“The American Industrial Revolution” in Companion to American Technology edited by Carroll Pursell. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2005, pp. 31-51. more

CafC02.fm Page 31 Tuesday, August 10, 2004 5:21 PM CHAPTER TWO The American Industrial Revolution JAMES C. WILLIAMS Halfway through the twentieth century, American sociologist Henry Pratt Fairchild (1950) observed that United States Census enumerators in 1900 counted 23 persons who had been alive when the first Census was taken in 1790. He speculated about the extraordinarily fascinating times through which these centenarians had lived: “This little handful of individuals had not only shared in the growth of one of the greatest nations in history, from its birth to its late adolescence, but, even more, their lifetime had also covered a century [in] which . . . the availability of vast stretches of unexploited land [converged] with brand-new, and incredibly efficacious, instrumentalities for getting things out of the land and fitting them for human use” (pp. xi, xvi–xvii). They had lived, Fairchild rightly declared, through an age of striking technological change. The great societal transformation known as the Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain, where canals built during the late eighteenth century vastly improved transportation. This accelerated the change from a traditional agrarian and artisan society to one based on manufacturing and machine-made goods, a change already underway in textile production. At the same time, coal replaced wood as fuel, technological innovations occurred in iron production and use, improvements in precision machining of wood and metal set the foundation for the machine tool industry, and James Watt (1736–1819) invented a steam powered engine in 1769 that eventually freed manufacturers from relying on waterpower and opened up enormous opportunities in locomotion. Despite the War of Independence and subsequent hostile relations between Great Britain and the new United States, the Americans shared in the benefits of Britain’s technological changes. As colonists, they had years of experience importing tools, machines, and the people who made and used them. Therefore, even though British legislation in 1785 prohibited the export of textile machinery, steam engines, and other new machines, “the Americans were well positioned,” note historians Hindle and Lubar (1986, p. 25), “to import the Industrial Revolution from their former mother country.” All they needed was the motivation to do so, which their location and geopolitical situation in the world readily provided. America in 1800 In 1800, the United States was a quiet, pre-industrial nation comprised largely of white subsistence farmers, who were hostile to aristocracy, supportive of equality, and CafC02.fm Page 32 Tuesday, August 10, 2004 5:21 PM 32 JAMES C. WILLIAMS independent of character. It operated under a new and untested political system, an experiment in democratic republicanism that some Europeans thought was teetering and which the Federalists from whom Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) had just captured the presidency already felt had collapsed. Yet, the country was remarkably rich in natural resources which had a potential that was, if not infinite, huge, and the ambitions and energies of many of its people churned as if awaiting some great thing. Between 1795 and 1797, the Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt spent thirty months in America, visiting from Pennsylvania to New England. Wherever he went, he met people on the move, discovering that the idea of being permanently attached to a piece of land, so highly valued by European peasants, here signified a lack of spirit. He concluded that the United States was “a country in flux. . . . [T]hat which is true today as regards its population, its establishments, its prices, its commerce will not be true in six months” (as cited in Appleby 2000, p. 6). Historian Joyce Appleby declares that for the generation of Americans born after the War of Independence and the adoption of the Constitution, “national goals cemented . . . personal ambitions to an imagined national enterprise that vindicated democracy in a world of monarchies.” The energies of these Americans and their children led Michel Chevalier, a French visitor in the 1830s, to report that in the United States “all is circulation, motion, and boiling agitation.” “Experiment follows experiment; enterprise follows enterprise” (as cited in Appleby 2000, p. 7). Chevalier visited the United States in the midst of a market revolution that stemmed from a focus on economic growth, which most Americans believed essential to national survival. Nationalist leaders such as Alexander Hamilton fostered this by strengthening public credit and trade during the 1790s, whereas the egalitarian Jefferson fostered it by seeking to expand the agrarian foundation of the country. Historian Pursell (1995, p. 36) remarks: “The calculus of success was implicit. To preserve . . . liberty and ensure prosperity, the economy had to grow.” Economic growth depended on population increase, which a remarkably high fertility rate plus immigration provided over the next one hundred years, and it required the progressive exploitation of natural resources, the availability of which steady and rapid expansion across the continent seemed to guarantee in perpetuity. Since the technologies available to use them defined natural resources, America’s “well-being and very survival depended on a powerful technological base.” Transportation and Communication Time, distance, rivers, mountains, and topography greatly occupied Americans living in 1800. The country occupied an area roughly a thousand miles by a thousand miles, its boundaries stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River and from the Great Lakes and St Lawrence River almost to the Gulf of Mexico. Four nations the size of France, Europe’s largest, could fit into it and have room left over. Five million three hundred thousand non-Native Americans, of which 17 percent were enslaved, occupied the thinly populated country. Two-thirds of them lived within 50 miles of the Atlantic tidewater, while only a half million lived west of the Appalachian CafC02.fm Page 33 Tuesday, August 10, 2004 5:21 PM THE AMERICAN INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 33 Mountains. Surrounded by the empires of Spain and Great Britain, historian Ambrose (1996, pp. 51–2) observes: “it was not clear the country could hold on to its existing territory between the Appalachians and the Mississippi. . . .” The Whiskey Rebellion in the 1790s had shown that Americans living west of the Appalachians “were already disposed to think of themselves as the germ of an independent nation that would find its outlet to the world marketplace . . . by the Ohio and Mississippi river system to the Gulf of Mexico.” During his presidency, Thomas Jefferson, had to nip secessionist plots in the bud, lest they destroy the nascent republican experiment. The problem, of course, was that nothing moved over land faster than the speed of a horse. As Ambrose (1996, p. 52) puts it: “No human being, no manufactured item, no bushel of wheat, no side of beef . . . , no letter, no information, no idea, order, or instruction of any kind moved faster. Nothing ever had moved any faster. . . .” Roads were poor and often impassable in the rainy season. By stagecoach from the nation’s largest city, Philadelphia, to its second largest city, New York, a distance of 90 miles took two days. One needed to travel three more days to cover the additional 175 miles to the third largest city, Boston. Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1801: “Of eight rivers between here [Monticello, Virginia] and Washington, five have neither bridges nor boats.” A 225-mile trip from Monticello to Philadelphia consumed ten days (quoted in Ambrose 1996, p. 52). When it came to the West, only four roads crossed the Appalachians into western Pennsylvania and Kentucky and Tennessee, and once they entered the mountains they became little more than trails. By any route, it took six weeks or more to travel from the Mississippi River to the Atlantic Seaboard. “Until the end of the 1820s,” writes the historian Appleby (2000, pp. 62–3), “only those living on the nation’s rivers could be sure of long-distance transportation, and then only in one direction.” As long as people beyond the Atlantic tidewater depended on rivers and roads for transportation, only grain transformed into whiskey could pay for its freight overland to the East. Moreover, west of the Appalachians few crops earned a profit when sent downriver to New Orleans. The cost of mailing a letter through the newly established post office clearly shows the enormous expense of travel and communication: “For every letter composed of a single sheet of paper, not exceeding 40 miles, 8 cents; over 40 miles and not exceeding 90 miles, 10 cents; over 90 miles . . . , 12½ cents; over 150 miles . . . , 17 cents; over 300 miles . . . , 20 cents; over 500 miles, 25 cents” (quoted in Pratt 1950, xii). Considering the value of a penny in 1801 compared to today, even prosperous Americans did not indulge in trivial letter writing. No wonder Americans in the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys contemplated an independent future. If the United States were to survive, much less grow and prosper, Americans simply had to overcome the great distances that marked their far-flung territory. Roads, canals, and engineering As with many aspects of the Industrial Revolution, Americans followed the British example in transportation technology. Beginning in the 1790s, state governments CafC02.fm Page 34 Tuesday, August 10, 2004 5:21 PM 34 JAMES C. WILLIAMS chartered private turnpike companies to build improved roads. The first, the Philadelphia and Lancaster Turnpike Company, opened in 1794 and was an immediate financial success. Subsequently, scores of such corporations formed, and by 1820 all the cities along the northern and middle-Atlantic corridor were connected by improved roads. Even Congress responded to the pestering of Americans west of the Appalachians by approving construction of the National Road. Started in Maryland in 1808, the 80-foot-wide stone-covered road reached the Ohio River in nine years and, eventually, Vandalia, Illinois, in 1852. Soon thereafter, however, all the segments of the National Road had been turned back over to the states. Roads and turnpikes remained a local responsibility until the twentieth century, and few of them were macadamized or otherwise surfaced. As in Britain, canals soon rivaled roads and turnpikes. Among the first was the 27-mile Middlesex Canal connecting the Charles and Merrimack rivers in Massachusetts. Work started in 1793, construction was overseen by sometime cabinetmaker and man of learning, Laommi Baldwin (1744–1807). He and his crew had done little surveying, never built a canal (few, if any, had seen one), and possessed only traditional hand tools; however, they agreed with Secretary of War Henry Knox (1750–1806), a Bostonian and great supporter of the project, that surveying and such was “more a matter of accurate perceptions and judgments than of science” (quoted in Morrison 1974, p. 20). Unfortunately, their first survey resulted in a vertical error of forty-one and a half feet in one six-mile stretch, and workers confronted a wide range of other insoluble problems: how to expeditiously dig a ditch, dispose of the earth they dug, seal the ditch so water would not seep through the bottom and sides, design a canal lock, lay up brick or stone with mortar that held under water, and design machinery for opening and closing the locks. “They found, in sum,” observes historian Morrison (1974, p. 21), “that they did not know anything about building a canal.” Baldwin sought to depend on “the morals and steadiness of our own people,” a workforce comprised mostly of farmers. But he quickly realized that he needed help. In Philadelphia, he found William Weston (1753–1833), an Englishman supervising construction of a shorter canal to connect Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna and Schuylkill rivers. Weston had learned most of what he knew about canal construction from James Brindley (1716–62), who completed the Duke of Bridgewater’s famous canal in Britain in 1761. Eager to visit Boston, Weston looked at the Middlesex Canal project in early 1794. In just two weeks, he used a telescopic leveling instrument to accurately survey the entire canal route, advised on building materials, instructed how to seal the canal by puddling the bottom and sides with clayey soil, and drew up designs for locks and valve gate machinery. Nevertheless, trial and error guided the Middlesex Canal builders as they translated what knowledge Weston gave them about canal building into the actual construction of one. Over a dozen years later at a cost of over three times the original estimates, they finally completed the 20-lock canal. In 1808, the year the Middlesex Canal was opened, Jesse Hawley, a flour merchant in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, wrote a series of articles calling for the building of an east-west canal from the Hudson River to Lake Erie along the one CafC02.fm Page 35 Tuesday, August 10, 2004 5:21 PM THE AMERICAN INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 35 relatively low-level route on the entire east coast, north of Georgia, which runs through the eastern mountains to the enormous interior of the country. The same year, Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin (1761–1849), who, like President Jefferson, believed in the importance of transportation and communication to the young nation, submitted to Congress a Report on the Subject of Public Roads and Canals, a transportation master plan. In it he argued that the federal government should invest $20 million over ten years on roads, canals, and river navigation improvements. Moreover, he emphasized that financing these projects ought to be the responsibility of governments because the projects themselves provided so much for the public good. Economic hard times and war with Britain between 1812 and 1815 interrupted Hawley’s vision as well as Gallatin’s, but New Yorkers and their governor, De Witt Clinton (1769–1828), soon put it back on course. Seized by what was widely scoffed at as an impossible dream, New York State in 1817, entirely out of its own funds, flung itself into a project so dramatic, visionary, and immense that the world was astonished: the excavation and construction of the 363-mile long Erie Canal. Nothing like it had ever been attempted before, and its completion seven years later in 1825 revolutionized North American geography. Oceangoing vessels could navigate to Albany on the Hudson River and transship their passengers and cargoes to canal boats, which journeyed right on to the lake port of Buffalo, on Lake Erie. Even though the canal cost $7 million to construct and had an average towage speed of less than two miles per hour, freight could be shipped at one-twentieth of the overland price. New York State became the highway of the westward movement, and New York City, sitting at the entry point to this great water-transport network, became the preeminent seaport, metropolis, and eventually financial capital of the continent. “The Artificial River,” as historian Sheriff (1996), describes the Erie Canal, was 4 feet deep, 28-feet wide at bottom and 40-feet wide on the surface. Its 14-foot wide towpaths stood about three feet above the channel’s surface, it traveled on aqueducts over 18 valleys, and it contained 84 locks, which raised the water 62 feet up from Lake Erie to the summit and then 630 feet down to the Hudson River. The engineering task was enormous and the results spectacular, and several sites along its length quickly became famous landmarks. Historian Nye (1994, p. 34) suggests that two of them – the giant staircase of five locks in Lockport that carried boats up and over the Niagara escarpment and the 802-foot stone aqueduct that carried the canal over the Genessee River at Rochester – are among the first examples of Americans’ embrace of the “technological sublime,” that essentially religious, passionate experience aroused by confronting impressive objects. One might expect that only formally trained engineers could accomplish such a task, as the Middlesex Canal, the Erie Canal’s engineers had little or no practice in building anything. They learned on the job, perfecting their skills at surveying, discovering how to use limestone-based hydraulic cement in place of puddling, and inventing new machines, such as stump pullers and turf cutters. As Morrison (1974, p. 41) observes, the canal project became “the first – and quite possibly the best – school of CafC02.fm