The Growth of Business
Big Ideas and Questions:
1. What impact did Big Business have on population movement and growth?
2. How did big business change America?
My Thoughts:
While some Americans were moving west on the Transcontinental Railroad and having conflict
with the Native Americans in the Great Plains, those who stayed East found themselves building a
grand nation of industry. In the years before and immediately after the Civil War, new inventions in
the East led to the growth of big businesses.
In the 1850s, Americans found ways to use oil for heating, lighting and cooking, and found
ways to get it from the ground. Henry Bessemer discovered a way to manufacture one to two days of
steel in ten to twenty minutes, and immigrants moved into the United States who were willing to do
manufacturing work. After the war, new inventors like Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell
brought great change to the country. Edison developed electric light and an electric power system.
Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. By 1880 there were 55,000 telephones in America.
Twenty years later there were 1.5 million. The great change continued into the 1890s when J. Frank
and Charles Duryea first test a gas powered car. In 1908, Henry Ford built the first incredibly popular
model car for consumers to buy: The Model T.
Americans had so much more money in the years after the Civil War, this money, along with
advertising and the Railroads allowed big business to thrive! America was already filled with
natural resources, and new technology helped them harness those resources. Trains, advertising,
money and new inventions brought about a boom in big business, especially in three fields: oil,
railroads and steel.
By the late 1800s, oil was found to be useful for power, heating, lighting and cooking. In 1859
Edwin L. Drake proved that it was possible to pump oil from the ground. In efforts to make oil
affordable to everyone, businessmen tried to find cheap ways to pump it, and to refine it. No one was
more successful than John D. Rockefeller. Rockefeller became the titan of the oil industry, starting a
company called Standard Oil Company. Standard Oil made oil less expensive and available to
everyone, but it also became a big monopoly. A monopoly is a when a company has total ownership
of a product or service. This means that they completely control that product. Rockefeller had almost
complete control over the oil business, but many big leaders in business at that time controlled
monopolies too.
As Railroads developed moving east to west, they did two extremely important things. First,
they brought raw materials from the west to the factories in the east. They would bring things like
copper, lead, and iron back to the factories. They especially brought iron from the west to
Pittsburgh. The second thing railroads did was take the goods (the finished products) from the
factories to people! That way people could receive goods, and since the railroads went across the
country- people across the country could get them; creating a national market. The titan of the
railroad and shipping industry was Cornelius Vanderbilt from New York. The Vanderbilt family made
millions, and there are still rich Vanderbilt’s today (like TV’s Anderson Cooper!).
By the middle of the 1850s, Henry Bessemer had developed the Bessemer process, which
made manufacturing steel easy and cheap. A Scottish immigrant named Andrew Carnegie perfected
the process and developed a steel manufacturing plant in Pittsburgh. Like Rockefeller, Carnegie
came to hold a monopoly over the steel industry, and even bought mines, and railroads so that he
could mine his own materials, create the steel at his factories, and then ship them out on his
railroads. Carnegie was a mastermind, and eventually sold his company in 1901 for $480 million.
Like Rockefeller and Vanderbilt, Carnegie gave a lot of his money away to public works. He was a
very famous philanthropist.
The growth of business caused a growth in cities, as immigrants and workers had to move into
the cities in order to find work. These big businesses used many workers, which was good in that so
many people had a job, but oftentimes these workers were treated poorly. The main thing to
remember about the Growth of Business is that new inventions from the middle of the 1800s caused
a great wave of business which made luxury items cheaper and easier to make. The big businesses
caused people to move into the cities, but eventually those workers would be mistreated.
1. Look in paragraph 2. Name two inventors and their inventions.
2. Who made the incredibly popular car starting in 1908?
3. Name four things that “brought about a boom in big business.”
4. Who controlled the oil industry?
5. Who controlled the Railroad Industry?
6. Who controlled the Steel Industry?
7. In what city was the steel industry located?