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textile mills
Textile mills popped up in the northeast during the first industrial revolution. Cotton was spun in these mills, as they were aided by the invention of the cotton gin and the spinning jenny. Soon, small towns would be centered around these mills, one famous mill being the Lowell Mill. Cotton would prove to be America's most proporous good during this time. -
flour mill
The flour mill was created by Oliver Evans in 1782. The mill produced flour that was finer, drier, and easier to store, helping make flour production more efficient. -
water powered spinning mill
The water powered spinning mill was made by "the Father of the Industrial Revolution", In 1789, Samuel Slater moved from England to the US, where he violated English lawby constructing the British textile machines. He commited this act of industrial espionage by memory. He created the nation's first water- powered spinning mill in Pawtucket, RI, bringing about the nation's first industrial revolution. The water from the spinning mill would power textile factories, helping them spin cotton. -
Cotton Gin
The cotton gin began to be used in America after Eli Whitney created in in America in 1793. It was very popular during the first industrial revolution in America. The cotton gin quickly and easily separates the cotton fibers from the seeds, a tedious and painful job formerly performed by hand. The fibers are processed into cotton goods, and the seeds may be used to grow more cotton. The cotton gin was used more and more as many textile mills began to pop up in the North. -
interchangable parts
The idea of interchangable parts was also brought to America by Eli Whitney. With this system, if a part of a product was not working, a new part could be put in to place it, instead of making a whole new product. This saved people money and was used the most in the military with military equiptment. -
steamboat
The steamboat was created by Robert Fulton in 1803. It was beneficial in America because it helped famrs and factories trade their goods more efficiently. Robert Fulton's first successful steamboat was named the Claremont. -
mechanical reaper
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. This device helped harvist crops, making agriculture manufacturing more productive. -
Steel Plow
John Deere created the steel plow in 1836. Prior to Deere's introduction of the steel plow, most farmers used iron or wooden plows which stuck to the rich Midwestern soil and had to be cleaned very frequently. The smooth sided steel plow solved this problem, as it would dig up and rotate the rough soil, making it easier for farmers to plant crops. This would ultimatly aid migration into the American Great Plains in the 19th and early 20th century. -
Rotary Printing Press
Richard Hoe invented the rotary printing press, in which a cylinder rolled over stationary plates of inked tape to make an impression on paper. This made printing much easier which made communication better in America as more news could be printed. -
heavy iron plow/steel plow
The steel plow was known as the "plow that broke the plains". In the second frontier movement, western farmers thought that the land was too dry to successfully farm, but this plow broke through the soil and proved it to be fruitful. This also started the purchasing of large expensive machines by farmers for plowing, which led many of them to debt. -
Transcontinental Railroad created
The Union Pacific Railroad Company, which worked its way from eas to west, joined the Central Pacific Railroad Company, which built tracks from California toward the east in Ogden, Utah in 1869. Immigrants did most of the work for little pay, and many died while building the railroad. In all, the Union Pacific built 1,086 miles of tracks and the Central Pacific built 689 miles. This bonded together America because it made it easier to transport goods. -
Westinghouse Air Brake
The air brake helped make railroads safer by reducing the amount of crashes on the railway. -
Military Tank
The tank was invented in 1872, but was not really used until World War I in 1914. Tanks were a big advantage in the war because they could roll over the trenches that were widely used in the war, ultimatly ending the stalmates between oposing sides. Over the years the tank has been modified and is still widely used today in wars. -
Steel Rail
Steel Rails replaced iron tracks because they were tougher, safer, and could hold heavier loads. Cornelius Vanderbilt helped popularize steel rails. -
Barbed Wire
Barbed wire was invented by Joseph F. Glidden in 1874 during the second western movement. It solved the problem of how to build fences in the treeless prairies. -
Telephone
Alexander Graham Bell was the first to patent the telephone, an "apparatus for transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically". After experimenting with many primitive sound transmitters and receivers, Grahm pantented the telephone in March of 1876. It allowed messages to be sent and recieved much easier, and instead of taking days to recieve a message, you could hear it directly in just minutes. -
Lightbulb
Thomas Edison invited an electric light that was practical for home use. The use of electricity and lightbulbs then spread all around the world. -
Radio
The Radio was invented at the end of the 19th century. It was used during World War I but it really became popular in middle and upper class homes in the 1920s. It was another addition to the many added types of entertainment in the roaring twenties. -
Airplane
The Wright brothers (Orville and Wilbur) made the first airplane in 1903 and continued to make modifications for several years. Charles Lindbergh made the nonstop flight across the Atlantic in 1927. This opened up a new world of transportation. -
Washing Machine
Louis Goldenberg of New Brunswick, New Jersey invented the electric washing machine around the late 19th century to early 20th century. US electric washing machine sales reached 913,000 units in 1928. The washing machine took away the hassle of washing clothes by hand and continually improved throughout the thirties. A washer and dryer could be spotted in almost every suburban home by the late 1940s. In fact, the first laundromat opened in Fort Worth, Texas in 1934. -
Vacuum Cleaner
In 1907, James Murray Spangler, a janitor from Canton, Ohio, USA invented the first practical, portable vacuum cleaner. In addition to suction that used an electric fan, a box, and one of his wife's pillowcases, Spangler's design incorporated a rotating brush to loosen debris. Unable to produce the design himself due to lack of funding, he sold the patent in 1908 to William Henry Hoover who had Spangler's machine redesigned with a steel casing, casters, and attachments. -
