Transcript The Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution
The Invention of the Machine
Pgs. 431-438
Industry Comes to the U.S.
Before and after the War of 1812, the
economy of the United States had been
growing.
 New inventions changed the way goods
were made.
 People began using machines instead of
hand tools.
 This brought great changes in the way
people lived, worked, and traveled.

England Leads the Way
In 1789 England was the only country in
the world with a spinning machine.
 This machine was used to weave cotton
and wool fibers into cloth, or textiles.
 Textile mills were factories where cloth
was made from cotton or wool.
 England guarded the design of the
spinning machine closely.
 Anyone caught leaving England with
machine designs was put in jail.

Samuel Slater
Samuel Slater worked in a
textile mill and studied the
new spinning machine
until he could remember
exactly how each iron gear
and wooden spool worked.
 Samuel broke British law
and took his knowledge to
the United States.

Samuel Slater and Moses
Brown
When Samuel
arrived in the
United States in
1790, he built a
spinning machine
for Moses Brown.
 Brown and Slater
built a textile mill
in Rhode Island.
 It was America’s
first factory.

Mass Production
An inventor named Eli Whitney thought of
a new way of manufacturing that could
produce large amounts of goods at one
time.
 His idea was called mass production.
 Before this time, a craftsman would
produce one item from start to finish
making all the parts and putting them
together.

Mass Production
With mass production, identical copies of
the same item could be produced using
machines and untrained workers in
factories.
 Whitney created interchangeable parts
that could be used to repair a broken
item.
 Machines could put the parts together
very quickly.

The Lowell System
Francis Lowell of Massachusetts invented a
system where all the steps of creating a
product could be completed at the same
factory.
 For example: spinning, dyeing, and
weaving were combined in one factory.
 Raw cotton went into the factory and
finished cloth came out.

Working Conditions
A typical work day was 14 or 15 hours.
 There were dangerous working conditions.
 The pay was low. Around 80¢ a day.
 Men, women and children often worked in
factories.
 Factory owners provided living quarters
(boarding house) for workers.
 Most factory workers were immigrants.

The Melting Pot
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1820 – 8,835 workers
1825 – 10,199 workers
1830 – 23,322 workers
1835 – 45,374 workers
1840 – 84, 066 workers
1845 – 114,371 workers
Almost half of the immigrants were from
Ireland. Others came from Germany, Poland,
and other parts of northern and central Europe.
Manufacturing Cities
By the 1840s thousands of immigrants
were coming to America to take jobs in
the new factories.
 The populations of manufacturing cities
like New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and
Baltimore grew rapidly.

Transportation Improvements
The Erie Canal was built to link Lake Erie and
the city of Buffalo, New York to the Hudson
River.
 The National Road was built linking the
Atlantic coast to Ohio.
 The steamboat was invented by Robert Fulton
in 1807.
 The first locomotive was invented in 1830. By
1850 about 9,000 miles of track crossed the
United States mostly near the Atlantic coast.