Page 36 Tuesday, August 10, 2004 5:21 PM 36 JAMES C. WILLIAMS general engineering in this country.” The military academy at West Point offered the only formal engineering education in the United States but had only been established in 1811 and did not graduate its first civil engineer until 1818. The country’s first private school of civil engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute near Albany, New York, was not founded until 1824, the year before the canal was completed. So, the Erie Canal actually educated a generation of civil engineers, who fanned out across the country to build many more canals and a multitude of other projects. Although Americans built fewer than one hundred miles of canals before 1815, they invested over $125 million on 3,326 miles of canals during the next twenty-five years, the money for which largely came from governmental bodies. Through canal building, the nation took a giant step toward tying together its enormous continental domain. These artificial rivers greatly extended technology’s transformational impact on the environment by adding enormously to what historian Cronon (1991, p. xix) calls “second nature,” the “artificial nature that people erect atop first nature . . . the original, prehuman nature. . . .” The new routes of travel available from east to west soon came to seem “natural,” and the Great Lakes Basin and other previously inaccessible areas quickly teemed with settlers. Steamboats Through most of the nineteenth century, horses and mules towed canal boats, but steam engines took hold on America’s rivers. “The notion of steam propulsion for boats was nearly as old as the steam engine itself,” writes Pursell (1995, p. 75), “but the proper proportions of engine to boat and the best way to apply the power – whether by water forced out the back in a jet, screw propellers, paddle wheel . . . , or by banks of oars or poles – was not obvious.” A number of inventors worked hard to make the steamboat a technical as well as a commercial success (Hindle 1981). During the 1790s, the most promising of them were John Fitch (1743–98), John Rumsey (1743–92), and John Stevens III (1749–1838), but they fell into a legal battle over their patents and who among them would receive royalties from the others. Thus it fell to Stevens’s brother-in-law, Robert R. Livingston (1746–1813) and Robert Fulton (1765–1815) to launch the first successful steamboat operation. In 1801, Livingston, newly appointed ambassador to France, met Fulton, a Pennsylvanian living in Paris. They signed a contract to build and operate a boat on the Hudson River between New York and Albany. Fulton had built a boat in France in 1803, using side paddle wheels and a Watt-type steam engine with a separate condenser, none of which infringed on the patents of Fitch, Rumsey, or Stevens. Following the boat’s successful testing, Livingston used his political connections to secure a steam transport monopoly in New York, and Fulton launched a second, similar boat, The Clermont, in 1807. Technically and financially successful, the two men extended steamboat commerce from the Hudson River into Long Island Sound, and in 1811, they inaugurated steamboat service on the Mississippi River. Not surprisingly, however, other entrepreneurs entered the game, and competition spawned lawsuits over river traffic monopolies. In 1824, the United States Supreme CafC02.fm Page 37 Tuesday, August 10, 2004 5:21 PM THE AMERICAN INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 37 Court ended the Livingston–Fulton control of steamer service on the Hudson by establishing the precedent in Gibbons v. Ogden that only Congress could regulate commerce between the states. Between 1816 and 1818, Henry M. Shreve (1785–1841) in Louisiana employed a high-pressure steam engine based on the one invented in 1805 by Philadelphian Oliver Evans (1755–1819). As high-pressure engines replaced the Bolton and Watt-type low-pressure engines, much faster steamboats extended along the Atlantic tidewater, to the Great Lakes, and to the western rivers. They drastically cut river travel time and shipping costs both downstream and upstream; on the western rivers, where river travel occurred only on flat-bottomed keelboats poled by hand and upstream passage was virtually nonexistent, their impact was revolutionary. By 1855, there were 727 steamboats on the Mississippi River system, and at least fifty plied rivers in California. Western boats, designed for shallow, snag-infested river bottoms, principally carried freight and appeared a bit ungainly with two or three above decks for passengers. One contemporary described them disdainfully “as an engine on a raft with $11,000 worth of jig-saw work” (quoted in Pursell 1995, p. 77). Although standard-design high-pressure wood-fueled engines driving stern or side paddle wheels moved steamboats along at speeds reaching 20 knots, the speed plus navigational obstructions took a tragic toll on both steamboats and passengers. Five hundred and twenty boats were lost by 1850 to snags, various navigational accidents, and boiler explosions. Bursting boilers, 42 of which killed 273 people between 1825 and 1830, resulted both from efforts to make speed and from deficiencies in boiler construction and poor maintenance. Following a severe explosion near Memphis, Tennessee in 1830 that killed almost 60, Congress authorized the federal government to give its first grant for scientific research to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia to discover the cause of boiler explosions. In 1836, the Institute submitted a report calling for federal boiler inspectors; following another explosion killing 140 people in Charleston, it became law. This set, remarks historian Cowan (1997, p. 111), “the precedent on which all succeeding federal safety-regulating legislation would be based.” Railroads Equally dramatic and historic to canal building and steamboats in North America was the application of steam power to land travel, and the construction of thousands of miles of railroads connecting the east coast with the interior. The first railroading began in Britain in 1825, but its most extraordinary development occurred in the United States. Americans borrowed and improved on British technology immediately. In January 1831, the Charleston and Hamburg Railroad in South Carolina became the first in the nation to begin regular service, and its locomotive, the Best Friend of Charleston, built at the West Point Foundry in New York in 1830, was the first one built entirely in the United States. Several foundries and machine shops, such as Philadelphia’s Matthias Baldwin Engine Works and Norris Locomotive Works, were set up to produce locomotives while other firms turned to build other railroad equipments. By 1840, America’s 3,326 miles of trackage far surpassed the less than CafC02.fm Page 38 Tuesday, August 10, 2004 5:21 PM 38 JAMES C. WILLIAMS 2,000 miles in all of Europe. What is more, Austria, some German states, Russia, and even Britain began importing American locomotives. Although almost all the railroads constructed during the 1830s were east of the Appalachian Mountains, the need to conquer distance in so enormous a country was urgent, and a continental expanse free of boundary and tariff restrictions lay open for development. Especially in the Midwest and West, land was cheap and much of it was flat, making railroad construction easier than in Europe, and the American economy was more innovative and less hampered by monopolies and long-established customs. The result was a veritable detonation of railroads, building feverishly all over the countryside. By 1860, so frantic was the pace of railroad construction, that trackage totaled more than 30,000 miles, whereas canals, even though many new ones had been built, were fewer than 9,000 miles in total extent. There was not enough private capital in the country to provide the transportation network that was wanted, so following the precedent established for funding roads and canals, state governments and local communities responded by making generous grants to railroad projects, devising attractive charters to make construction profitable, and sometimes building the railroads themselves. During the 1850s, the federal government joined in this public funding, giving the Illinois Central land grants that ultimately totaled four million acres. It also sponsored a series of surveys to determine the best