The Expansion of Industry

Chapter 14 Section 1

Introduction:

1. What are the pros and cons of railroad expansion?

2. What dangers do the railroad workers encounter?

3. How will businesses and the general public benefit from the

transcontinental railroad?

4. How might railroad construction affect the environment?

Government Support for Business

Natural Resources Fuel Industrialization

After the Civil War, the United States was still largely an agricultural nation.

A mere 60 years later, by the 1920s, it had become the leading industrial power in the world. Wealth of Natural

Resources

Growing Urban

Population

Black GoldIn the 1840s American’s

started using kerosene to light lamps, after the

Canadian geologist

Abraham Gesner discovered how to distill the fuel from oil or coal.

Black Gold

It wasn’t until Edwin L. Drake

successfully used a steam engine to drill for oil near

Titusville, Pennsylvania, that removing oil from

beneath the earth’s surface became

practical.

Black Gold This discovery led to the

oil boom that spread to Kentucky, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and later Texas.

Petroleum-refining industries arose in Cleveland and Pittsburgh as entrepreneurs rushed to transform the oil to kerosene.

Gasoline, after the automobile became popular became the most important form of oil.

Oil was not the only natural resource that was plentiful in the US.

Coal and Iron were also found.

Removing the carbon from iron produces a lighter, more flexible, and rust-resistant metal – steel.

Bessemer Steel Process

Bessemer Steel Process

Even the successful Bessemer process was bettered by the 1860s.

It was eventually replaced by the open-hearth process, enabling manufacturers to produce quality steel from scrap metal as well as from raw materials.

What natural resources were most important for industrialization?

New Uses for Steel

RAILROADSBARBED WIRE

FARM MACHINES

BRIDGESSKYSCRAPERS

The Home Insurance Building in Chicago.

-William Le Baron

Jenney

By capitalizing on natural resources and their own ingenuity, inventors, changed more than the landscape,

their inventions affected the very way people lived and worked.

The Power of Electricity

• Thomas Ava Edison, 1876, established the worlds first research lab in Menlo Park, NJ.

• He perfected the incandescent light bulb and later invented and entire system for producing and distributing electrical power.

• By 1890, electric power ran numerous machines, from fans to printing presses.

• Allowed manufacturers to locate their plants wherever they wanted.

Inventions Change

Lifestyles

Chri

stop

her

Shole

s,

typew

rite

r, 1

867

Alexander Graham Bell, telephone, 1867

• These inventions affected office work, and created new jobs for women.

• Clothing was now mass produced

• Freed laborers from backbreaking labor and helped improve workers’ standard of living.

Exit Ticket: 1 paragraph

If the US had been poor in natural resources, how

would industrialization have been affected?