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Invention of the Cotton Gin
a machine that revolutionized the production of cotton by greatly speeding up the process of removing seeds from cotton fiber. By the mid-19th century, cotton had become America’s leading export. Despite its success, the gin made little money for Whitney due to patent-infringement issues. -
Creation of Conestoga Wagons
The Conestoga wagon can be traced to the Conestoga River region of Pennsylvania’s Lancaster County in the mid- to late-18th century. Conestoga wagons, became a common sight over the next century, as they carried farm products to cities and other goods from cities to rural communities. -
Signing of the Treaty of Velasco
The public treaty provided that hostilities would cease and that Santa Anna would withdraw his forces below the Rio Grande and not take up arms again against Texas. In addition, he also pledged to restore property that had been confiscated by the Mexicans. Both sides promised to exchange prisoners on an equal basis. The Texans would send Santa Anna back to Mexico and would not pursue the retreating Mexican troops. -
Invention of the John Deere Steel Plow
a broken steel sawmill blade gave him an opportunity. He knew well the back-breaking difficulty of farmers near his home in Grand Detour, Illinois. While plowing, they often interrupted their work to scrape the sticky prairie soil from their cast-iron plows. He envisioned that soil sliding easily off of a highly polished steel moldboard. With steel scarce in the area, Deere acquired a broken steel saw blade, and from it crafted a new type of moldboard plow. -
Creation of Morse Code
It worked by transmitting electrical signals over a wire laid between stations. In addition to helping invent the telegraph, Samuel Morse developed a code that assigned a set of dots and dashes to each letter of the English alphabet and allowed for the simple transmission of complex messages across telegraph lines. -
Signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed on February 2, 1848, ended the Mexican-American War in favor of the United States. The war had begun almost two years earlier, in May 1846, over a territorial dispute involving Texas. The treaty added an additional 525,000 square miles to United States territory, including the including the land that makes up most of the western territories. -
Establishment of the Underground Railroad
The Underground Railroad was a network of people, African American as well as white, offering shelter and aid to escaped slaves from the South. It developed as a convergence of several different clandestine efforts. The exact dates of its existence are not known, but it operated from the late 18th century to the Civil War, at which point its efforts continued to undermine the Confederacy in a less-secretive fashion.
