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Brooke Hindle (1918–2001)

Författare till Engines of Change: the American Industrial Revolution 1790-1860

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This is a beautifully illustrated and very optimistic book. As an accompaniment to the Smithsonian exhibit that bears its name, it is extremely well done. Hardly a "coffee table book," it illustrates with a good deal of enthusiasm and subtlety the transformation of American Technology from the Early Republic to the Civil War.

In Chapter I: The Industrial Revolution and Technological Change, they begin with a discussion of the "Early Foundations" for American technology in the Renaissance fascination with "spur gears, lantern candle gears, cams, etc." Shortages of wood forced England early on to use coke to fire blacksmiths' forges. "Major Areas of Technological Revolution" included changes in iron production, the rise of the steam engine, the mechanization of textile production, and precision machine work. "Related Socioeconomic Changes" included the movement from craft labor to wage labor and the concentration of production in "dark satanic mills." Housewives were burdened by new tasks, but the quality of life was rising as a result. "The Role of Great Britain" for the American Industrial Revolution was to provide a ready source of people, machines and know-how to the recently independent colonies. Though they initially tried in a mercantilistic fashion to slow the outflow of people, machines and knowledge, people worked around these constraints.

In Chapter II: The New United States: Land of Opportunities, "Material Improvement" are placed at the center of the European efforts to conquer, colonize and exploit the new world. Far away from old Europe, "Reduced Constrictions" made it easier for people to "strike out on their own," to succeed or fail in the absence of European constraints. One might add that the ideology of classical republicanism placed a premium on virtue, and here technology could be ambivalent. Yet, "Natural Resources," including abundant Land, Wood, and Iron, were certainly a factor in "fueling" the acquisitive drive of "possessive individuals." The authors point especially to the importance of wood in a memorable passage:

The technologies and the economy imported to the colonies from England and the Continent were based mostly on wood. Wood served three functions. It was, first, a material used in structures from houses to ships and for making wagons, tools, scientific instruments, and many household and work devices. Its second use was as fuel for cooking, space heating, and industrial heating, including the smelting of iron. The third use of wood was for the chemicals derived from it; these included potash (an industrial alkali), naval stores such as turpentine, tannin for tanning leather, and maple sugar. Because wood was so nearly a universal necessity, America's vast supply can hardly be overrated. (p. 35)

The abundance of wood had positive and negative effects -- its cheapness favored the shipping industry for instance, but its very cheapness made people wasteful. "Human Resources" were scare in the Early Republic, so ways of work that reduced the need for muscle power were often attractive. In this "Land of Opportunities" they do note that many suffered as a consequence of others' prosperity.

Considering in Chapter III: The Promise of Technology some of the roots of American inventiveness, they point to the experience that Americans had early on with agricultural technologies. Yeoman farmers working to make their farm implements more productive produced numerous "Anonymous Technological Improvements," of which the American ax is just one well known example. Working with "Mills and Gears," American farmers were "Farmer - Artisans" who worked in "Shop Crafts," thereby gaining familiarity and hands-on experience with the technical basics. Without the guild system, craft skills were at a low level in the US, but they were more broadly distributed. Even before the Revolution, this hands-on technical know how enabled the innovations that lead to the Pennsylvania rifle, which was regarded as the "secret weapon" of the Revolution. "The New Technology" produced both "Enthusiasm Versus Resistance," as advocates of American development ranged behind Alexander Hamilton and promoters of the Agrarian Republic took up Jefferson's cause. Yet "The Opportunity" lay in the enthusiasm for technical improvement, an enthusiasm which Jefferson did share.

