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Explore the impact of the Industrial Revolution in America, from the shift to machine-based production to the emergence of new classes of workers and industrialists. Discover key advancements in the textile industry and the rise of mass production with interchangeable parts.
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The Industrial Revolution • The Industrial Revolution, which began in England in the late 1700s, spread to the United States and the rest of the world by the early 1800s. • During the Industrial Revolution, people shifted from making things and doing work by hand to making things and doing work with machines. • It created a new class of workers as well as a new class of industrialists, owners of large factories and other businesses based on manufacturing.
The Textile Industry • The first important breakthrough of the Industrial Revolution took place in how textiles, or cloth items, were made. • Before the Industrial Revolution, spinning thread took much more time than making cloth. Several workers were needed to spin enough thread to supply a single weaver. • In 1769 Englishman Richard Arkwright invented a large spinning machine called a water frame. It could produce dozens of cotton threads at the same time. • The water frame used flowing water as its source of power. It lowered the cost of cotton cloth and increased the speed of textile production
Textile Mills in the U.S. • Samuel Slater, a skilled British mechanic, immigrated to the United States after carefully memorizing the designs of textile mill machines. He placed his machines in a mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. The machines worked. • Soon after, other Americans began building textile mills. • Most were located in the Northeast, where merchants had the money to invest in new mills. • The Northeast also had many rivers and streams that provided a reliable supply of power. • Fewer mills were built in the South, partly because investors in the South saw agriculture as an easier way to make money.
Mass Production • In the late 1790’s, the U.S. government worried about a possible war with France, and American gun makers could not produce muskets quickly enough to satisfy the government’s demand. • Eli Whitney gave officials a proposal for mass-producing guns for the U.S. government using water-powered machinery. • He promised to build 10,000 muskets in two years.
Interchangeable Parts • Eli Whitney also came up with the idea of using interchangeable parts—parts of a machine that are identical. • Using interchangeable parts made machines easier to assemble and broken parts easier to replace. • Interchangeable parts sped up mass production, the efficient production of large numbers of identical goods.