transcontinental rail routes, and during the Civil War in 1862 the northern controlled Congress chartered the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads with a lavish land grant and loan guarantee program. It continued to provide similar support for other railroad projects through the end of the century. Dominating the railroad system by the 1850s were the great east–west trunk lines, such as the New York Central, the Pennsylvania, the Erie, and the Baltimore & Ohio, which headed out westward from the Atlantic seaboard in a more or less straight line to Chicago. Beyond that city, railroad builders threw out a complex network, which gave an electrifying stimulus to the growth of the rapidly expanding farm empire, which had already, with canals, begun focusing on Chicago as its “natural” outlet to the East. In the incredible surge of railroad building nationwide, some 2,500 miles of track were laid in the state of Illinois alone during the 1850s. This made Chicago even more the place to which farmers sent their crops, for there they could market them to the East through the trunk railroads running to New York and other northeastern cities, or put them on lake steamers, which continued to carry a heavy traffic. The volume of wheat arriving in Chicago by rail mounted dramatically, and by 1860, writes Cronon in Nature’s Metropolis (1991, p. 68), “eastern investors and Chicago railroad managers had succeeded in imposing a new geography on the western landscape. Almost all the new lines west of Lake Michigan focused on the city, extending from it like the spokes of a great wheel and dividing the region into a series of pie-shaped wedges, each more or less within the territory of a single Chicago-based railroad.” By the 1870s, construction of transcontinental railroads from the Middle West to the Pacific Coast connected Chicago as well to all the states along the Pacific Coast. CafC02.fm Page 39 Tuesday, August 10, 2004 5:21 PM THE AMERICAN INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 39 While Chicago became the great metropolis of interior North America, railroads stimulated industry everywhere, particularly the iron and steel industry. Between 1800 and 1860, iron consumption increased fivefold and the rolling of rails was perfected. The most important technical innovation in the industry, however, was the adoption of the Bessemer-Kelley steel-making process that burned carbon out of molten iron by blowing highly pressurized cold air through it. Developed in 1855 by Henry Bessemer (1813–98) in Britain and perhaps simultaneously in the United States by Kentucky ironmaster William Kelly (1811–88), the process was capitalized on by the entrepreneur Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919). During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Carnegie’s adoption of Bessemer process, mainly to produce steel rails for the competitive and impatient railroad industry, led to what historian Thomas Misa (1995) calls the “reckless mass production” of rails. Unfortunately, as railroads began using larger locomotives and carrying heavier loads, Carnegie’s sacrifice of quality for quantity, resulted in railroad companies having to rebuild their trackage. The Magic of the Railroads “Railroads were more than just natural,” observes Cronon (1991, p. 72): “their power to transform landscapes partook of the supernatural, drawing upon a mysterious creative energy that was beyond human influence or knowledge.” To Americans of the nineteenth century they were the most stunning, fascinating symbol of the American Industrial Revolution. Even more than the Erie Canal, the railroad became a sublime and romantic symbol of humankind’s conquest of nature, especially of technology’s dramatic alteration of space and time. Railroads ran across the countryside at extraordinary speeds never before attained on land, pulling incredible loads day and night. By the 1850s, it took not two weeks to travel from Chicago to New York City, but, astonishingly, only two days. As a result, Americans began thinking of their country in quite new perceptual terms, for with speed of transport it shrank drastically in people’s minds. The railroad embedded itself in the psyches of the American people and into the national culture. When people watched steam locomotives snorting by on the plains, they were watching an awesome wonder on the stage of national life: a physical object, constructed of iron and steel, which had incredibly leaped into life and motion, like some magical genie coming alive right before one’s eyes. They endowed railroads and their locomotives with personality. The hooting sound of the locomotive’s steam whistle could be heard for miles, wafting over the plains. Farmers and their families in their remote homes drew comfort from the regularly recurring signal, coming to them through the dark night, that out there, bustling along, was life, and life connected with the far away city and all the world beyond. City dwellers came to see the railroad as the engine of their communities, a grand icon of economic and cultural progress. Writers, remarks Cronon (1991, p. 73), who waxed poetic about the railroad were surely right to regard it as much more than just a machine. It touched all facets of American life in the second half of the nineteenth CafC02.fm Page 40 Tuesday, August 10, 2004 5:21 PM 40 JAMES C. WILLIAMS century, insinuating itself into virtually every aspect of the national landscape. . . . The railroad left almost nothing unchanged: that was its magic. To those whose lives it touched, it seemed at once so ordinary and extraordinary – so second nature – that the landscape became unimaginable without it. Telegraph Telegraph lines soon accompanied the signatures left by railroads across the land. Artist and professor Samuel F.B. Morse (1791–1872) conceived of the electromagnetic telegraph in 1832, while aboard a ship returning to the United States from London. He worked on the idea for several years during the hours and days he could grasp between his teaching duties at New York University, securing scientific and mechanical assistance when he needed it (Hindle 1981). After he patented and demonstrated his communication device and the code to transmit words, Morse and partners whom he had enlisted along the way, convinced Congress in 1842 to fund the building of an experimental line between Baltimore and Washington. The line, completed two years later, was not much of a success. The government turned its back on further support and few customers paid to send messages. Nonetheless, Morse and his partners persisted, arranging to commercialize the telegraph with entrepreneurs in the private sector. Line extensions had reached some 1,200 miles by 1846, when the outbreak of the Mexican War created a national hunger for news. “By 1850 the telegraph was more than just accepted,” observes Lubar (1993, p. 83), “it was the rage.” Businesses soon grasped the advantages of telegraphic communication. Perhaps it was prophetic that Morse’s first line in 1842 had followed the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad’s tracks, for railroads were among the first to exploit the new device. Telegraph communication soon became essential to the management of rail traffic, and as railroads expanded and stretched across the nation, so did telegraph lines. The first transcontinental telegraph was completed before the first transcontinental railroad during the 1860s, as was a viable transatlantic cable. Meanwhile other businesses discovered its value. Dealers in commodities, financial institutions, and news used it heavily, and the telegraph became a technological icon of wealth and information. Along with the railroad, Morse’s telegraph had conquered space and time and seemed to have a sublime moral influence as well. In 1881, Scientific American argued that the telegraph made possible “kinship of humanity.” “The touch of the telegraph key,” brought a international reaction to the assassination of President James A. Garfield (1831–81) “that welded human sympathy and made possible its manifestation in a common, universal, simultaneous heart throb” (quoted in Marvin 1988, p. 199). Manufacturing While the United States experienced a transportation and communication revolution during the nineteenth century, it also underwent a transformation in the way its CafC02.fm Page 41 Tuesday, August 10, 2004 5:21 PM THE AMERICAN INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 41 people made things. Particularly in the northern states, manufacturing took hold in the form of the factory system imported from Britain, but it was not universally welcomed. “The promise of labor-saving devices strongly appealed to a nation concerned with establishing independence, safeguarding moral purity, and promoting industry and thrift among her people,” observes historian Kasson (1976, p. 50). Technological progress in transportation and communication seemed to overcome the country’s regional fragmentation, but “the union of technology and republicanism, while settling some issues, raised others. . . . [Could] her manufacturing towns, . . . avoid the blight and degradation of their English counterparts.” Apprehension about this was strongest among the egalitarian followers of Thomas Jefferson. While they looked to new mechanical technologies as a means of achieving a virtuous and prosperous republican society, they nevertheless felt that virtue and liberty were grounded in agrarian life. Thus, they worried about the evils of factory towns and the corrupting influence such places could have on the political economy. Hamiltonian nationalists, on the other hand, quickly embraced manufacturing as crucial to liberty and national health. They set out to allay their fellow citizens’ anxieties by ensuring that manufacturers operated under a strict system of moral supervision, which would protect the health and virtue of their workers as well as republicanism. Such factories would result in a middle landscape between the city and the wilderness, where the virtue of Jefferson’s agrarian world and the civilizing process of progress would coexist. Not surprisingly, this vision of the republican factory first emerged in New England, where waterpower, an available labor supply of farmwomen and children, and an enterprising, industrious, and moralist Yankee culture existed together. Lowell system Beginning in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1813, a group of merchants known as the Boston associates formed the Boston Manufacturing Company and established what was probably the first true factory in America: a textile mill in which all the processes were power operated. The associates soon located mills in several other New England towns, the most famous of which was Lowell, Massachusetts, where they ultimately transformed an unsettled tract of land on the Merrimack River, 25 miles north of Boston, into a water-powered industrial city. When the first Lowell mills opened in 1822, raw cotton was turned into finished cloth in four-story-high factories in which every process that could be had been mechanized and integrated – spinning, dying, bleaching, and weaving. The large corporate-owned mills were run not by the owners but entirely by salaried managers, who oversaw the workforce. The patriarchal Boston associates sought to establish in Lowell an ideal factory community that would provide a virtuous institutional environment for their workers and thereby avoid the poverty and degradation associated with factory towns. Drawing on social thinking of their time, they organized the Lowell mills on the model of “total institutions,” such as asylums, which fully cared for the morals and virtues of its people. Rather than establishing a workforce of permanent factory CafC02.fm Page 42 Tuesday, August 10, 2004 5:21 PM 42 JAMES C. WILLIAMS operatives, they hired young, single women from the surrounding countryside. In theory, each would work until she earned a dowry, left for marriage, and was replaced by another single girl. In addition to earning a wage, “Lowell girls” were housed in dormitories, supervised by matrons, and provided compulsory religious services. The Lowell factory system was to be, in Kasson’s words (1976, p. 70), “a beacon of republican prosperity and purity upon the American landscape.” By 1855, thanks to rapid expansion permitted by the virtue of corporate ownership, Lowell boasted 52 mills employing over 12,000 workers. Its success caused the factory system to surge into other industries, from boots and shoes and papermaking to diary products and meatpacking. But, Lowell’s growth also contributed to the failure of the Boston associates’ attempt to smoothly weave the machine into the republican garden. (Marx 1964, 158–60) From the start, they provided no housing at all for the Irish-Catholic immigrants who built the canals and mills and who lived in thrown together shanties, and over time the “Lowell girls” found themselves treated less and less well. As Lowell grew, explains Cowan (1997, pp. 87–8), Parents could not control their children’s labor, and they could not negotiate with their children’s employers . . . [M]anagers stopped being able to control where workers lived and how frequently they went to church. The Lowell system created a new kind of wage laborer: a person who contracted individually with her or his employer and who lacked either an older family member or any other form of communal support system to help with the negotiations. During the 1830s, managers increased workloads, wages declined, and workers began to fight wage slavery. But immigration, particularly the massive influx from Ireland during that country’s potato famine, gave managers a new source of labor. Nativist prejudices soon took aim at factory workers; wages continued declining and a permanent working class took shape. With the advance of industrial capitalism, the early emphasis on virtue in adopting the factory system into republican society gave way to a more technocratic vision of progress. The American system of manufactures One of the most distinctive ways in which Americans gave shape to the Industrial Revolution was in the way they produced goods. During the 1850s, British observers of American products, tools, and manufacturing techniques saw novel and original methods, which historians have since referred to as “the American system of manufactures.” (Rosenberg 1969; Mayr and Post 1981; Hounshell 1984, pp. 15–17) Traditionally, observes Pursell (1995, p. 87), manufactured goods “were made one at time by skilled craftspeople, who, perhaps with the help of an apprentice, saw the entire process through to its end.” The American system, however, sought “to achieve uniformity of product by the transfer of skills from workers to machines.” Jigs, gauges, fixtures, dies, and special tools produced “a large number of similar parts, the accurate dimensions of which were determined by the CafC02.fm Page 43 Tuesday, August 10, 2004 5:21 PM THE AMERICAN INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 43 design and setting of the machine tool, rather than [by] the skill and experience of the worker.” The American system of manufactures, sometimes called armory practice, emerged from methods used in the American arms industry to produce guns with interchangeable parts made by special purpose machines and a relatively unskilled workforce. Historian Hounshell (1984, p. 27) remarks: “The United States War Department . . . found the idea of interchangeability irresistible.” To achieve it, the government lavished an extraordinary sum of money over many years on its own armories and on private arms contractors. The first of those private contractors, Eli Whitney (1765–1825), inventor of the cotton gin, is often credited with the idea of interchangeability, but we know now that even though he thought about making muskets with interchangeable parts, he never achieved it. Credit goes to John H. Hall (1781–1841), who planned out and installed a series of machines at the federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, during the 1820s, and to Elisha K. Root (1808–65), who developed a similar system at Samuel Colt’s (1814–62) private arms factory in Hartford, Connecticut (Smith 1977). Other contributors to the process included Simeon North (1765–1852), who developed the first metal milling machine in 1816, and Thomas Blanchard (1788–1864), who patented a special purpose lathe in 1822 that could cut irregular shapes, such as gunstocks (Cooper 1991). British visitors to the United States during 1850s were particularly fascinated with small arms production. They put the system to the test at the Springfield Armory in Massachusetts, where they selected ten muskets made between 1844 and 1853, tore them down, and thoroughly mixed up their parts. When regular armory workers reassembled the weapons, they fit