came down in bad weather. They were a hazard for electric company employees and pedestrians alike. “The overhead system is a standing menace to health and life,” reported one medical journal in 1888 (Freeberg 2014). In 1889, a fire caused by overheated electrical wires ignited a building full of dry goods and burned down much of downtown Boston.
The most noteworthy effect of high‐quality, affordable lighting was the widespread practice of running factories 24 hours a day – which made them much more productive without any improvements in the technology of production. Replacing putrid gas lamps also made the smell of factories better for the workmen who worked there. As the electrical grid became more reliable, electric motors gradually began to replace steam engines as the source of power in manufacturing. Using small electric motors as a source of power freed factories from having to be located near water sources to feed boilers and made it possible for them to be smaller too.
Between 1880 and 1900, factories tended to adopt electric lighting but kept using earlier sources of power for their operation. Electric power for factory operations came quickly between 1900 and 1930. Both these developments (along with the large supply of immigrant workers) contributed to the industrialization of cities. The electrification of industrial facilities of all kinds proceeded quickly during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Businesses got wired for electricity much faster than cities because they could make the most use of what started out as a relatively expensive service.
Because factories were concentrated in or near cities, it was a lot cheaper to wire them than it was to wire farms or even smaller cities away from electrical generating stations. Many of the new factories built during this later period appeared outside city limits, another new development. Electrification allowed managers to automate jobs once done by hand labor, thereby eliminating inefficiency, gaining greater control over the production process, and boosting overall productivity. New devices like time clocks and even new modes of production like the assembly line also depended upon electric power.
The advent of cheap and readily available electricity had a particularly important effect upon the physical layout of American cities during this period. Frank Sprague, an electrical engineer who had once worked for Thomas Edison, designed the first electric streetcar system for Richmond, Virginia, in 1888. Such systems supplanted horse‐drawn carriages, making it possible for people to travel further and faster than they would have otherwise. This gave rise to a burst of suburbanization, a spate of new towns on the outskirts of American cities where wealthy and middle‐class people could move to escape from the difficulties of modern urban life but still be close enough to enjoy many of its advantages.
The new suburbanites often traveled to and from work via new electric streetcars. The electrical equipment manufacturer Westinghouse was one of the major manufacturers of vehicles powered by an overhead wire. Electric streetcars had the advantage over horses of not leaving manure or of dying in the streets. Streetcars were more popular during weekends than during the week as working‐class people took advantage of low fares to explore new neighborhoods or to visit amusement parks, like Coney Island, generally built at the end of these lines.
In the same way that employers and city planners depended upon streetcars to move people, manufacturers became more dependent upon railroads, after 1880, to move their finished products. Railroad track mileage grew greatly after the Civil War, connecting cities and leading to the growth of new factories in places that were convenient to the necessary resources to make marketable goods. Eventually, mass distribution was a prerequisite to benefit from all that increased productivity. For all these reasons, separating the causes and effects of industrialization and urbanization is practically impossible.
Throughout the nineteenth century, factories usually had to be built near shipping ports or railroad stops because these were the easiest way to get factory products out to markets around the world. As more railroad tracks were built late in the nineteenth century, it became easier to locate factories outside of downtowns. Streetcars helped fill up the empty space downtown where factories would have gone. They made it easier to live further away from work and still commute to the heart of downtown, thereby making it possible for other kinds of businesses to locate there. One example would be the large urban department store, a phenomenon that predates 1880, but grew into its own after that date. Such stores like Wanamaker's in Philadelphia or Marshall Field's in Chicago bought the products of industrialization in bulk and sold them at a discounted price to workers who might have had trouble getting access to them any other way.
2.4.3 Structural Steel and Skyscrapers
While retail emporiums could be blocks long and only a few stories tall, other business rented space in thinner buildings built much higher. By the late 1880s, structures that had once been built with iron began to be built with a structural steel – a new, stronger kind of steel. The practice had begun in Chicago, championed by the architect Louis Sullivan, who designed the first skyscrapers there. A skyscraper, Sullivan wrote, “must be every inch a tall and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation that from bottom to top it is a unit without a single dissenting line” (Alexiou 2013). That kind of design required a skeleton of structural steel upon which other substances like brick or granite could hang. Even then, such skyscrapers had to be tapered; otherwise, the weight from the top floors could make the whole structure collapse.
Creating structural steel for skyscrapers required entirely different production methods than had been required to make Bessemer steel (which had been used primarily for railroad rails). Quantity and speed were the main requirements of producing Bessemer steel. Structural steel required a more carefully made product. The demands of structural steel encouraged steelmakers like Andrew Carnegie to redesign entire factories, most notably replacing older Bessemer converters with the open‐hearth process. This new kind of steelmaking not only produced higher quality steel but also required fewer skilled workers. This encouraged Carnegie's company to lock out its union workforce at Homestead, Pennsylvania, in 1892, so that it could save money by employing cheap replacement workers.
The other innovation that made skyscrapers possible was the electric elevator. Elisha Graves Otis designed the first reliable elevator in 1857. With electric power, it became possible to rise 60 stories in a matter of seconds. Before the elevator, rental spaces in commercial buildings cost more on lower floors because people didn't want to have to walk up stairs to get to the top. With elevators, tenants willing paid a premium in order to get better views out of their windows. Without elevators, nobody would have bothered to erect a building taller than five stories (Misa 1999, 2016).
The construction of skyscrapers was itself a terrific example of the industrial age coordination of labor and materials distribution. Steel skeletons meant that the unornamented higher sections of a building could be worked on even before the inevitable elaborate ornamental fringes on the lower part of the building were finished. This saved both time and money. When New York got so crowded that there was no space to store raw materials, the appearance of those materials would be carefully choreographed, and they would be taken directly off of flatbed trucks and placed in their exact positions near the tops of new buildings. Around the turn of the twentieth century, a major skyscraper could be built in as little as one year. The faster a building could be built, the faster an owner could collect rents and begin to earn back construction expenses.
The great benefit of skyscrapers was the ability to compress economic activity into smaller areas. “The skyscraper,” explained one New Yorker in 1897, “gathers into a single edifice an extraordinary number of activities, which otherwise would be widely separated. Each building is an almost complete city, often comprising within its walls, banks and insurance offices, post office and telegraph office, business exchanges restaurants, clubrooms and shops.” These same miniature cities also included numerous retail outlets, where the products of industrialized manufacturing could be purchased (Rees 2013). Shorter distances between these locations accelerated the pace of economic activity, which promoted further economic growth. However, large projects (like the many skyscrapers associated with the building of New
