Second Industrial Revolution - Industry

Industry

The Bessemer process was the first inexpensive industrial process for the mass-production of steel from molten pig iron. Its inventor Sir Henry Bessemer, revolutionized steel manufacture by decreasing its cost, increased the scale and speed of production of this vital raw material, and decreased the labor requirements for steel-making. The Bessemer process was soon followed by the Siemens-Martin furnace which was used in the open hearth process. The open hearth furnace allowed recycling of scrap iron and steel. Because it was easier to control quality with the open hearth process, it became the leading steel making process in early 20th century.

The concept of interchangeable parts had been implemented in the early 19th century by inventors including Honoré Blanc, Henry Maudslay, John Hall, and Simeon North. Interchangeable parts in firearms had been developed by the armories at Springfield and Harper's Ferry by the mid 19th century and mechanics familiar with armory practice introduced the concept to other industries, mainly in New England. The system relied on machine tools, jigs for guiding the tools and fixtures for properly holding the work and gauge blocks for checking the fit of parts. This method eventually became known as the American system of manufacturing. Application of the American system to the sewing machine and reaper industries in the 1880s resulted in substantial increases in productivity. The American system was applied in the bicycle industry almost from the beginning. A later concept developed during the period was scientific management or Taylorism developed by Frederick Winslow Taylor and others. Scientific management initially concentrated on reducing the steps taken in performing work such as bricklaying or shoveling by using analysis such as time and motion studies, but the concepts evolved into fields such as industrial engineering manufacturing engineering and business management that helped to completely restructure the operations of factories, and later, entire segments of the economy.

The use of wood for making paper freed paper makers from using cotton and linen rags, which had been the limiting factor in paper production since the invention of the printing press (ca. 1440). Finding a more abundant source of pulp became particularly important after a machine was invented for continuous paper making (Ptd. 1799). The first wood pulp (ca. 1840) was made by grinding wood, but by the 1880s chemical processes were in use, becoming dominant by 1900.

The petroleum industry, both production and refining, began in 1859 with the first oil well in Pennsylvania, U.S.A. The first primary product was kerosene for lamps and heaters. Kerosene lighting was much more efficient and less expensive than vegetable oils, tallow and whale oil. Although town gas lighting was available in some cities, kerosene produced a brighter light until the invention of the gas mantle. Both were replaced by electricity for street lighting following the 1890s and for households during the 1920s. Gasoline was an unwanted byproduct of oil refining until automobiles were mass produced after 1914, and gasoline shortages appeared during World War I. The invention of the Burton process for thermal cracking doubled the yield of gasoline, which helped alleviate the shortages.

Electrification allowed the final major developments in manufacturing methods of the Second Industrial Revolution, namely the assembly line and mass production. The importance of machine tools to mass production is shown by the fact that production of the Ford Model T used 32,000 machine tools, most of which were powered by electricity. Henry Ford is quoted as saying that mass production would not have been possible without electricity because it allowed placement of machine tools and other equipment in the order of the work flow.

Electrification also allowed the inexpensive production of electro-chemicals, a few of the more important ones being: aluminum, chlorine, sodium hydroxide and magnesium.

Railroads overtook steamboats operating on rivers and canals as the main transport infrastructure. The building of railroads accelerated after the introduction of inexpensive steel rails, which lasted considerably longer than wrought iron rails. Railroads lowered the cost of shipping to 0.875 cents/ton-mile from 24.5 cents/ton-mile by wagon. This increased the population of many towns. Improved roads such as the Macadam pioneered by John Loudon McAdam, were developed in the first Industrial Revolution, but the road network was greatly expanded during the second Industrial Revolution with a few hard surfaced roads being built around the time of the bicycle craze of the 1890s.

Iron had been used in ship building for a relatively short time before the development of inexpensive steel, after which steel quickly displaced iron.

The gasoline powered automobile was patented by Karl Benz in 1886, although others had independently built cars around that time. Henry Ford built his first car in 1896 and worked as a pioneer in the industry, with others who would eventually form their own companies, until the founding of Ford Motor Company in 1903. Ford and others at the company struggled with ways to scale up production in keeping with Henry Ford's vision of a car designed and manufactured on a scale so as to be affordable by the average worker. The solution that Ford Motor developed was a completely redesigned factory with machine tools and special purpose machines that were systematically positioned in the work sequence. All unnecessary human motions were eliminated by placing all work and tools within easy reach, and where practical on conveyors, forming the assembly line, the complete process being called mass production. This was the first time in history when a large, complex product consisting of 5000 parts had been produced on a scale of hundreds of thousands per year. The savings from mass production methods allowed the price of the Model T to decline from $780 in 1910 to $360 in 1916. In 1924 2 million T-Fords were produced and retailed $290 each.