368. Progress of Invention
The electric telegraph was now in common use . It en - abled the newspapers to tel the people what was going on as they never had done be - fore . Perhaps the invention that did as much as any one thing to make life easier was the sewing machine . Elias Howe was the first man to make a really practicable sewing machine . Other inventors improved upon it , and also made machines to sew other things than cloth , as leather . Agricultural machinery was now in common use . The horse reaper had been much improved , and countless machines had been invented to make agricultural labor more easy and economical . Hundreds of homely articles , as friction matches and rubber shoes , came into use in these years . In short , the thirty years from Jackson ＇ s inauguration to the se - cession of the Southern states were years of great progress . But this progress was confined almost wholly to the North . In the South , living in 1860 was about the same as it had been in
1830, or even in 1800.As a Southern orator said of the South ,＂ The rush and whirl of mod - ern civilization passed her by .＂
用户评论