9.1.1 The Expansion and Transformation of Technology

Many developments of the Second Industrial Revolution built on or improved earlier technology. Mass production of steel, for example, had begun with the development of the Bessemer process in the 1850s. This innovation removed impurities from molten pig iron, producing stronger steel better suited to building rail lines and machines. Later engineers further improved the process. The open-hearth Siemens-Martin process, first developed in Germany in the 1860s, was slower than the Bessemer process, but it produced higher-quality steel that was less brittle. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Siemens-Martin process had become the most common way of manufacturing steel. The mass production of steel made possible the great engineering feats of the Second Industrial Revolution, such as the first skyscrapers and the expansion of railroads (Figure 9.4).

Improvements in steel manufacturing enabled other innovations. As rust-resistant steel became less expensive, more could be used to manufacture rail lines, making them heavier, stronger, and able to support heavier locomotives pulling heavier loads. Railroads expanded across the United States and Europe, carrying more freight and passengers.

Other inventions also made railroads more efficient. The air brake, invented by George Westinghouse in 1869, sent compressed air through a line to enable the train’s engineer to apply brakes from the locomotive. Before this, trains had been braked by workers who jumped from one moving car to the next and applied the brakes manually. The method was obviously very dangerous, and if a train car broke free, there was no way of stopping it. Because trains could now be stopped more safely, they could also travel at higher speeds.

By the end of the nineteenth century, railroads had become a common way of transporting people and products over land across distances long and short. Two new modes of transportation vied with railroads for popularity. The first modern bicycle, the safety bicycle, was developed by John Kemp Starley of England in 1885 and sported two wheels of equal size, unlike earlier bicycles with oversized front wheels that required riders to perch far above the ground. The safety bicycle could be ridden by anyone, including women and children. Developments in rubber-production technology also improved the bicycle. The process of vulcanizing rubber, discovered by American inventor Charles Goodyear in 1839, made it stronger and better able hold its shape under extremes of temperature. (Non-vulcanized rubber melts in the heat and shatters in the cold.) In 1887, Scottish-born inventor John Boyd Dunlop made a pressurized air-filled pneumatic tire from vulcanized rubber, just in time for use by bicycle and automobile manufacturers. Although pneumatic tires had been invented earlier, Dunlop’s was the first practical tire to be mass produced, and he patented his invention in 1888. By the 1890s, bicycling had become popular in Europe and the United States, and tens of thousands of people rode daily.

Eventually eclipsing both the train and the bicycle in popularity in the United States and western and central Europe was the gasoline-fueled automobile, patented by the German Karl Benz in 1886 and marketed beginning in 1888 (Figure 9.5). Within a few decades, the automobile had transformed the world as few other inventions have. Cities and suburbs could expand beyond the reach of rail lines, leading city and national governments to raise taxes to pay for new roads. New businesses that sold and repaired cars replaced blacksmiths and stables. City traffic grew noisier and more dangerous, and autos added their exhaust to the emissions of factory smokestacks. The automobile industry also increased the demand for rubber and petroleum, which most industrialized nations needed to import. Even though the United States was initially able to satisfy its petroleum demands with domestic oil, it had to look elsewhere for rubber.

The automobile’s arrival depended on another crucial invention—the internal combustion engine. This engine generates power by burning fuel, often some form of petroleum, in the presence of oxygen in a chamber, to produce a gas whose high pressure exerts force on another component such as a piston, rotor, or turbine blade, causing it to move. Internal combustion engines powered automobiles as well as machinery in small workshops, offering an alternative where steam engines, which were large, could not easily fit.

Internal combustion did not become the sole source of energy that powered the Second Industrial Revolution, however. It did not completely replace steam or the horse. Indeed, the steam turbine, invented by Sir Charles Parsons in 1884, provided efficient power for river- and ocean-going vessels. Steam was also used to generate electricity, one of the great developments of the Second Industrial Revolution. Burning coal turned water to steam that moved the blades of turbines, which generated electric current. Parsons’s steam turbine served this purpose in Britain and the United States. Water power also generated electricity; in 1882, the first world’s hydroelectric plant opened in Appleton, Wisconsin. Wind turbines also generated electricity, and in 1911 Italy built a plant to produce electricity from geothermal power. By the end of the century, electricity was the dominant force powering the factories of industrialized nations.

Electricity ran machines in factories and lit streets, workplaces, and homes following the invention of the incandescent light bulb, by Joseph Swan in Britain in 1878 and Thomas Edison in the United States in 1879. The incandescent bulb’s bright light replaced the dim and often odorous illumination of oil and gas lamps that brought the risk of fire and, in the case of gas, of suffocation and explosions. Electric lighting made it possible for factories to operate far into the night.

Communications technology improved when the first transatlantic telegraph line between Great Britain and North America was completed in 1858, and by the end of the century all the world’s continents were connected except Antarctica. The telephone, patented by American inventor Alexander Graham Bell in 1876, spread throughout Europe and North America during the same time, greatly easing business communications. In 1901, the Italian engineer Guglielmo Marconi successfully transmitted a wireless signal across the Atlantic Ocean from Wales to Newfoundland, Canada. He then founded broadcasting stations in Europe and North America and used them to send communications to ships at sea. In the 1920s, once the vacuum tube and the triode had been developed, commercial radio that broadcast news, music, and radio plays became available as well.

Other discoveries transformed the factory and the home. Chemical experimentation produced synthetic aniline dyes yielding textile colors more intense and vibrant than those from plant dyes, transforming fashions. Along with combine harvesters, mechanical seeders, and horse-drawn machines that reaped, gathered, and winnowed grain in one operation, chemical fertilizers enabled farmers to grow ever-larger crops. Another invention, barbed wire, helped cattle ranchers protect their herds. Refrigerated rail cars were perfected in the 1870s by engineers working for U.S. meat packer Gustavus Swift. The meat and other foods being produced in increasing quantities could now be shipped great distances without spoiling.

Other inventions made office workers more productive. Typewriters and adding machines were common by the 1880s, and New York jeweler Willard Legrand Bundy patented the time clock in 1888. Upon arriving at or leaving work, employees inserted a card in the machine, which stamped it with the exact time and led to the expression “punching the clock.”

New technology also changed leisure activities. In 1877, Edison patented the phonograph, a machine that could record sound by tracing soundwaves with a stylus on a rotating disc or cylinder and then play it back. Although it had business applications, the phonograph was soon used for entertainment. Phonograph recordings were often combined with the projection of still photographic images to create audiovisual presentations, the forerunners of motion pictures (Figure 9.6).

Photographic technology advanced in the first half of the nineteenth century, enabling people to permanently record images with a camera. In the late nineteenth century, a number of people began taking multiple photographs of objects or people in motion and replaying them quickly to give the impression of movement. A patent for a machine to do this was filed by English inventor Wordsworth Donisthorpe in 1876, and a variety of photographers and inventors tried to perfect the process in the following years. The most famous experiment was made in 1878 by English photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who photographed running horses and replayed the images on a machine he called the Zoopraxiscope. Following the invention of photographic film by New York native George Eastman in 1884, light-sensitive cameras captured images on strips of paper coated with gelatin. In 1887, French inventor Louis Le Prince patented a motion-picture camera that relied on photographic film and used it to record the first movie still in existence: a scene, only a few seconds long, of people walking in a garden in England. The age of cinema had been born, but it was some time before recorded sound and moving images were synchronized.