Chapter 17: Industrial Supremacy

• the Bessemer process


  -blowing air through molten iron to burn out the impurities and create a much stronger metal (steel)

  -developed by Henry Bessemer (Englishman) and William Kelly (American) simultaneously
• anthracite (hard) coal

  bituminous (soft) coal
• basic research- favored by many scientists who didn't like "commercialism" of knowledge and liked basic research

  practical research- favored by engineers who were concerned with the research and development agendas of corporations
• scientific management (Taylorism)


  an idea proposed by Frederick Winslow Taylor that argued that scientific management made human labor compatible with the demands of the machine age

  -subdividing taks

  -interchangeable workers sped up the production process
• Henry Ford


  -american businessman and founder of Ford Motor Company, father of modern assembly lines that enabled him to lower the prices of his cars
• horizontal integration

  combined a number of firms engaged in the same enterprise into a single corporation
• vertical integration


  a company took over all the different businesses on which it relied for its primary function
• John D. Rockefeller


  american industrialist who founded the Standard Oil Company, which dominated the oil industry
• social darwinism


  -the idea that individuals rose and fell in society because of their innate "fitness"

  -(introduced by Herbert Spencer)

  -supported by William Graham Sumner who argued that those who fail are unfit for success
• under a trust agreement, stockholders in individual corporations transferred their stocks to a small group of trustees in exchange for shares in the trust itself
• labor contract law


  permitted employers to pay for that passage of workers in advance and deduct that amount later from their wages (repealed 1885)
• Noble Order of the Knights of Labor

  -labor union open to all

  -argued for an 8 hour work day + abolition of child labor

  -founded by Uriah S. Stephens, later leadership under Terence V. Powederly
• American Federation of Labor (AFL)

  -labor union that represented mainly skilled white workers

  -founded by Samuel Gompers (1886)
• haymarket square riot (1886)


  a turning point that transformed public perception of Labor activism, associating it with violence and radicalism
• great railroad strike of 1877

  -shut down over 60% of the nations railroads

  -the common public worker realized they did have power over giant corporations through unions
• pullman strike


  -railcar owners cut wages

  -argued that the workers on strike required government action because they were preventing the transportation of federal mail
• Andrew Carnegie 


  -a Scottish-born American industrialist who founded the Carnegie Steel Company

  -his company dominated the America steel industry
• Gustavus Swift


  assembly line