"Transfer by Immigrants" of technological know how, as we learn in Chapter IV: The Transfer of Technology, was especially common from Britain. Though illegal, men like Samuel Slater came to the US passing themselves off as laborers. They brought with them the knowledge of the latest in English machinery, in Slater's case that was the knowledge of the Arkwright system of factory production. Slater also brought with him the child labor system, which he adopted to New England mores at Pawtucket. "Transfer by Importing Machines" was also a way to get cutting edge equipment into the country, but the prohibition on exports by the British government slowed this considerably until well after 1840 when it was lifted. Under the category of "Transfer Failure," they count the Newcomen Engine. Imported in 1753 by Phillip Shuyler for his deep copper mine in NJ, it failed to meet the business need for pumping water. Since there were few deep mines at that time, the Newcomen Engine was abandoned. Under "Delayed Transfer," they count the "English Iron Revolution." While the commerce with England in American Iron was duty free before the Revolution, after the Revolution the British relied on their own sources and American production fell off. "Reverse Transfer" to Britain did happen but on a limited scale, since the social factors that made labor saving machinery so useful in the US weren't there in Britain.

Chapter V: Invention and Technological Change turns the focus onto innovation, that putting of technology to productive use at which the American technical generalist excelled. In a consideration of "Invention and the Patent System," we are reminded that the very patent system was structured to reward single "inventors," no wonder that we have celebrated inventor heroes as the one's pictured in Christian Schussele's painting Men of Invention of 1836 (p. 76). "Celebrated Inventions" of the Early Republic included Eli Whitney's cotton gin and Robert Fulton's steam boat, but the stories of these "inventions" are more complicated that the way they are often told. Whitney's design of his cotton gin was so easy to copy that he spent years in the courts trying to fight these abuses. Robert Fulton actually succeeded despite the patent system, focusing instead on his partnership with Robert Livingston to obtain a monopoly on traffic on NY waterways for a period of twenty years, mooting the patent protection issue. Samuel Morse's Telegraph, another celebrated invention was hardly his work alone. As Paul Israel has shown, he benefited from participation in a community of mechanics whose work he built on and through whose feedback he was able to refine the machine he was working on. The important thing about the patent system was certainly the requirement that people build models that were kept at the patent office. This allowed people to come in and view the models and learn from them. "Tariffs" on imported manufactures became a divisive issue and "Other Government Support" to commerce remained at a low level, despite efforts of advocates such as Henry Clay. Support for the early manufactures came mostly from "Voluntary Organizations." The American Philosophical Society (APS) was founded before the revolution for the promotion of useful science (what we would today call technology). The Franklin Institute of Philadelphia held held fairs to encourage technological innovations and material improvement. Mechanics institutes were established in most major cities. "The Controversy" over the benefits of technological improvements, much of them around factory technology, continued to divide the country throughout the period of industrialization.

Rather than positing as simplistic opposition between agriculture and industrialization, in Chapter VI: Farming and Raw Materials Processing: Causes and Effects of Mechanization they explain that "farming expansion and prosperity constituted a foundation on which industrialization rested, and that technological change became important in farming development itself. "Farm Production" was overwhelmingly commercial and increasingly mechanized in the American colonies. They note that "by the 1820s mechanical reapers, threshers, grass cutters, and seed drills were numerous. Change was in the air, gut few of these devices worked satisfactorily and they were not much used." (p. 95) Much effort was given over to improving farm methods and machinery, The Berkshire Movement, spread agricultural fairs across New York and the nation to showcase improvements in farming. Though most farmers made their own plows of wood, increasingly metal plows were being developed and patented. "Food Processing," most often taking place on the farm was also widely commercial even in Colonial times. Commercial grist mills served a function throughout the colonies, where a farmer could bring grain to be ground. The mechanization of flour milling developed by Oliver Evans introduced a continuous mechanized process for flour production. By mid-century Gail Borden was producing condensed milk in cans and other foods were also preserved in foods and jars. "Industrialization grew in a symbiotic relationship with agriculture. It helped to produce the cities that put great demands, and restrictions, on farmers. Industrialization depended on increasing farming production to free labor for the factories. Farming depended upon industrialization to provide the transportation, the new and mechanized food processing implements, and the markets for farm production upon which the whole pattern of change rested." (p. 106) "Coal and Iron" production began in earnest in Pittsburg around 1815, where large supplies of bituminous coal were mined to fuel the coke reduction of ore, puddling and rolling using steam engines. The spreading use of cheap coal and the development of anthracite for "hot blast" iron reduction were aided by the growth of the railroads in the 1830s and 1840s. Iron production, railroads, and agricultural mechanization were all connected in varied and complex ways.

