Industrial Revolution Scavenger Hunt

1 The Industrial Revolution took place in the world from 1750 -1850. In the United States it began between 1800-1820. The Industrial Revolution marked an economic shift from agricultural society to one based on wage labor. !What are the six major characteristics of the Industrial Revolution ?**The main causes of the Industrial Revolution was to provide better transportation systems, for technological advancements, and factory systems. ** The main features involved in the Industrial Revolution were technological, socioeconomic, and cultural. 1. The use of new basic materials, chiefly iron and steel. 2. The use of new energy sources, including both fuels and motive power, such as coal, the steam engine, electricity, petroleum, and the internal-combustion engine.

2 Invention of new machines, such as the spinning jenny and the power loom that permitted increased production with a smaller expediter of human energy. 4. A new organization of work known as the factory system, which entailed increased division of labour and specialization of function. 5. Important developments in transportation and communication, including the steam locomotive, steamship, automobile, airplane, telegraph, and radio. 6. The increasing application of science to industry. These technological changes made possible a tremendously increased use of natural resources and the mass production of manufactured goods. !The factory system began in 1790, where they tried to keep control of the new technology by placing workers in an assembly line and having them only work on a specific part of the product.

3 Samuel Slater: Samuel Slater has been called the "father of the American factory system." He was born in Derbyshire, England on June 9, 1768. The son of a yeoman farmer, Slater went to work at an early age as an apprentice for the owner of a cotton mill. Eventually rising to the position of superintendent, he became intimately familiar with the mill machines designed by Richard Arkwright, a genius whose other advances included using water power to drive his machines and dividing labor among groups of workers. Sneaky Departure In 1789, Slater emigrated to the United States. He dreamed of making a fortune by helping to build a textile industry. He did so covertly: British law forbade textile workers to share technological information or to leave the country.

4 Slater set foot in New York in late 1789, having memorized the details of Britain's innovative machines. Rhode Island Mill With the support of a Quaker merchant, Moses Brown, Slater built America's first water-powered cotton spinning mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. By the end of 1790, it was up and running, with workers walking a treadmill to generate power. By 1791, a waterwheel drove the machinery that carded and spun cotton into thread. America's Industrial Revolution Slater employed families, including children, to live and work at the mill site. He quickly attracted workers. In 1803, Slater and his brother built a mill village they called Slatersville, also in Rhode Island.

5 It included a large, modern mill, tenement houses for its workers, and a company store -- a small pocket of industry, a ready-made rural village. Slater's factory system became known as the Rhode Island System. It was soon imitated -- and improved upon by innovators like Francis Cabot Lowell -- throughout New England. Slater died in 1835 !How did the Slater borrowing technological advancements imported from England lead to the Industrial Revolution ? Eli Whitney In popular mythology, Eli Whitney has been deemed the "father of American technology," for two innovations: the cotton gin, and the idea of using interchangeable parts. Young Entrepreneur Eli Whitney was born in 1765 and grew up on a Massachusetts farm.

6 During the revolutionary War he manufactured nails to fill the demand caused by British embargos. Young Eli quickly learned how the marketplace worked, and diversified into hatpins and canes. It was his genius to observe what people needed, and to provide it. Economy-Building Invention After working his way through college at Yale, Whitney moved to South Carolina. There he saw how hard it was to separate the green seeds from short-staple cotton. In just a few days in 1793, he invented a machine that could do the task ten times faster than a slave doing the work by hand. The cotton gin revolutionized agriculture. It also made possible the cotton economy of the American South, perpetuating and increasing the practice of slavery upon which the agricultural system depended.

7 Manufacturing System In 1798, Whitney, who had not seen much profit from his epochal machine, launched a new venture: arms manufacturing. Once again he observed carefully, noting a war scare with France, and delivered something necessary and innovative: arms that he claimed he could produce more efficiently with the help of machines. His idea of machine-made, interchangeable parts was the beginning of what would become known as the "American system" of mass production. Although other Americans would create this system in their industries, it was Whitney who popularized the idea and was instrumental in lobbying politicians to pass legislation to standardize arms production. !Francis Cabot Lowell: Consolidated Manufacturing This American Industrial pioneer left as his legacy a manufacturing system, booming mill towns, and a humanitarian attitude toward workers.

8 Bringing Industry to America In just six years, Francis Cabot Lowell built up an American textile manufacturing industry. He was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts in 1775, and became a successful merchant. On a trip to England at age 36, he was impressed by British textile mills. Like Samuel Slater before him, Lowell was inspired to create his own manufacturing enterprise in the United States. Risk Takers In 1813, back in Boston, Lowell and several partners formed the Boston Manufacturing Company. Lowell led them in both technical and business decisions. They introduced a power loom, based on the British model, with significant technological improvements. And they found a novel way to raise money: they sold $1000 shares in the company (each worth over $10,000 in 2002 dollars).

9 The shareholder corporation they devised would rapidly become the method of choice for structuring new American businesses. Integrated Manufacturing The company built a tall brick mill building next to the Charles River in Waltham, Massachusetts, incorporating various mechanization technologies to convert raw cotton into cloth. The Waltham mill integrated the chain of tasks under a single roof, inaugurating what would become the American factory system of the nineteenth century. Waltham cloth gained immediate popularity. Mill Girls Another of Lowell's innovations was in hiring young farm girls to work in the mill. He paid them lower wages than men, but offered benefits that many girls, some as young as 15, were eager to earn.

10 Mill girls lived in clean company boardinghouses with chaperones, were paid cash, and benefitted from religious and educational activities. Waltham boomed as workers flocked to Lowell's novel enterprise. How did Better transportation systems lead to the Industrial Revolution ? The transportation industry also underwent significant transformation during the Industrial Revolution . Before the advent of the steam engine, raw materials and finished goods were hauled and distributed via horse-drawn wagons, and by boats along canals and rivers. In the early 1800s, American Robert Fulton (1765-1815) built the first commercially successful steamboat, and by the mid-19th century, steamships were carrying freight across the Atlantic.