Common in all industries was the consumption and high use of electricity. The United States strived to find a cheap and efficient source of electricity to power its companies. Oil and the invention of the dynamo greatly aided industries need for power.

After ten years the trust was dissolved by a court decision in Ohio. The companies that had made up the trust later joined in the formation of the Standard Oil Company (New Jersey), since New Jersey had adopted a law that permitted a parent company to own the stock of other companies. It is estimated that Standard Oil owned three-fourths of the petroleum business in the U.S. in the 1890s.

This interaction of various companies initiated the trend of combination, which would continue through the rest of the Nineteenth Century. In 1850, the New York Central Railroad Company was formed by the merging of a dozen small railroads between the Hudson River and Buffalo. Single companies had begun to extend their railway systems outside of the local domain. Between 1851 and 1857, the federal government issued land grants to Illinois to construct the Illinois Central railroad. The government made the growth of one of the largest companies in the nation possible.

Some of his inventions were improvements on other inventions, like the telephone. Some of his inventions he deliberately tried to invent, like the light bulb and the movie projector. But some inventions he stumbled upon, like the phonograph. Of all his inventions, Edison was most proud of the phonograph.

 Consolidation- central control and rational organization

Andrew Carnegie was an American who owned industries and was charitable. At age 33 he had an annual income of $50,000. He said, "Beyond this, never earn, make no effort to increase fortune, but spend the surplus each year for benevolent purposes."

By 1872 Standard Oil had purchased and controlled nearly all the refining firms in Cleveland, plus two refineries in the New York City area. Before long the company was refining 29,000 barrels of crude oil a day and had its own shop manufacturing wooden barrels. The company also had storage tanks with a capacity of several hundred thousand barrels of oil, warehouses for refined oil, and plants for the manufacture of paints and glue.

The earliest railroads constructed were horse drawn cars running on tracks, used for transporting freight. The first to be established and built was the Granite Railway of Massachusetts (1826), that ran approximately three miles. The first regular carrier of passengers and freight was the Baltimore and Ohio railroad, completed on February 28, 1827. It was not until Christmas Day, 1830, when the South Carolina Canal and Railroad Company completed the first mechanical passenger train, that day the modern railroad industry was born. This industry would have a profound effect on the nation in the coming decades, often determining how an individual lived his life.

With the Civil War, production of new railroads fell dramatically. At the same time, however, usage of this means of transportation increased greatly. By the conclusion of the war, the need for an even more diverse extension of railways was extremely apparent.

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2876
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page double spaced)