1. Chapter 11 Lesson 1 Industrial Revolution

2.  In the 1700’s most people were farmers.  Cloth, tools, and furniture were made by hand or in small shops.  In the early 1800’s, people began making cloth and other goods in factories.  New forms of transportation were needed to move these goods faster.  These changes in manufacturing and transportation are called the Industrial Revolution.

3.  The Industrial Revolution began in Britain with their textile industry.  Textile means  Machines spun cotton into yarn faster than the hand- powered spinning wheel.  In 1790, Samuel Slater, a British mechanic opened the first cotton- spinning mill in the United States.  His cotton mill was on a river in Rhode Island. It used water power to run its machines.  These textile machines helped cotton become America’s biggest export. cloth or fabric

4.  In 1793, Eli Whitney invented a cotton engine, or cotton gin.  This cotton gin could pick the seeds from the cotton and clean it faster than farmers could clean it by hand.  Cotton production rose from 2 million pounds per year in 1790 to 60 million pounds per year in 1805.

6.  After inventing the cotton gin, Eli Whitney was hired by the U. S. government to make 10,000 guns.  At this time, guns were still made by hand.  A part made for one gun would not fit another gun.  Whitney used interchangeable parts.  Interchangeable parts are parts made by a machine to be exactly the same size and shape.

7.  Mass production  Fitting together the same parts over and over was faster than making a single gun by hand.  Manufacturers used interchangeable parts and mass production to make many types of tools and machines.  This increased the productivity of the country.  Productivity means making many products at once. is the amount of goods and services produced by workers in a certain amount of time.

8.  An entrepreneur  In 1814, an entrepreneur named Francis Cabot Lowell built a mill (factory) near Boston, Massachusetts.  His mill was the first factory in the world to turn raw cotton into finished cloth.  The mill had both cotton-spinning machines and power looms to weave cloth.  Lowell’s mill was a great success. takes risks to start a business.

9.  Many people went to work in these factories.  Their lives changed from working on the farm to working in a factory.

10.  Workers in the first textile mills were usually girls and young women.  Some were as young as 10 years old.  Mill workers lived in boardinghouses and worked from 5:00 AM to 7:00 PM.  Although they had little free time, they still found time to take classes, learn new languages, and write poems, stories and essays.  They published these writings in a magazine called The Lowell Offering.  One mill worker, Lucy Larcom, became a well-know writer and teacher.

11.  The Industrial Revolution also changed life for people who stayed on the farm.  Cyrus McCormick built a horse- drawn reaper.  A reaper has sharp blades that cut grain.  Harvesting an acre of wheat by hand took about 20 hours. The reaper did the same job in less than an hour.

12.  In the early 1800’s, settlers headed west in search of land.  At the same time, factories and farms produced more goods to be shipped to distant cities.  Overland travel was slow, difficult, and expensive. Early roads were barely wide enough for a horse.  In 1811, the federal government began building the National Road to connect Ohio with the East.  By 1833 the road stretched from Cumberland, Maryland to Columbus, Ohio.

13.  The National Road later went as far as Illinois.  It became the most traveled road in the United States at this time.  Towns and businesses were built along the road creating more growth for the country.

14.  Robert Fulton’s steam-powered boat made its first trip from New York City to Albany on August 9, 1807.  Before this, boats needed oars, wind, or water currents in order to travel.  Within a few years, steamboats were widely used on rivers for travel.

15.  Because roads were so poor at this time, rivers and canals were the fastest and cheapest ways to ship goods.  Canals are waterways built for travel and shipping.  In 1825, the Erie Canal opened.  This canal connected the Hudson River to Lake Erie.  By 1840, more than 3,000 miles of canals were built in the eastern part of the country.

17.  Wagons on new roads, steamboats on rivers, and barges on canals all changed transportation.  The steam locomotive created a larger change.  Trains pulled by steam locomotives (engines) were very fast.  A trip from New York City to Albany, New York took hours by steamboat. The same trip by train only took 10 hours.  By 1850, the country had 9,000 miles of railroad track. Soon farmers and factories could ship their goods to almost any city in the country.