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Before Eli Whitney's idea came along, every musket was handmade, unique, and took days to make. If a part of the gun broke, someone had to spend time hand-making a new part for that gun. He decided to help speed up the process and have guns manufactured and make them identical. He thought interchangeable parts would save everyone time and money. He went to Washington D.C to pitch his idea, and officials thought it was a dumb idea until he demonstrated how the factories would do it. (Faster, more efficiently)

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In 1764, someone named James Hargreaves created an invention called the spinning jenny. The spinning jenny helped speed the process of making thread with a spinning wheel. It was able to spin several threads at a time.

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During the War of 1812, a man named Francis Cabot Lowell had an idea to improve British textile mills. He knew that in Britain they had different factories for spinning thread and weaving it into cloth. He thought it would be a good idea for both things to be done under one roof. He created a mill in Waltham, MA. This mill had "all the machines needed to turn raw cotton into finished cloth." When he died, his partners created a mill town and named the town after him. By 1821, five farm families lived in Lowell, Massachusetts. In 1836, up to 10,000 people lived there. Visitors described the houses as neat, snug, and nicely carpeted.

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The hours spent working at Lowell Mills were long. People had to work 12 hours every day, six days of the week.

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In 1825, Jethro Wood decided to start manufacturing an iron plow that would have replaceable parts. A man named John Deere used Wood's invention and improved it by creating a steel plow that could be pulled by a horse, rather than an ox.

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Some people needed to work in the new mills. The company would hire young women known as Lowell girls. The girls would work in the factories for a few years, and then come home so they could get married. Parents used to get concerned about sending their young daughters off into this strange place. The companies created "boarding houses" and set up rules to keep the women safe. In 1842, Charles Dickens visited the mill and the Lowell girls, and he was very impressed.

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In 1844, a man named Samuel F. B. Morse got a patent to create a telegraph. It was going to send electrical signals across a wire. He also created the morse code, a system of communication that used dots, dashes, and spaces. The Congress gave him funds to set this up and run a wire from D.C to Baltimore. He did it on May 24, 1844.

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In 1846, Elias Howe made a sewing machine. After a few years, someone else built off this idea. His name was Isaac Singer. Because of their machine, people could make multiple shirts in the same amount of time it would to take to handmake a shirt.

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Because of urbanization, cities were growing, and more people wanted to live in them. There were no sewers, and dirt roads turned into mud when it rained. Garbage and sewage leaked into bodies of water, causing it to become polluted. An epidemic of cholera killed thousands of people.

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In the 1800's, people didn't consider child labor cruel. 7 year old children worked at the factories. They were small, which made them useful for squeezing in between the machines.