%321.  Mechanical Inventions.%—­The introduction of the steamboat and the railroad, the great development of manufactures, the growth of the West, and the immense opportunity for doing business which these conditions offered, led to all sorts of demands for labor-saving and time-saving machinery.  Another very marked characteristic of the period 1825-1840, therefore, is the display of the inventive genius of the people.  Articles which a few years before were made by hand now began to be made by machinery.

Before 1825 every farmer in the country threshed his grain with a flail, or by driving cattle over it, or by means of a large wooden roller covered with pegs.  After 1825 these rude devices began to be supplanted by the threshing machine.  Till 1826 no axes, hatchets, chisels, planes, or other edge tools were made in this country.  In 1826 their manufacture was begun, and in the following year there was opened the first hardware store for the sale of American-made hardware.

The use of anthracite coal had become so general that the wood stove was beginning to be displaced by the hard-coal stove, and in 1827 fire bricks were first made in the United States.  It was at about this time that paper was first made of hay and straw; that boards were first planed by machine; that bricks were first made by machinery; that penknives and pocketknives were first manufactured in America; that Fairbanks invented the platform weighing scales; that chloroform was discovered; that Morse invented the recording telegraph; that a man in New York city, named Hunt, made and sold the first lock-stitch sewing machine ever seen in the world; that pens and horseshoes were made by machine; that the reaping machine was given its first public trial (in Ohio); and that Colt invented the revolver.

%322.  Condition of the Cities.%—­Yet another characteristic of the period was the great change which came over the cities and towns.  The development of canal and railroad transportation had thrown many of the old highways into disuse, had made old towns and villages decline in population, and had caused new towns to spring up and flourish.  Everybody now wanted to live near a railroad or a canal.  The rapid increase in manufactures had led to the occupation of the fine water-power sites, and to the creation of many such manufacturing towns as Lowell (in Massachusetts) and Cohoes (in New York).  The rise of so many new kinds of business, of so many corporations, mills, and factories, caused a rush of people to the cities, which now began to grow rapidly in size.

[Illustration:  New York in 1830 (St. Paul’s Chapel, on Broadway)]

This made a change in city government necessary.  The constable and the watchman with his rattle had to give place to the modern policeman.  The old dingy oil lamps, lighted only when the moon did not shine, gave place to gas.  The cities were now so full of clerks, workingmen, mechanics, and other people who had to live far away from the places where they were employed, that a cheap means of transportation about the streets became necessary.  Accordingly, in 1830, an omnibus line was started in New York.[1] It succeeded so well that in 1832 the first street horse-car line in America was operated in New York city.