Singer and Colt and businessmen like them, many of whom were accused of being monopolist, were singularly obsessed with technological innovation and efficiency. They wanted to harness technology to make goods more quickly, to make goods better, and to make them cheaper. Isaac Singer, who started from small-town beginnings, invented the modern sewing machine in 1853. He also initiated the idea of purchasing based on an installment plan. While Singer was mass producing sewing machines, Samuel Colt mass produced guns.
The problem that both Singer and Colt ran into was that they didn't have enough high quality machine tools, okay, that were needed to make exact replicas of every part, time, time again. Each part of a device, be it the sewing machine or parts of a revolver, had to be exactly identical in order to allow for mass production. So if you're doing, if you're going to make a thousand revolvers, you need a thousand barrels that are the exact same, so that the bullet will fire from the gun straight out, and so that the barrel will effectively attach to the thousands of handles that you've manufactured to put this gun together. This bedeviled production in the late 19th century. At first, manufacturers relied on a group known as the fitters to assemble nearly identical parts.
The fitters had to bring the parts together to make one unit. And because of the lack of... precision in the machine equipment in order to get the barrels to fit to the handles etc they would have to file off little bits they would have to use markers to note areas in the metal that were slightly off and then they would go and they would manually sand down areas or grind them in order to get them to be more exact and to get the components to fit together This was, obviously, a time-consuming enterprise, and it was a major bottleneck to mass production. It wasn't the fitter's fault, of course. It was the fault of the lack of precise machine equipment.
But all the same, it showed that the advent of mass-produced goods was being held back because individual components were not exact replicas, and thus... They could not be quickly interchanged. Despite the bottleneck, by the 1870s, Singer had refined production so that he was producing about 270,000 sewing machines a year.
That was approaching the level of a thousand a day. As production ramped up, sales tactics became modernized. Singer dispatched traveling salesmen who would go from town to town selling Singer sewing machines. And this became a common sight in towns and cities across America after the Civil War.
Salesmen targeted women, and Singer offered the sewing machines on installment plans. Now, there was an interest rate involved, but the consumer was able to have the sewing machine before paying the full cost of it. And in the growing towns, recall the urbanization of America that America was witnessing during this period, Singer would rent spaces for showrooms.
And there, he hired women with sewing skills. And they were put on display in the showrooms. So women would walk by the showrooms and they would see these other women sewing. They would stick their head in and chat.
Maybe they would learn a technique about sewing. But the overall impression was that it was much faster and much easier to sew with a Singer sewing machine. The first products with full interchangeability of parts were Albert Pope's bicycles, which enjoyed a popular vogue in the 1890s.
Improvements in machine tools and hard steel. facilitated Pope's achievement. The parts of a Pope-made bicycle were identical, allowing for complete interchangeability.
Pope also pioneered the idea of trade shows, with the first bicycle trade show being hosted in 1883. The American bicycle craze enabled Pope to enlarge his market, and then he innovated further in sales by stratifying his market, which meant he would have a top-line luxurious model and then below that he would have a sort of medium luxury model and then you would go down to cheaper models. So the offering went from very lavish to very modest, something that would later inspire car makers. The bicycle also inspired other inventors. including the Wright brothers, who began as bicycle repairmen. Pope attached pneumatic tires to the bicycles for the first time.
Previously, bicycles that existed had solid rubber tires. And he also devised ball bearings for the bicycles. And so what we see as a result of Pope...
the interchangeability of parts, and the design innovations that he's made is really the advent of the modern bicycle thanks to Albert Pope. So what we see here at the top is an older version of a bicycle from the mid-19th century. This is called a penny farthing.
Actually very dangerous. The rider had to sit way up top. And then you actually see the first bicycle on the bottom left.
And if you look at this picture, you'll note while many of the design features are very common, there's no pedals. So literally you just straddled this thing and you pushed it along by by walking, essentially. But thanks to Pope, you see the pedals You see the use of ball bearings and chains, and you see the more buoyant rubber tires. This is the safety bicycle that emerges, and you can see it here in the bottom right.
The fundamental change, I mean there's been no fundamental change in this bicycle really since Pope's innovation in the 1890s. Now, one of the problems that Pope ran up against was that the quality of the roads in America were so bad that you simply could not stay balanced on a bicycle. There were potholes everywhere. It would rain.
You didn't have flat surfaces. Most roads were frankly just dirt tracks. Some in cities were cobblestone. And so what he did was he founded a league, the League of American Wheelmen. which was a cyclist lobbying group, and this group petitioned for the improvement of roads.
They gained a huge ally when automobiles gained wider adoption in the 10 to 15 years after the advent of the safety bicycle. So, these are major innovations in terms of the creation of the modern bicycle. But, We have to take a moment and reflect on what this meant. This had vast impacts on society because it greatly improved mobility. One of Pope's assistants, a guy named Hiram Percy Maxim, wrote, quote, I saw transportation emerging from a crude stage in which mankind was limited to the railroad, or to the horse, or to Shanks Mare.
Shanks Mare is just a reference to walking. The bicycle represented a very significant advance. Here I was covering the distance between Salem and Lynn on a bicycle. Here was a revolutionary change in transportation. My bicycle was propelled to respectable speed by a mechanism operated by my muscles.
It carried me over a lonely country road in the middle of the night. covering the distance in considerably less time than an hour. A horse and carriage would have required at least two hours. A railroad and train would have needed half an hour. But it would only carry me from station to station.
And I must conform to its timetable. This was not always convenient."So what we're seeing is an America that is becoming much more integrated as far-flung regions are connected by the railroad. And there's a general awareness that is growing up all around the country about the differences among different regions. You could travel across the entire expanse of the United States in a few days. And comfort, really. And this was in stark contrast to the harrowing and dangerous journey that would have taken months to complete back in, say, 1848. But really, You did not need to travel to experience the world in a whole new way. In 1879, an American inventor named Thomas Edison patented the electric light bulb. And over the course of the 1880s and 1890s, electricity, electric lights, became commonplace. First along streets in the United States and Canada, and then spreading out to many European cities, and indeed some Asian cities. Then, homes started to be wired so that you could operate an electric lamp. All of a sudden, restaurants, bars, theaters, and coffee houses began to stay open later into the night because they had lights and people could travel to and from along the streets with lights.