scope; gunpowder, which revolutionized the art of warfare, and the printing press, which fostered the spread of scientific and popular knowledge. People had already become accustomed to inventiveness before the great inventions of the machine age were made. The significance of this intellectual outlook is well stated by Barnes as follows, "The general intellectual conditions prevailing in any age determine the possible degree of progress in science and technology. The status of science and technology is the basic factor creating the prevailing type of economic institutions."' 12

The so-called Industrial Revolution was not an overnight transformation. It had its beginnings in the stone ages, and it reached fruition at the end of a thousand years of transition from the end of the Roman Empire to the inventions of Watt and Hargreaves. The great inventions in spinning and electricity were themselves almost a hundred years apart. And even greater than the inventions of that hundred years have been the continuing discoveries of applied science in electricity, chemistry, engineering, and automatic machinery. The Industrial Revolution is still going on, a continuous process of discovery and invention. The advances made since 1890 are fully as revolutionary, compared with the century of the steam engine and the locomotive, as those were compared with the centuries of hand tools. The machine economy now commands the center of the stage in the development of a technology of production for the satisfaction of the economic wants of

man.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ABBOTT, W. C., The Expansion of Europe.

BARNES, H. E., Social History of the Western World.

BREASTED, J. H., Ancient Times.

CUNNINGHAM, W., Western Civilization.

GIDDINGS, F. H., Studies in the Theory of Human Society.

GOLDEN WEISER, A. A., Early Civilization.

GRAS, N. S. B., Introduction to Economic History.

KROEBER, A. L., Anthropology.

LIPSON, E., The Economic History of England.

LOWIE, R. H., Primitive Society.

Culture and Ethnology.

MARVIN, F. S., The Living Past.

OGBURN, W. F., Social Change.

OSBORNE, H. F., Men of the Old Stone Age.

ROBINSON, J. H., The Mind in the Making.

SHEPHERD, W. R., Expansion of Europe, Political Science Quarterly, Volume XXXIV.

SLATER, G., The Making of Modern England.

USHER, A. P., Industrial History of England.

WISSLER, CLARK, Man and Culture.

12 H. E. Barnes, Social History of the Western World, p. vii. See also C. J. Hayes, A Political and Social History of Modern Europe, Vol. I, pp. 414-426; and James Harvey Robinson, Medieval and Modern Times, Chapter XXII.

CHAPTER III

THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF ECONOMIC

SOCIETY (Continued)

The first country to experience the Industrial Revolution was England. Hence a description of the early mechanical inventions has mainly an English setting.

The Inventions of the Industrial Revolution.-The initial inventions of the Industrial Revolution were made in textile manufacturing. The spinning jenny of James Hargreaves, invented in 1767, which originally operated eight and, later, eighty spindles instead of one; the water frame spinning machine of Richard Arkwright, invented in 1768; the "mule," which combined the best features of these two inventions, finished by Samuel Crompton in 1779,-these were the first true machines. They so increased the efficiency of spinning that more yarn could be made than could be woven into cloth. To enable weaving capacity to keep pace with this new spinning capacity, the power loom was perfected in 1787 by Edward Cartwright. In 1792, Eli Whitney invented in America the first cotton gin, increasing from one pound to three hundred the amount of cotton one man could clean in a day. These primary inventions revolutionized first the textile industries and later all industries of basic importance to society.

Machinery could not be hand driven. The harnessing of natural energy was essential. Taking advantage of earlier experiments in physics and adding improvements to many earlier attempts at invention, James Watt in 1769 produced the first successful steam engine. The engine was first applied to pumping water from coal mines, to hoisting coal, and to driving machinery, and in the course of time to propelling the locomotive and the steamboat.

The maintenance of these inventions required more iron for machine construction. Discovery of methods of smelting by the use of coal and coke instead of charcoal, and of methods of producing malleable iron by the so-called puddling process, gave a new impetus to the mining and manufacture of metals. The machine age is often termed the age of coal and iron, because these are indispensable materials in the primary productive enterprises. The importance of these industries is so great that practically all manufacturing enterprises are localized in the vicinity of supplies of coal and iron.

The steam engine and ample supplies of coal and iron were a preparation for the revolution in land and water transportation. In 1807 Robert Fulton drove his steamboat up the Hudson River, and in

1838 the first steamship crossed the Atlantic by steam alone, in half the time required for sailing vessels. Engineering achievements in canal construction were widely applied, and by 1830 nearly all important points in England had been linked together by canals. In 1825 George Stephenson, taking advantage of many prior experiments and inventions, successfully demonstrated the railroad locomotive. This opening of the revolution in land transport occurred about fifty years later than completion of the first great manufacturing inventions. The railroad, however, did not come into wide use until about 1860 to 1870, when the invention of telegraphic communication made possible a complete technique of transportation.

The Industrial Revolution therefore rested originally upon inventions in three great fields,-manufacturing, power, and transportation. Machines, engines, and railroads were the trinity which ushered in the modern machine age.

These inventions revolutionized, in turn, the whole organization of economic life. Machinery remade economic institutions. Machinery, concentrated in mills and workshops, created the factory system. Machinery gave a strong incentive to ownership of buildings, raw materials, and mechanical equipment by private capitalists, and thus established modern capitalism. Machinery made possible large scale production, with ownership divorced from management, and personal contact between employer and employee a myth of the past. Machinery put labor as individuals at the mercy of management, and thus gave rise to the major modern movements of reform, such as unionism, the struggle for political democracy, and socialism. Machinery caused population to be urbanized and made the masses of people, living in congested metropolitan centers, absolutely dependent upon a nation-wide and a world-wide organization of production, communication, transportation and commerce. Machinery required the financing functions of credit, banks and exchanges, and brought into universal usage the modern price system. Machinery has created countless problems too difficult for private business to solve and has therefore necessitated the assumption of elaborate economic functions by modern government. Each of these illustrations emphasizes the outstanding fact that the underlying force to which all economic institutions have been compelled to adapt themselves has been the mechanical inventions which produced. the Industrial Revolution.

