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Edwin Drake drills the first oil well in Titusville, Pennsylvania.
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After about six years of manual labor, the last golden spike was driven in Promontory, Utah. The completion was celebrated by a ceremony when the golden spike was driven in.
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Rockefeller started the Standard Oil company with his brother, William Rockefeller, Henry Flagler, and others in Cleveland, Ohio. By 1882 he had a near monopoly which, among his other business practices, resulted in anti- trust laws.
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Alexander Graham Bell received his patent on this day, and three days later successfully tested the invention. However, there were many others( Elisha Gray, Antonio Meucci and Thomas Edison) who claimed to have invented the telephone first.
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President Rutherford B. Hayes had the telephone installed in the Whites House’s telegraph room, even though the technology new so they had limited uses for it.
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Thomas Edison perfected a high resistence, incandescent electric light bulb in his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey. It worked by passing electricity through a thin platinum filament in the glass vacuum bulb, which delayed the filament from melting
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Operators of the new railroad lines needed a new time plan that would offer a uniform train schedule for departures and arrivals, so they introduced four standard time zones for the continental United States which offered greater efficiency in production, safety, and scheduling.
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The first electric trolley line was invented in Richmond, Virginia and was called the Richmond Union Passenger Railway.
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The Sherman Antitrust Act was the first federal act to outlaw monopolistic business practices and regulated competition among enterprises by prohibiting contracts, combinations, or conspiracies “in the restraint of trade or commerce”.
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In Downtown, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Carnegie founded his steel company, and eventually monopolized the industry in 1897 by controlling all the levels of production(distribution, finance, etc).
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J.P. Morgan founded U.S. Steel by combining Carnegie Steel Company, the Federal Steel Company and the National Steel Company. This Became the first billion dollar company.
