50 Fun Facts About American Industrial Revolution

Which US president holds a patent, granted in 1849, for a device to lift riverboats over shoals?

Abraham Lincoln is the only US president to hold a patent. The scale model he had built for the Patent Office is now kept by the Smithsonian.

Which animal beat Peter Cooper's steam locomotive Tom Thumb in a famous 1830 race near Baltimore?

A horse hauling a rail car won, but only after a belt slipped off the locomotive's blower pulley. Until then Tom Thumb had been pulling easily ahead.

Which apprentice memorized British textile machine designs, sailed for New York in 1789 and was branded a traitor?

Samuel Slater carried the designs in his head because British law banned exporting them. Americans came to call him the father of their Industrial Revolution.

Which New York landmark did P. T. Barnum parade 21 elephants across in 1884 to show it was safe?

Brooklyn Bridge had opened in 1883, and a stampede on its stairway killed at least twelve people six days later. Barnum's parade, led by Jumbo, eased doubts and advertised his circus.

Which fastener did Walter Hunt patent in 1849, then sell the rights to for $400 to pay off a $15 debt?

The safety pin made millions of dollars for others after Hunt sold the patent outright. He also built an early sewing machine, patented in 1854.

Which relay mail service closed in October 1861, two days after the transcontinental telegraph was completed?

Pony Express riders had cut coast-to-coast message times to about ten days. The service lasted only 18 months and was a financial failure.

Which San Francisco dry-goods merchant shared an 1873 patent with tailor Jacob Davis for riveted work pants?

Levi Strauss was a Bavarian immigrant who sold wholesale goods in gold-rush California. Davis, a customer in Reno, had the rivet idea and asked him to help apply for the patent.

What did American railroads introduce on November 18, 1883, ending a patchwork of local clocks?

Standard time zones took effect on a telegraph signal at noon that Sunday. Congress did not write them into law until the Standard Time Act of 1918.

Which Yale graduate's 1793 cotton gin made short-staple cotton profitable and strengthened slavery in the South?

Eli Whitney lost much of his own profit from the gin in legal battles over patent infringement. He turned instead to making muskets for the United States Army.

Which 363-mile waterway, mocked as a governor's 'Big Ditch', linked Albany to Buffalo on opening in 1825?

The Erie Canal took eight years to dig and cut the cost of shipping freight between Buffalo and New York City by about 90 percent.

Which Massachusetts city's textile mills employed some 8,000 workers by 1840, nearly three-quarters of them women?

Lowell recruited the daughters of New England farmers, known as mill girls, and housed them in boarding houses. In 1845 they formed the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association to press for a ten-hour day.

Which American designed the submarine Nautilus for Napoleon before launching a Hudson River steamboat in 1807?

Robert Fulton called his vessel the North River Steamboat, though it became known as Clermont. It covered the 150 miles to Albany in 32 hours.

Which portrait painter turned inventor opened a 38-mile telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore in 1844?

Samuel Morse built the experimental line with $30,000 from Congress, running it along a railroad's right-of-way. He was already in middle age when he took up telegraphy.

In which present-day state did Leland Stanford drive a ceremonial golden spike on May 10, 1869?

Utah was still a territory when the Central Pacific and Union Pacific rails met at Promontory Summit. Stanford's swing missed the spike, but the telegraph flashed the word 'done' regardless.

Laborers from which country made up about eighty percent of the Central Pacific Railroad's workforce by 1868?

China supplied some 12,000 of the railroad's laborers by 1868, the year its crews breached Donner summit. They could be hired at a lower cost and did most of the heavy manual work.

Which Scottish-born former bobbin boy built a steel empire and then gave away almost 90 percent of his fortune?

Andrew Carnegie spent his last 18 years giving away about $350 million, with special emphasis on building local libraries. At his first job he changed spools of thread in a cotton mill twelve hours a day.

Which former assistant bookkeeper built Standard Oil into a company controlling about 90% of American oil?

John D. Rockefeller became the richest person in the United States. In later life he was known for handing out dimes to adults and nickels to children wherever he went.

