This Fleeting World

70 This Fleeting World
and track stimulated coal and metal production and engineering. During
the early nineteenth century many of these technologies spread to other
parts of Europe and to the United States.
A third wave of innovations occurred during the second half of the
nineteenth century. Industrial technologies spread in North America, in
other parts of Europe, and in Russia and Japan. Military humiliation at
the hands of Western nations during the 1850s and 1860s forced the
governments of Russia and Japan to realize that they had to encourage
industrialization if they were to survive, because industrial power clearly
enhanced military power. Steel, chemicals, and electricity were the most
important new technologies during this wave of the industrial revolution,
and new forms of organization brought banks and factories together in
large corporate enterprises, the largest of which were formed in the United
States. In Germany and the United States systematic scientific research
began to play an important role in technological innovation, as did large
corporations, and innovation began to be institutionalized within the
structures of modern business and government.
By the end of the nineteenth century Britain was losing its industrial
primacy to Germany and the United States: In 1913 the United States accounted
for almost 19 percent of the world’s GDP, Germany for 9 percent,
and the United Kingdom for just over 8 percent.
Subways have proven to be an efficient means of transportation in crowded cities.
This diagram is a cross-section of the Chicago subway system in the early twentieth
century.