•Nearly half the world’s people lack water and sanitation technology that was available to ancient Romans two thousand years ago.
In 1800, the Chinese emperor ordered a ban on using, importing, and producing the drug that was destroying his country—making opium the world’s first illegal drug. The law was no more effective than current laws outlawing marijuana, cocaine, or heroin. Chinese addicts continued to use the drug; British merchants continued to sell it.
In 1838, the emperor appointed the Chinese equivalent of a drug czar, imperial commissioner Lin Zexu. Under Lin’s direction, Chinese authorities imprisoned or executed more than two thousand Chinese opium dealers. Like their present-day American counterparts, the Chinese drug enforcement agents soon realized they needed to stop the drug supply at its source.
In theory, controlling the foreign drug merchants should have been easy. The Chinese government maintained tight restrictions over foreign trade. European merchants could only trade in Canton. They were allowed in the city only between October and March and were restricted to special neighborhoods. They had to deal exclusively with licensed Chinese merchants.
Lin Zexu issued a warning to British dealers who were still bringing the now illegal drug into China. When the merchants continued to trade in opium, Lin had them barricaded in their warehouses until they surrendered their merchandise. Lin Zexu seized and destroyed twenty thousand chests of illegal opium from British warehouses in Canton.
In response, sixteen British warships sailed to China, where they attacked and blockaded Chinese ports, sank Chinese ships, occupied Shanghai, and sailed up the Yangtze River to threaten Nanjing. The nation with the largest population on earth was forced to submit to one of the smallest—thanks to Britain’s possession of steam and guns.
ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE world, north and south in one nation were about to wage war with each other over one side’s possession of another “commodity”—the slaves who were the foundation of the southern economy.
Only eighty years after the American Revolution, the United States entered into the first war of the industrial age.
The Northern and Southern states were divided on many issues. The largest and ugliest was the question of slavery. Liberty was incomplete in the country whose ideal of freedom had inspired revolutions around the world. Four million Americans were owned by other humans. Traded as commodities—bought and sold, as if they were animals rather than human beings, and often treated less humanely than their owners’ livestock.
Slavery was an issue in itself, but it was also shorthand for the economic tensions that divided the nation. Even during the colonial period, when 90 percent of the American colonists lived outside of cities, there was a difference between the small farms of the North and the slave-based plantations of the South. In the 1820s and 1830s, cities in the Northeast embraced the Industrial Revolution, but the South did not. Northern mill owners bought cotton from Southern plantations at the same time that Northern abolitionists railed against the evils of slavery.
Liberty was incomplete in the country whose ideal of freedom had inspired revolutions around the world.
The nation grew closer and closer to war. When Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860, Southern states feared that abolition would soon follow. A month after his election, South Carolina seceded from the United States, and the country slid into what would be four years of brutal warfare.
The American Civil War was fought with a combination of up-to-date technology and battle tactics that belonged to a previous era. New, mass-produced weapons created mass-produced death on the battlefield. The Gatling gun, a predecessor of the machine gun, fired an unimaginable two hundred rounds per minute. Rifled muskets loaded with aerodynamic lead bullets changed common soldiers into marksmen. For the first time since the introduction of the gun in Ming China, ordinary soldiers could aim their weapons at a distant target and have a fair chance of hitting it. The day of the infantry charge was over, though officers trained at West Point continued to lead heroic suicidal charges against a line of armed infantrymen. Even troops far from the line of fire learned to protect themselves with trenches and fortifications, foreshadowing the trench warfare of the First World War.
New weapons weren’t the only way the Industrial Revolution shaped the Civil War and contributed to the South’s eventual defeat. Most of the nation’s railroad track, telegraph system, and manufacturing capacity was in the North. Thanks to their extensive rail network, the Union army was able to move men and material to the front more quickly than the South. A newly formed U.S. Military Telegraph Corps strung more than four thousand miles of telegraph wire in the first year of the war and sent more than one million messages flying to and from the battlefield, allowing President Lincoln to monitor battlefield reports and lead realtime strategy sessions with his generals. Weapons, munitions, and uniforms poured out of Northern factories—Samuel Colt’s factory alone produced 7,000 rifles, 113,000 muskets, and 387,000 six-shooters over the course of the war.
New York and Pennsylvania each had more industrial capacity than all the seceding states combined. In the end, the South was unable to stand up against the North’s manufacturing ability.
“The Fall of Richmond, Va. on the Night of April 2, 1865,” detail of lithograph by Currier and Ives.
DEADLY LEAD
In the nineteenth century, weapons manufacturers used Earth’s densest and softest common metal to create the deadliest ammunition in history—the minié bullet, known to troops in the American Civil War as “minié balls.” Made of soft lead, minié balls had a hollow, cylindrical base and a rounded conical nose. This design made the minié ball faster to load and gave it greater range and accuracy than the traditional ball. Minié balls flatten when they meet human flesh, tearing through muscle and bone. When the ball hits, bones splinter and shatter into hundreds of spicules: sharp, bony sticks that the force of the bullet drives through muscle and skin.
