The Revolution Spreads Trivia Quiz

Answer: Samuel Slater smuggled plans for the new machines out of England.

Understandably, Britain was reluctant to share their new inventions with other countries; it was much better if they could sell their products to foreign customers! Strict laws originally forbade the exchange of machines or even blueprints of them. Sly Samuel Slater, sometimes called "Slater the Traitor", had worked in English textile mills since the age of ten, and understood the mechanics of the machines.

By the time he was twenty-one he left England for New York City, after having memorized all he could about the new technology. Andrew Jackson called him "The Father of the American Industrial Revolution".

Answer: Lowell Mill Girls

Francis Cabot Lowell built the first mill town in the United States at Waltham, Massachusetts. Females were recruited to work there, primarily because they could be paid about half the wage of a male worker. Usually between the ages of fifteen and thirty, the Lowell Mill Girls were generally daughters of New England farmers.

Although they came to work there for different reasons, many experienced financial independence for the first time, free from their fathers or husbands. It is estimated that by 1840, approximately 75% of the mill workers in America were women.

Answer: It removed the seeds from raw cotton.

Really, without the use of Whitney's cotton gin in England, industrialization would not have made progress as quickly as it did. One of the first inventions of the Industrial Revolution, the flying shuttle, could weave cloth faster. However, it created the need for a better way to make thread. Once the spinning jenny was invented to spin thread faster, there was a noticeable lack of cotton to spin into thread to make cloth. Throughout history, many cultures had attempted to find a faster way to remove the seeds from cotton.

However, by the beginning of the Industrial Revolution it was still a task largely done by hand. It is estimated that it took about ten hours for a single person to remove the seeds from a pound of cotton; two or three people operating a cotton gin could produce about fifty pounds of cotton a day! Unfortunately, it is also noted that the cotton gin created a increased the need for cheap labor (in practice, slavery) in the southern United States; it increased demand for cotton and slave labor was used to grow and pick it.

Answer: Sewing Machine

Howe was not the first person to invent a type of sewing machine, however, he improved many of the design features of the machine, and was awarded the first U.S. patent for a sewing machine that had a lockstitch design. The lockstitch used an upper and lower thread that twined together when the needle passed through a hole in the fabric. Howe's design included three features that modern sewers will recognize: a needle with an eye at the point, a shuttle to form the lockstitch, and an automatic feed. Howe also received a patent for what he called the "Automatic, Continuous Clothing Closure", but never tried to market his zipper!

Answer: Mechanical Reaper

McCormick completed a task, the development of a successful mechanical reaper, that had been started in Virginia by his father and a slave held by the family. His father, Robert, had actually applied for a patent for the machine. However, he was never able to produce a machine that ran reliably. Cyrus gained a patent for his machine in 1834, but it took six years to sell just two of them! The reaper did not work well in hilly terrain, so he moved west to Chicago, and built a factory there. Finally there was a market where his reaper would sell well!

Answer: Steel Plow

A blacksmith by trade, when John Deere moved from Vermont to Illinois, he found that the cast-iron plows used by farmers there really didn't work very well. As a young boy working in his father's tailor's shop, he remembered the importance of keeping the needles polished, and had an idea that polished steel might work better as a material for plows, and also be self-scouring if the moldboard (wedge that breaks the soil) was shaped correctly. Within four years, he had orders for 75-100 steel plows a year! Fourteen years later, by 1855, his company had sold more than 10,000 of his plows, which were known as "The Plow that Broke the Plains".

Answer: Telegraph

Sadly, Morse became interested in improving communication after discovering that his wife was not only ill, but also dead and buried by the time news of her illness reached him and he was able to travel to New Haven Connecticut from Washington, D.C. A telegraph had already been invented in 1774, but it did not have a practical design, needing twenty-six electrical wires to transmit. With the assistance of other scientists, Morse reduced that bundle to one wire, and also invented a code that would be used to spell out messages. By 1844 he had received a patent for his invention, and the first message on a line from Baltimore to Washington, D.C. was transmitted.

Answer: Muskets

Really the idea of interchangeable parts can be traced back to ancient times, and others had more recently implemented the idea when making certain types of armory. Whitney was in financial trouble (the design of the cotton gin was easy to copy and it was therefore difficult to maintain patent laws), and decided to capitalize on the demand in the U.S. for guns in the late 1790s.

The U.S. War Department, fearful of war with either Britain or France, was issuing contracts for muskets, and even though Whitney had never made one, he received a contract for the manufacture 10,000-15,000 muskets in 1798 that were to be delivered by 1800.

Although he did not deliver the arms on time (it was eight years later), and the government complained that Whitney's muskets did not compare those make in government armories, he was awarded another contract, and made 15,000 more muskets in four years.

Answer: Cumberland Road

About 620 miles long, the Cumberland Road connected the Potomac and the Ohio Rivers, and served as the first "Gateway to the West" in the United States. Originally spanning the route between Cumberland, Maryland, and ending at Wheeling, Virginia, the road was later expanded across Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.

In the 1830s the road became the first in the United States to be surfaced with the macadam process.

Answer: "Clermont"

As a young man, Fulton traveled to England with letters of introduction, which enabled him to meet people like Robert Owen and the Duke of Bridgewater, and study the designs of inventors, such as James Watt. Many Europeans were already working on the design of a steamboat, and while in France in 1803 he was able to design his first steamboat and give it a test run on the Seine River.

The steamboat, originally known as the "North River Steamboat", was met with mixed reviews after making its way to the United States, although it wasn't called "Fulton's Folly" very long! By the way, some sources say that the boat was never known as the Clermont in Fulton's time; a friend of Fulton's wrote a biography about him two years after his death, and mistakenly called his boat the "Clermont".