39 - Second Industrial Revolution (abridged)

Second Industrial Revolution

phase of rapid heavy industrialization in late 1800s-early 1900s; saw mass production of steel and chemicals, enormous expansion of rail and steamship, electrification, mass communications (newspaper, telegraph, telephone, and radio); internal combustion engine and petroleum; assembly lines; sewage systems

Alessandro Volta

Italian physicist who invented the chemically-powered electric battery in 1799

John Dalton

English chemist and physicist who developed atomic theory in 1808

Michael Faraday

English physicist who invented the first simple electrical generator in 1831

Henry Bessemer

English engineer who in 1856 developed a cheap, efficient method to mass produce steel by using a blast of air to burn impurities out of molten iron

Alfred Krupp

German industrialist who transformed his family's small steel business into the world's largest industrial company with 75,000 employees; "the Cannon King" who armed the German and other modern militaries

Charles Darwin

English biologist who proposed the theory of evolution in Origin of Species (1859); argued that all living forms evolved through the ability to adapt in a struggle for survival

Herbert Spencer

English philosopher who applied the theory of natural selection to human societies; introduced the expression "survival of the fittest"

Social Darwinism

theory that people are subject to Darwinian laws of natural selection; argued that the strong should see their wealth and power increase at the expense of the weak; used to justify late 19th-early 20th century political conservatism, capitalism, imperialism, and racism

eugenics

science of improving human populations through selective breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics and forced sterilization of people deemed unfit for reproduction

Alfred Nobel

Swedish chemist who invented dynamite in 1867; established a peace prize so he would not only be remembered for his invention's deadly military applications

Dmitri Mendeleev

Russian chemist who developed the periodic table of chemical elements in 1869

Louis Pasteur

French scientist who discovered relationship between germs and disease in the 1860s leading to better sanitation

Joseph Lister

British surgeon who pioneered use of antiseptics to sterilize equipment

British Public Health Act of 1875

provided local authorities with powers to build sewers, regulate housing, and establish building codes new streets and structures

vaccinations

inoculations against cholera, rabies, tetanus, typhoid fever, and bubonic plague developed in the 1880s-1890s

demographic transition

shift from high birth rates and high infant death rates to low birth rates and low death rates; caused by improved standards of living from technological progress and accompanying sharp decline in the death rate due to infectious diseases

Thomas Edison

American inventor of the phonograph, an incandescent light bulb, motion picture camera, and other devices in the late 19th/early 20th centuries

skyscrapers

a building over 10 stories tall supported by a steel frame; first introduced in 1884

streetcar suburbs

residential communities of the late 19th century linked to urban centers by electric street cars which were first introduced in Richmond, Virginia in 1887

Sigmund Freud

Austrian physician whose work focused on the unconscious causes of behavior and personality formation; developed practice of psychoanalysis

Ivan Pavlov

Russian physiologist who studied psychological classical conditioning; trained dogs to salivate at the ringing of a bell

Marie and Pierre Curie

French physicists who discovered radioactivity in the 1890s

Max Planck

German physicist who developed quantum theory to understand atomic and subatomic processes in 1900

Albert Einstein

German physicist who developed mathematical theories to explain the behavior of planetary motion and the movement of electrical particles; after 1905 issued theory of relativity

Henry Ford

American automobile manufacturer who pioneered assembly line mass production in 1913