together and worked perfectly. It was a technical triumph, but achieving product uniformity was an expensive luxury for most manufacturers. While many of the special tools developed for the arms industry, such as the concept of Blanchard’s copying lathe, transferred to the production of other products, advances in mechanized production took time. The few manufacturers who invested in machine tools found themselves working with the toolmakers to improve the tools and solve production problems. Over time, the machine toolmakers used the improved tools to solve production problems in other industries. Since all manufacturers depended on similar metalworking techniques, common needs converged at the machine tool industry itself. Following an uneven trajectory, then, mechanization and uniformity in manufacturing, the hallmarks of the American system, ultimately transformed a multitude of traditional handicrafts. Clock-making is a good example. In 1802, long before armory practice was perfected, Eli Terry (1772–1852), a clockmaker in Connecticut, harnessed waterpower for clock-making and began designing special purpose tools for making the wooden workings of his clocks. Two decades later, Seth Thomas (1785–1865) licensed Terry’s methods and soon he and other clock manufacturers were producing machine-made clocks. In time, production of high-quality sheet brass led to the adoption of machine-made brass clock wheels and gears. By 1850, the price of a clock had fallen over a half century from $50 to $1.50, and the average CafC02.fm Page 44 Tuesday, August 10, 2004 5:21 PM 44 JAMES C. WILLIAMS clock factory produced as many as 150,000 clocks annually (Hindle and Lubar 1986, pp. 219–26). After mid-century, sewing machine manufacturers began adopting armory practice techniques, benefiting from diffusion of know-how when individual mechanics migrated from the firearms industry. William H. Perry (1820–?) came from Samuel Colt’s small arms factory to the Wheeler and Wilson Manufacturing Company in 1856, and Henry M. Leland (1843–1932) moved from the Springfield Armory to Brown & Sharpe Manufacturing Company in 1872, when the latter was manufacturing tools as well as Willcox & Gibbs sewing machines, both introducing armory practice. (Leland later went on to found the Cadillac Motor Car Company.) Ironically, the leading sewing machine company, Singer, continued to use general-purpose machine tools and hand labor; its market success came through advertising and other marketing techniques. Toward the end of the century, bicycle makers were the first manufacturers to go beyond traditional armory practice. Particularly outside New England, they abandoned traditional drop-forge metalworking techniques in favor of pressing bicycle parts from sheet steel. By the 1890s, entire bicycles were being fabricated from pressed steel. Meanwhile, it became apparent that larger operations could be much more productive than small ones in terms of the investment and the number of people employed. Larger operations could afford larger equipment, the use of more power, and the most up-to-date technical innovations. Greater mechanization meant labor saving, and this meant cheaper products. Thus, economies of scale permitted private manufacturers to make the investments necessary to achieve product uniformity. Shortly after the century ended, Henry Ford (1863–1947) combined the pressed steel production techniques of bicycle makers with the best of the American system of manufactures and introduced the term “mass production” into people’s vocabulary. Agriculture The factory system, once begun, could only result in the destruction of local crafts in small towns and expand the urban world. Transportation and communication technologies further undermined craft-based communities while they transformed landscape, space, and time. Technology, through the agency of the inventormechanic-engineer-entrepreneur, marginalized the farmer-citizen in whom Jefferson entrusted the nation’s virtue. While the Industrial Revolution overwhelmed agrarianism, at the same time it brought about an agricultural revolution. At the outset of the nineteenth century, 80 percent of Americans worked in agriculture. They used traditional hand tools such as hoes, scythes, and pitchforks, and draft animals assisted them in plowing and hauling. Clearing land of forests was their biggest task, however. Using only axes, levers, and teams of oxen or horses, the job of removing stumps consumed far more work than all other tasks combined. In 1841, it took as much as 13 days for one man to clear an acre of stumps, and during the course of the century almost 150 million acres of land were cleared. Although people marketed scores of clever inventions, as late as 1890 the only truly effective CafC02.fm Page 45 Tuesday, August 10, 2004 5:21 PM THE AMERICAN INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 45 aid to removing stumps from a field was blasting powder. But if technology did not come to the farmer’s rescue in clearing land, new and improved tools and machines for plowing, planting, harvesting, hauling, and preparing foodstuffs for market made American farmers remarkably productive. On the prairies that dominated the vast center of the country, stumps gave way to rock-hard soil. With traditional iron-tipped wooden plows or plows made entirely of wrought iron, Pursell (1995, p. 110) tells us, “it took three to five yoke of oxen and two people an entire day to turn just one-half acre of prairie sod.” Then in 1837, in Illinois, John Deere (1804–86) introduced a plow with a share of steel attached to the moldboard. Within two decades, he was producing and shipping by rail 10,000 plows a year from a factory he erected in the town of Moline, and now he was making steel plows with steel moldboards as well as steel shares. The Deere plow was a real prairie sod buster, the matted roots in the soil sliced cleanly by the polished steel share and the moist sod turned by the moldboard without sticking, as it did to wood or iron. In 1868, James Oliver (1823–1908) invented the chilled-iron plow, which also had the virtue of nonstick surfaces, and out in California, local mechanics introduced the steel gangplow, several plow shares grouped together with which scores of acres a day could be prepared for sowing grain. With more and more land being planted with hay and grain, harvesting by scythe proved a bottleneck. Gathering hay by rakes pulled by horses began dispensing with the pitchfork during the 1830s, and one person and a horse could bring in 20 to 30 acres of hay per day by the 1870s. But replacing the scythe with a machine for cutting the hay, wheat, or other grains proved much more difficult. Several inventors attacked the problem, and after 1850, Cyrus McCormick’s (1809–84) horse-drawn reaper swept across the country. His reaper, with a bar of stationary metal fingers to hold the grain stalks while a reciprocating horizontal blade moved through the bar and cut them, could harvest 12 acres a day on flat land. It quickly began to replace harvest hands, and by 1861, just as the Civil War drained the Midwest countryside of young men, almost 70 percent of the region’s wheat was mechanically harvested. Meanwhile, other inventors had introduced the cylindrical thresher, first powered by animals and after mid-century increasingly by steam engines. Not surprisingly, inventors tried to combine reaping and threshing. Hiram Moore developed the first combine in Kalamzoo, Michigan, in 1836. He had mixed results with the machine because of Michigan’s damp climate, and in 1854 sold a half-interest in it to a Californian, George Leland. In California, where hot summer air thoroughly dried the wheat and where ranches as large as 60,000 acres appeared to demand new harvesting technology, the combine was perfected. Soon several companies produced wheat combines, some of them so large that 20- to 40-horse teams had to pull them. The combine soon spread to wheat farms everywhere (Williams 1997, pp. 32–4). Mechanics and inventors surfaced in every state. Hank Monk, Mark Twain’s fictional hero in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1963, p. 15), represented them: “I could make anything a body wanted – anything in the world, it didn’t make any difference what; and if there wasn’t any quick, new-fangled way to make a thing, I could invent one – and do so as easy as rolling off a log.” Agricultural CafC02.fm Page 46 Tuesday, August 