IHSS C2021-22

Electric Lighting Urbanization and Its Challenges - Aiden C        The light-bulb was invented in 1879 by Thomas Edison in order to serve as a replacement for candles, which were inefficient for lighting and needed to be constantly replaced. The addition of light-bulbs in large cities and homes allowed people to keep areas around them lit at all times, which would allow for full day productivity, rather then the great decrease in productivity that cities would normally see at night. Following the introduction of light-bulbs came into the general public, cities immediately jumped on them and they were installed on almost every major city street that had access to electricity. Sadly, despite how helpful this new addition was, there raised some major problems in the process of transporting electricity to the lights in order for them to run. First of all was the issue of distance, as currently, direct current technology could only travel relatively short distances. With ...

 Communication is the key to life. Without communication, it would be chaos. Communication ranges all the way back to the caveman era. The first form of communication was cave paintings and now we all have phones.  David Alter had created Telegrams. It was the first big advancement in communication.  A telegraph is a communication system that sends information by making and breaking an electrical connection. It is most associated with sending electrical current pulses along a wire with Morse code encoding. It was a big advancement that eventually led to the telephone. Alexander Graham Bell is often credited with being the inventor of the telephone since he was awarded the first successful patent. However, there were many other inventors such as Elisha Gray and Antonio Meucci who also developed a talking telegraph.  We advanced so much that we now have Phones!

           Isa Pedersen Mr. Roddy IHSS 29 April 2022 Public Transportation                 The first modes of public transportation started in the 1820s with horse drawn carriages. It was not as popular as you might think it was, it took a while to spread around the public as a popular mode of transportation. Once the horse drawn carriages were fully fledged and people started looking into other more modern modes of public transportation. The next step to this was cable cars, then rail lines, and then they created the modern way of public transportation, buses. Back in 1662 Blaise Pascal created a system of horse drawn carriages that he tested in Paris, these were called "Five-Penny Coaches". This did not catch on because barely anyone could afford these coaches. This plan quickly failed and the next model of early buses was created in 1826. In 1826 the Omnibus was created. These were no...

The first article mentioned the many issues of mass migration into urban areas. One of these problems is slums forming in cities. I found this to be very interesting as previously I thought that slums don't exist and have never existed in the US. The population of New York City was doubling every century from 1800 to 1880. At the time, New York didn't have enough resources and infrastructure to hold this many people and this much growth. The first slums in the US actually started appearing in the  1700s, also in New York. But this quantity of growth was not present at the time, and these slums really began to grow exponentially in the 1800s. Slums in New York peaked in 1900 when around 100,000 out of the 2.9 million people in New York were living in slums. These Slums started to disappear in the early 20 century when higher quality, cheaper living conditions began to be built. But this only slowed down the growth of slums. Major slums didn't disappear in New York until the ...

  Ethan Zweig Mr. Roddy IHSS April 29, 2022 History of City Public Transportation Transportation is a major part of city history. It leads people to their destination whether it’s work, restaurants, or home. Public transportation started in the 1820s in France and London with the introduction of the omnibus and a horse drawn car which could hold up to 10 people. In 1873 the city of San Francisco tested their first of many cable cars. Due to the rolling hills there, Andrew Smith Hallidie was inspired to create this form of transportation to make sure the poor horses weren’t overly exhausted by climbing up those steep hills. In 1890 the first railway in the form of a metropolitan railway on what would become the London Underground. The first rapid transit system in the United States was built a few years later in 1892 in Chicago - the “L” train still runs today. Boston, Massachusetts opened the first subway system in the U.S 1897 to avoid severe weather conditions. 1922 led to the ...

Wyatt Quillin Mr, Roddy IHSS 29 April 2022 The Rise of Skyscrapers The first skyscraper ever built was in 1885 in Chicago. It was called the Life Home Insurance building, it was only 10 stories tall and  was completely supported by a steel frame. From here, skyscrapers only started to get taller and more sophisticated. As technology improved, stronger frames could be built, resulting in taller skyscrapers. These massive towers were becoming more popular not just for their conservative use of horizontal space, but for their status. As cities were becoming more urbanized, space was becoming less and less of a resource. Because of this, builders started taking to building vertically to adapt to the denser areas. With the growing urban population, real estate prices started to increase, making skyscrapers more desirable as they could pack a lot more people in for a lot less space. Because these buildings were so impressive, businesses began using them as symbols of status and power. An...

Urbanization - Transportation Some of the aspects that contributed to the urbanization of cities in the 19th century were electrical lighting, advancement in communication and transportation, and the addition of skyscrapers. I wanted to look further into the advancement of transportation throughout the years. With the start of urbanization, trains and railroad systems became the most efficient way to travel between cities. These trains also made it easier to carry heavy amounts of cargo and were powered by coal, wood, or oil during the time. Today we definitely don't use trains as much, but they still are around. The trains of the 21st century run at an incredibly high speed and are powered electrically.  The use of trains for transportation became much less popular when cars and smaller automobiles were introduced to cities in the 1900s. Automobiles became an even more efficient way to get from place to place. They used to run on diesel, or gasoline, like most cars today, but beca...