Minié balls aren’t the only way lead can kill. Lead is a poison. Our bodies don’t use it for anything, but they treat it the same way they do calcium: if you are exposed to lead, it accumulates in your body. At low concentrations, lead poisoning causes poor appetites, stomachaches, exhaustion, headaches, and insomnia. Higher levels of lead poisoning can damage the brain and the kidneys.
In the past, lead was man’s go-to metal for anything where its malleability and resistance to corrosion were a plus. The Romans used lead for water and sewer pipes. (Roman lead pipe survives today in Roman baths.) For centuries, people added lead to paints, cosmetics, and pottery glazes. In fact, lead paint was used in the United States until 1978. It’s amazing anyone survived.
With increasing recognition of lead’s hazards, we’ve reduced the ways lead is used. Today, the primary uses for lead are as radiation shielding, solder for electrical connections, and in lead acid batteries.
APRIL 3, 1865. RICHMOND, VIRGINIA. The war has reached a turning point. General Philip Sheridan’s forces have overrun the Confederate defenses at Five Forks. General Robert E. Lee can no longer hold back the advance of the Union army.
Sheridan’s troops will reach the Confederate capital by morning. The city is preparing to evacuate. Civilians and soldiers hurry through the streets, carrying as many of their belongings as they can. Some are on horseback. More have loaded their possessions on carts, carriages, and wagons. A few find a place on the last trains to leave the city. Others leave by canal barges, small skiffs, and larger boats.
Two members of the city militia, Captain Herring and Adjutant Linden Kent, are burning official documents in front of the government offices. A man gallops toward them, dust flying up from his horses’ hooves. The two soldiers reach for their guns, then relax as they realize it’s the man in charge of the evacuation, Provost Marshal Isaac Carrington.
SAMUEL COLT
Before Samuel Colt, pistols had to be reloaded after every shot. In the 1830s Colt designed a revolutionary revolving cylinder with six tubes for bullets.
Cocking the gun’s hammer spun the cylinder so bullets could be fired one after another.
But the invention of the revolver was just one way Colt changed the world of weapons. In the early nineteenth century, guns were made by hand, one gun at a time. Colt introduced the idea of mass production. A machine produced thousands of identical parts, and then the guns were assembled by hand along an assembly line.
Colt Third Model Dragoon Percussion Revolver
Carrington tells them they have new instructions from General Lee. Evacuation is not enough. Tactical retreat is no longer an option. Kent and Herring are ordered to burn anything of value so it doesn’t fall into Union hands. They hurry to follow Lee’s orders
Before long, they enter an open warehouse filled with piles of dried tobacco leaves. The leaves are already dry as tinder, but Kent and Herring douse the tobacco and the walls of the warehouse with kerosene. Once outside, they torch the building. Flames lick up the kerosene-soaked walls, then flare into an inferno as they reach the dried tobacco.
All across the city, members of the rear guard are doing the same thing, setting fire to storehouses and arsenals. Soon the flames from burning stores and the embers from smoldering documents begin to spread, fire joining fire until the city is ablaze. When the flames reach the Tredegar Iron Works, the loaded shells that are stored there explode, blowing out windows and tearing doors from their hinges. Soon columns of dense, black smoke hover in the air.
The last members of the army retreat from the city on horseback, leaving a blazing ruin behind them to greet the Union army.
Five hard-fought days later, Lee and the Army of Virginia are surrounded. They have no choice but to surrender to Union general Ulysses S. Grant.
THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR represented a turning point for the United States—and the world. The weapons and military strategies used, the means of recording what happened, as well as the industrial infrastructure that supported the American Civil War look familiar to us in a way that earlier wars do not. Modern elements had appeared in wars before. The Crimean War (1854–56) saw the first use of the telegraph, the first war photography, the first true war correspondents, and the birth of modern nursing. (Clara Barton would be the first to acknowledge her debt to the redoubtable Miss Nightingale.) Railroads played a critical role in the Indian Rebellion of 1857. In each of those wars, modern elements played an important role.
Ironclad warships like the USS Monitor (right) and the CSS Virginia (left) were used for the first time in the American Civil War.
In the case of the American Civil War, such innovations shaped the nature of war itself, and by war’s end, humanity stood on the edge of a brave, new world—poised for technological revolution on an unprecedented scale.
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CLOSER
Immigrants awaiting examination at Ellis Island, 1902
A HALF CENTURY HAS PASSED SINCE THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR, AND THE YEARS HAVE BEEN MARKED BY INNOVATION AND IMMIGRATION. AMERICA HAS BEGUN A SECOND INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION THAT IS RAPIDLY USHERING IN A MODERN WORLD.
From the sewing machine to the assembly line, from air-conditioning to the Model T, American ingenuity has created—and is still creating—new technologies that will ultimately contribute to the well-being of all mankind. Businesspeople and visionaries are taking the discoveries of pure science and transforming them into practical innovations. Some new technologies just make everyday life a little easier. Others are completely changing the world.
