622 



U.S. Rise to Technological Maturity 



Many factors, some geographic or historical and some sociological 

 or economic, contributed to the emergence of the United States as the 

 most dynamic technological nation of the world. An unpeopled con- 

 tinent with rich natural resources and temperate cliinate was settled 

 by immigrants who tended to be self-selected for initiative, education, 

 independence, and political sophistication. A chronic labor shortage 

 automatically placed value on labor-saving devices and machinery. 

 These combined to sustain rapid progress in technological innovation 

 toward high manpower productivity and swift economic growth. 



Foremost among the new Nation's needs were roads, canals, and a 

 postal system, all of which the early Government undertook to pro- 

 vide. Later, the railroad and telegraph were eagerly seized upon to 

 link up throughout all parts of the Nation the flow of goods and 

 information. 



The American Civil War had a profound effect on technology. For 

 the first time, ". . . the technological resources of a whole nation were 

 ultimately mobilized to overwhelm an opponent. There was mass- 

 production of weapons and ammunition, of uniforms and boots; 

 canned food was supplied to armies transported for the first time by 

 rail."" 



The revolutionary nature of "mass production" made it the "great- 

 est contribution of America to the development of technology." Eli 

 Whitney, inventor of the cotton gin,^^ is also credited with the key 

 technological developments that paved the way for modern mass pro- 

 duction. There were four steps in this process : interchangeability of 

 parts, specialization of production function, the conveyor belt, and 

 mechanical instrumentation. The first two of these were demonstrated 

 at AMiitney's arms plant in Connecticut, and the third came much 

 later in the Dearborn plant of Henry Ford. The fourth step, which is 

 still evolving, consists of instrumented controls, computers, computer 

 software, and mechanical slaves, all to replace human operators. 



Rostow describes functionally the passage of the United States 

 through the stages of economic growth : 



Steel launched this great expansion, and railway steel remained an important 

 category of use ; but in these decades, mass-produced lighter engineering products 

 came into their own : agricultural equipment, the typewriter, and those two 

 almost universal harbingers of the age of durable consumers goods — the sewing- 

 machine and the bicycle. Above all, with the railways mainly laid by the 1880s, 

 the nation became a unified Continental market with powerful incentives within 

 it to organize production and distribution in vast centralized bureaucratized 

 units. 



Much in this industrial surge was based on radical improvements in the metal- 

 working machine tool, which comes as close to being a correct symbol for the 

 second phase of industrial growth as the railway is for the first. And, by the 

 1890s, electricity, chemical, and automobile industries, which were to play an 

 extremely important role in the third phase, were commercially in being, the 

 first two rooted in new and expanding fields of science and technology." 



i« Ibid, page 819. 



" Of this 1793 invention, the History observes that it had "led to a great increase in 

 the size of cotton plantations, [and had] affected directly the lives of every man and 

 woman, black and white, in the Southern States, and ultimately, through the slavery ques- 

 tion and the Civil War, the whole of the North as well." (Ibid., page 818.) 



"Walt W. Rostow. "The United States in the World Arena: An Essay in Recent 

 History." (New York, Harper and Row, Publishers, 1960), page 7. 



