Do Now What were some of the important advancements of the Scientific Revolution?

Transcription

1 Do Now What were some of the important advancements of the Scientific Revolution? Objective Students will understand the technological advancements of the Industrial Revolution

2 The Industrial Revolution

3 With the new understanding of science brought about by the Enlightenment, people across Europe and the United States began experimenting with new technologies, trying to make the production and transport of manufactured goods, like cloth, cheaper and faster. This time period, from about 1800 to 1900, is known as the Industrial Revolution, and it changed the way humans live and work forever. One of the first major inventions of the Industrial Revolution was the cotton gin, created by the American inventor Eli Whitney in Before industrialization, the process of making cloth, necessary for everything from clothing to bags and sacks, was very time-consuming and labor-intensive. Cotton and wool had to be harvested, spun into thread, and woven into cloth entirely by hand. Cotton, in particular, was very time-consuming because all of the natural seeds had to be picked out by hand before it could be spun into thread. The cotton gin was a simple, hand-cranked machine that removed the seeds from raw cotton, cutting the amount of time that stage of cloth-making took by half, and also saving the worker s fingertips from being rubbed raw in the process. Design drawing of an early cotton gin Here is a video showing a working cotton gin: SQ

4 Just a few years before the invention of the cotton gins, inventors in England had made a more complicated machine that spun raw cotton into thread with much less time and energy than doing so by hand. The machine was called the spinning jenny, and the time and effort saved by the machine made it much cheaper and faster to make thread. The spinning jenny was so important to the cloth-making industry in England that the English government made it illegal to transport plans for building a spinning jenny outside the country. Such a short time after the American Revolution, and with relations between the US and England still tense in the 1790 s, the invention of the cotton gin made cloth-makers in the US anxious to find out how to build spinning jennies themselves, in order to develop a competitive American cloth, reducing the need for trade with England. American cloth-makers began offering large sums of money to English engineers who would be willing to break the law and move to America with plans for the machine. Design drawing of a spinning jenny

5 The first person to take up this offer was the 21-year old son of an English cloth-maker, named Samuel Slater. In order to get around the illegal practice of transporting plans outside the country, he completely memorized them, and went to Rhode Island and claimed one manufacturer s offer after he successfully built a new machine from memory. Though it seems slow, this video demonstrating an early spinning jenny was a huge improvement on the handspinning method:

6 Now that American cloth-makers had the basic design, they began experimenting with improving it. Just a few years later, an American named Francis Lowell traveled to England and memorized the plans for a new machine in England used to weave thread into cloth, called a power loom. He returned to America and built the first integrated cloth factory in Massachusetts, meaning that the entire process from ginning, to spinning, to weaving was done in one place. He was also the first manufacturer to develop the modern system of employment; instead of paying workers to work at home, or having them live in the factory, he paid them regular wages to work for a certain period of time at the factory every day and the workers went back to their homes when they were done. Though it seems so basic now, this new work organization was revolutionary at the time. Drawing of the original Lowell factory in Lowell, Massachusetts

7 One problem that manufacturers in the United States faced, though, was the time and effort required for transportation. Unlike Europe, which had a widespread road network developed over several hundred years, the United States was a very young, undeveloped nation. In the 1790 s, the only well-maintained roads were inside large cities, which were still only connected to each other by bumpy, uneven dirt paths running through farmland and wilderness. To help correct this problem, private companies began widening and flattening existing roads or building new ones and charging tolls for people using it. In 1811, construction started on the National Road, a large road paid for by the federal government that was the first large, well-maintained road to cross the Appalachian mountains. Starting in the city of Cumberland, Maryland, it reached the other side of the mountains in Wheeling, Virginia in The road extended further and further west over the years, eventually reaching southern Illinois in Construction of the National Road in western Maryland

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9 While roads were a wise investment in many inland areas, with cities far apart from each other, many areas along the more densely-populated east coast of the country were also interested in canals because they wanted even faster transportation of goods and people. In 1805, a canal was created through a giant swamp along the border of North Carolina and Virginia, called the Great Dismal Swamp. While the swamp had been too shallow and dense with trees to allow large ships to sail through it, ships now had a clear, deep passage straight through it. An even more ambitious canal project, called the Erie Canal, was started in 1817, paid for by a combination of the federal government and private investors. The goal was to connect Albany, New York, on the Hudson River, with Buffalo, New York, a city on Lake Erie, 363 miles away. Aside from the huge distance it needed to cross, there was also the problem of Buffalo being 565 feet higher in elevation than Albany, which would make it nearly impossible to sail upstream. To solve this problem, the canal was built with a series of 83 locks contained areas of water that could be raised and lowered to allow travel upstream, as well as down. The Great Dismal Swamp Canal today

10 Hundreds of skilled engineers from Germany had to be hired to build the complicated locks needed to make the complete trip, but the project was completed in Now, a trip from New York City to Cleveland, Ohio took only 18 days, where it used to take at least 40.

11 Exit Ticket What was the purpose of the Industrial Revolution?