Which inventor, nicknamed a wizard, ran the Menlo Park laboratory now considered the first industrial research lab?

Thomas Edison registered 1,093 US patents, averaging one every 10 to 12 days of his adult life. He was completely deaf in one ear and barely hearing in the other.

Which inventor, whose mother and wife were both deaf, demonstrated an early telephone at the 1876 Centennial Exposition?

Alexander Graham Bell came to see the telephone as an intrusion on his real work as a scientist. He refused to have one in his own study.

Which Manhattan garment maker's 1911 factory fire killed 146 workers, many trapped behind locked stairwell doors?

Triangle Shirtwaist kept its doors locked to prevent theft and unauthorized breaks. The deaths led to new laws on factory conditions and spurred the growth of the garment workers' union.

Which Virginian demonstrated a mechanical reaper in 1831, building on work by his father and the enslaved Jo Anderson?

Cyrus McCormick always claimed credit as the machine's single inventor. His father had worked on a grain reaper for 28 years without producing a reliable version.

Which Vermont-born blacksmith moved to Illinois and made the first commercially successful steel plow in 1837?

John Deere reasoned that a plow of highly polished steel would better handle the prairie's sticky soil. In one version of the story he cut the blade from an old saw.

Which self-taught chemist hit on vulcanized rubber over a hot stove in 1839 yet died almost $200,000 in debt?

Charles Goodyear's process, vulcanization, takes its name from Vulcan, the Roman god of fire. He was jailed for debt more than once, including in Paris in 1855.

Which former actor's sewing machine firm, an early American multinational, won home buyers with installment payments?

Isaac Singer was not the first to patent such a machine, but his was practical and easy to adapt to home use. He fathered 26 children by five different women.

Which inventor showed New York's Crystal Palace crowds in 1854 an elevator that stopped when the hoisting rope broke?

Elisha Otis devised the brake while installing machinery at a bedstead factory in Yonkers. He fitted the first such elevator for passengers in a New York store in 1857.

Which fencing did Illinois farmer Joseph Glidden patent in 1874 after using a coffee mill to shape his best design?

Barbed wire set farmers who wanted fencing against ranchers who were losing the open range. Some Texas cattlemen took to cutting the fences so their herds could reach grazing land.

Which office machine did printer Christopher Sholes sell to gunmaker Remington in 1873, QWERTY keyboard included?

The typewriter's QWERTY layout is usually said to have been arranged to keep the type bars from clashing. It is still used on computer keyboards, which have no type bars at all.

Which carmaker astonished the world in 1914 with a $5 daily wage, more than double most of his workers' pay?

Henry Ford wanted to end a turnover so heavy that departments hired 300 men a year to fill 100 jobs. The best mechanics in Detroit flocked to his plant.

Which author's 1906 novel The Jungle exposed the meatpacking industry and led to the Meat Inspection Act?

Upton Sinclair spent seven weeks gathering material in the stockyards for a socialist newspaper. He meant to expose working conditions, but the public outcry was over unsanitary food.

Which federal holiday did President Grover Cleveland sign into law in 1894, after thirty states already observed it?

Labor Day was first made a public holiday by Oregon in 1887. Cleveland favored the September date over May 1, which he feared would become a commemoration of the Haymarket affair.

Which Treasury Secretary's 1791 Report on Manufactures urged subsidies and moderate tariffs to build American industry?

Alexander Hamilton wanted to protect infant industries until they could compete with established firms abroad. His ideas became the basis of the American School of economics.

Which conflict, by cutting off almost all foreign trade, created a home market for goods made in the United States?

The War of 1812 forced Americans to make what they had once imported. It also proved the need for a national bank, and President Madison reversed his opposition to one.

Which Speaker of the House devised the 'American System' of protective tariffs, a central bank and federal public works?

Henry Clay was the first to call the plan the American System. He argued that the West should back the tariff because urban factory workers would become buyers of western food.

Which federally financed highway, authorized by Thomas Jefferson in 1806, ran from Cumberland, Maryland to Illinois?

