Abraham Lincoln had no way of knowing that his world was changing so rapidly as he grew up in a frontier time warp. Nine years before Lincoln was born, Alessandro Volta had discovered how to create electricity, which would change the world much more dramatically than steam had done. When Lincoln was five, the circular saw was invented. By the time he was twenty, the trickle of technological change had swelled into a torrent:  the electric motor, photographic negatives, acetelyne, carpet power looms, rubber, ozone, thermodynamics, the hydroelectric crane, the first form of an electric light bulb, rayon, tungsten steel, the passenger elevator, the lawnmower, electrical incandescent light, the practical storage battery, and the discovery of petroleum in Titusville, Pennsylvania, and the subsequent oil boom. All of these represent just a few of the inventions and discoveries that would revolutionize Lincoln’s world during his lifetime.

When Lincoln was born, America was almost totally an agricultural nation. But technology began to change there, too. The cotton gin (1793), the Deere steel plow (1833), the McCormick reaper (1834), and the grain elevator (1842) would make seismic changes in farm productivity.

Changes at Home

The home life of Mary Todd, the future Mrs. Lincoln, would change, too. During her lifetime came the development of the icebox (1803), the canning process (1810, 1819) and Mason canning jars (1858), and the sulfur match (1827). With the sulfur match it was no longer necessary to keep a fire burning day and night. Now a fire could be started whenever anyone wanted one. More inventions that transformed domestic life during this period were Howe’s sewing machine (1843), Singer’s continuous-stitch sewing machine (1851), and the cold-storage machine. And what a difference a simple little thing like a safety pin (1849) would make in a mother’s life!

For company and special occasions, party hostesses could now offer Ghirardelli’s chocolate (1851), potato chips (originally called “Saratoga chips,” 1853), strawberry shortcake (1855), and dessert out of a hand-cranked ice cream machine (1846); children could enjoy chewing gum (1848).

Customs and fashions were changing as well. At the dinner table, the two-pronged fork was changing to four prongs, and good manners required not using it with the left hand anymore but moving it to the right.

In 1800, only eighteen years before Mary Todd’s birth and for the first time in fashion history, a shoe for the right foot was contoured differently from one for the left foot. Trousers began to replace breeches in Paris by 1821, and by 1823, men were transitioning to trousers in America as well. In 1830, stiff white collars would begin to make men’s social occasions miserable, while in the same year it became fashionable for women’s sleeves to expand enormously. During the 1850s, women sometimes dared to wear those scandalous items of attire called “bloomers.” More prosaically, in California’s mining camps, more and more men were wearing Levi Strauss’s utilitarian creation—jeans.