Between 1790 and 1900 Cities in America

Every bit the state grew, sure elements led some towns to morph into large urban centers, while others did non. The post-obit 4 innovations proved critical in shaping urbanization at the turn of the century: electric lighting, communication improvements, intracity transportation, and the ascension of skyscrapers. Every bit people migrated for the new jobs, they often struggled with the absenteeism of basic urban infrastructures, such as better transportation, adequate housing, means of advice, and efficient sources of light and energy. Fifty-fifty the basic necessities, such equally fresh water and proper sanitation—often taken for granted in the countryside—presented a greater challenge in urban life.

Electric Lighting

Thomas Edison patented the incandescent calorie-free bulb in 1879. This evolution speedily became mutual in homes every bit well as factories, transforming how even lower- and middle-class Americans lived. Although slow to make it in rural areas of the land, electrical power became readily available in cities when the beginning commercial ability plants began to open in 1882. When Nikola Tesla subsequently developed the AC (alternating current) organisation for the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company, ability supplies for lights and other mill equipment could extend for miles from the ability source. AC power transformed the use of electricity, allowing urban centers to physically embrace greater areas. In the factories, electric lights permitted operations to run twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. This increment in production required additional workers, and this demand brought more people to cities.

Gradually, cities began to illuminate the streets with electric lamps to allow the city to remain debark throughout the night. No longer did the pace of life and economic activeness slow substantially at sunset, the manner it had in smaller towns. The cities, post-obit the factories that drew people there, stayed open all the fourth dimension.

Communications Improvements

The phone, patented in 1876, greatly transformed communication both regionally and nationally. The telephone rapidly supplanted the telegraph as the preferred form of communication; by 1900, over 1.5 1000000 telephones were in use effectually the nation, whether as private lines in the homes of some middle- and upper-class Americans, or jointly used “political party lines” in many rural areas. By allowing instant communication over larger distances at any given time, growing telephone networks made urban sprawl possible.

In the aforementioned fashion that electrical lights spurred greater factory production and economical growth, the telephone increased business organization through the more than rapid footstep of need. Now, orders could come constantly via telephone, rather than via mail-club. More orders generated greater production, which in turn required however more workers. This demand for boosted labor played a key role in urban growth, as expanding companies sought workers to handle the increasing consumer demand for their products.

Intracity Transportation

As cities grew and sprawled outward, a major challenge was efficient travel inside the city—from home to factories or shops, and so back once again. Most transportation infrastructure was used to connect cities to each other, typically by runway or canal. Prior to the 1880s, the most common form of transportation within cities was the motorbus. This was a large, horse-drawn carriage, oft placed on fe or steel tracks to provide a smoother ride. While omnibuses worked adequately in smaller, less congested cities, they were not equipped to handle the larger crowds that developed at the close of the century. The horses had to stop and rest, and horse manure became an ongoing problem.

In 1887, Frank Sprague invented the electric trolley, which worked along the aforementioned concept every bit the omnibus, with a large wagon on tracks, but was powered by electricity rather than horses. The electric trolley could run throughout the twenty-four hour period and night, like the factories and the workers who fueled them. But it too modernized less important industrial centers, such as the southern urban center of Richmond, Virginia. As early on as 1873, San Francisco engineers adopted pulley technology from the mining manufacture to innovate cablevision cars and turn the city’s steep hills into elegant middle-class communities. Yet, as crowds continued to grow in the largest cities, such as Chicago and New York, trolleys were unable to move efficiently through the crowds of pedestrians (Effigy). To avoid this challenge, urban center planners elevated the trolley lines higher up the streets, creating elevated trains, or 50-trains, as early as 1868 in New York City, and quickly spreading to Boston in 1887 and Chicago in 1892. Finally, as skyscrapers began to dominate the air, transportation evolved one step farther to move underground as subways. Boston’s subway system began operating in 1897, and was quickly followed by New York and other cities.

The Ascension of Skyscrapers

The concluding limitation that large cities had to overcome was the e’er-increasing need for space. Eastern cities, unlike their midwestern counterparts, could not continue to grow outward, equally the land surrounding them was already settled. Geographic limitations such as rivers or the declension likewise hampered sprawl. And in all cities, citizens needed to be close plenty to urban centers to conveniently access work, shops, and other core institutions of urban life. The increasing cost of real estate made upwardly growth attractive, and so did the prestige that towering buildings carried for the businesses that occupied them. Workers completed the first skyscraper in Chicago, the ten-story Habitation Insurance Building, in 1885 (Figure). Although engineers had the capability to go higher, thank you to new steel construction techniques, they required another vital invention in guild to brand taller buildings viable: the elevator. In 1889, the Otis Elevator Visitor, led by inventor James Otis, installed the first electric elevator. This began the skyscraper craze, allowing developers in eastern cities to build and market prestigious real manor in the hearts of crowded eastern metropoles.

Jacob Riis and the Window into “How the Other One-half Lives”

Jacob Riis was a Danish immigrant who moved to New York in the late nineteenth century and, after experiencing poverty and joblessness first-hand, ultimately congenital a career every bit a police reporter. In the course of his work, he spent much of his time in the slums and tenements of New York’s working poor. Appalled by what he found there, Riis began documenting these scenes of squalor and sharing them through lectures and ultimately through the publication of his volume,
How the Other Half Lives, in 1890 (Figure).

By nearly gimmicky accounts, Riis was an constructive storyteller, using drama and racial stereotypes to tell his stories of the ethnic slums he encountered. Simply while his racial thinking was very much a product of his time, he was also a reformer; he felt strongly that upper and middle-form Americans could and should intendance about the living weather of the poor. In his volume and lectures, he argued against the immoral landlords and useless laws that allowed unsafe living conditions and high rents. He too suggested remodeling existing tenements or edifice new ones. He was not alone in his concern for the plight of the poor; other reporters and activists had already brought the issue into the public eye, and Riis’s photographs added a new element to the story.

To tell his stories, Riis used a series of securely compelling photographs. Riis and his grouping of amateur photographers moved through the various slums of New York, laboriously setting up their tripods and explosive chemicals to create enough low-cal to have the photographs. His photos and writings shocked the public, fabricated Riis a well-known figure both in his twenty-four hours and beyond, and eventually led to new state legislation curbing abuses in tenements.