The new American nation, recently independent from Britain had evaded the problem of transportation with the hinterland by focusing on trade with Europe and the Caribbean, contributing to the growth of the seaport cities. In Chapter VII: Transportation and the Need for Invention, they consider the growing need to develop internal infrastructure in the Early Republic. "River Transportation" and roads "Roads" provided only the most elemental forms of transport in the Early Republic. The construction of "Canals," especially the Erie Canal completed in 1825 between Albany and Lake Erie, linked the East to the developing interior. Roads and Canals both remained expensive, however. "Steamboats" formed a major technological innovation that allowed Americans to make use of the large rivers like the Hudson, Mississippi and Missouri. By combining the existing technology of the steam engine with a monopoly on NY waterways, Robert Fulton moved the steamboat forward and made it a commercial success. It remained for "Railroads" to connect the vast interior where travel by waterway was impossible. Though experimenting with early railroad designs in the early part of the century, the birth of the American Railroad industry occurred with the import of a British locomotive steam engine called the John Bull by Robert Stevens and his Camden and Amboy Railroad in New Jersey.

The authors make it clear in Chapter VIII: The John Bull and the Rise of American Railroading that the British lead the early development of locomotive technologies. "The Camden and Amboy Railroad" took full advantage of this superior technology in 1831 when it imported the John Bull locomotive engine from the Robert Stevenson Company in England. In the late 1820s, debates raged in the New Jersey legislature over how best to encourage better connections between New York and Philadelphia. Advocates of canals and railroads were only placated when both were granted a state charter. During his trip to England in the late 1820s, Robert Stevens saw the newest locomotive called the Planet at the Robert Stevenson locomotive shops. He insisted, however, on ordering the latest and greatest -- the next generation model called the Samson, which would become the John Bull in America. "The Invention of the American Locomotive" arose out of adaptations made to the John Bull at the Camden and Amboy's locomotive shops. Within a little more than a decade, the American shops that adopted and modified this technology were selling locomotives back to England. "The Rise of the American Railroads" was based on more than the technology. It was, as Alfred Chandler has explained, an organizational and -- more precisely a management -- revolution that attended this transformation. In "Railroads and the American Industrial Revolution," the authors explain how it was that the railroads, more than any other technological invention, were the engines of change driving the American Industrial Revolution. While they extended the reach of transportation networks, they also brought extensive social and cultural changes. Annihilating time and space, they changed perceptions of time and raised fears of horrible accidents. These fears were hardly unfounded, as by the 1850s the train wreck was an all to common occurrence. the impact of the locomotive was ambiguous. "At the same time, however, that it stands as a symbol for greater speed, lower costs, and greater benefits to consumers as well as entrepreneur, it also stands for monopoly, privilege, and corruption, and the rise of a technological and corporate elite." (p. 150)

Hindle and Lubar explain the benefits to "Early American Industry" of low barriers of entry to mechanization and the flexibility of the economy in Chapter IX: The Business of Production. With a flexible banking system in the new country, people fell in and out of bankruptcy. Raising money to start new businesses, people turned often turned to family or suppliers. In order to raise greater sums of capital, businessmen had resort to the corporate form of organization. As businesses grew, drives for increasing administrative efficiency gave rise to conflict between "Factory Management and Labor." "The Development of American Industry" represented great diversity, especially in a regional sense -- with the South depending heavily on the muscle power of slaves. The scarcity of waterpower in the South discouraged manufacture there as there were fewer rivers to provide the waterpower for waterwheels. With fewer mechanized operations, the South had fewer skilled mechanics.