Car (Ford Model T)
Cars such as the Ford Model T were mass produced and became cheap and easy to own. Many people started purchasing Ford Model T's in the 1920s. -
Assembly Line
The assembly line, created by Henry Ford, is a manufacturing process in which parts are added to a product in along a line of people, each person adding a part, to create a finished product much faster than a handcrafting-type method. The assembly line was developed by Ford Motor Company between 1908 and 1915 made assembly lines famous in the following decade through the social ramifications of mass production, such as the affordability of the Ford Model T. -
Gasoline-engine Tractor
After World War I, new technology for farming was invented such as the gasoline-engine tractor, inspired by cars such as the Ford Model T. This greatly increased farm productivity, but the products were not needed as much so farmers fell into poverty and were greatly frustrated. This began to lead to the Great Depression. -
Poison Gas
Germany invented poison gas and gas was used as a weapon by many countries involved in World War I. This is the first war in wihch gas is used as a weapon. Gas masks were used to protect the men from this harmful gas. -
Traffic Light
Police officer William Potts from Detroit Michigan was the inventor of the traffic light. He used red, amber and green lights and thirty-seven dollars worth of wire to form this light, which was put on the corner of Woodward and Michigan Avenues in Detroit. Around the same time, African- American Garrett Morgan invented the automated traffic light which worked basically the same way the railroad lights work today. This was the concept on which four way traffic lights are built. -
Refrigerator
The first refrigerator to see widespread use was the General Electric "Monitor-Top" refrigerator introduced in 1927. It expanded the refrigerator market during the 1930s and provided a safer, low-toxicity alternative to previously used refrigerants. Separate freezers became common during the 1940s. These devices, did not go into mass production for use in the home until after World War II. The 1950s and 1960s saw technical advances like automatic defrosting and automatic ice making. -
Television
In 1927, Philo Farnsworth made the world's first high scale working television system. Although television became more familiar in the United States with the general public at the 1939 World's Fair, the outbreak of World War II prevented it from being manufactured on a large scale until after the end of the war. True regular commercial network television programming did not begin in the U.S. until 1948. As the suburbian era errupted, a tv could be found in almost every suburbian home. -
Transcontinental Flight
Charles Lindbergh was the first to fly solo across the Atlantic when he flew from New York (Long Island) to Paris on the Spirit of St. Louis. This sparked a new era of technology and added to the prosperity of the 1920s (although it ended shortly after). -
Atomic Bomb
The atomic bomb was created by scientists in America and was under the Manhattan Project. It ultimatly ended WWII between the US and Japan when the US dropped the first bomb on August 26, 1945 on Hiroshima and the second one on August 9, 1945 on Nagasaki. This was the first time that nuclear weapons had ever been used and nuclear weapons are also big factors in the Cold War. -
Microwave Oven
The micorwave was invented by Dr. Percy Spencer in 1946. Dr. Spencer created a metal box with an opening into which he fed microwave power. The energy entering the box was unable to escape, thereby creating a higher density electromagnetic field. When food was placed in the box and microwave energy fed in, the temperature of the food rose very rapidly. -
Hydrogen Bomb
During the Manhattan Project, Edward Teller, a scientist involved, began drafting ideas for a nuclear weapon far more powerful than the atomic bomb: the hydrogen bomb. This was later created by scientists during the Cold War to beat the USSR and have an advantage. The first test of the thermonuclear eplosion was at Bikini Atoll on November 1, 1952. Later, the USSR created a hydrogen bomb as well, but luckily neither country ended up using it during the Cold War. -
Heat Seeking Missile
The first heat seeking missle became an advantage to the Americans during the Vietnam War, as it could detect a heat source on the ground. This enabled fighter jets to fly higher off the ground and pick up where a target was, since the missle could detect the heat from humans. -
Napalm and Agent Orange
Napalm was a part of a guerilla warfare tactic in the Vietnam War. It is a flammable liquid, so when dropped from a plane, it would burn towns to the ground. Agent Orange was also used in the war in Vietnam. It is a poiseness pesticide that when used would make food unedible, and cause babies born to be deformed. Both were invneted in 1942, but not heavily used until the Vietnam War. -
Sputnik
The USSR launched Sputnik in 1957, and had the leg up on the space race and it was evident as the incessant beeping sound given off by the satellite could be heard from all around the world. In 1958, the United States responded and launched Explorer I. This essentially began the space race during the Cold War. -
Calculator
The first calculator was invented in 1966 by Texas Instruments. This greatly helped many people including students and businessmen. This invention along with improved televisions and other electronics shaped the beginning of the technological revolution in the 1970s. -
Automatic Teller Machine (ATM)
The ATM was first installed in Enfield Town in North London, United Kingdom on 27 June 1967 by Barclays Bank.The first ATMs accepted only a single-use token or voucher, which was retained by the machine. These worked on various principles including radiation and low-coercivity magnetism that was wiped by the card reader to make fraud more difficult.
The machine dispensed pre-packaged envelopes containing ten pounds sterling. The ATM came to the United States in 1968. -
Boeing 747
The first flight of the Boeing 747 was in 1969 and these aircrafts were introduced in 1970. It was created in response to the increasing air travel in the 1960s, and the invention of this aircraft has increased air travel especially with businessmen due to improved cost efficiency.
