Innovations Throughout Chicago’s History
Chicago during the 19th century, as it is today, was booming and expanding faster than anyone in the city could handle. They had large crop plots, but very ineffective ways to harvest and transport these crops, and thus were left stagnated, waiting for the world catch up, it would seem. One piece of the puzzle came in the form of the McCormick Reaper, allowing a much faster and more efficient way of harvesting grains. Of course, Chicago was still fledgling at this time, and didn’t have the cash to spend on these fancy new farming machines, but Cyrus McCormick had a plan. Using the newly established railroad, he sent his machines over to Chicago, on good faith alone. This purchase on credit idea was what allowed Chicago access to the tools they needed to properly thrive.

But there was one last piece of the puzzle missing. They were able to harvest grain at an amazing rate, but the rate at which these grains were loaded and unloaded proved to be a monstrous bottleneck. Enter the grain elevator.

These buildings made emptying grain into rail cars a number of times faster than man ever could. Now with these innovations in place, the agricultural industry of Chicago boomed as they were able to bring the full yield of their crops to practically anywhere in the nation. With so many crops being grown, packed, and moved, there was a need for balance within the agricultural market. This need was taken up by the Chicago Board of Trade, ensuring that wheat prices were kept stable, and that the farmers were kept honest about their crop yields and profits. This opened the door for The Chicago Future’s Market, where people could openly buy and trade agricultural stocks, essentially. The better a farm did, the more money the shareholders received as a result.
With growth of the railroads in Chicago, came growth of an unsuspected commodity at the time, mail order items. Aaron Montgomery Ward opened the first mail order company that would become ‘giant.’ The ability to order products through the mail, rather than taking a carriage to the store and hauling back whatever you bought would be especially enticing to those who would have to haul those things long distance. Groceries and such were easy to just carry back, but furniture or anything bulky? Forget about it. So who is living out in a field, isolated from civilization by a good margin, and is rich enough to buy big ticket items semi-regularly? The exact type of people who driving Chicago’s economy, Farmers.
For those who live in civilization though, there was something else needed to grasp the business of the consumer, so Mr. Montgomery Ward instilled a new policy within his business,which is now a practice that we’ve grown accustomed to, “satisfaction guaranteed or your money back.” This meant that clothes that didn’t fit, items that were defective, or things you just regretted buying could be returned for a refund. With companies Montgomery Ward & Co and Marshall Field now able to take full access of the public rail system, all sorts of goods can be shipped from one end of the US to the other.

The lumber industry in Chicago was one of the biggest money makers for the city in the 1800’s. Due to some lucky geography, Chicago is located right near large forested areas in the Upper Great Lakes region, and also happens to be a large trading center in the nation. The problem was that much of the lumber would come by boat through river travel, and there was no direct access to the lake that could direct that traffic to Chicago. In 1836, a solution to that problem began being built largely by Irish immigrants, and that solution was the Illinois-Michigan(I-M) Canal. In 1848, the canal was finished, and Chicago recorded that they had doubled the amount of lumber they moved through the city the previous year.

Meat packing and processing has a very rich history in Chicago, as well as IIT. One of the first meat packing pioneers, Philip Armour, was responsible for the boom in the meat packing business, focusing his efforts mainly on pork. His method for butchering a hog was an assembly line fashion, where each man in the line had a different cut to make, or piece to remove. This not only greatly increased the amount of meat one factory could produce in a day, but it also ensured that every part of the pig was not wasted, leaving inedible parts to different industries such as glue from the hooves, and gelatin from the fat. Even the undesirable meat products such as skin, intestines, and loose meat chunks were scraped together to make sausages.

- https://www.thoughtco.com/mccormick-reaper-1773393
- http://www.american-historama.org/1881-1913-maturation-era/grain-elevators.htm
- https://www.ciadc.org/news/2016/4/7/field-trip-crab-tree-farms
- http://www.demimonde.com/2010/05/21/mail-order-catalogs-patent-medicines-and-the-birth-of-american-consumerism/
- http://www.walkingwithawareness.com/pictureshenn.htm
- https://stravaganzastravaganza.blogspot.com/2011/04/meat-packing-industry-in-united-states.html