Second Industrial Revolution
A period of rapid industrialization from the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, marked by steel, electricity, chemicals, and mass production.
Bessemer process: A method for converting molten pig iron into steel by blowing air through it. It made steel production faster and cheaper, enabling railways, bridges, and large-scale construction.
Mass production: The manufacture of large quantities of standardized goods, often using specialized machinery and assembly lines. It turned industrial capacity into affordable consumer products at unprecedented scale.
Automobile: A self-propelled road vehicle designed primarily to carry people. Its mass production became a defining application of steel, engines, and assembly-line methods.
Urbanization: The growth in the share of a population living in towns and cities. Factories and transport networks drew workers into rapidly expanding industrial cities.
First Industrial Revolution: The eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century transformation driven chiefly by mechanized textiles, coal, and steam power. It preceded this era, whose leading technologies included steel, electricity, and industrial chemistry.
Open-hearth process: A steelmaking method that refines iron in a regenerative furnace using a shallow bath of molten metal. It complemented the Bessemer process by allowing more control over steel composition.
Assembly line: A production system in which a product moves between workers or machines for successive operations. Moving work to the product helped make automobile production faster and more uniform.
Rail transport: The movement of people and goods by vehicles running on railway tracks. Steelmaking advances expanded railway networks and their carrying capacity.
Labor movement: Organizations and campaigns through which workers seek better conditions, pay, and political rights. Factory labor conditions strengthened unions and wider demands for worker protections.
Third Industrial Revolution: The late-twentieth-century shift toward electronics, computers, and information technology in production and society. It marks a later technological wave, distinct from the era of steel and electrification.