Introduction

This is the story of how major changes in technologies affected the goods and services required for American life and health from colonial times to the present day.   As used here, technology means the materials, tools, machines (complex tools) and processes used in the production chain that ends with those consumable goods and services that comprise essential living standards; that is, the quantity and quality of food, drink, clothing, shelter, medicine and health care available to the average family in an average populated area.   Remote and isolated populations, e.g., pioneers, must do with much less.   Not discussed is the vast and complex story of why and how these living standards are distributed among various groups of Americans so that some have better and more life and health than others.   Nor is there any discussion of strife between labor and capital, an immense subject better told in other places.

Technologies affect living standards in three ways: (1) They create goods and service that people want, but don't have.   Today's transportation modes and disease cures did not exist in early America.   (2) They improve the quality of goods and services that people already have.   Clothing and shelter today are more comfortable and longer-lasting than formerly.   (3) They increase the availability of goods and services to more people by reducing the effort, waste, and cost to produce them.   More food, drink and health care are available to a greater proportion of the U.S. population people today than in earlier times.

Technological changes are not the only means to improve living standards, of course.   A society might use more of the existing technologies, e.g., build more roads, bridges, iron furnaces, turbines and houses.   It can put more idle people to work and teach them to work more efficiently.   It can use more of its existing resources, like land, trees, minerals and water with the existing technologies.   In addition to the existing technologies and resources, changing work habits (e.g., more leisure and less work), improved business organization, e.g., vertical integration, new government regulations, tariffs, and extended education affect living standards.   This study is concerned with the major technologies, invented or discovered, in the United States or in foreign countries, that affected American essential living standards significantly throughout U.S. history.

Improvement in living standards is not inevitable because of countervailing events: economic depressions, wars, resource depletion, environmental pollution, product substitution (replacement of one product by another), and more.   The history of different industries, work groups, countries, regions, and cultures shows that living standards do not always improve, at least relative to other countries, regions, cultures and occupations.   In the Middle Ages around 1200 C.E., the countries in the Middle East had more advanced technologies and were more prosperous than those in Europe; today, they are not.   In the U.S.A. before the end of World War II (1945), the northeast and midwest regions, then known as the "industrial heartland", but now known as the "rust belt", had higher average incomes than other U.S. regions; today they do not.   Horses and blacksmiths were replaced by tractors and machinery where producers and consumers benefited from the changes, but horse breeders and blacksmiths did not. Therefore, the story of changes in technologies has morals.   It is a tale worth telling.