories also penetrated the shoe industry.

o Shoes were still largely handmade but manufactures were beginning to employ workers who specialized in one or another of the various tasks involved in production.

o Some factories began producing large numbers of identical shoes upgraded sizes and without distinction as to rights and lefts.

o From 1840 to 1860 the factory system spread rapidly.

o It increased from $483 million to $1 billion after ten years.

o By 1860 it reached $2 billion.


o For the first time the value of manufactured goods was approximately equal to that of agricultural products.

o The Northeast plants were so large that the region produced more than two-thirds of the nation’s manufactured goods.

o Of the 1,311,000 workers in manufacturing in the U.S., about 938,000 were employed in the mills and factories of New England and the mid-Atlantic states.

Advances in Technology:

o America was advancing in

technology at a rapid pace.

o Change was so rapid in fact, that

some manufacturers built their new

machinery out of wood, by the time

wood wore out, they reasoned

improved technology would make

the machine obsolete.


o By the 1830s, American technology had become so advanced, particularly in textile manufacturing that industrialists in Britain and England were beginning to travel to the U.S. to learn new techniques instead of the other way around.

o The manufacturing of the machine tools, the tools used to make machinery parts was an important contribution to manufacturing.

o The government supported much of the research and development of machine tools, often in connection with supplying the military.


o For example, a government armory in Springfield, Massachusetts, developed two important tools the turret lathe (Used for cutting screws and other metal parts).

o And the universal milling machine (which replaced the hand chiseling of complicated parts and dyes) early in the nineteenth century.


o The precision grinding machine (which became critical to among other things the construction of sewing machines) was designed in the 1850s to help the U.S. Army produced standardized rifle parts.

o The Federal Armories such as those at Harpers Ferry, Virginia became the breeding ground of many technological discoveries.


o By the 1840s, the machine

tools used in the factories of

the Northeast were already

better than those in most

European factories.


o Interchangeable parts which Eli Whitney and Simeon North had tried to introduce into gun factories, now found their way into many industries.

o Eventually, interchangeability would revolutionize watch and clock making, manufacturing of locomotives and steam engines, and the making of many farm tools.

o It would also help make possible such newer devices as bicycles, sewing machines, typewriters, cash registers, and eventually the automobile.


o Industrialization also profited from the introduction of new sources of energy.

o Coal replaced wood and water power as a fuel for many factories.

o Mined mostly from Pennsylvania the new power sources made it possible to locate mills away from running streams and thus permitted the industry to expand still more widely.


o Great technological advances in American industry owed much to American inventors, as the patent records of the time make clear.

o In 1839 Charles Goodyear a New England hardware merchant, discovered a method of vulcanizing rubber (giving it greater strength and elasticity) by 1860 his process had found over 500 uses and had helped create a major American rubber industry.


o In 1846, Elias Howe of Massachusetts constructed a sewing machine.

o Isaac Singer made improvements on it, and the Howe-Singer machine was soon being used in the manufacturing of ready-to-wear clothing.

o For all the technological innovations that characterized the early factory system, most American industry remained wedded to the most traditional source of power: water.


o In the 1820s, and 1830s water power remained the most important source for manufacturing.

o The first important factory towns in New England, Lawrence, Lowell, and others emerged where they did because of the natural waterfalls that could be channeled to provide power for the mills built along their banks.

o This sometimes required factories to close for periods in the winter when rivers were frozen.


o That was one reason factory owners

began to look for alternatives forms

of energy that could be used

throughout the year.

o Which led them by the late 1830s

to rely more and more heavily on

steam and other transportable

forms of energy that could be fueled

by wood, coal, or later petroleum.

chapter 10:transportation, communication and...

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