Chapter X: Machine Shops: Machines Make Machines discusses the development of an American machine tool industry. Many machine makers emigrated from England in the 1820s and 30s, infusing the American machine shops with much needed skilled workers. No task was technologically more complex than the manufacture of locomotives in the antebellum era. Assembled of 5,000 separate parts and requiring more than 30,000 man hours the steam locomotive was a gargantuan undertaking. "The Norris Locomotive Works" in Philadelphia was one of the world's premier builders of locomotives at mid century. Employing 600 men by 1855, they used a vast array of machines to build the locomotives. With its own forge shop for creating the forged iron from which the locomotives were build, it also had a vast machine shop powered by a central steam engine. Side lathes, panning mach9ines, slotting engines were all connected to the steam engine by means of a system of clutch, belts, pulleys and shafts. The labor of skilled machinists using precise micrometers and other tools of their trade were under the management of inside contractors who were themselves skilled machinists. Other less involved "Small Machine Shops," such as the Alfred clock factory and machine shop in Harwinton, CT were run by jacks of all trades who made rifles, carpenter's tools and blacksmith's tools from scratch. "The Machinists' Trade" was crucial to the industrialization of America. "So important," write Hindle and Lubar, "were the skills of the machinist that they became fundamental to the spread of the Industrial Revolution in America. Itinerant machinists diffused new ideas throughout the country. By moving from one industry to another, they transferred the knowledge that allowed the American Industrial Revolution to happen as quickly as it did." (p. 181) Isaac Markham of Middlebury, VT and Simeon North of Middletown, CT were two such men whose work had a widespread impact.

Chapter XI: Textiles and the Styles of American Industrialization considers the ways in which factories involved in the manufacture of textiles set the styles of American Industrialization. "Early Factories and Machines" in the mid 18th C were often set up as industries to employee poor women at spinning and weaving, such as the House of Industry in Boston. These were of limited success. Preferring to keep this work at home, colonial Americans used domestic spinning jennies or plantation spinners in the South outside the factory environment. It would take some effort and time to overcome the ideological predisposition against the factory form. "The New England Mill Village" pioneered by Samuel Slater in Pawtucket, RI began to break down the barriers to factory production by working within the New England environment and culture. "Only spinning was done at Slater's mill; weaving was still done in the homes of families throughout the area, as it had always been. Slater made sure that traditional family structure was reinforced in work at the mill." (p. 191). From Pawtucket, the mill villages spread out through the Blackstone Valley into Southern Massachusetts. By 1860 there were dozens of mill villages throughout southern New England, employing men at skilled trades and women and children at the less skilled and lower paid positions. "The Large Corporate Mills" of Lowell, MA built by the Boston Associates brought together money, machines and water power to produce integrated factories for the production of textiles. Establishing a paternalistic regime, the Lowell Mills attracted young native-born women from the farms of New Hampshire to work the machines. As T. Dublin has explained, these mills had the effect of fostering women's independence and empowering the women who worked there for brief periods before marrying. In the 40s the pace and intensity of work sped up, paternalism broke down and Irish immigrant workers began to work the mills with their families. The moral workplace thus gave way to the search for profits. "The Philadelphia Style," in contrast to the course cloth produced at Lowell focused on fancy and specialty goods at hand looms employing skilled workers. Dozens of "Southern Mills" were founded in the 40s and 50s, but at their peak in 1860, all of them combined had fewer spindles than Lowell alone.

