Module Three: A New Industrial Age Vocabulary

Vocabulary flashcards covering key terms, figures, inventions, court cases, and concepts from the American History lesson on the Expansion of Industry and the Railroad Age.

Industrialization

The process of using raw materials, machines, and unskilled labor to cheaply produce large amounts of finished products.

Abraham Gesner

The individual who discovered how to distill kerosene from oil and coal.

Edwin Drake

The individual who made drilling for oil practical by utilizing a steam engine.

Henry Bessemer

The developer of the Bessemer process, which removes carbon from iron ore to manufacture steel.

Bessemer process

A technique created by Henry Bessemer that removes carbon from iron ore to produce steel.

Open Hearth

A method of steel manufacturing that improved upon the Bessemer process by the 1860s.

William Le Baron Jenney

The architect who designed The Home Insurance Building in Chicago, the first skyscraper made using steel.

Thomas Alva Edison

The inventor who created the incandescent light bulb at Menlo Park, New Jersey, alongside Lewis Latimer, and developed a system for distributing electrical power.

Lewis Latimer

The inventor who worked with Thomas Alva Edison on the development of the incandescent light bulb.

Christopher Sholes

The inventor of the typewriter.

Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson

The inventors who created the telephone.

Promontory, Utah

The location where the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads met on May 10, 1869, joined by a golden spike.

C.F. Dowd

The individual who proposed dividing the earth into time zones in 1883, a system adopted by Congress in 1918.

Credit Mobilier

A corrupt construction company formed by stockholders of the Union Pacific railroad.

The Grangers

An organization of farmers who fought against railroad monopolies and land abuses.

Munn v. Illinois

An 1877 Supreme Court case in which the court upheld the validity of Granger laws.

Interstate Commerce Act

An act that created a five-member committee after an 1886 Supreme Court decision ruled that states could not regulate interstate commerce.

Panic of 1893

An economic collapse that ruined smaller railroads and consolidated control under seven major companies.

Vertical and Horizontal integration

Business strategies used by industrial capitalists to expand control over industries and increase monopolies.

Social Darwinism

A social and economic theory based on natural selection that was endorsed by business capitalists.