ABSTRACT

The nineteenth century had yielded a variety of solutions to technological problems that must have seemed amazing to anyone who reflected on the matter and who had been aware of the situation of just twenty years earlier. The 1900–1930 period probably would have been a time of prosperity in the US if the new technology had done nothing more than enabled improvement in the cost efficiency of prior-existing industries. Yet, the growth of the "big four" innovation streams; automotive, electric power, telephony, and electrification of industry and homes; slowed or ceased by 1930. The important link between technology and growth in the period from 1896–1929 was the emergence of mass markets and mass production. The fundamental role of the nineteenth century's technology legacy in early twentieth-century prosperity is readily apparent in a review of new tools of industry that underpinned the prosperity.