What was robber barons vs captains of industry

Factories became an assemblage of unskilled laborers performing simple and repetitive tasks under the direction of skilled foremen and engineers. Machine shops, comprised of highly skilled workers and engineers, grew rapidly. The number of unskilled and skilled workers increased as their wage rates grew.

Railroads gave rise to the development of modern management techniques, such as the use of clear chains of command, statistical reporting, and complex bureaucratic systems. Railroad companies systematized the roles of middle managers and set up explicit career tracks.

They hired young men at age 18—21 and promoted them internally until a man reached the status of locomotive engineer, conductor, or station agent at age 40 or so. Career tracks were offered to skilled blue-collar workers and white-collar managers, starting in railroads and expanding into finance, manufacturing, and trade.

Together with rapid growth of small business, a new middle class was rapidly growing, especially in northern cities. Extensive national networks for transportation and communication were created.

The corporation became the dominant form of business organization, and a managerial revolution transformed business operations. By the beginning of the s, the United States had the highest per capita income and industrial production in the world, with per capita incomes double those of Germany and France, and 50 percent higher than those of Britain.

The telephone and electric lightbulb are perhaps the two most influential nineteenth-century inventions. Examine the advent of such late nineteenth-century inventions as electricity, the telephone, and the lightbulb. Alexander Graham Bell is commonly credited as the inventor of the first practical telephone. His work culminated in one of the most profitable and contested of all nineteenth-century patents.

After traversing the wire, these currents passed through the receiver, which consisted of an electromagnet in a tubular metal can that had one end partially closed by a thin circular disc of soft iron. When the undulatory current passed through the coil of this electromagnet, the disc vibrated, thereby creating sound waves in the air. The first long-distance telephone call was made on August 10, , by Bell from the family homestead in Brantford, Ontario, to his assistant located in Paris, Ontario, some 10 miles away.

The telephone was instrumental to modernization and labor. It aided in the development of suburbs and the separation of homes and businesses, but also became the reason for the separation between women occupying the private sphere and men in the public sphere. This would continue to isolate women and the home.

Women were regarded as the most frequent users of the telephone. As a means of liberation, it enabled women to work in the telecommunications sector as receptionists and operators. The autonomy was celebrated as women were able to develop new relationships and nurture preexisting ones in their private lives.

Social relations are essential to the access and usage of telephone networks. Most of the inventions produced there were legally attributed to Edison, though many employees carried out research and development under his direction.

Edison did not invent the first electric lightbulb, but rather the first commercially practical incandescent light. Many earlier inventors had previously devised incandescent lamps, including Henry Woodward and Mathew Evans. Farmer, William E. These early bulbs had an extremely short life, were expensive to produce, or drew a high electric current, making them difficult to produce on a large commercial scale.

By , Edison had produced a new concept: a high resistance lamp in a very high vacuum, which would burn for hundreds of hours. While earlier inventors had produced electric lighting in laboratory conditions, dating back to a demonstration of a glowing wire by Alessandro Volta in , Edison concentrated on commercial application.

He was able to sell the concept to homes and businesses by mass-producing relatively long-lasting lightbulbs and creating a complete system for the generation and distribution of electricity. Electric lighting in factories greatly improved working conditions, eliminating the heat and pollution caused by gas lighting, and reducing the fire hazard to the extent that the cost of electricity for lighting often was offset by the reduction in fire insurance premiums.

Electric light was much brighter than that of oil or gas lamps, and there was no soot. Although early electricity was very expensive compared to today, it was far cheaper and more convenient than oil or gas lighting. In and , Michael Faraday discovered the operating principle of electromagnetic generators. The improvements in electrical-generation technology increased the efficiency and reliability greatly in the nineteenth century.

The first magnetos only converted a few percent of mechanical energy to electricity. By the end of the nineteenth century, the highest efficiencies were more than 90 percent. In the early days of commercial electric power, transmission of electric power at the same voltage as used by lighting and mechanical loads restricted the distance between generating plant and consumers.

In , generation was with direct current DC , which could not easily be increased in voltage for long-distance transmission. Due to this specialization of lines and because transmission was inefficient for low-voltage high-current circuits, generators needed to be near their loads. George Westinghouse became an adversary of Edison when he promoted the direct current DC for electric power distribution instead of the more easily transmitted alternating current AC system invented by Nikola Tesla and promoted by Westinghouse.

Unlike DC, AC could be stepped up to very high voltages with transformers, sent over thinner and cheaper wires, and stepped down again at the destination for distribution to users. The problem with DC was that power plants could only deliver DC electricity economically to customers within about one and a half miles about 2. The war against AC involved Edison in the development and promotion of the electric chair using AC as an attempt to portray AC as having greater lethal potential than DC.

