Inventors & Innovations
This inventor developed a practical, long-lasting incandescent light bulb and helped establish systems for electric lighting.
Who was Thomas Edison?
This economic system relies largely on private ownership, investment, and competition in markets.
What is capitalism?
This entrepreneur made automobiles affordable to many Americans through mass production.
Who was Henry Ford?
These are the four basic inputs used to produce goods: natural resources, workers, tools or investment, and initiative.
What are the factors of production?
This name describes an era that looked prosperous on the surface but had serious problems beneath it.
What was the Gilded Age?
This device sent coded messages over wires, allowing people to communicate over long distances much faster than by mail.
What was the telegraph?
This business structure sells shares to investors and exists as a legal entity separate from its owners.
What is a corporation?
This term describes a person who starts or organizes a business, often taking financial risks.
What is an entrepreneur?
This production method moves a product from worker to worker, with each person completing a specific task.
What is an assembly line?
This belief applied “survival of the fittest” to society and was used by some to defend economic inequality.
What was Social Darwinism?
This communication invention allowed people to transmit spoken conversations over wires.
What was the telephone?
This approach combines competing companies in the same industry under one owner or control.
What is horizontal integration?
This term describes wealthy people who donated money to causes such as education, health, or the arts.
What is a philanthropist?
These workplaces brought workers and machinery together to manufacture goods on a large scale.
What are factories?
This law, passed in 1890, aimed to prohibit trusts and other combinations that restrained trade.
What was the Sherman Antitrust Act?
This steelmaking method forced air through molten iron, helping produce steel more quickly and cheaply.
What was the Bessemer process?
This approach combines different stages of production or distribution under one company, such as raw materials, manufacturing, and shipping.
What is vertical integration?
This label was used by critics for powerful industrialists they believed gained wealth through unfair or exploitative practices.
What were “robber barons”?
This trio names the traditional factors of production.
What are land, labor, and capital?
These organizations use donated funds to support public-benefit work, often through grants to other organizations.
What are charitable foundations?
These fuels, formed from ancient organic matter, include oil; drilling for this resource expanded as industry and transportation grew.
What are fossil fuels, especially petroleum or rock oil?
This hands-off approach favors limited government involvement in business.
What is laissez-faire?
This inventor and entrepreneur is associated with experiments in powered flight and the first successful controlled, sustained airplane flight.
Who were the Wright brothers?
This rapid expansion of factories, production, transportation, and business during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries transformed the U.S. economy
What was industrialization, or the explosion of industrial growth?
These combinations of companies were used to consolidate control; a large firm might also gain a monopoly by dominating a market.
What are trusts and monopolies?