Chapter XII: The Rise of the Factory discusses the uneven development in the move to factory production in the US in which "the transition from work in the home to the mechanized factory was not simple, and never complete. Some work remained in the household and small shop, some was done primarily in the home and partially in factories, and dome moved to factories where machines were not used." (p. 205) As Ruth Cowan has made clear, women's burden in doing house work only increased during this period and they bore the double burden of work and home and male work was increasingly centered outside the home. "The Garment Industry" that grew up in American cites relied heavily on the "sweated" labor of women who assembled the garments by sewing them at home. This form of labor was one of the most exploitative and only became worse with the introduction of sewing machines, which the women were expected to buy for themselves by the late 1850s. "The Boot and Shoe Manufacture" was similarly an industry that relied upon a putting out system where people assembled part of the product in home shops called ten footers. After the pieces of shoes were cut at the factory, the boss brought the pieces by to be assembled by the men in their ten footers. Increasingly more of the process was done in the factory, as was the case in Lynn, MA. Factory production of shoes there caused social tensions and strikes in the late 1850s. Examining "Other Industries, Other Factories" it is clear that the size of factories grew to 1860, though the absolute size of the average shop still remained well under 100 employees.

Chapter XIII: Clocks and Guns: The 'American System' of Manufacturing considers the cases of interchangeable parts production for clocks and military small arms and find that the latter actually made their product more cheaply using this method whereas the latter did so for ideological reasons. "Clocks for the Masses" traces the production of clocks from wood to brass in the 19th C. In the 18th C few clocks were made and those that were made represented a tremendous amount of effort from highly skilled craftsmen. The motivation to know the time was not high in the 18th C, but it became increasingly important to people as the 19th C progressed. As early as 1802, Eli Terry of Plymouth, CT built a clock factory with water powered machines to speed up the production of wooden clocks that he then sold through traveling Yankee peddlers. Terry continued to build machinery to automate wooden clock production and based upon his work and the work of other skilled mechanics, the CT wooden clock manufacturing industry was booming in the 1830s. In 1836, they reached a high of 80,000 wooden clocks. They achieved this high level of production by using standard templates to produce standard interchangeable parts. Falling victim to its own low prices and too rapid expansion, the wooden clock industry went into decline after this time, only to be replaced by a second brass clock industry. Starting in about 1830, CT clockmakers starting using stamped brass gears for their clocks to produce the new clocks using the same interchangeable parts approach as the wooden clock industry had. Companies like the Jerome Manufacturing Company of Derby, CT turned out 130,000 clock as year in brass by the early 1850s. Cheap clocks were affordable to almost all by that period. "The Armory System of Mass Production" developed interchangeable parts for small arms as well, though at a higher cost than the traditional system of craft production. The Army wanted the battlefield advantage afforded by interchangeable parts for quick repairs in the field. Requiring greater precision than clocks, the challenge of interchangeable parts manufacture was great as well, but the government was willing to underwrite this work. As Merritt Roe Smith explains in his Harper's Ferry, the first steps toward what would be called the "American System" were made at the Springfield Armory. By 1825 Thomas Blanchard had developed a gun stock turning lathe that was in operation there. In addition, Simeon North developed a milling machine for cutting metal parts in 1816 in his CT shop, a development that would later be taken up by David Hall at his rifle works at the Harper's Ferry Armory. Jigs, fixtures, pattern pieces and gauges replaced the handicraft work of the armory artisans as armory work became more industrialized and brought under stricter management discipline. Stringent quality controls and inspections were put in place and workmen whose weapons were found to have defects had their pay docked. As David Hounshell explained in his From the American System, the spread of the "American System" to other industries was slow and didn't really happen until after the Civil War. Though the Wheeler and Wilson Company adopted armory practice in making sewing machines in the mid-50s, they did not achieve much success until after the war when they were acquired by Singer, who had been far more successful selling their machines made with traditional craft methods.

