American History, Combined Edition by Thomas S. Kidd

Author:Thomas S. Kidd
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: B&H Publishing Group
Published: 2019-09-21T00:00:00+00:00

An Age of Invention

The rise of large-scale industrial capitalism did not focus just on the mass production of basic materials such as oil and steel but also on new inventions that revolutionized home life and communication. Some of these, like the Bessemer process in steel, vastly streamlined the production or use of existing technologies. Steady improvements in telegraph cables meant that many of the world’s cities, even beyond the United States and Europe, were connected by cable by the end of the nineteenth century. This meant that agents of global companies such as Standard Oil could use the telegraph to communicate quickly about developments on the other side of the world.

Although the telegraph remained one of the most transformative inventions in human history, the late 1800s saw the advent of the device that would replace it: the telephone. Alexander Graham Bell, a Scottish immigrant living in Boston, invented the telephone in 1876. It could convert sound waves into electrical impulses, and then back to sound on the receiving phone. Bell’s company, American Telephone and Telegraph, came to dominate the market for phones and phone services for more than a century. (In 1982, the AT&T company, under antitrust pressure from the government, agreed to let go of its regional phone service companies, setting the stage for a flowering of new telecommunications companies and technologies in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.) By 1905, there were 10 million phones in service in the United States. Household telephones remained a luxury, however, and telephones often came last to homes of the rural South and to impoverished sections of major cities.

Thomas Edison is rightly known as one of America’s greatest inventors. Perhaps his most transformative invention was the electric lightbulb, or incandescent lamp. He also developed a sophisticated system for delivering electrical current to homes and businesses, to make lights and other electric-powered goods usable. Edison’s company opened the coal-fired Pearl Street power station in New York City in 1882, the same year he opened a hydroelectric station in Appleton, Wisconsin. By 1900, thousands of power stations were illuminating about 2 million electric lights across the nation. Electrical power and light revolutionized everything from the urban environment, especially at night, to the working capacity of factories.

Electrification came first to the homes of wealthy urbanites; by 1907, only 8 percent of homes were running on electricity. But that number went up steadily to 68 percent of American homes in 1930. As part of the New Deal in the 1930s, President Franklin Roosevelt established initiatives promoting rural electrification. As was so often the case, the poor and those in rural areas were the last to benefit from these technological changes. The electrification of homes created a new market not only for lightbulbs, but for domestic appliances, such as irons, toasters, electric clocks, vacuum cleaners, and washing machines. Later came refrigerators, stoves, and electrical heaters.

Even places such as Luna Kellie’s Nebraska were transformed by electrification. Just twenty-five miles north of Hastings, Nebraska, the town of Grand

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