Cotton Gin

In 1794, U.S.-born inventor Eli Whitney (1765-1825) patented the

cotton gin, a machine that revolutionized the production of cotton

by greatly speeding up the process of removing seeds from cotton

fiber. By the mid-19th century, cotton had become America’s

leading export.

Greene and her plantation manager, Phineas Miller (1764-1803), explained the problem with short-staple cotton to Whitney, and soon thereafter he built a machine that could effectively and efficiently remove the seeds from cotton plants. The invention, called the cotton gin (“gin” was derived from “engine”), worked something like a strainer or sieve: Cotton was run through a wooden drum embedded with a series of hooks that caught the fibers and dragged them through a mesh. The mesh was too fine to let the seeds through but the hooks pulled the cotton fibers through with ease. Smaller gins could be cranked by hand; larger ones could be powered by a horse and, later, by a steam engine. Whitney’s hand-cranked machine could remove the seeds from 50 pounds of cotton in a single day.

Still, the cotton gin had transformed the American economy. For the South, it meant that cotton could be produced plentifully and cheaply for domestic use and for export, and by the mid-19th century, cotton was America’s leading export. For the North, especially New England, cotton’s rise meant a steady supply of raw materials for its textile mills.

One inadvertent result of the cotton gin’s success, however, was that it helped strengthen slavery in the South. Although the cotton gin made cotton processing less labor-intensive, it helped planters earn greater profits, prompting them to grow larger crops, which in turn required more people. Because slavery was the cheapest form of labor, cotton farmers simply acquired more slaves.

Commercial Steamboat

Robert Fulton, American inventor, engineer, and artist who brought steamboating from the experimental stage to commercial success. He also designed a system of inland waterways, a submarine, and a steam warship.

Fulton was a member of the 1812 commission that recommended building the Erie Canal. With the English blockade the same year, he insisted that a mobile floating gun platform be built—the world’s first steam warship—to protect New York Harbor against the British fleet. The Demologos, or Fulton, as the ship was alternately called, incorporated new and novel ideas: two parallel hulls, with paddle wheel between and with the steam engine in one hull and boilers and stacks in the other. It weighed 2,745 displacement tons and measured 156 feet in length; a slow vessel, its speed did not exceed 6 knots. Launched in October 1814, the heavily gunned and armoured steamship underwent successful sea trials but was never used in battle; when peace came in December, it was transferred to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where it was destroyed by an accidental explosion in 1829.

By 1810 three of Fulton’s boats served the Hudson and Raritan rivers. His steamboats also replaced the horse ferries that were used for heavily traveled river crossings in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. He retained the typical broad double-ended hulls that needed no turning for the return passage. Manhattan’s crosstown Fulton Street, named in 1816, was the principal thoroughfare connecting the two river terminals.

Steamboat

Fitch hit on the idea of a steam-powered vehicle in 1785. He certainly may have mused that a steam-powered boat would have prevented his capture in the first place. Such a boat -- able to move upstream or down, independent of weather and tide -- would have obvious advantages for people using the nation's waterways. Initially, he knew nothing of the British inventors of low-pressure steam engines, or of Oliver Evans and his contemporary high-pressure steam engine, being developed on the east coast.

Scraping together private investments and racing ahead of his competitors, Fitch built the first steamboat in 1787. Its distinguishing feature was a rack of canoe-like paddles, inspired by the sight years earlier of a canoe full of Indian warriors racing through the water. He took it to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in summer 1787, hoping to impress the delegates and garner financial backing. He left only with words of praise.

In April 1790, Fitch and his partner, Henry Voigt, launched a refined version of the craft. Although it made a successful maiden trip between Philadelphia and Trenton and provided regular service for a season between Philadelphia and Bordentown on the Delaware River, their steamboat nevertheless failed to find business. Desperate for funding, Fitch crossed the Atlantic to introduce his steamboat in France. Realizing that it would not be adopted there either, Fitch returned to the United States and fell into a depression.

Textile Mill Machinery

In 1789, Slater emigrated to the United States. He dreamed of making a fortune by helping to build a textile industry. He did so covertly: British law forbade textile workers to share technological information or to leave the country. Slater set foot in New York in late 1789, having memorized the details of Britain's innovative machines.

With the support of a Quaker merchant, Moses Brown, Slater built America's first water-powered cotton spinning mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. By the end of 1790, it was up and running, with workers walking a treadmill to generate power. By 1791, a waterwheel drove the machinery that carded and spun cotton into thread.

Slater employed families, including children, to live and work at the mill site. He quickly attracted workers. In 1803, Slater and his brother built a mill village they called Slatersville, also in Rhode Island. It included a large, modern mill, tenement houses for its workers, and a company store -- a small pocket of industry, a ready-made rural village. Slater's factory system became known as the Rhode Island System. It was soon imitated -- and improved upon by innovators like Francis Cabot Lowell -- throughout New England. Slater died in 1835.