The Economic Development of the United States to the Civil War.-Although the Industrial Revolution occurred first in England, it soon spread to other countries and had taken effect in all the leading countries by the end of the nineteenth century. Once the movement was well under way, all advanced nations had something original and important to contribute to the machine technique. England was not the only country which made important inventions and discoveries. Inventions and discoveries in applied science have been a composite contribution of many countries. The modern technology of production is a

joint creation of the industrial nations. Each nation, it is true, borrowed much from England in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, but once started each such borrower has in turn had its own unique and important inventions and discoveries to contribute to the pooled knowledge of the world.

The experience of the United States well illustrates how a nation is both a borrower from and a contributor to this joint stock of technology. The Americans did not feel keenly the need of developing their own manufactures until about the period of the War of 1812. Prior to this period the people had engaged almost entirely in agriculture and the trades closely connected with it. Such manufacturing as was done rested upon the use of hand tools, much as in England before that country was affected by the Industrial Revolution. The Americans were content to buy the bulk of the manufactured goods which they required from abroad, giving in exchange exports of agricultural products.

The events surrounding the War of 1812 stimulated a marked growth of manufacturing within the country. The Embargo and Non-Intercourse Acts of 1807 and 1809 and the War of 1812 practically cut off all foreign trade of the United States. This stoppage of the foreign source of manufactured supplies created a strong demand that the manufactures formerly imported should be made at home. Samuel Slater, who had previously worked in Arkwright's factories in England, reconstructed from memory the spinning jenny. Francis C. Lowell in 1814, after inspecting machinery in England, reconstructed from memory the power loom, and put into operation a factory which under one roof performed the complete process of converting cotton into cotton cloth. These machines had to be built from memory in each case because England, in order to hold a monopoly of her inventions, prohibited any one from carrying out of the country plans or blue prints. The Industrial Revolution had to be smuggled from England into the United States. By 1831 American factories were producing twenty yards of cloth per head of the whole population and by 1860 more than forty-six yards per head. Woolen and metal manufactures underwent a corresponding growth. In 1846 Howe invented the sewing machine, thus laying the basis of the ready made clothing industry. And in 1861 Mackaye invented the sole-sewing machine, thereby introducing the factory manufacture of shoes and leather goods.

This manufacturing progress was accompanied by progress in the use of mechanical power. The steam engine was applied to driving machinery, and the abundance of water power, especially in New England, furnished cheap energy for the factories.

Manufacturing and power technique were supplemented by improvements of transportation. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, there was a large increase of turnpikes, toll roads, and bridges, the most important road being the famous Cumberland route. There was a keen interest in the building of canals, the most important being the Erie

canal, completed in 1825. There was an expansion of river traffic, owing to the use of steamboats following Fulton's invention. There was a rapid growth of railroads following the first line opened by the Baltimore and Ohio in 1830. By 1860 there were 30,000 miles of railroad in operation, including eight trunk lines connecting the tide-water district with the interior. Up to the Civil War, in spite of the growth of railroads, water transportation nevertheless remained the dominant mode of transportation. The cost of transport by rail was less than onetenth of that by ordinary highways, but transport by water was still cheaper. As late as 1872, 85 per cent of the freight between New York and Philadelphia still went by water. The railroad however was coming into its own, and the census of 1860 sums up the contemporary view of the railroad by referring to "that vast and connected system which like a web now covers every portion of our wide domain and supplies means of locomotion and a market, almost at his own door, for nearly every citizen of the United States." This vast system welded together the manufacturing and commercial East, the cotton and tobacco growing South, and the food producing West, and in spite of slavery and secession was a powerful force in keeping the economic union solid and indestructible.

Closely interwoven with these developments of the Industrial Revolution were developments in communication. The experimental researches and studies in electricity, from the time of William Gilbert in 1600, and prosecuted by such men as Benjamin Franklin, Galvani, Volta, Ampère, Ohm, Faraday, Cavendish and Henry, were brought to a practical focus in the invention of the telegraph in 1835 by Samuel F. B. Morse. By 1862 San Francisco and Washington were united by wire, and four years later Cyrus W. Field and Peter Cooper carried to success the first Atlantic cable. The newspapers, to take advantage of this new facility for news gathering, had repeatedly experimented with improved printing machinery. In 1845, R. M. Hoe invented the rotary press and started the newspaper on its modern career. The telephone was invented in 1876 and, together with the other means of communication, became an indispensable part of the expanding machine technology.

An Agricultural Revolution was taking place simultaneously with the Industrial Revolution in the United States. Until about 1830 the tools and implements of farming were practically the same as those which had been in use 4,000 years earlier. Hand sowing of grain, reaping by sickle, scythe or cradle, threshing by flail or by the tramping of horses or cattle, tillage by a crude cast iron plow and by hoe, were the main farm methods still in use. By 1866 every one of these operations was done by machinery driven by horsepower. From 1830 on, there was a series of inventions of drills, planters, cultivators, mowing machines and threshing machines. Cyrus McCormick patented the reaper in 1834 and started manufacturing the new invention in Chicago in 1848. The chilled steel plow was perfected by James Oliver in the