Chapter XIV: Communitarian Experiments and the Problems of Industrialization includes discussions of "New Harmony," "The Shakers," and "Engineers' Utopias." Owen's New Harmony on the Wabash River in Illinois tried to bring a utopian socialist vision to technical development -- and ultimately failed. He was, however, an inspiration for many who sought a more just and humane approach to technology. The Shakers, founded by Mother Ann Lee in 1774 sought simplicity in life and in the design of useful technologies. Shaker chairs, flat brooms and wooden clothes pins were highly prized, though their approach to production was not well suited to the industrializing economy of the antebellum US. They contrast the utopian failure of John Etzler with the practical successes of John Roebling. Etzler sought to use renewable energy sources such as tides and solar power, but attracted only a small audience. Today he is primarily remembered through the critique of Thoreau. Roebling, by contrast, after failing in establishing an engineers' utopia in Pittsburgh, PA moved to Trenton, New Jersey and put his cable making machinery to work, thereby starting a revolution in suspension bridge construction. While both Etzler and Roebling came over on the same ship to America from their native Germany, it was Roebling who studied the ship's masts and stays which inspired his later construction of cabling. Roebling's practical approach yielded greater results than Etzler's flights of fancy.

Chapter XV: The London Crystal Palace Exhibition and the Recognition of American Technology recounts the events of the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition in London. "Technological progress especially was touted as an objective of the exhibition. Americans, more than any other people, believed that their future was tied to the new technology. It was fitting, therefore that American exhibitors did especially well at the Crystal Palace. Americans won more prizes, proportionately, than any other country." (p. 250) Manufactured goods especially, represented an industrial product of the Americans that was cheaply produced for a mass market. In contrast, the Europeans' products were of higher quality and much more ornate. Above all the Americans did best with machinery -- in particular machines for firearms production, woodworking tools and agricultural implements. Perhaps prophetically, the sailing ship America beat the British entry in the international yacht race. This fair was a "coming of age for American inventors and industrialists." In 1876, at Philadelphia, the Americans would hold their own fair. That fair, dominated by the technologies of steam, would represent (as David Nye has noted) another kind of coming of age. For the time being water power had the technical momentum behind it.

In the Epilogue: The Role of Technology, Past and Present, they considers "The Transfer of Technology" according to its appropriateness in the modern world. Pointing to Jean Gimpel's work in the third world with medieval technologies that might in fact be more appropriate to these developing economies than the technologies of the 20th Century.
… (mer)
 
Flaggad
mdobe | Jul 26, 2011 |
Gary Kulik, "A Factory System of Wood: Cultural and Technological Change in the Building of the First Cotton Mills" in Brook Hindle, ed. Material Culture of the Wooden Age (1981)

Excerpted as "A Factory System of Wood" in Gary Kornblith, ed., The Industrial Revolution in America (1998)

In the case of Slater Mill in Pawtucket, RI and other sites in the first stages of industrialization in America, there were often greater elements of continuity than change in Cotton Mill construction and operation. The major contribution made by Slater and Arkwright was the system of manufacture which the mill put in place -- "a system of interconnected machines linked together by gears, shafts and a central power source, and designed to produce a single product" --, all the major components of which were wood. When Samuel Slater introduced the first factory system to the United States in 1792 in Pawtucket, RI. The construction of this mill out of wood is an essential link to the traditions of carpenters, joiners, turners, mill wrights and pattern makers -- all workers in wood in the artisan tradition. Through the wood components, the form remained traditional while the effect of the system was revolutionary. Mills from the 1790s until the embargo fashioned themselves after the Slater mill. The impact of Slater's system was profound.

Architecturally, the mill at Pawtucket has the look of a farm building. In contrast with the British Mills, the American blended into the countryside. Instead of dark satanic mills of brick and stone, Slater's Mill (and others) employed vertical siding to take advantage of the plentiful supply of wood and short supply of labor in New England. The architecture of America's early mils evoked the tentative nature of the new form of capitalist enterprise, whereas in Britain buildings were monumental structures designed to inspire awe. Projecting an "image of sober rectitude" there was nothing out of place about the new factories. As the British empire built more imposing and monumental architecture, American mills were built to look like humble churches. Even when American mill buildings began to be constructed out of brick and stone between 1815 and 1840, the foundation they built on came out of this "Age of Wood."
… (mer)
 
Flaggad
mdobe | Jul 24, 2011 |

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