industrial revolution

The period of technological innovation in the world that began in England in the 1800s and spread to America during the Reconstruction Era immediately after the Civil War. One major effect was the genesis of middle class America as people took jobs in emerging industries and new industrial plants. Before the industrial revolution there were only two social classes in the United States: wealthy (many were slave owners) and poor agrarian families. The wealthy at that time were hardly wealthy by today’s standards. It’s believed that the invention of the printing press sparked the revolution, leading to the creation of the steam engine, followed by industrial plants and technological innovation. The industrial revolution then sparked the emergence of big business and capitalism as people found employment opportunities in new industries and industrial plants, attracting people to urban areas. The textile industry, mining, the pharmaceutical industry and healthcare, the insurance industry, power plants, retail industries and the steel industry are just a few industries that emerged during the industrial revolution. Thanks to the emergence of the steel industry, the world’s first “skyscraper” emerged in Chicago in the 1880s. Then came the invention of the car by Elwood Hayes of Kokomo, Indiana; and the airplane by the Wright Brothers of Ohio; and then television and radio; and then the rocket by Robert Goddard and the space age; the birth of the microchip and the computer; mass communications, and then Big Brother and the internet--all of these were effects of the industrial revolution that greatly changed our society and lead to the current “second industrial revolution.” In less than a century mankind went from being a strictly agrarian, slave-owning society to landing on the moon. Key events during the Revolution: The invention of the lightbulb and phonograph by Thomas Edison, the invention of the telgraph by Samuel F.B. Morse, the invention of pills and elixirs by Colonel Eli Lilly (Eli Lilly and Co. pharmaceuticals), the invention of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell, the beginning of the retail industry with Sears-Roebuck, the unification of America's railroad in Promontory Point, Utah, Andrew Carnegie and the Steel Industry, John Rockefeller and the oil industry, etc.