America’s second industrial revolution is fueled by the arrival of millions of newcomers. Ambitious, self-selected risk takers come from all over the world, hoping to share in American prosperity. America transforms them—and they transform America. They work in the factories spawned by new industries. They help build the growing cities. And they are on the front lines of innovation. Yankee tinkerers stand in line at the patent office next to immigrants from Germany, Poland, and Russia. America is a melting pot not only of peoples, but of ideas.
Humans are more closely linked than ever before, by railroad, steamship, telegraph, and radio. People and information travel at speeds unimaginable a hundred years ago. Material progress is changing how we live and profoundly altering our relationships to the earth and to each other. It is also bringing practical challenges and moral dilemmas previously unseen. They will ultimately reveal the best and worst of human nature.
The Machine Shop at the Phoenix Works Institute
Thomas Alva Edison
early 1900s vacuum cleaner
Sholes and Glidden typewriter
IN THE YEARS AFTER THE American Civil War, the world moved from the age of steam and iron to the age of electricity and steel, from the mechanical to the electromechanical. We made massive leaps forward in transportation, communication, manufacturing, and construction.
Ideas were generated, and adopted, at unprecedented speed. In 1863, the United States Patent Office issued fewer than four thousand patents; by the end of the century, it often received a hundred patent applications a week. The feedback loop between scientific discovery and invention accelerated. The growing publishing industry put news of breakthroughs in science into the hands of tinkerers and visionaries who transformed them into useful tools.
Americans were quick to pick up inventions and important ideas from other places and develop them into practical applications with enormous impact. Andrew Carnegie revolutionized the steel industry with English inventor Henry Bessemer’s innovative steel-processing technique. Henry Ford combined mass production techniques with the internal combustion engines, independently developed by German engineers Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler in 1885, making automobiles part of everyday life. Thomas Edison, a notoriously hard-nosed experimenter, summed up the idea of translating scientific invention into innovation: “We’ve got to come up with something. We can’t be like those German professors who spend their whole lives studying the fuzz on a bee.”
Factories flourished. In 1860, manufacturing was responsible for only 12 percent of America’s gross national product. By 1894, industrial production had tripled, bypassing agriculture as the main source of America’s wealth, and the United States was the world’s leading manufacturer.
The immediate effects of the second industrial revolution were not all positive. Between 1870 and 1890, the population in America’s three largest cities, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, increased by more than 200 percent due to the growing need for industrial labor. Inner-city neighborhoods were as crowded and dirty as any London slum during the first industrial revolution. Few had paved and lighted streets or sewer and water lines. And 40 percent of America’s working class made less than the five hundred dollars per year needed to feed a family of five an adequate diet.
Ford Model T assembly line, ca. 1913
Singer sewing machine, ca 1850
Over time, the benefits of the second industrial revolution trickled down. American inventions, and adaptations of other people’s inventions, changed daily life in ways that would have astonished the pioneers of the first industrial revolution. Ordinary people could now enjoy goods and services that had once been available only to the wealthy. Thomas Edison’s lightbulb drove the development of a centralized system for generating and distributing inexpensive electricity, eventually bringing light and power to every home. His phonograph allowed rural and working-class people to hear the music of great orchestras for the first time. Isaac Singer’s sewing machine, the first home appliance, not only relieved women of the drudgery of hand sewing—it created the clothing industry. The poor were no longer limited to clothing they made themselves. Henry Ford’s automated production line turned the automobile from a luxury item to a mass-marketed product. The second industrial revolution was bracketed at one end by the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, and at the other by the development of aviation and the automobile as practical means of transportation. In the world’s newly industrialized countries, people were more mobile than they had ever been before.
We will make electric light so cheap that only the rich will burn candles. —Thomas Edison
THE WRIGHT BROTHERS FIRST FLIGHT
DECEMBER 14, 1903. KITTY HAWK, NORTH CAROLINA. It’s a beautiful day for flying. The Wright brothers toss a coin to decide who will get the first shot at testing their newest glider. Wilbur wins.
But the flight doesn’t go as planned. The plane rises a few feet in the air, up, up . . . and then plunges straight down into the sand, snapping a skid.
Back to the drawing board. . . .
DECEMBER 17, 1903. THE WRIGHT BROTHERS HAVE SPENT the last three days in the shed they use as a hangar, repairing the damage caused by Wilbur’s crash. Now they’re ready to try again. And this time, it’s Orville’s turn.
The weather has changed. Bitter winds blow in from the north at twenty miles an hour. Puddles of water from a recent rain have turned into a layer of ice. Orville thinks the weather is perfect . . . for flying. Nonflyers are less enthusiastic. Only five of the spectators invited to witness today’s trial run were willing to brave the cold. But Orville is undeterred.
He runs the engine and propellers for a few minutes to warm them up, unties the anchor ropes, then lies on the lower wing and grasps the lever that controls elevation. The plane moves down the wooden rail the Wrights laid so the craft would have a smooth surface to slide on. It gathers speed. Excited, Wilbur runs alongside, holding one wing to help balance the machine. Orville pushes the elevation lever forward. . . .
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