THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION By Luke Sinagra

FACT 1  The Industrial Revolution is one of the greatest and worst times in history. One of the most unfortunate parts of that time period was that factory owners were looking for cheap labor and, as a result of that, child labor became a common thing. By the age of six, many children were already working fourteen hours a day in factories!

FACT 2  Eli Whitney is the one who invented the cotton gin, however, he didn’t realize it would revitalize slavery. Whitney’s invention helped the cotton industry just when the south was having economic problems. The cotton gin (short for cotton engine) was a machine for getting the seeds out of the cotton. Where as before the slaves had to do it by hand, they now used it to increase production by a considerable amount.

FACT 3 Francis Cabot Lowell was a textile manufacturer in the U.S. in the early 1800s. He founded a mill that carried out the whole process of making cotton. After taking a trip to England and visiting a British cloth factory, he used the knowledge he obtained in the cloth factory and built his own spinning and weaving textile. He became quite famous due to this miraculous invention.

FACT 4  Robert Fulton is in my opinion the most influential inventor of the period. During the 1780s, he became the first American to build a steam engine. This engine was used to power boats all over the United States. He built a paddle steamboat, the Clermont, that traveled from New York to Albany on the Hudson River. The steam engine was a great invention because it was important to the transportation industry.

FACT 5  In conclusion, the Industrial Revolution was a huge outburst of inventions for the U.S. and in any other parts of the world. Many of the inventions from then are still used today. There were other minor inventions, such as the sewing machine (invented by Elias Howe), the steel plow ( invented by John Deere), and vulcanized rubber ( invented by Charles Goodyear), for which are lives are much better today.