The Second Industrial Revolution, which lasted from the late 1800s to the early 1900s, saw a wave of new technologies and inventions that led to dramatic changes in the economy and the way people lived and worked in Europe, Great Britain and in particular the United States.
Steel mills, chemical plants and massive factories have pumped vast amounts of consumer goods, advanced electric light and power, and new forms of connected transport and communication more than ever. Mechanized farming equipment changed the way food was produced and turned farming into a big industry.
It was also a time when innovators dared to dream big and take big risks, either by devising new inventions or by finding ways to make existing products more efficiently. As a result, some have made huge fortunes.
“One of the reasons for this period of great inventiveness from the 1870s to the 1920s was the increasing complexity and interdependence of production processes, which enabled designers and engineers to identify major bottlenecks and ‘inefficiencies that slowed or blocked progress,’ says Philip Scranton, professor emeritus of industrial and technological history at Rutgers University, and author of Never-ending novelty: specialized production and American industrialization, 1865-1925. “Meeting these challenges successfully could generate patents and profits, serious incentives to attempt a solution.”
Here are eight important inventions of the Second Industrial Revolution.
Air brake
A locomotive fitted with Westinghouse air brakes.
Universal History Archives / Universal Images Group / Getty Images
Trains were invented before the Second Industrial Revolution, but accidents are common because slowing and stopping them is a tedious process. Then came George Westinghouse, a largely self-taught engineer who dropped out of college after three months because he was too busy making things up. In 1872 he obtained a patent for an ingenious system which used air pressure to keep the train’s brakes off; when the train engineer reduced the pressure, the brakes slowed the wheels and the train came to a precise stop. Westinghouse airbrakes helped make possible the rapid growth of railways as a safe and reliable means of transporting people and goods across the country.
WATCH: Modern wonders in HISTORY Vault
Bulb
Thomas Edison is exhibiting a replica of his first successful incandescent lamp, which produced 16 lighting candles, unlike the 50,000 watt 150,000 candle lamp.
Bettmann Archives / Getty Images
Thomas Edison, perhaps the most famous inventor in American history, created many of his many innovations, from the phonograph and camera to the alkaline storage battery, during the Second Industrial Revolution. But perhaps his most influential breakthrough was his invention and commercialization of the first durable and practical incandescent bulb for wide use.
Edison came up with the idea of putting a charred bamboo filament in a vacuum bulb and then heating it to produce light. He continued to tinker with his creation and eventually upgraded his bulbs to such an extent that they could last 1200 hours. Edison’s “electric lamp,” for which he obtained a patent in January 1880, illuminated homes and businesses across the country and helped create an indoor culture that defined his days by the clock rather. than by sunrise and sunset.
READ MORE: When Thomas Edison turned night into day
Petroleum refinement
In the early 1900s, William Burton, a chemist and head of Standard Oil Co. in Indiana, developed a process in which crude oil was placed in a container and heated until it reached a temperature over 700 degrees Fahrenheit. At this temperature, the oil would break down into simpler and more useful by-products. Burton “gave us the line of distillates that goes from oil to gasoline to petrochemicals,” says Scranton. “No cracks, no interstate highways.”
The QWERTY typewriter keyboard
Christopher Latham Sholes’ daughter with the first QWERTY typewriter keyboard.
Keystone-France / Gamma-Keystone / Getty Images
Like many modern inventions, the typewriter was not the result of a single genius, but was gradually developed by a succession of visionaries from the mid-1700s. But it was not until the mid-1700s. 1870 that the first truly practical typewriters went on sale. In 1878, the typing visionary Christopher Latham Sholes, a former journalist and customs inspector, came up with the idea of fitting a typewriter with a QWERTY keyboard, the letter arrangement of which was designed to slightly slow down the fingers of typists and prevent typewriters from getting stuck.
The QWERTY keyboard has triumphed over other key arrangements and has become the popular system of choice. Mark Twain used the system to type his 1883 novel Life on the Mississippi, which may have been the first literary work composed on a typewriter.
READ MORE: How the Second Industrial Revolution Changed People’s Lives
The skyscraper
The Chicago Home Insurance Building, c. 1930.
George Rinhart / Corbis / Getty Images
The Chicago Home Insurance Building, completed in 1885, was the first modern steel-framed skyscraper, allowing a taller building to be constructed without the enormous weight of traditional masonry. Engineer and architect William Le Baron Jenney, designed the design, which used rolled steel I-beams at the Carnegie plant in Pittsburgh.
It was the first use of steel in a building in the United States, and marked the beginning of an era in which large office buildings and office towers rose in downtown areas to across the country. This change radically altered the appearance of cities and made it possible for more people to live and work there.
READ MORE: 10 Surprising Facts About The Empire State Building
The tractor
Before the advent of mechanized agriculture, farmers had to devote part of their acreage to raising cereals to feed horses and mules, as these animals helped them work the land. By the 1890s, farmers were already using steam engines, but the machines were cumbersome and dangerous, as a spark from the boiler could set a field on fire.
But an Iowa inventor named John Froelich devised a solution. With the help of his mechanic, Will Mann, Froelich replaced the steam engine with a single-cylinder gasoline engine. After testing the modified machine in the great fields of South Dakota, he showed it to businessmen in Iowa, who formed the Waterloo Gasoline Traction Engine Company. The business was slow to get up and running, but by 1914 its Model R Waterloo Boy tractor became a big seller, according to the Froelich Tractor Museum. Gasoline tractors have proven to be essential in boosting agricultural productivity and enabling American farmers to feed a growing population.
The safety razor
The first safety razor invented by King Gillette, c. 1901.
Back in the days when men’s only choice for shaving was a straight razor that had to be sharpened regularly with a strap, it was safer and more convenient to grow a beard.
But in 1895, a street vendor named King Gillette came up with the idea for a razor with a handle that used a tiny, disposable metal blade that could be tossed in the trash and replaced when it finally got dull. Initially, metallurgists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology told him the idea wouldn’t work, but eventually he found an engineer trained at the same university, William Emery, who was able to create the blade. In 1901, Gillette and Nickerson formed the American Safety Razor Company, and Gillette obtained a patent for the disposable blade safety razor in 1904.
Wireless
Guglielmo Marconi, Italian physicist and radio pioneer.
The Print Collector / Getty Images
The invention of the telegraph in 1844 allowed people to communicate instantly over long distances for the first time, but they were still limited by the need to have miles of cables installed to connect the transmitter and receiver.
But starting in the mid-1890s, an Italian inventor by the name of Guglielmo Marconi came up with a better method: transmitting messages by radio waves. Marconi did not receive much encouragement in his own country, so he moved to England and formed a wireless telegraphy company. By 1899, Marconi’s technology was able to send messages over the English channel and from ships.
In 1901 it achieved another, even more spectacular success, when a wireless telegraph station in Cornwall, England, succeeded in carrying a message across the Atlantic Ocean to another of its stations in St John’s, Newfoundland. Marconi’s breakthrough was the start of global communications that allowed the modern world’s mobile phones and the internet to connect billions of people.
