Industrialization, technological progress, and tremendous advances in transportation and communication also touched the lives of the Transcendentalists. As large-scale, mechanized factories multiplied throughout New England, where textile manufacture thrived, Emerson, Thoreau, and their comrades could not help but observe the changes wrought by this trend. Because Transcendental philosophy espoused the spiritual and moral and denigrated the material, the Transcendentalists mistrusted technological progress and its effect on the workforce. Thoreau, for instance, wrote in the chapter of Walden titled "Economy":
As with our colleges, so with a hundred "modern improvements"; there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. . . . Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end. . . . We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. ,
The simplicity of his life at Walden Pond from 1845 to 1847 was Thoreau's proof that material progress was not necessary for a rich life.
Robert Fulton's steamboat the Clermont made a trial run from Albany to New York in 1807. In 1838, transatlantic steamship service began. Work on the Erie Canal began in 1817; the canal was opened in 1825. Other canals followed quickly. Movement westward necessitated the building of roads and bridges. The need for faster ships to accommodate trade led to the building of the first clipper ship in Baltimore in 1832. In the same year, the horsecar (the horse-drawn streetcar) was introduced in New York. Beginning in 1828, the railroad revolutionized travel in the United States. It spread rapidly and soon surpassed the canal in importance. The Fitchburg Railroad opened in Emerson's and Thoreau's Concord in 1844. The rate of railroad building was very rapid in the 1850s. The Pullman, or sleeper car, was introduced in 1859. Samuel F.B. Morse developed the telegraph in 1835 and patented it in 1840. The first successful transatlantic cable was laid in 1866.
