As America modernized, the Copper Country tended to follow the trends occurring elsewhere. Rapid advances in technology, creation of steel, chemicals and electricity contributed to a changing American economy, but the mass production of consumer goods transformed America. Mechanization of industry eliminated the need of highly skilled craftsmen, churned out more goods faster than craftsmen, and because machines did not demand wages, prices of goods decreased.

As the Library of Congress’ presentation, Work in the Late 19th Century points out: By the 1870s, machines were knitting stockings and stitching shirts and dresses, cutting and stitching leather for shoes, and producing nails by the millions. By reducing labor costs, such machines not only reduced manufacturing costs but lowered prices manufacturers charged consumers. In short, machine production created a growing abundance of products at cheaper prices.

Cheaper prices led to a national shift towards consumerism, suggesting to economists and historians a new economic element: disposable income. Manufacturers could see no reason why Americans should not spend their disposable income on their products. So, manufacturers began producing consumer products. Oddly, and probably greatly appreciated by all members of society, newly available products such as deodorants, mouthwashes, toothpaste, shampoos appeared on shelves.

While the Western Federation of Miners, like other labor unions in the early 20th century, was agitating in the Lake Superior copper region in 1913, an electrical engineer named Edwin Howard Armstrong, in simple terms, invented a special circuit to transmit sound waves via long-range radio. In more technical terms, as PBS’ Who Made America? reported, Armstrong built a feedback amplifier to improve a triode valve invented by Lee de Forest. After several months of work, Armstrong designed a device that not only detected and amplified radio waves; it also generated them. His circuitry used a method called amplitude modulation (AM).

Armstrong’s genius and innovation led to the world’s first commercially licensed radio station in 1920, KDKA radio, in Pittsburgh. The station first went on the air on Nov. 2 of that year, with a broadcast of the returns of the Harding-Cox presidential election. Eight years later, in 1928, WHDF radio station began broadcasting out of the third floor of the Herman Jewelers store in Calumet.

While Armstrong was inventing modern radio, Henry Ford further awed America, if not the world, with his moving assembly line, which he installed at his factory in Highland Park in 1913. Ford’s activities had a profound impact on the Copper Country, which became a major source of frustration to the Lake Superior copper mines in the form of labor shortages.

In 1908, the first year that Ford produced his Model T, it sold for $850. In 1914, his moving assembly line reduced the price to $490. Because his plant had a ridiculously high labor turnover (work on the assembly line was more boring than most could endure), and to undermine union organizers, in 1914, Ford increased worker wages from $2.50 to $5 a day. By 1924, his Model Ts had dropped from $490 to $295; many of the millions of units sold were purchased by Copper Country residents.

Science and technology transformed life in the Copper Country. They also changed the ways Copper Country residents viewed life and the world around them. Gradually, people began to see that the mining companies, with their corporate paternalism, were not giving the people a good deal after all. Rather, corporate paternalism was a tool used by companies to maintain maximum control not only over the workplace, but also social control over workers, their families, their housing and their communities. The rapid rise of the Lower Michigan auto industry, Henry Ford’s $5-a-day plan, the rapid growth in cities due to the rise of factories, disposable income — gradually many Copper Country residents came to see the role of the mining company in their lives as more of a hindrance than a benefit. They wanted something else, something different, something more. Many came to see the demand for consumer goods as more than just modern conveniences to be desired, but as an opportunity to sell those goods to their friends and neighbors — an opportunity to get up out of the mines and into a small business of their own, independent of the corporations and their petty shift bosses, dictatorial managers and corporate leaders who placed more value on a penny saved than a life saved.

Small, independent businesses sprang up that provided little luxuries to people who could drop a nickel or a dime now, where a decade before a nickel or a dime was valuable. In Calumet, there were nickelodeons like the Royal Theatre, on Sixth Street, Warren’s Jewelry; in Lake Linden, Laurium, Hancock, Houghton, Ontonagon — all boasted modern moving picture theaters. Ice cream parlors, soda fountains sprang up throughout the Copper Country.

Another indicator of a skyrocketing economy was the impressive number of financial banks suddenly open in every town, along with increasing numbers of insurance agents and offices.

In 1916, the Houghton County Electric Company boasted of the installation of a 3,500-horsepower turbine generator at its Houghton plant, together with necessary boilers and equipment, allowing for a total capacity of 7,000 electrical horsepower.

“You know how much it costs you to operate by steam,” the company’s advertisement said in enticing undertones. “Let us show you how much you can save in investment and operating costs by using our power.”

The world outside the Upper Peninsula was indeed modernizing, advancing, moving forward like a train — starting slowly but gradually gaining speed and momentum — into the 20th century. The Copper Country’s residents were eager to board it.