Edison continued to carry out a brief but intense campaign to ban the use of AC or to limit the allowable voltage for safety purposes. AC eventually replaced DC in most instances of generation and power distribution, enormously extending the range and improving the efficiency of power distribution.

Though widespread use of DC ultimately lost favor for distribution, it exists today primarily in long-distance high-voltage direct current HVDC transmission systems. Lochner v. Josephson alleged that like the German antecedents, American big businessmen amassed huge fortunes immorally, unethically, and unjustly.

The theme was popular during the Great Depression, a time of public scorn for the abuses of big business. Robber barons were contrasted with " captains of industry ," a term originally used in the United Kingdom during the Industrial Revolution describing a business leader whose means of amassing a personal fortune contributes positively to the country in some way.

This might have been through increased productivity, expansion of markets, providing more jobs, or acts of philanthropy. Some nineteenth-century industrialists who were called "captains of industry" overlap with those called "robber barons," however. These include people such as J.

Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, Andrew W. Mellon, and John D. The positive term was coined by Thomas Carlyle in his book, Past and Present. John Davison Rockefeller was an American industrialist and philanthropist. He was the founder of the Standard Oil Company, which dominated the oil industry and was the first great U. Rockefeller revolutionized the petroleum industry and defined the structure of modern philanthropy.

In , he founded the Standard Oil Company and aggressively ran it until he officially retired in As kerosene and gasoline grew in importance, Rockefeller's wealth soared, and he became the world's richest man and first American worth more than a billion dollars. Adjusting for inflation , he is often regarded as the richest person in American history.

Andrew Carnegie was a Scottish-American industrialist who led the enormous expansion of the American steel industry in the late nineteenth century. Leland Stanford was truer to the name robber baron than many others. Andrew Carnegie was a great business man by the end of his life but there are some minor details of his earlier life that show his cons. The purpose of Carnegie Steel made it possible for the east and west to unite in the construction of more railroads and transportation of goods.

During that time he led his workers into intense labor and decreased pay which encouraged them to stand up for themselves to a strike that ended in many fatalities. Andrew Carnegie made mass impact to the United States through vertical integration, implementing new technology to industry like the Bessemer process and later in life giving his wealth to the.

In conclusion, Carnegie was not a robber baron; he was a captain of industry. His business tactics, successful monopoly on steel, and philanthropy demonstrate this as well. The Captains of Industry were certainly one of the most important factors in the development of United States in the period directly after the Civil War.

While there is some merit to the argument that the industrial leaders were Robber Barons that did more harm than good, their contributions to American society clearly outweigh those negatives. The Captains of Industry quite literally revolutionized the American way of life that gave the U. This was made possible due to the emergence of corporations in areas such as finance, steel, oil, and railroads. When these men combined with other factors, such as the mechanization of agriculture, immigration, migration,.

Andrew Carnegie was a wise man who gave motivational speeches of how he got to where he was. I have known millionaires starving for lack of the nutriment My aspirations take a higher flight.

Instead of the rags to riches story, Morgan, born into a wealthy family, was given the financial world to conquer. Steel, General Electric and other major corporations while using his influence to help stabilize American financial markets during several economic crises.

Capitalism, America 's new economic system, depended on competition and played a huge role in the overall process. The prison-industrial complex is a corrupt political system that consists of overpowered politicians whose sole ambition is exploiting poor, uneducated, and under-privileged Americans to make money. The prison system has been proven to be ineffective, and costly waste of resources.

By referring to industrialists like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Captains of industry, however, were often philanthropists. They made their wealth — and used it — in a way that would benefit society, such as providing more jobs or increasing productivity. Born in , John D. Rockefeller became one of the richest men in the world as the founder of the Standard Oil Company. Andrew Carnegie served as a great example of an American rags-to-riches story. Born to a poor Scottish family, he and his parents immigrated to the U.

He built his fortune by investing in the steel industry and became the owner of Carnegie Steel Company, which by was the largest steel company in the world. Despite some criticism of how some workers at Carnegie Steel were treated, Carnegie himself was extremely active in terms of philanthropy.

At face value, Morgan contributed greatly to American industry. He also created the first billion-dollar company, U.

At one point in his life, he was a board member of as many as 48 corporations. However, Morgan engaged in some unethical and anticompetitive practices to ward off competition. For example, he was believed to head a money trust that controlled the banking industry and was commonly considered a figurehead of Wall Street.