Tovadang's List: Impact of Industrial Revolution Technology

• The nineteenth century marked the end of a long era of wind-powered ocean travel when the sail was replaced by the steam engine.
• Water transport was critical long before the industrial era. Boats on rivers or barges on canals could carry great weight with relatively little effort, and sailing ships had long been used for global commerce. But while horses could tow a canal barge in any weather, a boat on a larger body of water, such as a river, lake, or ocean, usually needed wind to move, and wind was unreliable. Ships in the eighteenth century sometimes floated in harbors for days or even weeks waiting for enough wind to let them maneuver into open water.
• In the United States, water transport was especially important as the newly settled country had few good roads but many navigable rivers.
• The missing element in the early efforts to apply steam-engine technology to water transport was success in business, rather than technology. Potential customers were not accustomed to technical innovation, and they did not use the new craft often enough to cover the costs.
• the person most closely associated with the successful introduction of steamboats—the American Robert Fulton (1765–1815)
• prolific inventor who launched a steamboat named the Clermont on the Hudson River in 1807. Simultaneously he launched a successful business ferrying passengers and freight between Albany, New York, and New York City.
• At the time, canals were attracting major investment in England as a means of improving inland transportation.
• In 1819 the American ship Savannah claimed to be the first steamship to cross the ocean, although the Savannah hadPage 61   |   Top of Article sails and relied on the wind for a good deal of the journey. Ships propelled exclusively by steam did not make the ocean crossing until 1838, by which time the propeller had replaced the paddle wheel as the means of propulsion.

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• the dramatic reduction in the extensive forests of oak trees that once supplied not only lumber to build houses and ships, but also wood to burn for heat in the winter. With the disappearance of the oaks, coal was viewed as a solution to heating needs.
• echnology solved one problem, the shortage of firewood, and created another: air pollution due to extensive burning of coal.

• transportation systems also played an important role in the expansion of the IndustrialPage 46   |   Top of Article Revolution.
• They made it possible to ship raw materials and manufactured goods over long distances economically, and to conduct commerce across the North American continent almost instantaneously.
• in the United States, and the completion of the transcontinental railroad described by J. D. B. Stillman (1819–1888) linking the East Coast with the Pacific, were seen at the time as exciting developments that could change life. And indeed they did.

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