| Term | Definition |
|---|
| Industrial Revolution | a period of rapid growth in using machines for manufacturing and production that began in the mid-1700s |
| textiles | cloth items that were the first major breakthrough of the Industrial Revolution |
| Richard Arkwright | Englishman that invented the water frame that lowered the cost of cotton cloth and increased the speed of textile production in 1769 |
| Samuel Slater | British mechanic that the immigrated to the United States after memorizing the design of textile mills |
| technology | the tools used to produce items or to do work |
| Eli Whitney | came up with the idea of interchangeable parts when he promised to build 10,000 muskets for the U.S. government, which lead to mass production |
| interchangeable parts | parts of a machine that are identical |
| mass production | the efficient production of large numbers of identical goods |
| Rhode Island System | Slater's strategy of hiring families and dividing factory work into simple tasks |
| Francis Cabot Lowell | a businessman from New England who changed the textile industry in the Northeast |
| Lowell system | a system that was based on water powered textile mills that employed young, unmarried women from local farms and included a loom that could both spin thread and weave cloth in the same mill |
| trade unions | groups that tried to improve pay and working conditions |
| strikes | when workers would refuse to work until employers met their demands |
| Sarah G. Bagley | a strong voice in the union movement that founded the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association who wanted to influence an investigation of working conditions and shorten the work days to 10hrs |
| Transportation Revolution | a period of rapid growth in the speed and convenience of travel because of new methods of transportation |
| Robert Fulton | an American who tested his first steamboat in France in 1803 and several years later invented the Clermont |
| Clermont | the first full-sized commercial steamboat |
| Gibbons v. Ogden | case that reached the Supreme Court in 1824 where the court reinforced the federal government's authority to regulate trade between the states by ending monopolistic control over waterways in several states, which freed up the waters for even greater shiping and trade |
| Peter Cooper | he built a small but powerful locomotive called the Tom Thumb in 1830 and raced it against a horse-drawn railcar |
| Samuel F. B. Morse | he perfected the telegraph in 1832 |
| telegraph | a device that could send information over wires across great distances |
| Morse code | different combonations of dots and dashes that represent each letter of the alphabet |
| John Deere | a blacksmith who invented a steel blade for the iron plow in 1837 |
| Cyrus McCormick | developed the mechanical reaper that quickly and efficiently cut down wheat |
| Isaac Singer | he made improvements to Elias Howe's sewing machine |
| cotton gin | a machine invented by Eli Whitney to remove seeds from short-staple cotton |
| planters | large-scale farmers who held more than 20 slaves |
| cotton belt | the area of high cotton production |
| factors | crop brokers who managed the cotton trade |
| Tredgar Iron Works | one of the most productive iron works in the nation located in Richmond, Virginia |
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