And we have so revolutionized our methods of production that we now produce seven times as much coal, fourteen times as much oil and pig-iron, twenty-two times as much copper, and forty-three times as much steel.
There were no skyscrapers in 1876, no trolleys, no electric lights, no gasoline engines, no self-binders, no bicycles, no automobiles.

There was no Oklahoma, and the combined population of Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, and Arizona was about equal to that of Des Moines.

It was in this year that General Custer was killed by the Sioux; that the flimsy iron railway bridge fell at Ashtabula; that the "Molly Maguires" terrorized Pennsylvania; that the first wire of the Brooklyn Bridge was strung; and that Boss Tweed and Hell Gate were both put out of the way in New York.
The Great Elm, under which the Revolutionary patriots had met, was still standing on Boston Common.

Daniel Drew, the New York financier, who was born before the American Constitution was adopted, was still alive; so were Commodore Vanderbilt, Joseph Henry, A.T.Stewart, Thurlow Weed, Peter Cooper, Cyrus McCormick, Lucretia Mott, Bryant, Longfellow, and Emerson.

Most old people could remember the running of the first railway train; people of middle age could remember the sending of the first telegraph message; and the children in the high schools remembered the laying of the first Atlantic Cable.
The grandfathers of 1876 were fond of telling how Webster opposed taking Texas and Oregon into the Union; how George Washington advised against including the Mississippi River; and how Monroe warned Congress that a country that reached from the Atlantic to the Middle West was "too extensive to be governed but by a despotic monarchy." They told how Abraham Lincoln, when he was postmaster of New Salem, used to carry the letters in his coon-skin cap and deliver them at sight; how in 1822 the mails were carried on horseback and not in stages, so as to have the quickest possible service; and how the news of Madison's election was three weeks in reaching the people of Kentucky.