10, 2004 5:21 PM 46 JAMES C. WILLIAMS societies sponsored fairs in every corner of the country, giving prizes to the inventors of the best hay rakes, windmills, barley crushers, grinders, grape presses, and other farm machinery. Over the course of the nineteenth century, land given over to farming in the United States quadrupled, thanks to generous government policies, and although only 40 percent of Americans were still engaged in farming by 1900, the actual number of farmers climbed from about 4 million to almost 30 million. Even if draft animals still powered most farm equipment, a large proportion of farm work had been mechanized, industrialized farming had been introduced to the nation, and government had begun support of agricultural education and scientific experiment stations. A great transformation occurred, as farmers and their new technologies pushed aside natural ecosystems and brought in the few crops, European in origin (save corn), that henceforth would replace the original diversity of the landscape. Networks and Systems Emerge As the nineteenth century dissolved into the twentieth, the United States completed its passage from a pre-industrial, rural and agricultural society to an industrial and increasingly urban society. In doing so, its people discovered they were dependent less on the vagaries of nature than on the successful functioning of technological networks and systems in transportation, communication, energy, and urban services. Their lives increasingly were embedded in technological systems that were simply second nature to them. The telegraph and the railroad were perhaps the first such technological systems. Toward the end of the century, the telegraph connected the entire country together. “The elongated spider’s web of electric wires that carried telegraph signals,” suggests Cowan (1997, pp. 151, 153), “really looked like a network.” Railroads, newspapers, the stock market, government, and even families keeping in touch with one another had come to depend on it. “By 1880, if by some weird accident all the batteries that generated electricity for telegraph lines had suddenly run out, the economic and social life of the nation would have faltered.” Similarly, over 150,000 miles of main line railroad tracks linked every corner of the country by 1890, and thousands of miles more were being laid each year. Railroad ownership became consolidated and the rail system became physically integrated, resulting in standard gauge tracks, standard car sizes, standard automatic couplers, and in 1883 even an industry- and, by default, a nation-wide standard railroad time, which Congress would finally make official 35 years later. Energy in pre-industrial America came from human labor, animal power, waterpower, and wood. Controlled locally and by individuals, it inspired what Mumford (1964) aptly labeled “democratic technology.” As the nineteenth century progressed, however, control over energy resources changed. In the American south, the white society systemized its already enslaved black human labor into work rhythms that were more like a modern assembly line than were the factories of the time. Outside the south, American industry turned to coal for heat, raising steam, and smelting metals, and large-scale energy systems began to emerge. Through CafC02.fm Page 47 Tuesday, August 10, 2004 5:21 PM THE AMERICAN INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 47 vertical integration, Carnegie Steel owned and controlled its own coal and iron mines as well as the rail and steamship lines that delivered the coal and ore to its mills. In California, which possessed almost no good coal, an international energy system emerged during the 1870s: entrepreneurs exported California’s high quality wheat to Britain and America’s Atlantic seaboard in exchange for imported high-grade coal (Williams 1997, pp. 46–8). But the development of petroleum for lighting and fuel created a much larger energy system. Within a decade after prospectors dug the first oil well in Titusville, Pennsylvania (1859), entrepreneurs began constructing iron pipelines to deliver petroleum from the oil fields to rail loading points and eventually to the refineries themselves. John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937) and his Standard Oil Trust played a leading role in the integration of petroleum transportation systems into a network of pipelines and rail tank cars. Other late nineteenth-century technological systems included telephonic communication and electricity. Bell Telephone, controlling the patents issued in 1876 to Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922), created from the start an integrated and standardized system by manufacturing the telephone instruments, which they leased only to local companies that operated under a license to Bell. After their patent protection expired in 1893, thousands of independent companies entered the business, which profoundly expanded the telephone network, but the Bell system was wellestablished. “By 1920,” writes Cowan (1997, p. 162), “there were 13 million telephones . . ., 123 for every 1,000 people. Eight million of those 13 million phones belonged to Bell and 4 million to independent companies that connected to Bell lines.” Meanwhile, developments in electricity through the work of Thomas Edison (1847–1931), Nikola Tesla (1856–1943), Frank Sprague (1857–1934), and others created yet another network of wires. As electricity was applied to street lighting, street railways, and commercial and domestic lighting as well as other uses, a sophisticated technological system took shape that involved a variety of technological components to generate, transmit, and deliver electricity. Its complexity precluded a single national system, but regional systems, some with distinct variations were identifiable by 1900 (Hughes 1983). Finally, water and waste disposal systems evolved as Americans became more urbanized (Tarr 1996; Melosi 2000). Water supply and waste disposal during the first half of the nineteenth century had a very local focus. Potable water came from wells, rainwater cisterns, and nearby streams and ponds. Kitchen garbage and other household waste were thrown into the street or into vacant lots where pigs rooted it out. Human waste and most wastewater went into privy vaults and cesspools. Gutters or open channels down the center of streets carried off rainwater. Such methods were satisfactory for small cities, but growth brought insufficient and often contaminated water supplies and an intolerable waste situation. In 1799, Philadelphia became the first American city to construct a waterworks to pump potable water from a nearby river, and by the time of the Civil War, the country’s 16 largest cities plus another 120 communities had waterworks. By 1880, the number reached almost 600, and, by 1902, municipal indebtedness incurred to build water systems had reached $1.4 billion. CafC02.fm Page 48 Tuesday, August 10, 2004 5:21 PM 48 JAMES C. WILLIAMS Unhappily, cities were slower to provide for methods of removing garbage and wastewater. As more and more city residents piped fresh water into their homes between 1800 and 1850, per capita water consumption increased dramatically from 2–3 gallons to 50–100 gallons per day. Consumption kept climbing during the second half of the century with household installation of modern sinks, bathtubs, and, worse, flush toilets. Overflowing privy vaults and cesspools across urban America made removing wastewater crucial, and after 1850 cities began constructing wastewater systems. Planners and engineers believed that disease came from filth and that running water purified itself, so they constructed massive combined waste and storm sewerage systems to carry sewage away from cities and deposit it in running waterways before it could decay. Unfortunately, the raw sewage polluted water supplies, and it was thanks only to bacteriological research and, in the 1890s, to chlorination, that water supplies polluted by raw sewage could be made potable. With large, inflexible systems in place, dealing with ever-widening regional pollution and industrial waste disposal was left to twentieth-century planners and engineers. Conclusion In the course of one hundred years, the Industrial Revolution transformed every aspect of American life. A thinly populated agrarian society evolved into a bustling country of vibrant urban-industrial centers and expansive