Industrial lubrication

Despite his qualifications, McCoy was unable to find work as an engineer in the United States due to racial barriers; skilled professional positions were not available for African Americans at the time, regardless of their training or background. McCoy accepted a position as a fireman and oiler for the Michigan Central Railroad. It was in this line of work that he developed his first major inventions. After studying the inefficiencies inherent in the existing system of oiling axles, McCoy invented a lubricating cup that distributed oil evenly over the engine's moving parts. He obtained a patent for this invention, which allowed trains to run continuously for long periods of time without pausing for maintenance.

McCoy continued to refine his devices, receiving nearly 60 patents over the course of his life. While the majority of his inventions related to lubrication systems, he also developed designs for an ironing board, a lawn sprinkler, and other machines. Although McCoy's achievements were recognized in his own time, his name did not appear on the majority of the products that he devised. Lacking the capital with which to manufacture his lubricators in large numbers, he typically assigned his patent rights to his employers or sold them to investors. In 1920, toward the end of his life, McCoy formed the Elijah McCoy Manufacturing Company to produce lubricators bearing his name.

Interchangeable Parts

During the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, machines

took over most of the manufacturing work from men, and factories

replaced craftsmen’s workshops. The event that laid the

groundwork for this monumental change was the introduction of

interchangeable parts, or pre-manufactured parts that were for all

practical purposes identical, into the firearms industry.

Interchangeable parts, popularized in America when Eli Whitney

used them to assemble muskets in the first years of the 19th

century, allowed relatively unskilled workers to produce large

numbers of weapons quickly and at lower cost, and made repair

and replacement of parts infinitely easier.

In the mid-18th century, the French gunsmith Honoré LeBlanc

suggested the gun parts be made from standardized patterns, so

that all gun parts would follow the same design and could be easily

replaced if broken. LeBlanc was not alone in imagining the

potential value of this concept; an English naval engineer Samuel

Bentham had earlier pioneered the use of uniform parts in the

production of wooden pulleys for sailing ships. LeBlanc’s idea

didn’t catch on in the French gun market, however, as competing

gunsmiths saw clearly the effect that it would have on their craft. In

1789, Thomas Jefferson, then serving as American minister to

France, visited LeBlanc’s workshop and was impressed by his

methods. Despite LeBlanc’s efforts, however, it would be left to

another man to fully introduce interchangeable parts into the

American—and later the international—weapons industry.

Mechanized Cotton Mill

In 1813, back in Boston, Lowell and several partners formed the Boston Manufacturing Company. Lowell led them in both technical and business decisions. They introduced a power loom, based on the British model, with significant technological improvements. And they found a novel way to raise money: they sold $1000 shares in the company (each worth over $10,000 in 2002 dollars). The shareholder corporation they devised would rapidly become the method of choice for structuring new American businesses.

The company built a tall brick mill building next to the Charles River in Waltham, Massachusetts, incorporating various mechanization technologies to convert raw cotton into cloth. The Waltham mill integrated the chain of tasks under a single roof, inaugurating what would become the American factory system of the nineteenth century. Waltham cloth gained immediate popularity.

Another of Lowell's innovations was in hiring young farm girls to work in the mill. He paid them lower wages than men, but offered benefits that many girls, some as young as 15, were eager to earn. Mill girls lived in clean company boardinghouses with chaperones, were paid cash, and benefitted from religious and educational activities. Waltham boomed as workers flocked to Lowell's novel enterprise.

Sewing Machine

At the age of 19 Singer became an apprentice machinist, and in

1839 he patented a rock-drilling machine. Ten years later he

patented a metal- and wood-carving machine. While working in

a Boston machine shop in 1851, Singer was asked to repair a Lerow

and Blodgett sewing machine; 11 days later he had designed and

built an improved model, which he patented and sold through I.M.

Singer & Company. The first to embody features allowing

continuous and curved stitching, his machine employed an

overhanging arm holding the needle bar over a horizontal table,

thus making it possible to sew on any part of the work. His basic

design features have been followed in almost all subsequent

machines.

Singer pioneered the use of installment credit plans, which have

had a profound effect on consumer sales in modern society. In 1863

Singer and Clark formed the Singer Manufacturing Company, and

Singer retired to England.

Roads

Nineteenth-century cities were typically designed around a grid road pattern. Most dramatically, the Commissioners of Manhattan in 1811 laid out the entire island north of the colonial southern tip in a grid of wide avenues running north-south and narrow streets running east-west. As the city grew rapidly during the nineteenth century, the avenues were extended north and crossed by higher-numbered east-west streets. The rectangular blocks formed by the streets were more easily bought and sold by speculators and developers than the irregularly shaped parcels of most colonial settlements.

The main roads of colonial towns were laid with cobblestones. Gravel and blocks made of wood or granite were also used for some road paving in nineteenth-century towns. Although travel on these uneven surfaces was jolting, stones and blocks were an improvement on the vast majority of roads made of dirt.

