15 September 2009

A Spirit of Invention

This article is excerpted from the book Outline of the U.S. Economy, published by the Bureau of International Information Programs. View the entire book (PDF, 3.26 MB).

Across the country, a flow of inventions sparked dramatic increases in farm output. Jefferson himself had experimented with new designs for plow blades that would cut the earth more efficiently, and the drive to improve farming equipment never slackened. In Jefferson’s time, it took a farmer walking behind his plow and wielding his sickle as many as 300 hours to produce 100 bushels of wheat. By the eve of the Civil War, well-off farmers could purchase John Deere’s steel plows and Cyrus McCormick’s reapers, which cut, separated, and collected farmers’ grain mechanically. Advanced windmills were available, improving irrigation.

In the next 40 years, steam tractors, gang plows, hybrid corn, refrigerated freight cars, and barbed wire fencing to enclose rangelands all appeared. In 1890, the time required to produce 100 bushels of wheat had dropped to just 50 hours. In 1930, a farmer with a tractor-pulled plow, combine, and truck could do the job in 20 hours. The figure dropped to three hours in the 1980s.

Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, introduced in 1793, revolutionized cotton production by mechanizing the separation of cotton fibers from sticky short-grain seeds. Cotton demand soared, but the cotton gin also multiplied the demand for slave labor. Whitney, a Massachusetts craftsman and entrepreneur, fought a long, frustrating battle to secure patent rights and revenue from southern planters who had copied his invention, one of the earliest legal struggles over the protection of inventors’ discoveries.

Whitney did succeed on another front, demonstrating how manufacturing could be dramatically accelerated through the use of interchangeable parts. Seeking a federal contract to manufacture muskets, Whitney, as the story was told, amazed Washington officials in 1801 by pulling parts at random from a box to assemble the weapon. He illustrated that the work of highly trained craftsmen, turning out an entire product one at a time, could be replaced with standardized processes involving simple steps and precision-made parts—tasks that journeymen could handle. His insights were the foundation for the emergence of a machine tool industry and mass production processes that made U.S. manufacturing flourish, eventually producing “a sewing machine and a pocket watch in every home, a harvester on every farm, a typewriter in every office,” journalist Harold Evans notes.

The 19th century delivered other startling inventions and advances in manufacturing and technology, including Samuel Morse’s telegraph, which linked all parts of the United States and then crossed the Atlantic, and Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, which put people in direct contact across great distances. In 1882, Thomas A. Edison and his eclectic team of inventors introduced the first standard for generating and distributing electric energy to homes and businesses, lighting offices along New York’s Wall Street financial district and inaugurating the electric age.

And a transportation revolution was launched with the completion of the first transcontinental railroad, when converging rail lines from the East and the West met in Utah in 1869.

“The American economy after the Civil War was driven by the expansion of the railroads,” writes historian Louis Menand. During the war, Congress made 158 million acres (63 million hectares) available to companies building railroads. Railroad construction fed the growth of iron and steel production. Following the first connection, other lines linked the country’s Atlantic and Pacific coasts creating a national economy able to trade with Europe and Asia and greatly expanding U.S. economic and international political horizons.