Technology has changed the world in many ways, but perhaps no period has introduced more change than the Second Industrial Revolution. From the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century, cities grew, factories spread, and people's lives became regulated by the clock rather than the sun.
“It was a tremendous change in people's lives,” says Joshua B. Freeman professor of history at Queens College and author of Behemoth: Factory Building and the Modern World.
Rapid advances in the creation of steel, chemicals and electricity helped fuel production, including mass-produced consumer goods and weapons. It has become much easier to get around on trains, cars and bicycles. At the same time, ideas and news spread through newspapers, radio and telegraph. Life got so much faster.
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It was a time when industrial growth created a class of wealthy entrepreneurs and a comfortable class medium supported by workers who were formed by immigrants and arrivals from farms and small towns Americans.
“People come from rural areas who are used to directing their work, which is organized around the seasons and light,” says Freeman. "Now they are working in a factory that is clock-regulated and unchanging."
These shocking images exposed to child labor in America
For many, the shift from rural to factory life was tiring – especially for the children.
When social activist Jane Addams threw a Christmas party at the home of the group she had just founded in the Chicago slums in 1889, she distributed chocolates to the poor girls who lived there. She was surprised when they refused. The girls said they worked long hours in a candy factory and couldn't stand the sight or smell of it.
“We found that for six weeks they worked from seven in the morning until nine at night,” Addams later wrote, “and were exhausted and sated. A keen awareness of severe economic conditions was thus imposed on us in the middle of the season of goodwill.”
The first factories were built in the 18th century, with British textile factories spreading to the United States, a time known as the First Industrial Revolution. Next, innovations in production line technology, materials science, and industrial manufacturing of tools facilitated the mass production of all kinds of goods that reshaped the family and physical landscape Americans.
Factories produced sewing machines for domestic use, steel beams for skyscrapers and railways that cut across the plains and mountains.
Long-distance transport networks connected by rail, steamships and canals have opened up new markets for farmers, factory owners and bankers who could bring America's natural resources to a market global. For the first time, the goods of the American heart could be transported over long distances, eliminating the need for a Black Diamond Express train on the Lehigh Valley Railroad in Pennsylvania, around of 1898.
Railroads were mainly responsible for this great explosion of economic production, according to Richard White, professor of history at Stanford and author of Railroaded (2001). Iron chariots also changed the human and natural environment of the West and, of course, led to conflicts with Native Americans who have lived there for generations.
“If a Western Rip Van Winkle had fallen asleep in 1869 and woken up in 1896, he would not have recognized the lands the railroads had touched,” writes White. “The bison had given in to the cattle; mountains were destroyed and bored. Large swaths of earth that had once whispered grass now screamed corn and wheat. “
Rail lines expanded from 35,000 miles in 1865 to 254,000 miles in 1916. However, after World War I, the railroad would be replaced by the automobile. With his emphasis on vertically integrating parts and manufacturing assembly lines, Henry Ford was its king. At its peak, the Ford Motor Company plant in Michigan employed 40,000 workers under one large roof.
While some historians discuss the exact boundary between the First Industrial Revolution, which began in the mid-century XVIII, and the second, which started around the mid-nineteenth century, the main difference is that the second saw the start of production in pasta. manufacturing and consumer goods.
Household items like soap, butter and clothes that used to be made at home also started to be made in factories. And the workers – including women – had the money to buy these products.
At the same time, all kinds of goods became standardized for the first time, according to Priya Satia, professor of international history at Stanford University. For example, industrial standardization marked an evolution in the arms industry, says Satia, author of Império das Armas: Building the Industrial Revolution.
“You could produce all the parts of a weapon and assemble any set and make and a weapon,” says Satia. "The advantage is that if you're on the field and something goes wrong, someone can send that part and fix it without having to redo the entire weapon."
The changing world of the Second Industrial Revolution also led to the fear of social critics about the loss of freedom, autonomy and independence that is replaced by boredom, repetition and fatigue, according to Freeman. Early 20th century movies like Fritz Lang's sci-fi metropolis, Metropolis, or the Charlie Chaplin's montage comedy Modern Times captures this fear of the factory worker like a robot human.
"Ford is a great hero," says Freeman, "but the other side of the coin is a nightmarish vision of the factory as Satan's province."
The Second Industrial Revolution ended just before World War I, historians say. This was followed by the Third Industrial Revolution, in which digital communication technology and the internet changed the way we transmit information, do business and interact with each other.
Some argue that we are now entering a Fourth Industrial Revolution, in which robotics, artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles and biotechnology are changing our concepts of life and consciousness. The trajectory of this phase of human development must await future historians to write.
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