The Second Industrial Revolution

This revolution would not have been possible without inventors,

innovators, great captains of industry and the common man. • Nicolas Cugnot• Charles and Frank Duryea• Henry Ford• Cornelius and William Vanderbilt• James J. Hill• Leland Stanford• Orville and Wilbur Wright• Edwin Drake• John Davison Rockefeller• Elijah McCoy• Henry Bessemer• Andrew Carnegie• Henry Clay Frick• J.P. Morgan• Samuel Morse• Alexander Graham Bell• Christopher Sholes• George Westinghouse • Thomas Edison

The Great Age of Invention and Innovation

• Transportation

• Oil

• Steel

• Communications

• General Industrial and Technological Advances

Transportation

• Nicholas Cugnot, a French army officer is generally given credit for developing the three wheeled, steam driven horseless carriage in 1769. The carriage was later used in 1770.

Charles and Frank Duryea built the first successful gasoline powered automobile in the United States. The auto was tested in September 1893.

Charles Duryea (1893) Frank Duryea (1945)

link to: autohistory

Henry Ford and eleven other investors launched the Ford Motor Company in 1903. In 1913 Ford introduced the moving assembly line to mass produce his automobiles. By 1918 half of all cars in America were the Ford Model T. Ford employed tens of thousands of workers and used innovative business techniques to make his company an automotive giant.

The innovations in automobile manufacturing gave Americans jobs, greater mobility, and a sense of freedom that many had never experienced before.

1913 Ford Model T Ford Country Squire Station Wagon

1965 Ford Mustang

Railroads ruled the land in the mid and late 1800s and on into the 1900s. People such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, James Hill, Leland Stanford and many others built thousands of miles of track and linked the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans by using the iron horse.

                                

Linking a nation – The Transcontinental Railroad

link to: transconrr

                                                                         

Wilbur and Orville Wright

December 17, 1903Orville Wright flies 120 feet in 12 seconds

The work of the Wright Brothers continued….

• After the first flight the brothers continued the development of the airplane. On November 16, 1904 the Wright Flyer II flew 1760 feet in 40 seconds.

and continued.

• The Wright Flyer III. The brothers did not mind pictures of their planes in flight, but they feared close ups due to the fact that others may steal their ideas.

Crude oil was known to have existed for hundreds of years. By the mid-1800s demand for oil was increasing greatly. The demand had to be met. Enterprising businessmen began to drill. Oil wells popped up in Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Texas and California.

Link to: Black Gold-Texas Tea-Oil

Edwin L. Drake and oil driller “Uncle Billy” Smith kicked off the oil boom in the U.S. in Titusville, PA in 1859.

Link to: Drake Well Museum

John Davison Rockefeller exemplified the capitalist spirit of the day. His Standard Oil Company dominated the oil industry. The business practices of vertical and horizontal integration were used to almost wholly monopolize the oil industry.

Innovators and inventors like Elijah McCoy saw the rising demand for the industrial use of oil. Before his invention of the oiling cup, moving machinery had to be shut down to be oiled. The oiling cup solved that problem by oiling moving machinery. His is the “Real McCoy.”

Sir Henry Bessemer patented a process in 1855-1866 that was called the Bessemer process. The process rapidly changed molten iron into steel. Steel could now be produced more quickly and cheaply. The process was later adopted in the United States where it would be responsible for changing the landscape of the nation.

The egg-shaped container, usually lined with clay or dolomite (calcium magnesium carbonate), was tilted down to pour molten iron into the top and then returned to a vertical position. Air was then forced through channels in the bottom of the converter causing a spectacular shower of flames to burst from the top. After the burn, the converter was tilted and the steel was poured out.

Andrew Carnegie:The King of Steel

Carnegie,pictured in 1878, opened his first steel plant on August 22, 1875. The Edgar Thomson plant, which operates today, sits beside the Monongahela River in Braddock, PA. The plant wasnamed after the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Carnegie’s first order – 2000 steel railsfor the Pennsylvania Railroad.

Link to: Historic Steel

The Duquesne Works were once part of Carnegie Steel.

A closed mill in Youngstown, Ohio

The roots of Bethlehem Steel trace to 1857 when iron was the main product. As time progressed, both iron and steel were produced. After the company changed names several times, it finally became the Bethlehem Steel Corporation in 1904. Charles Schwab and Joseph Wharton formed what would become one of the most prominent steel corporations in the world.

Charles Schwab Joseph Wharton

The Bethlehem Steel Works

Bethlehem Steel filed for bankruptcy in 2001. In 2003 the remnants of the company were acquired by the International Steel Group. An industrial giant was slain.

Long distance communication was greatly improved in the 1830s. A five wire telegraph was developed in Europe in 1834. Samuel Morse unveiled his one wire telegraph in 1837. A system of dot and dashes, called Morse Code, was used to instantly communicate with others over long distances.

Link to: Message Received

Early Morse telegraph and receiver

The invention of the typewriter revolutionized communication. Christopher Sholes was an inventor and innovator who helped totransform American society.

http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/bledison.htm

http://www.tqnyc.org/NYC051872/historyofcars.html

http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h845.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_J._Hill

http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/people/s_z/stanford.htm

http://falcon.jmu.edu/~ramseyil/inventors.htm

http://www.newyorkrailroads.com/FavoriteSteam/

http://www.wright-brothers.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promontory_Summit

http://www.drilshop.com/hallfame/drakewel.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Morse

http://www.150.si.edu/150trav/remember/r819.htm

http://www.abdn.ac.uk/~nph126/selected.php?id=59

http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/whi/fullRecord.asp?id=3218