>>MARK HORGER: When we talk about the industrial
transformation of the American economy in the late nineteenth
century, we start with railroads. It would be very difficult to
over state the importance of the railroad network and the
expansion of the railroad network, in the second half of the
nineteenth century, to the other economic development we're
going to discuss. And there're a few reasons for this.
The first reason may seem fairly obvious but it's worth stating
out loud. That the railroad network represented the
transportation and communication infrastructure on which the
goods and other economic developments we're going to talk
about moved on more freely. There's a rough analogy here
with what we talked about in Module 2, when we talked about
the influence of canals.
And there was enormous expansion of the railroad network in
the late nineteenth century, and also ways the railroad
network got more efficient at as a transportation network. So
for example, in the middle of the nineteenth century as
railroads were first being built around the country, they were
usually built as regional networks and were not always closely
integrated with one another all over the country. Just because
there was a rail line on the map between Chicago and Boston
didn't necessarily mean you could get on a train in Chicago and
arrive in Boston on the same train.
By the turn of the 20th century, the railroad network had
coalesced into the hands of a relatively small number of large
firms, and the railroad network had gotten more efficient as a
transportation network in a variety of ways, through things
like rail companies sharing cars with one another, pooling cars,
and making it more likely in 1890 or 1900, that you could get
on a train in Chicago or more importantly that you could put
goods on a train in Chicago and it would arrive in at a relatively
distance point in a much more efficient way then it would in
1840 or 1850.
Just to give you a visual sense of what we are talking about
here, this is a rail map of Ohio in 1892. This is not a street map
this is a railroad map. This is how much of the state you could
get to from the rest of the state on a commercial rail network
by the 1890s. And we can show similar maps in much of the
industrial Northeast and Midwest. Southern and Western map
might be slightly more sparse than that, but this is the extent
we are discussing by the time we get to the 1890s.
Another reason why railroads are so important to these
economic transformations is that the railroads were pioneers
in bigness. And what I mean by this is that the railroads were
the first private corporations in the United States to get so
large both literally in the physical sense of the actual
percentage of the country that they covered with
infrastructure and also so large as business institutions, as
organizations and as bureaucracy. That they were the first
companies to have to learn how to be that large efficiently. And
a lot of the basic businesses techniques and practices and
organizational techniques that they pioneered wound up
spreading throughout the rest of the economy as these trends
spread to other industries.
It may seem strange today to talk about a bureaucracy as an
efficient thing, but these large corporations had to construct
relatively efficient bureaucratic organizations that allowed
information about the business to flow smoothly up and down
a relatively sophisticated flow chart. And then the people who
sat in those desks represent a new kind of middle class
individual that we'll talk about in one of our next mini lectures.
And a lot of the trends that the railroads pioneered in terms of
finding the capital on international markets to finance
themselves, building efficient organizations, tracking the flow
of goods across hundreds if not thousands of miles of railroad
across the country. These spread to other industries in the late
nineteenth century.
Finally the railroad formed a kind of symbiotic relationship
with a series of other important core industries in the late
nineteenth century, especially the coal, iron, and steel
industries. First of all, these businesses were all one another's
best customers. You have to use a lot of iron and steel to build a
railroad network across the country. And coal was the primary
industrial fuel at the time.
There are also a variety of ways in which the steel industries,
in particular, allowed the series of the transformations in the
American city that we're going to talk about in the late
nineteenth century to take place.
Steel in nineteenth century terms was sort of a miracle
substance that was light and efficient to build with. And before
the late nineteenth century, steel was very expensive. It had to
be made, largely by hand, largely by skilled workers. But in the
late nineteenth century, a series of industrial techniques made
it possible to make large amounts steel cheaply in large
factories. Made it possible to transform a whole series of things
about the built in environment because of the existence of
inexpensive steel. So these are pictures of steel mills in
Pittsburg, in the late nineteenth century. Pittsburg was a city
that was transformed physically and from an economic
standpoint by the steel industry. And it's actually worth
thinking about the sheer physical size of this, and the sheer
physical impact of living next to it working in it, or living in a
city dominated by it. One of the ways that the steel industry in
the late nineteenth century figured out how to be efficient
using the kinds of business techniques that we talked about
when we talked about railroads.
Is that Andrew Carnegie, the person who built the
steel industry in Pittsburg area, managed to get wealthy
basically by controlling the cost of steel and not worrying so
much about the price of steel. One of the was they did that is
that they figured out that there was a lot of waste if you turned
a steel mill on and off. Once the thing was on and hot, you
wanted to keep it hot and control how much steel you made by
the flow of raw materials through the infrastructure. And so in
the late nineteenth century the work regime in the steel
industry was two twelve hour shifts, and it wasn't uncommon
for steel works to be expected to work a twenty-four hour turn
around shift so that they could flip the shift from day to night.
And then inexpensive steel makes a series of other things in
the city, possible.
So we showed you this picture of Brooklyn, of Manhattan from
Brooklyn in 1903. The thing I like about this picture as a means
of explaining some of the things we're talking about here is
that even though if you literally stood there today and took the
same picture. Or actually what you could do is that you could
put, you could go to Google Earth, you could put the little green
man on the bridge and achieve more or less the same thing at
your own computer. If you did that, the only thing that would
literally be in both pictures world probably be the bridge.
Which was constructed in the 1880s and was itself one of the
first significant pieces of American infrastructure that was
made possible because of the relatively inexpensive steel in the
wire holding of the bridge. But this is a New York that has
recently been transformed by the fact that you can build tall
buildings that you can build urban transportation
infrastructure relatively cheaply and inexpensively.
This is recognizably modern New York. And in some key ways
this picture is in terms of what it was like to live is closer in
some ways to how we live today, than this picture was to this
picture of New York taken a generation earlier around the time
of the Civil War. And it's inexpensive steel that makes a lot of
this possible. For example in the late nineteenth century,
American cities don't just continue to spread outward, they
begin to spread up, and inexpensive steel makes that possible.
There is kind of a natural limit to how tall you can build
something out of masonry or out of brick. The taller you go
the thicker the walls have to be. There is kind of a natural limit
to how tall you'd want to build something like that. Plus it also
helps when someone has invented the elevator, which has also
happened in the nineteenth century. And the elevator is also a
product, a technology that depends on inexpensive steel cables
so that you don't accidentally plummet to your death as you're
actually going up and down floors.
And so the building on the left is the headquarters of the New
York World, a newspaper which was built in 1890. And when
it was built it was the first structure in New York City, first
private structure that was taller than the tallest church steeple
in the city. And was the first of a generation of what they began
to call skyscrapers that where built over the next ten to twenty
years in New York and also Chicago.
And this is newspaper row, in New York. Several of these other
buildings were headquarter of other newspapers. That's the
Tribune in the middle, one of the original, older buildings of the
New York Times is on the right. As we'll see when we discuss
college football, and it's relationship to the daily newspaper.
The newspaper industry in the 1890s was growing and
expanding in a variety of creative ways both in terms of
circulation and in terms of what kind of product they
produced, and those moguls spent some of that money building
huge imposing skyscrapers right next to New York City Hall.
This is the kind of urban infrastructure that isn't really
technologically possible until there are large amounts of
inexpensive iron and steel available in the economy. And so
these industrial developments had a significant impact literally
on what kind of city you could build.
And as we'll see in the next mini-lecture many of the business
techniques that these industries pioneered spread to other
areas of the American economy. And the existence of this basic
symbiotic industrial core in the late nineteenth century made
possible the series of technological innovations in other
industries.