As cities grew rapidly during the nineteenth century, the poor condition of the roads became an important sanitary issue, not just an inconvenience. Excrement dropped by animals and waste thrown out windows by humans was ground into the dirt or the gaps between stones, spreading diseases such as cholera, typhoid, and dysentery through direct contact and contaminated water supplies.

Canals

Ever since the days of Jamestown and Plymouth, America was

moving West. Real growth in the movement of people and goods

west started with the canal.

For over a hundred years, people had dreamed of building a canal

across New York that would connect the Great Lakes to the Hudson

River to New York City and the Atlantic Ocean. After unsuccessfully

seeking federal government assistance, DEWITT

CLINTON successfully petitioned the New York State legislature to

build the canal and bring that dream to reality. "CLINTON'S

DITCH," his critics called it.

Construction began in 1817 and was completed in 1825. The canal spanned 350 miles between the Great Lakes and the Hudson River and was an immediate success. Its success led to the great CANAL AGE. By bringing the Great Lakes within reach of a metropolitan market, the ERIE CANAL opened up the unsettled northern regions of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. It also fostered the development of many small industrial companies, whose products were used in the construction and operation of the canal.

New York City became the principal gateway to the West and financial center for the nation. The Erie Canal was also in part responsible for the creation of strong bonds between the new western territories and the northern states. The Canal enabled the farmers to send their goods to New England. Subsistence farmers in the north were now less necessary. Many farmers left for jobs in the factories.

Pennsylvanians were shocked to find that the cheapest route to Pittsburgh was by way of New York City, up the Hudson River, across New York by the Erie Canal to the Great Lakes — with a short overland trip to Pittsburgh. When it became evident that little help for state improvements could be expected from the federal government, other states followed New York in constructing canals.

Ohio built a canal in 1834 to link the Great Lakes with the Mississippi Valley. As a result of Ohio's investment, Cleveland rose from a frontier village to a Great Lakes port by 1850. Cincinnati could now send food products down the Ohio and Mississippi by flatboat and steamboat and ship flour by canal boat to New York.

The state of Pennsylvania then put through a great portage canal system to Pittsburgh. By the 1830s, the country had a complete water route from New York City to New Orleans. By 1840, over 3,000 miles of canals had been built.

Railroads

The first engines used in the United States were purchased from the STEPHENSON WORKS in England. Even rails were largely imported from England until the Civil War. Americans who had visited England to see new STEAM LOCOMOTIVES were impressed that railroads dropped the cost of shipping by carriage by 60-70%.

Baltimore, the third largest city in the nation in 1827, had not invested in a canal. Yet, Baltimore was 200 miles closer to the frontier than New York and soon recognized that the development of a railway could make the city more competitive with New York and the Erie Canal in transporting people and goods to the West. The result was the BALTIMORE AND OHIO RAILROAD, the first railroad chartered in the United States. There were great parades on the day the construction started. On July 4, 1828, the first spadeful of earth was turned over by the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence, 91-year-old CHARLES CARROLL.

New railroads came swiftly. In 1830, the SOUTH CAROLINA CANAL AND RAIL-ROAD COMPANY was formed to draw trade from the interior of the state. It had a steam locomotive built at the West Point Foundry in New York City, called THE BEST FRIEND OF CHARLESTON, the first steam locomotive to be built for sale in the United States. A year later, the Mohawk & Hudson railroad reduced a 40-mile wandering canal trip that took all day to accomplish to a 17-mile trip that took less than an hour. Its first steam engine was named the DeWitt Clinton after the builder of the Erie Canal.

Although the first railroads were successful, attempts to finance new ones originally failed as opposition was mounted by turnpike operators, canal companies, stagecoach companies and those who drove wagons. But the economic benefits of the railroad soon won over the skeptics.

Steel Plow

The genius of blacksmith Deere’s innovation was to discard the cast-iron moldboard—the blade—from the traditional plow of the rocky farm fields of the East, and replace it with a dynamically curved moldboard of wrought iron or steel. For his first plow of this new type, Deere took a large circular saw blade, cut off the teeth and reshaped the metal into a curving parallelogram. Attached to an upright post, and the post to a horizontal wooden beam with handles, his new moldboard exemplified the functional, plain objects of frontier America that would have such an influence on Modernism. This was a tool made not for clanking against the granite boulders of Vermont, but for shearing the sod and opening the rich, sticky, black almost-mud of the Midwestern prairies.

The plow is also music: It ran so smoothly through the black soil that some farmers said it made a singing sound, and it was sometimes called “the singing plow.”

The problem the pre-Deere plows encountered in Illinois was that they would not scour—as they moved ahead, the plowed dirt did not turn over and fall neatly to one side, but instead clumped on the moldboard, requiring maddening halts for the farmer to scrape it clean. John Deere’s revolutionary design solved that problem; it scoured.