Industrialists And Growth In The 19th Century

The Industrialists and Growth Settled in a vast country with abundant natural resources, Americans soon developed a sense for industry which was characteristic of the 19th century. Unlike Europe where the craftsmen guilds long opposed progress in manufacturing, America was eager to use new technologies that would save labor, which was scarce. Thus the young nation, once freed from Colonial restrictions, progressed faster than its former mother country and eventually emerged as the foremost industrialized country in the World, just a century after its Independence. England had given its American colonies a purely agricultural vocation, discouraging any form of industry that could once challenge the mother country's preeminence in the field. In the same way as commerce was regulated, industry was banished from the colonies, to ensure their dependence
Soon these technologies were applied to more civilian uses, from clock-making, printing presses to the vast array of agricultural instruments, soap and candle works, such as William Colgate's in New York and Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati. The Lorillards produced and marketed tobacco in ever larger quantities and the Havemeyers launched the largest sugar refining plants in Brooklyn, reengineering an industry that had already made the fortunes of the Van Cortlandts, the Bayards and the Roosevelts in colonial New York. With the manufacturing came a spirit of engineering, which brought always new machines and useful devices that more and more organized plants turned out in quantities for the merchants to market. Singer sewing machines revolutionized household garment production as much as the reaper did agriculture. Heavy manufacturing plants were built to turn out locomotives and axles for the rapidly growing railroads and soon American locomotives from Baldwin or Norris were exported