all right this is openstax u.s history chapter 18 industrialization and the rise of big business 1870-1900 we'll be looking at section 1 inventors of the age so a key part to driving this industrialization that took place in the post-civil war years were inventions and inventors which led to more efficiency in terms of production one of the ways in which inventions were incentivized was the u.s patent office so a patent is a way to protect intellectual property so if you're an inventor and you invent something incredibly useful you file it with the patent office and they will ensure generally that you are going to benefit from that you know that nobody else can essentially rip off your idea and create a copycat essentially and the number of patents that were issued in the united states increased dramatically so patents increased by a lot in the years between 1870 and 1900 so a lot of new inventions were being creative um and a lot of this was uh you know tied in with some bigger uh things happening to american society at the time so at the time that these inventions were hitting you know the united states there's a lot of immigration which is people arriving from well from from outside the u.s we'll say that so a huge population gross growth urbanization in fact in this period you are finding that the urban population is you know beginning to gain on the rural population and by the 1920s there are more americans that are actually living in cities as opposed to the farmland uh and industrialization which is more or less a process to produce more efficiently and you know a lot of this was tied to the invention of the steam engine which had been invented before the civil war i had replaced all natural sources of power to machine made but pretty soon new inventions like electricity especially make this process a little bit easier so commercial electricity again this would power things like lights but it could also power things like factories whereas before it was steam steam you know heating up water and allowing the pressure to go electricity could be produced in power plants and then you know transferred to wherever it needed to be another huge improvement was the invention of the flush toilet or indoor plumbing uh this had a lot to do with improved health and really just these two things together and all it takes is kind of a you know stark reminder when the power go out power goes out or if your plumbing doesn't work both of these things led to a big increase in the standard of living right electricity and indoor plumbing are are miracles and again you know you only need to be reminded when the power goes out how um you know how important those things are there was also other inventions and innovations taking place in other sectors of the economy so electricity flush toilets indoor plumbing steel was a big one two new ways of making steel so both the bessemer process and the open hearth process are new ways to make steel and steel was essentially used in everything from bridges to buildings to automobiles to you know trains you know you name it steel was used and this new process the bessemer process and the open hearth process uh increased production so much more steel was being produced in the united states and actually lowered the price decrease right so uh steel was stronger it was cheaper and there was a lot more of it thanks to some new innovative ways of of creating it um we'll talk about two actually uh yeah we have two uh inventors in particular the first one here is alexander graham bell and his invention of the telephone now prior to bell's invention the united states had been or was using telegraph lines this was invented by samuel morse and of course this is morse code that's used and it would be a series of dots and dashes that would send signals elect through electricity through telegraph lines and you could communicate over long distances in fact a trans-atlantic cable was laid in 1858 to allow the united states to communicate with europe uh instantaneously and so this was you know the ability for the united states to communicate in a very short amount of time as opposed to how people communicated in the past and that was of course you know physical so you'd actually have to send a letter to england to communicate with them well with the transatlantic cable in 1858 now for the very first time in human history you can practically communicate instantly between the united states and europe it makes the world kind of a smaller place it really was a pretty um significant invention but pretty soon the telegraph was improved by the telephone which is not just a code this was invented by alexander graham bell so he invented the telephone uh and then it was much bigger companies and corporations that made the telephone more available so the american telephone and telegraph company or at t which is still very much a company today you know really help make the telephone available all right help make it available and a lot of inventions uh kind of go down that same path that is there is inventor who creates whatever the process is and then usually somebody who then can make that uh more widely available to the public in this case uh a tnt but perhaps the most famous and known inventor of the time was thomas edison right this is thomas edison right here so we can say probably the most famous it's not famous inventor uh thomas edison was a serial inventor you know before he was like 25 years old he had 2 000 patents already he created the first modern laboratory at mello park so we might call this the first modern really was an invention lab and he invited scientists from all around the world there and they promised that they would create one invention a week really kind of gives you an idea of just how strong this innovative culture was amongst other things that thomas edison invented he invents a lot you know a phonograph which is kind of like a you know record player almost first thing that could play music he helped invent the motion picture projector which of course is associated with movies but his most famous and and most impactful invention was the incandescent light bulb right so this is electric lighting whereas before all lighting was done by open flame right usually sort of an oil um oil burning flame so this was a huge invention however edison struggled more on how to get electricity to the masses so he can invent the light bulb and said it was george westinghouse and his invention of alternating current as a way of getting electricity to places oops over a long distance so even though edison invented the light bulb he was not responsible for inventing the way of transferring that electricity using alternating current transferring it over long distances which ultimately help make electric lighting more available to the american public