National Road crews stopped at Vandalia, then the Illinois capital, when federal contracts ceased in 1839. The route was later celebrated as the Main Street of America.

Which tycoon nicknamed 'the Commodore' quit school at 11 to work on his father's ferry in New York Harbor?

Cornelius Vanderbilt started his own ferry between Staten Island and Manhattan at 16, then built his wealth in shipping and railroads. Rival captains coined the nickname in jest.

Which Wall Street banker formed U.S. Steel in 1901, creating the world's first billion-dollar company?

J. P. Morgan merged several steel and iron businesses to build the giant. During the Panic of 1907 he organized a coalition of financiers that saved the American monetary system from collapse.

Which steelmaking method, also claimed by American William Kelly, blows air through molten pig iron to remove carbon?

The Bessemer process made steel cheap enough to replace iron in railroad rails, its main use in America. Englishman Henry Bessemer patented it in the 1850s.

Which Pennsylvania city accounted for between one-third and one-half of American steel output by 1910?

Pittsburgh is still known as the Steel City. From 1891 to 1911 the federal government officially spelled its name without the final h.

Which city's Home Insurance Building of 1885, with a fireproof steel frame, is often cited as the first skyscraper?

Chicago's claim rests on the building's metal frame rather than its height: it rose only ten stories at first. The building was demolished in 1931.

Which name for late-1800s America did historians borrow from the title of an 1873 Mark Twain novel?

Gilded Age was Twain's satire on a promised golden age: serious social problems masked by a thin gold gilding of economic expansion. Historians applied the label in the 1920s.

Which business strategy has a steelmaker own iron mines, ore ships and coke ovens as well as steel mills?

Vertical integration puts a company's whole supply chain under one owner. Buying up rivals at the same stage, as Standard Oil did with refineries, is the horizontal kind.

Which 1890 law, named for an Ohio senator, banned unfair monopolies but was applied to trade unions until the 1930s?

The Sherman Antitrust Act was aimed at regulating businesses, but its ban on contracts restricting commerce was turned on unions. A later law spelled out that unions were exempt.

Which union leader, jailed for six months after the 1894 Pullman Strike, later ran for president from a prison cell?

Eugene V. Debs led a boycott of trains with Pullman cars that involved more than 250,000 workers in 27 states. He ran as a Socialist five times, the last in 1920 from a federal penitentiary.

Which detective agency sent 300 armed agents by river barge against steel strikers at Homestead, Pennsylvania in 1892?

Pinkerton agents were given Winchester rifles and towed upriver at night on two specially equipped barges. More than 300 riflemen on the high ground kept up a steady fire on them.

Which London-born cigar maker founded the American Federation of Labor and ran it for all but one year until 1924?

Samuel Gompers was sent to work as an apprentice cigar maker three months after his tenth birthday, to earn money for his impoverished family.

Which photographer left teaching in 1908 to document working children for the National Child Labor Committee?

Lewis Hine's pictures played a role in bringing about the first child labor laws in the United States. In 1930 he was commissioned to document the construction of the Empire State Building.

Which Danish-born police reporter used early flash photography to expose New York tenements in How the Other Half Lives?

Jacob Riis had experienced poverty himself while living in New York. His work brought him a close friendship with Theodore Roosevelt, who became head of the city's police board in 1895.

Which former railroad conductor, styled 'Colonel' to impress locals, struck oil at 69.5 feet near Titusville in 1859?

Edwin Drake had no military experience at all, and he failed to patent his drilling method. He lost all of his savings in oil speculation in 1863.

Which meatpacker is credited with the first practical ice-cooled railroad car, ushering in an era of cheap beef?

Gustavus Swift could then ship dressed meat to all parts of the country and abroad. He also pioneered turning animal by-products into soap, glue, fertilizer and even medical products.

Which product did Jan Matzeliger's 1883 lasting machine turn out at up to 700 pairs a day, halving prices nationwide?

Shoes had depended on skilled hand lasters, who could finish about fifty pairs in a ten-hour day. Matzeliger, born in Dutch Guiana, died of tuberculosis before seeing the full profit.