What was urbanization during the industrial revolution

Marriage outside this norm was not common. During the Industrial Revolution, marriage shifted from this tradition to a more sociable union between wife and husband in the laboring class. Women and men tended to marry someone from the same job, geographical location, or social group. The rural pre-industrial work sphere was usually shaped by the father, who controlled the pace of work for his family. However, factories and mills undermined the old patriarchal authority to a certain extent.

Factories put husbands, wives, and children under the same conditions and authority of the manufacturer masters. In the latter half of the Industrial Revolution, women who worked in factories or mills tended not to have children or had children that were old enough to take care of themselves, as life in the city made it impossible to take a child to work unlike in the case of farm labor or cottage industry where women were more flexible to combine domestic and work spheres and deprived women of a traditional network of support established in rural communities.

Privacy Policy. Skip to main content. Search for:. Urbanization Learning Objective Connect the development of factories to urbanization. Key Points Industrialization led to the creation of the factory, and the factory system contributed to the growth of urban areas as large numbers of workers migrated into the cities in search of work in the factories. In , Friedrich Engels published The Condition of the Working Class in England, arguably the most important record of how workers lived during the early era of industrialization in British cities.

He described backstreet sections of Manchester and other mill towns where people lived in crude shanties and overcrowded shacks, constantly exposed to contagious diseases.

These conditions improved over the course of the 19th century. Transportation advancements lowered transaction and food costs, improved distribution, and made more varied foods available in cities.

The historical debate on the question of living conditions of factory workers has been very controversial. While some have pointed out that industrialization slowly improved the living standards of workers, others have concluded that living standards for the majority of the population did not grow meaningfully until much later.

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. They were a hazard for electric company employees and pedestrians alike. The most noteworthy effect of high-quality, affordable lighting was the widespread practice of running factories twenty-four 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 and , factories tended to adopt electric lighting but kept using earlier sources of power for their operation.

Electric power for factory operations came quickly between and 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 20th 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 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 , 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 19th 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 19th 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 , but grew into its own after that date.

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 s, 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. 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, it also required fewer skilled workers. The other innovation that made skyscrapers possible was the electric elevator.

Elisha Graves Otis designed the first reliable elevator in With electric power, it became possible to rise sixty stories in a matter of seconds. With elevators, tenants willing paid a premium in order to get better views out their windows. Without elevators, nobody would have bothered to erect a building taller than five stories. 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 20th 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. 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. By the s, the value of land in Manhattan grew so fast because of its possible use for skyscrapers that second generation industrial families sold their mansions, since they no longer wanted to pay huge property taxes on them.

The same basic principles of skyscraper production—build it quick and large, and pack it with people—motivated the way that builders produced other kinds of urban domiciles. They came about as the result of a design contest, but were generally so crowded that they did more harm than good to the people who lived in them. Four families might live on a single floor with only two bathrooms between them. Designed to let light and air into central courtyards which explains why they were shaped like a dumbbell from above , stacked up back-to-back, one against the other they did neither.

Widely copied, New York City actually outlawed this design for new buildings in —but the old structures remained. Apartment houses made it easier to pack people into small urban areas and therefore live closer to where they worked. To counter these unequal tendencies, New Yorkers developed the idea of the cooperative, where many people bought a single building and managed it themselves.

Lavish apartments became alternatives for mansions once Manhattan real estate became too expensive for all except those with huge fortunes. The farther away that people lived from central business districts, the more they needed efficient transportation. Streetcars helped, to an extent, but passenger lines that centered on downtown neighborhoods left large areas that could be occupied with housing for a growing working population, provided that these residents had their own way to get around.

It also revolutionized the entire concept of American production. He would make a market for his cars by producing them so cheaply that nearly every American could afford one. Ford could achieve both quality and a low price at scale because of the assembly line. In the same way that a single carcass was picked apart by men with specialized jobs as it moved along a line, mounted upon a hook, Ford arranged his new factory at Highland Park so that men with highly specialized assignments could build an automobile much faster than before.

The assembly line moved work to the men rather than forcing men to move to the work, thereby saving valuable time and energy. It also extended the concept of the division of labor to its logical extreme so that workers would only perform one function in a much larger assembly process all day, every day. The applicability of these principles to the manufacturing of just about everything is what made Ford such an important figure in the history of industrialization. Mass production became possible for all kinds of things that had once seemed far removed from the automobile.

Ford built Model Ts at three different facilities over the entire history of that vehicle. He improved his production methods over time which included introducing and improving upon the assembly line so that he could produce them more cheaply and efficiently. Efficiency depended on speed, and speed depended upon the exact place in the factory where those machines were placed. Because Ford made only one car, he could employ single-purpose machine tools of extraordinarily high quality.

The company also used lots of other automated manufacturing equipment, like gravity slides and conveyors, to get parts of the car from one place to another in its increasingly large, increasingly mechanized factories.

Because the assembly line moved the work to the men rather than the men to the work, the company could control the speed of the entire operation. Like earlier manufacturers, Ford depended upon standardized, identical parts to produce more cars for less, but the assembly line also made it possible to conserve labor—not by mechanizing jobs that had once been done by hand, but by mechanizing work processes and paying employees just to feed and tend to those machines.

This was not fun work to do. Before Ford came along, cars were boutique goods that only rich people could afford to operate. After Ford introduced the assembly line actually a series of assembly lines for every part of the car , labor productivity improved to such a degree that mass production became possible.

Perhaps more important than mass production was mass consumption, since continual productivity improvements meant that Ford could lower the price of the Model T every year, while simultaneously making small but significant changes that steadily improved the quality of the car. Mass production eliminated choice, since Ford produced no other car, but Ford built variations of the Model T, like the runabout with the same chassis, and owners retro-fitted their Model Ts for everything from camping to farming.

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