innovations, social changes, and a political system increasingly apt to favor economic growth beyond any other concern. Before 1880, industrialization depended upon a prescribed division of labor – breaking most jobs up into smaller tasks, and assigning the same people to repeat one task indefinitely. After 1880, industrialization depended much more on mechanization – the replacement of people with machines – to increase production and maximize profits. The development of the modern electrical grid, starting in the early 1880s, facilitated such technological advances. Henry Ford's assembly line and the rise of mass production after the turn of the twentieth century only strengthened this effect. As a result, the total manufacturing output of the United States was 28 times greater in 1929 than it was 1859. Adjust that number for the growth in population over the same period, and it still multiplied seven times over (Wright 1941).
Cities in America date back to the beginning of the colonial period, but the tendency for new industrial factories to be located in or near urban areas meant that cities grew much faster during the late nineteenth century than ever before. This trend was most apparent in large cities like New York, which expanded from approximately half a million to around 3.5 million people between 1850 and 1900, and Philadelphia, which increased in size from slightly more than 100 000 inhabitants to more than 1.2 million people over the same period. During the last half of the late nineteenth century, Chicago proved to be the fastest growing city in the world. Overall, 15.3% of Americans lived in cities in 1850. By 1900, that percentage had increased to 39.7, and kept growing. The 1920 Census revealed that more Americans lived in cities than the countryside for the first time (Rees 2013).
Not every city in the country developed as fast as the largest cities did. Important regional differences existed in urbanization because of differences in the nature of industrial growth. The largest cities in the Northeast were manufacturing powerhouses that contained everything, from large factories building railroad locomotives to small shops producing textiles in people's apartments. The Northeast also gave rise to smaller cities that concentrated on particular industries, like Rochester, New York, which specialized in men's clothing, boots, and shoes. Following on a tradition of manufacturing from earlier in the century, New Bedford and Fall River, Massachusetts, increased in size because of their cotton textile factories. Other cities, like Elizabeth, New Jersey, grew as by‐products of the expansion of their larger neighbors.
Chicago, the largest city in the Midwest, made its name processing natural resources from the Western frontier before those resources traveled eastward as finished products. Grain and lumber – two industries that had been crucial for Chicago's early growth – relied on Chicago for marketing and storage. With perfection of the refrigerated railroad car, meat processing became such an enormous industry that the vast majority of the meat that Americans ate was processed in the stockyards on that city's south side. (That activity would disperse again, after the turn of the twentieth century, to other cities like Fort Worth and Kansas City.) Smaller cities in America's industrial heartland would grow around other manufacturing pursuits like steel in Youngstown, and machine tools and cash registers in Dayton, Ohio (Warner 1995).
The South had lagged behind the rest of the country since before the Civil War. As a result, many advocates for outside investment in this region expanded their activities after the war. They were somewhat successful. While the rate of industrialization (and therefore urbanization) picked up in the South during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it still has not fully caught up with the rest of the country. Birmingham, Alabama, for example, founded in 1871, flourished as a center for iron and steel manufacturing during the 1880s, when two railroads first linked that city to the region's mineral resources (Misa 1999). The growth of cotton mills in the “upcountry” section of the Carolinas began during the 1870s. After the turn of the twentieth century, this region became an important center of activity for the textile industry, in large part because of the available cheap, nonunion labor.
What separates this period from earlier periods in urban and industrial history is that this was the first time in American history that cities had moved to the center of American life. Cities were places where most of the new factories were built. Waves of immigrants settled in cities because that is where the job openings in industrial factories were. Cities were also places where the effects of industrialization, especially the increased inequality of wealth, were most visible. That means that the problems of cities became the problems of America.
2.4.2 The Electrical Grid and Improvements in Transportation
One of the reasons that later industrialization progressed at such a greater pace than before was the improvement in power sources. The early Industrial Revolution depended upon steam engines and waterpower. The earliest engines were large and prohibitively expensive for all but the largest firms. Water wheels were a possibility for smaller concerns, but they could not perform nearly as much work as later power sources could. Between 1869 and 1929, total available horsepower in the United States increased from 2.3 to 43 million units. In factories, the greatest part of that growth came from a huge increase in the use of electricity (Wright 1941).
Although factories had grown larger and more efficient over the entire nineteenth century, they grew particularly large after 1880, as the power to run them became cheaper, cleaner, and more convenient to acquire. Starting in the late 1870s, Thomas Edison turned the attention of his extensive laboratory toward harnessing electricity to create affordable electric light. This achievement depended not only upon the creation of an efficient, inexpensive, incandescent light bulb but also on the creation of an electrical system to power it – everything from generators, to electrical wires, to switches. Without a precedent for any of these things, the Edison Electric Company and many related subsidiaries (later gathered together under the umbrella of General Electric) had to manufacture just about everything to make the grid operate. “Since capital is timid, I will raise and supply it,” explained Edison to one of his investors. “The issue is factories or death!” (Jonnes 2004). Other companies soon followed, because creating the central stations and the grid that eventually powered just about everything was so obviously lucrative.
Symbolizing the importance of capital to Edison's efforts, the first person to have his home successfully wired for electricity was the banker J. P. Morgan, in 1882. Despite setbacks, his experience with electric light encouraged him to invest further in Edison's efforts. Edison built the first central generating station in New York City later that same year. The first area of Manhattan that Edison wired was a neighborhood filled with the homes and workplaces of those who operated the financial institutions he hoped to convince to invest in his enterprises, as well as two major newspapers that would publicize his achievements. By 1902, there were 2250 electrical generating stations in the United States. By 1920, that number grew to just short of 4000. Electricity spread from large cities to small cities and eventually out into rural areas by the 1920s (Cowan 1985; Cowan and Hersch 2017).
This kind of growth required substantial improvement beyond Edison's initial vision of an electrical system. The effects of a reliable electric grid on the cities where it first appeared were numerous, ranging from less coal smoke in the air to new sounds produced by various electrical creations – everything from streetcars to arc lights. Early arc lights were so bright people thought they could stop crime and vice by exposing the people who perpetrated these crimes. In smaller cities, obtaining electric light was a sign of modernization, which implied future growth. Modern light in urban workplaces made office work easier by lessening strain on the eyes. As electric light companies moved in, the much‐hated urban gas companies lost a considerable amount of economic power. Since people preferred electric light to gas, it became increasingly popular, as the grid expanded and the costs dropped. Electric light even changed the way people lived inside their houses. For example, children could now be trusted to put themselves to bed since there was no longer a fire risk from the open flames that were once needed to get to bed in the dark.
Nevertheless, the growing electrical grid created new urban dangers. High‐voltage electrical wires strung above ground joined other wires from telephones, telegraphs – even stock tickers – posed
