Around the turn of the century, America began its great industrialization period. Corporations arose, big business men emerged, reform movements began to grow, immigrants settled at a mass rate, and different social and economic changes swept the nation.
Andrew Carnegie
[pic]Andrew Carnegie owned the Carnegie Steel Company, which was very successful. Steelmaking became highly successful with the Bessemer process, invented in 1855 and refined during the Civil War. This made it easier to produce steel, which was superior to iron. Carnegie wrote an essay titled "The Gospel of Wealth" in 1889. In the essay, he encouraged wealthy businessmen to use their fortunes in ways that would benefit society. Carnegie became a great philanthropist and funded the creation of thousands of public libraries in the United States.
John D. Rockefeller
[pic]John D. Rockefeller was the founder of the Standard Oil Company. In 1879, he created a trust in an effort to gain more control of the oil industry. The creation of the trust allowed Standard Oil Company to take over more companies in the oil refining industry, creating a monopoly. In 1890, the Sherman Antitrust Act was passed by Congress to ban trusts. The act prohibited contracts made "in restraint of trade," but it did not define what this meant. The Standard Oil Company continued its monopoly in the oil industry until 1911 when the Supreme Court ruled that the company had broken the law. At this time, the company was broken up into several smaller companies.
Cornelius Vanderbilt
[pic]Cornelius Vanderbilt was an entrepreneur who owned steamboat and railroad companies that were quite successful. He controlled a railroad empire in the northeastern part of the United States. Vanderbilt had an estimated fortune of $100 million. He gave $1 million to a university in Nashville, Tennessee, that was later renamed Vanderbilt University in his honor.
Leland Stanford
[pic]Leland Stanford co-founded the Central Pacific Railroad. This railroad was part of the first transcontinental railway in the U.S. He served as governor of California from 1861 to 1863 and founded Stanford University.
Thomas Edison
[pic]Thomas Edison was perhaps the most famous inventor of the late 1800s. He was first recognized for the invention of the phonograph in 1877, and just two years later, he received a patent for the incandescent light bulb. Though not the inventor of the light bulb itself, Edison is well-known for having perfected the design. Other innovations attributed to Edison are the electric generator and the motion picture camera.
Alexander Graham Bell
[pic]Alexander Graham Bell was a Scottish-American inventor credited with the invention of the first telephone. His work with the deaf inspired his interest in speech patterns and communication. Bell set out to transmit sound with an electrical current of varying intensity. He received the first U.S. patent for a telephone in 1876.
Important Terms
• Corporation: a type of business in which owners sell stock, raise large amounts of capital, and enjoy limited liability.
• Monopoly: a condition when there is only one seller of a particular good or service in the market; for example, owning all of the steel companies in the U.S.
• Robber Barons: business owners who engaged in unfair or anti-competitive business practices; for example, John Rockefeller's establishment of a trust.
• Trust: when shareholders of one company turn their shares over to a board of trustees, who then control the business.
• Vertical Integration: when a person owns different parts of the same production path; for example, owning a cattle ranch and a meat-packing plant.
Rapid Industrialization and Urbanization
• The number of immigrants to fill jobs increased.
• Railroads enabled industrialization to spread to the western regions of the U.S. The transcontinental line made it easy to send goods across the country.
