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Peter CooperBuilt the first practical steam locomotive in 1825, the “Tom Thumb”.
It pulled a load of forty persons at ten miles per hour through a hilly and twisting route.
Henry Bessemer
The Bessemer steel process removed impurities from iron ore, resulting in faster and cheaper production of steel in 1850
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Robert FultonFulton’s steamboat, the “Clermont,” in 1807 showed that steamboat lines could travel upstream, could haul cargo faster and cheaper, and could operate in shallow water.
Samuel MorseWas an American painter who turned inventor. After having established his reputation as a portrait painter, in his middle age Morse contributed to the invention of a single-wire telegraph system in 1833 based on European telegraphs. He was a co-developer of the Morse code, and helped to develop the commercial use of telegraphy.
Elias HoweElias Howe was the inventor of the first American-patented sewing machine.
Elias Howe was born in Spencer, Massachusetts on July 9, 1819. After he lost his factory job in the Panic of 1837, Howe moved from Spencer to Boston, where he found work in a machinist's shop. It was there that Elias Howe began tinkering with the idea of inventing a mechanical sewing machine.
Samuel Slater
Early English-American industrialist known as the "Father of the American Industrial Revolution" (a phrase coined by Andrew Jackson), the "Father of the American Factory System" and "Slater the Traitor" because he brought British textile technology to America with a few modifications fit for America. He learned textile machinery as an apprentice to a pioneer in the British industry. He brought the knowledge to America where he designed the first textile mills, went into business for himself and grew wealthy. By the end of Slater's life he owned thirteen spinning mills and had established tenant farms and towns around his textile mills such as Slatersville, Rhode Island. In 1791 Slater had some machinery in operation. In 1793 Slater and Brown opened their first factory in Pawtucket.
Francis Cobalt LowellLowell became a successful merchant and traveled to England, where in 1810 he acquired information about the Lancashire power looms' inner workings. Upon his return to the United States, Lowell collaborated with master mechanic Paul Moody to construct an improved version of the machinery that conducted the spinning and weaving functions. In 1814, the Boston Manufacturing Company successfully gathered the entire process under one roof in Waltham, Massachusetts on the Charles River. Combined all the steps of textile production into one factory. Raw material entered one end of the plant and emerged as a finished product at the other end.
Samuel Colt
American inventor and industrialist from Hartford, Connecticut. He founded Colt's Patent Fire-Arms Manufacturing Company (today, Colt's Manufacturing Company), and made the mass production of the revolver commercially viable. Invented the Colt 45 in 1835, the six shooter allowed for multiple shots before having to reload.
Cyrus McCormick
Cyrus McCormick of Virginia was responsible for liberating farm workers from hours of back-breaking labor by introducing the farmers to his newly invented mechanical reaper in July, 1831. By 1847, Cyrus McCormick began the mass manufacture of his reaper in a Chicago factory.
The first reapers cut the standing grain and, with a revolving reel, swept it onto a platform from which it was raked off into piles by a man walking alongside. It could harvest more grain than five men using the earlier cradles.
John Deere
Was a typical blacksmith turning out hayforks, horseshoes, and other essentials for life on the prairie. Then one day, a broken steel sawmill blade gave him an opportunity. He knew that days in the field were difficult for farmers near his home in Grand Detour, Illinois, because they had to interrupt their work to clean the sticky prairie soil off of their cast-iron plows. He also knew that the soil would slide easily off of a highly polished steel moldboard. Steel was scarce in the area, so Deere fashioned a moldboard out of the second-hand blade.
Eli Whitney
The cotton gin was invented in 1793. The cotton gin revolutionized the cotton industry in the United States, but also led to the growth of slavery in the American South, and has been identified as a contributing factor to the outbreak of the American Civil War
