Overview: Technology and Invention 1800-1899

What we think of as the modern world was born not in the twentieth century but in the technological innovations of the nineteenth century. Almost everything that is quintessentially modern—rapid transportation and communication, entrepreneurship and the market economy, crowded urban centers, the primacy of the individual, the mastery of nature—began in the nineteenth century. Even that icon of modernity, the computer, grew out of two nineteenth-century devices, the punch card system of Joseph Jacquard (1752-1834) and the analytical engine of Charles Babbage (1791-1871).

Copernicus (1473-1543) can be considered the ancestor of nineteenth-century technology because, with his contention that Earth revolves around the Sun, he founded the scientific revolution. His theory was revolutionary because it engendered a new way of thinking: the belief that humans could master nature through careful observation, systematic experimentation, and determined problem solving. The relationship between scientific inquiry and technological advances that the scientific revolution produced in the nineteenth century was circular. Sometimes technology led the way, with science unable to explain why an invention worked until many years later. For example, the invention of canning preceded an understanding of bacteriology. Other times science took the lead. For example, an understanding of electromagnetism preceded the invention the telephone. What science and technology shared was the desire to address the problems of everyday life and the confidence that those problems could be solved.

"It's a small world!" is a common exclamation these days, and rapid transportation and communication—two industries born in the nineteenth century—are what made the world shrink. The first locomotive powered by high-pressure steam was built in England in 1803 by Richard Trevithick (1771-1833), followed in 1825 by the first commercial railroad. By 1869 a railroad track joined the United States from east to west, shortening the transcontinental trek from months to days. Steamboats, with their capacity for carrying cannons and maneuvering through narrow rivers, allowed England to police its enormous empire. The internal combustion engine, invented by Etienne Lenoir (1822-1900) in 1859 and improved by Nikolaus August Otto (1832-1891) in 1877, shortened distances even more by providing a source of power for cars and airplanes.

The communication industry saw comparable leaps during the nineteenth century. The telegraph, invented in 1835 by Samuel F. B. Morse (1791-1872), made it possible to send messages across wires sunk under oceans and strung across continents. Another form of signal transmission, the telephone, changed from a curiosity at the 1876 Centennial Exposition to a common sight in homes and businesses by the end of the century. Fast and cheap written communication was fostered by three advances in publishing: automated paper production, the steam-powered printing press, and the Linotype machine.

An economy characterized by entrepreneur-ship, the stock market, and international trade seems uniquely twentieth century, but in fact, these three features also characterized the nineteenth century. The century's first inventors, self-taught tinkerers such as Nicolas Appert (1749-1841), Oliver Evans (1755-1819), and Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (1765-1833), aggressively pursued patents and profits. Some, such as Isaac Singer (1811-1875) and Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922), amassed fortunes from their inventions. Others, notably Charles Goodyear (1800-1860), died in debt. But they all shared the drive, determination, and single-mindedness that distinguish contemporary entrepreneurs. Because the cost of innovations like railroads, subways, and telegraph lines was enormous, no single person could afford to build them. A formalized stock market was created in response to this need. And as industrial output expanded during the nineteenth century, fresh markets had to be opened. Britain, the world's first industrialized nation, exported its manufactured goods to China, Australia, South America, and Canada and imported agricultural products to feed its industrial workers.

The modern world is an urban world. The migration from country to city began with the Industrial Revolution, which took farmers from their fields and put them to work in factories. This transition would have been impossible without the nineteenth-century technologies that made it possible to feed and house this new category of worker. Refrigeration and railroads kept workers supplied with fresh, nutritious food at the same time that subways, bridges, artificial lighting, and high-rise buildings made cities more livable and efficient. Railroads also opened new land for cultivation. No longer constrained to ship their goods to nearby market via rivers, farmers spread out into the vast expanses of the American West, Australia, and Argentina, where they took advantage of tools like Cyrus McCormick's (1809-1884) reaper to increase agricultural productivity.

An often-criticized feature of modern life is its narcissistic preoccupation with the self. The origin of this preoccupation can be found in Romanticism, a movement that flourished between the late 1700s and the mid-1800s. Romanticism glorified the individual, self-expression, and the imagination. The ability to observe oneself as a unique individual, to compare oneself to others, and to interpret one's own conception of the world was extended by several nineteenth-century inventions. The first was photography. By the 1860s photography was used both to depict idealized beauty and to document the horrors of war. It gave significance and permanence to the people and events it captured and offered a new outlet for the imagination. In the final decade of the century, motion pictures became another medium for creativity, while phonographs allowed people to listen to their favorite music in their own homes.

At the end of the twentieth century people are questioning the place of technology in their lives. Is it a useful tool or is it a threat to nature and the divine order of the universe? This same dilemma preoccupied people in the nineteenth century. Many objected to refrigeration on the grounds that God alone has the power to produce cold, and they warned that those who ate previously frozen food would pay with shortened lives. Telephones, electric lights, subways, and suspension bridges were greeted with the same suspicion. Directions for turning on electric lights included the reassuring message, "The use of Electricity for lighting is in no way harmful to health, nor does it affect the soundness of sleep." Morse's first telegraph message, "What hath God wrought?" emphasized his reluctance to award himself first place as his invention's creator. Nevertheless, the technological advances of the nineteenth century were predicated on the belief that nature could be remade to suit human needs, and so it was. Nitroglycerin blasted a path for the railroad through the Sierra Nevada mountains, artificial lighting freed people from the limits of daylight, canning provided spring vegetables in the middle of winter, telephones brought distant voices into the same room, and machine guns ended hundreds of lives in a matter of minutes.

To describe the technological innovations of the nineteenth century, it is necessary to treat each one separately. In reality, however, there was no such separation, as can be seen in the case of steel. Without the large quantities of high-quality steel made possible by Henry Bessemer (1813-1898), there would have been neither railroad cars nor the rails they moved on. And the rapidly expanding cities that the railroads supplied with food and manufactured goods were equally dependent on steel for their bridges and subways. Technologies were also interdependent in a second way: development in one area inevitably spurred development in others. Charles Goodyear's vulcanized rubber did not find important markets until the invention of two unrelated technologies: electric lighting, with its need for insulated cables and wiring, and the automobile, with its need for tires. These connections weave across all the technologies discussed in this chapter, ultimately creating the fabric that is called modern life.

LINDSAY EVANS