The grand results that pour along this mighty age of steam įor our mountains, lakes and rivers are all a blaze of fire,Īnd we send our news by lightning on the telegraphic wires.Īpart from the technological inventions themselves, daily life in the 19th century was profoundly changed by the innovation of reorganizing work as a mechanical process, with humans as part of that process. Our fathers gave us liberty, but little did they dream The 1850 song, “Uncle Sam’s Farm,” written by Jesse Hutchinson, Jr., of the Hutchinson Family Singers, captured this sense that a unique historical rupture had occurred as a result of scientific and social progress: To them, these technologies seemed to erase the primeval boundaries of human experience, and to usher in a kind of Millennial era, a New Age, in which humankind had definitively broken its chains and was able, as it became proverbial to say, to “annihilate time and space.” Even the most important inventions of the 19th century that were not simply applications of steam or electrical power, such as the recording technologies of the photograph and the phonograph, contributed to this because they made the past available to the present and the present to the future.

Those who lived through these technological changes, felt them to be much more than technological innovations. According to some, the development and application of steam engines and electricity to various tasks such as transportation and the telegraph, affected human life by increasing and multiplying the mechanical power of human or animal strength or the power of simple tools. They were both “motive powers”: steam and electricity. There were two technological innovations that profoundly changed daily life in the 19th century.

How did innovation and technology change life in the 19th century? Answer

Inventions in the twentieth century