In broad terms, the history of United States’ Industrial Revolution is divided into two distinct periods. The first period began in the late 18th century with textile manufacturing, and its application of the steam engine. The technologies of both the textile mill, and its use of the steam engine, were transplanted from Great Britain to the United States by British immigrant and industrialist Samuel Slater.

The second period focuses on communication, electricity, steel production and the automobile.

Great Britain’s industrial revolution began in the early to mid 18th century with the invention of the steam engine. The steam engine was invented to create an efficient means of unwatering Cornish tin and copper mines, but it was soon discovered that the engine could also be applied to water transportation and powering textile mills. In the United States, the steam engine was introduced to power textile mills, then for use in mining applications.

Likewise, the evolution of steel manufacturing can also be traced back to England, in the 1740s, when Benjamin Huntsman, after several experiments, developed crucible steel, and alloy of iron and carbon, in clay pot crucibles.

Henry Bessemer, an English engineer, developed the Bessemer converter in 1856, which manufactured steel faster and cheaper.

In the United States, Curtis Grubb Hussey, Calvin Wells, Thomas M. Howe and James Cooper, of Hussey, Wells & Company, was the first American firm to successfully manufacture crucible steel. Hussey, Howe and Cooper were the principle investors in the Pittsburgh & Boston Copper Mining Company, owners of the Cliff Mine, on Keweenaw Point, and also the National Mine, in the Ontonagon District. With the copper purchased from the mining companies, Hussey built the Pittsburgh Copper Works, under the banner, C.G. Hussey & Company, with Howe as a silent financial partner.

Under Hussey’s direction, the C.G. & Hussey Company expanded from smelting and rolling copper to manufacturing crucible steel, improving the English process along the way.

It was Andrew Carnegie, however, who established the first steel mills in the U.S. to use the British “Bessemer process” for mass producing steel.

As Hussey had controlled several Upper Peninsula copper mines, Carnegie, in 1892, bought controlling interest in of the Norrie and Pabst mines in Ironwood, and also invested in Great Lake freighters and railroads to secure the complete transportation of this iron ore to his steel factories around Pittsburgh, according to a 2019 article authored by Mackenzie Martin and Larry Lapachin.

Two years later, in 1894, J.D. Rockefeller obtained controlling interest in the Lake Superior Consolidated Mines, which comprised, essentially, the iron mines of the Minesota Mesabi Range.

The first Bessemer-type steel manufactured in Michigan, though, was at the Eureka Iron Works, in Wyandotte, providing the material for railroad, stove and automobile manufacturing in Detroit.

Copper, iron and steel all made the second period of the American industrial revolution possible, and all three elements came together in the Detroit automotive industry.

While Ford is the name most people think of first when the Detroit auto industry is mentioned, Ford was not the only manufacturer, nor was he was the first. The first automobile is credited to a German designer and engineer named Carl Benz. He received a patent for his Benz Motorcar in 1885. In the U.S., however, the history of the automobile has some odd twists.

According to the Detroit Historical Society, on March 6, 1896, Charles Brady King drove Detroit’s first gasoline-powered vehicle down Woodward Avenue. Three months later, Henry Ford drove his first automobile, using engine parts he borrowed from King. It was the same year that the horse-drawn street cars were replaced with electric trolleys. Two years later, Ford organized the Detroit Automobile Company with backing from local investors, but it failed in 1902 after producing just two cars.

Meanwhile, Ransom E. Olds opened the first successful automobile factory in Lansing, in 1897. Two years later, his partner, Samuel Smith, bought the company and moved it to Detroit.

According to the Detroit Historical Society, Olds left Olds Motor Works in 1904 due to disagreements with Smith’s sons. He moved back to Lansing, where he formed the R.E. Olds Motor Car Company, using his initials, changing the name to REO Motor Car Company to avoid conflict with Olds Motor Works.

So, while Ford did not invent the automobile, nor did he invent the assembly line (he borrowed that concept from the meat packing industry), he did innovate using the moving assembly line to revolutionize how automobiles were manufactured. Ford Motor Company states that what made this assembly line unique was the movement element. Henry Ford famously remarked that the use of the moving assembly line allowed for the work to be taken to workers rather than the worker moving to and around the vehicle, as was the situation with Ransom Olds’ stationary assembly line. With Ford’s moving assembly line, the vehicle began to be pulled down the line and built step-by-step. At first it was pulled by a rope, and later it became a simple moving chain mechanism. The new process made it so that the Model T was now built in only ninety minutes. The price of a Ford dropped to $280, making them affordable to almost everyone.

In her 1979 article, Black Automobile Workers in Detroit, 1910-1930, Joyce Shaw Peterson stated that as an industry which had been growing rapidly since 1908, the auto industry had begun to receive new groups of workers.

“In fact,” Peterson wrote, “the industry had created a steady need for increasing numbers of workers and had employed large numbers of foreigners, especially Poles and southern Europeans as well as large numbers of rural and small town Americans from farming and mining areas of the Midwest.”

These included, of course, immigrant workers and naturalized American citizens from the Lake Superior copper and iron mines who sought a better life. Factories were no more dangerous than working 2,000 feet underground where at any given moment, without warning, a man could be killed under a rock fall.