When U.S. automaker Henry Ford published his autobiography, My Life and Work, in 1922, he used his chapter headings to frame a series of questions: "How Cheaply Can Things Be Made?" "Money -- Master or Servant?" "Why Be Poor?"
 

These are the very questions that have fascinated generations of American business and industrial leaders. In their drive to find answers, business people have sought to make and distribute more goods for less money and at greater profit. To a remarkable extent, they have done so.
 

Thanks to several waves of immigration, America gained population rapidly throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, when business and industry were expanding. Population grew fast enough to provide a steady stream of workers, but not so fast as to overwhelm the economy.
 

Industrial expansion was also powered by something in the American character: a strong dose of the entrepreneurial spirit. Some have traced this impulse to religious sources: the Puritan or Protestant ethic that considers hard work pleasing to God. But others have questioned whether the ruthlessness of some American businessmen, especially in the era of the "robber barons" in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is consistent with deep religious feeling.
 

In the late 18th century, American manufacturers adopted the factory system, which gathered many workers together in one place. To this was added something new, the "American system" of mass production, which originated in the firearms industry about 1800. The new system used precision engineering to transform manufacturing into the assembly of interchangeable parts. This, in turn, allowed the final product to be made in stages, with each worker specializing in a discrete task.
 

The construction of railroads, beginning in the 1830s, marked the start of a new era for the United States. The pace of building accelerated after 1862, when Congress set aside public land for the first transcontinental railroad. The railroads linked far-flung sections of the country into the world's first transcontinental market and facilitated the spread of settlements. Railroad construction also generated a demand for coal, iron, and steel -- heavy industries that expanded rapidly after the Civil War.