agricultural regions linked together by vast transportation and communication networks. Equally dramatic was the United States’ population growth, from 5.2 to 76 million people, a larger and larger proportion of which, even as the continent was put to the plow, flocked away from farms and into the cities to work in factories and commercial enterprises. With their exodus came a loss of independence that characterized the self-sufficient farmer and, for many independent craftspeople, the satisfactions of their trade. Thus, the social environment changed as these large groups, which had a great sense of personal worth and autonomy, were slowly diminished. Nevertheless, almost from the start of the nineteenth century fewer and fewer Americans agonized over what industrialization might do to national life. Victory in the War of 1812 guaranteed the existence of the Republic. Afterwards the attitude of Americans who had earlier wanted to keep America’s way of life simple and largely agrarian so as to keep the ordinary citizenry virtuous and independent gave way to something new: a rising intoxication with the possibilities that a swiftly developing industrial economy could fulfill dreams and bring a more abundant life for every individual. “Indeed,” writes American historian Kelley (1990, p. 187), “new productivity, it was believed, could also make people more optimistic, compassionate, and concerned for others.” Technological progress came to be seen as a powerful tool of republicanism, enhancing the idea that America meant prosperity and relative affluence for the common person. An outpouring of speeches, sermons, pamphlets, and books CafC02.fm Page 49 Tuesday, August 10, 2004 5:21 PM THE AMERICAN INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 49 described textile mills as sublime instruments of a better life, locomotives as fabulous creations, and mechanization as the path to cornucopia. These were “the images of the new America,” writes Kelley (1990, p. 187). “The most famous orator in the United States in the pre-Civil War generation – who would speak before President Abraham Lincoln (1809–65) at Gettysburg – the Harvard classics professor, leading Whig, and editor of the North American Review Edward Everett (1794–1865), spent a lifetime crying the marvels and beauties of industrialism. Republicanism and technology, he insisted, combined to put America, with its unusual freedom of economic life, in a position of promise offered by no other nation in the world.” Even America’s great Civil War, which tore the nation asunder, advanced rather than slowed the technological enthusiasm that enraptured Americans. The newly industrializing society seemed to enmesh people happily into dependency on technological networks and systems. While people no doubt felt liberated from the drudgery of isolated rural and small town life, they soon were encased in the regimes of urban-industrial society. In a powerful example of how dependent on technological networks and systems people became, Cowan suggests in her Social History of American Technology (1997, pp. 150–51) how a woman might provide food for her two-yearold child in a pre-industrial society compared to an industrial one. In the former, she could gather berries and nuts, dig for shellfish, or “work with a small group of other people to plant corn, tend it, harvest, and shuck it.” She could then “dry it, grind it into meal, mix it with water, and bake it into a bread for the child to eat.” While providing for her child she would be dependent on cooperating with a few other people, but she would have known them all and could have done all the things they did if “necessity had demanded.” In an industrialized world, however, “an average woman’s situation is wholly different.” To get bread for one’s child, a “woman is dependent on thousands of other people, virtually all of them unknown to her.” Grain is grown and harvested on mechanized farms fueled by petroleum-driven machines. It is stored “perhaps for several years” in large commercial granaries, turned into flour at a large corporate mill using electric powered rollers, transported (and transported and transported) by petroleum-fueled conveyances “to a baking factory, where dozens of people (and millions of dollars of machinery) . . . turn the flour into bread.” Then more transport “to a market, where the woman could purchase it” after first driving herself there in a manufactured, petroleum-fueled automobile – “all of this before a slice of it could be spread with peanut butter to the delight of a two-year old.” In a century, Americans had gone from an agrarian society in which self-sufficiency was more or less the norm and people worried over droughts, floods, insect infestations, and good or bad weather to an urban-industrial society in which they were much more dependent on technological systems and networks over which they had no control. Exchanging one sort of dependency for another, perhaps, suggests Cowan (1997, p. 151): “nature for technology.” One cannot help but wonder if this is what the 23 centenarians who so fascinated Henry Pratt Fairchild might have CafC02.fm Page 50 Tuesday, August 10, 2004 5:21 PM 50 JAMES C. WILLIAMS thought about the remarkable technological revolution that America underwent during the nineteenth century. FOR FURTHER READING Ambrose, Stephen E. Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). Appleby, Joyce. Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). Cooper, Carolyn C. Shaping Invention: Thomas Blanchard’s Machinery and Patent Management in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). Cronon, William. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991). Fairchild, Henry Pratt. The Prodigal Century (New York: Philosophical Library, 1950). Hindle, Brooke. Emulation and Invention (New York: New York University Press, 1981). Hindle, Brooke and Steven Lubar. Engines of Change: The American Industrial Revolution, 1790–1860 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986). Hounshell, David A. From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1932: The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). Hughes, Thomas P. Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983). Kasson, John F. Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America, 1776–1900 (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1976). Kelley, Robert. The Shaping of the American Past, Vol. I, 5th ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1990). Lubar, Steven. InfoCulture: The Smithsonian Book of Information Age Inventions (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993). Marvin, Carolyn. When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Communications in the Late Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964). Mayr, Otto and Robert C. Post, eds. Yankee Enterprise: The Rise of the American System of Manufactures (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981). Melosi, Martin. The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). Misa, Thomas J. A Nation of Steel: The Making of Modern America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). Morrison, Elting E. From Know-how to Nowhere: The Development of American Technology (New York: Basic Books, 1974). Mumford, Lewis. “Authoritarian and democratic technics,” Technology and Culture, 5 (January 1964): 1–8. Nye, David. American Technological Sublime (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994). Pursell, Carroll. The Machine in America: A Social History of Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). Sheriff, Carol. The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817–1862 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996). CafC02.fm Page 51 Tuesday, August 10, 2004 5:21 PM THE AMERICAN INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 51 Smith, Merritt Roe. Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology: The Challenge of Change (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977). Tarr, Joel A. The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective (Akron, OH: The University of Akron Press, 1996). Williams, James C. Energy and the Making of Modern California (Akron, OH: The University of Akron Press, 1997). Wosk, Julie. Breaking Frame: Technology and the Visual Arts in the Nineteenth Century (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992). CafC02.fm Page 52 Tuesday, August 10, 2004 5:21 PM