1750 to 1900 almost entirely by hand This transformation of work from a home-based system to centralized factories relying on complex machinery was the central element of the Industrial Revolution Britain’s newly automated spinning and weaving machinery quickly propelled the island nation into the forefront of economic production and soon set off efforts by competing nations, including the new United States, to equal Britain’s industrial achievements Bribes paid to British mechanics and industrial espionage were among the tactics used In 1793, with the invaluable assistance of British immigrant and skilled textile machinist Samuel Slater, a limited but successful textile factory opened in Rhode Island In the early 1800s growing conflict between Britain and the United States, resulting in the War of 1812, had the effect of making America’s home-grown industrialization even more crucial After 1807 the number of U.S textile mills sextupled The most important of the new mills was Francis Cabot Lowell’s Boston Manufacturing Company of Waltham, Massachusetts, where both spinning and weaving processes were automated under a single factory roof and a workforce, consisting primarily of young women from struggling New England farm families, provided lowcost labor In the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution, water wheels competed with the new steam engine But as the reliability of steam power increased and its siting flexibility became obvious, energy-dense coal became Europe’s and, later, North America’s major industrial fuel source At the U.S centennial celebration in Philadelphia in 1876, George H Corliss’s steam engine, the largest in the world, was both a major attraction and sole power source for the entire exhibition Within 40 years, steam engines would be largely replaced by electrical devices, although the electrical power these new machines used would, in most cases, still be generated by burning coal Some of the earliest experiments with static electricity were done by American Benjamin Franklin, whose 1751 article, “Experiments and Observations on Electricity,” made him a Fellow of Britain’s Royal Society By 1753 Franklin had developed the protective lightning rod Between the 1780s and 1800 Italian scientists Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta would discover electrical current and how to produce electricity chemically through the medium of the battery In 1831 Englishman Michael Faraday’s discovery of electromagnetism, scientifically refined by James Clerk Maxwell, paved the way for practical uses of electrical power George Westinghouse, who first gained fame in 1873 as the inventor of air brakes for trains, soon thereafter became fellow U.S inventor Thomas A Edison’s chief rival for the implementation of commercial electric power Westinghouse’s alternating current, developed for him by Nikola Tesla, became the standard Edison, inventor of the incandescent lightbulb and many other devices powered by electricity, lost his bid for direct current but nevertheless profited mightily Spread of Industry As the Industrial Revolution spread, the need to provide fuel and raw materials to new factories and ship their finished products helped set off a transportation revolution in many industrializing nations Efforts were made in Britain and elsewhere to improve road surfaces to facilitate safer passage for wheeled vehicles, at first drawn by horses or other draft animals In 1819 Scotsman John Macadam developed a crushed stone surface, significantly smoothing roadways The United States began building a National Road, starting in Baltimore after the War of 1812, but regional squabbles and high costs meant that, after 44 years, the road project ended 65 miles short of its projected St Louis terminus Similarly, imperial powers in Africa, Muhammad Ali in Egypt, and the Ottoman Empire in western Asia all financed projects to enlarge ports and build roads and railroads to facilitate the transport of cash crops and raw materials In 1757 and 1764 two canals built in England made it easier to move coal to emerging factories Other European nations and the United States soon joined in the canal-building boom In 1825 New York State’s Erie Canal, a water route connecting New York City to the Great Lakes and beyond, became one of the most successful projects in what would prove to be the brief golden age of canal transport The major transport successes of the early 19th century were steam-powered ships and railroads In 1807 on the Hudson River Robert Fulton demonstrated a new kind of water-going vessel, xxix