Incidentally this decade saw the completion of the Brooklyn Suspension Bridge in 1883, and the Great Forth Bridge in 1890.
1891-1900
The last decade of the Nineteenth Century gave us Parson’s steam turbine (1891) and Curtis’s steam turbine (1896); also Rudolf Diesel’s heavy-oil engine.
Langley’s model for a motor-driven airplane was built in 1896 and actually flew. Santos-Dumont made his first ascension in a dirigible in 1898, and Count Friedrich von Zeppelin built his first rigid dirigible in 1900.
J. B. Holland built a steam-driven submarine, and Simon Lake constructed the first submarine to be driven by an internal combustion engine.
This decade was largely devoted to the development of the automobile, which gradually evolved into a truly commercial machine. About 1900, Benjamin Holt invented the “caterpillar” tractor. The decade also saw the invention of the Lanston “monotype,” and Henry Wise Wood’s “autoplate” machine which revolutionized stereotyping.
In 1899 William Draper brought out a loom with an automatic shuttle-changing mechanism. Hulett invented the automatic ore unloader in 1898. Improvements were also made in automatic machine tools. J. E. Gleason improved the Bilgram gear cutter in 1898, and at the close of the century Taylor and White brought out their high-speed cutting tools which revolutionized machine tools.
The decade was also remarkable for the invention of X-rays, wireless telegraphy, and certain chemical processes, none of which really belong in this summary.