The Second Great Awakening led to Christian conflict with the Freemasons in New York. John Hascall’s left Freemasonry and met Hiram Moore in Michigan, where Moore built his combine to solve Hascall’s harvesting problems. The combine could harvest 30 acres a day at an 80% reduction in cost of threshing. Moore wasn’t commercially successful, but his combine helped influence others who would be. The modern combine led to drastic declines in food prices and economic expansion.

Surveying is an ancient profession dedicated to accurately determining property boundaries. William Austin Burt devised the solar compass to remove interference effects from local magnetic fields and develop accurate readings. The solar compass was a complex device that did not suffer from magnetic field interference. It became the US government’s standard surveying tool after its patent expired. Michigan became a leading producer of iron ore as a result of Burt’s invention.

Propeller- propulsion was dominated by the paddlewheel technology in the early 1800s. Francis Petit Smith invented a successful screw propeller in 1835. It was lighter, increased fuel efficiency, made the boat easier to steer, and was cheaper to install. Smith advertised his propeller to the British Navy through a series of trials he conducted. Steamship technology improved, tickets got cheaper, immigration increased, and propeller design improved.

Mechanical Calculator- Humans gave been building machines to aid in calculation for thousands of years. Babbage envisioned a programmable, mechanical computer that could print tabular data accurately without error. The analytical engine would use punched cards for programming and print out results in graphs or table form. Babbage never built the machine, but it has become a topic of interest in retrospect. IBM entered the computing market and transformed it.