Hey there and welcome back to Heimler’s History. So we’ve been going through Unit 6 of the AP U.S. History curriculum and in this video and the next couple we’re going to be considering a major theme of this time period, namely the industrialization of American, both its causes and effects. So in this video we be talking about technology, so if you’re ready to get them brain cows milked on an industrial scale, then let’s get to it. So during the last few decades of the nineteenth century, industry in the United States changed significantly, and when I say industry, what I mean is basically the way we made things to sell. And really the change comes down to this: prior to industrialization, Americans made things either to use themselves or to be sold locally, or at most regionally. During this period Americans began mass-producing goods to be sold all over the world. And that had some significant consequences, but for now let’s just focus on the technology that made such an innovation possible. And the granddaddy of all these technological innovations was the railroad. To have access to a quick and easy means of transporting goods created the occasion for a truly national market for sales. And if goods are easy to transport over long distances, that has the effect of opening up mass production and mass consumption. And, wouldn’t you know it, it did. After the Civil War the miles of railroads built increased five-fold. Now a big part of what helped the flurry of railroad building, as I’ve mentioned in a previous video, was the generous hand of Big Daddy Government. The federal government could see that expanding the networks of railroads and further connecting various parts of the country would be good for the economy. But in order to build railroads there’s one very important ingredient that you need, namely, land. And where would railroad companies get the massive tracts of land required? Ya daddy. The federal government provided land grants and loan subsidies to railroad companies. In the end, the government granted something like 170 million acres of land to this effort. By the end of the century, four new transcontinental railroads were built in addition to the first one finished in 1869. These connected Nebraska to California, New Orleans to Los Angeles, Kansas City to Los Angeles, and Minnesota to Washington. So with all that accomplished, the east and the west were now easily accessible to each other and this created a national market for goods. Now one of the reasons all of these railroads could be built was because of another advance in technology, this one with regards to the production of steel. In the 1850s an Englishman by the name of Henry Bessemer patented a process for making steel of much stronger quality, and that process was called the Bessemer Process. Essentially, the Bessemer process came down to this: blast air through molten iron and you get much higher quality steel. Why does blasting air through molten iron create better steel? I mean, I don’t know, it just does. The point is this new method of steel production enabled manufacturers to produce a far greater quantity and great quality of steel than had even been done before. And yet another innovation that facilitated all of this was greater access to natural resources like coal and oil, or if you’re like me and live in Georgia, allow me to pronounce it correctly: coal and ole. Coal was the first major source of energy for industrialization, both in factories and in locomotives, especially the hard coal known as anthracite coal found mainly in Western Pennsylvania. Later, oil surpassed coal as the main fuel of industry, and later automobiles. And yet another innovation that set the stage for the expansion of industry during this period had to do with communications. The telegraph was invented by Samuel Morse in 1844, but it was during this period that telegraph wires multiplied significantly. In this way communication could travel long distances at the speed of electricity. And not only did the telegraph connect various regions of the United States, but most notable during this period was the laying of a trans-Atlantic cable connecting America to Europe. And that didn’t just mean that Americans and Europeans could chat about whatever was on their minds [say hey to your mom for me lol]. This actually had the effect of creating an international market for basic goods like coal, oil, steel, and grain. But it didn’t stop with the telegraph. In 1876 Alexander Graham Bell further contributed to these same effects with the invention of the telephone. [say hey to your mom for me…] He actually is LOLing. Within a year of its development, Bell founded the Bell Telephone Company and by the end of 1880, there were something like 50,000 telephones in use in America. Okay, that’s a short one, but it is what you need to know about Unit 6 topic 5 of It’s the latest technological innovation in AP curriculum review. See what I did there? Here’s a playlist for more Unit 6 videos, and if you want me to keep making these videos, then get that clicky finger out and subscribe, and I shall oblige. Heimler out.