A plantation-sized cotton gin, near the beginning of the American cotton boom.
A plantation-sized cotton gin, near the beginning of the American cotton boom.
It is the supreme irony of US history that the South’s agrarian, antebellum slave economy was rescued by a mechanical device—invented by a Yankee businessman.
At the start of the nineteenth century, the South was a region in search of a purpose. Overwhelmingly agrarian, its population included over seven hundred thousand enslaved African Americans, growing tobacco, rice, and indigo—all waning industries. Europe, the biggest and richest market in existence, could find these commodities and many more at lower prices elsewhere in the world.
There was always cotton, which grew so abundantly south of the Mason-Dixon Line that Alexander Hamilton wrote, “Several of these Southern colonies might some day clothe the whole continent” with it. Cotton was already an enormously important product in world trade, feeding the bustling cloth mills of England that were at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution—but nearly all of it came from India. Long-staple cotton was farmed profitably along the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina, its black seeds easily removed by rolling presses, but it would not grow farther inland. Superior, short-staple cotton required a person working fourteen hours a day to pull all the green seeds from the short, dense fibers of just one pound of the stuff. Cotton, it seemed, was too labor-intensive even for a slave economy.
Eli Whitney to the rescue. Born in central Massachusetts in 1765, young Eli started his own business at age eleven, crafting nails—a hardware badly lacking during the Revolution—at his father’s forge and personally selling them to outlying farms. When the war ended and nails again proliferated, Whitney noticed a change in women’s fashion and turned to making hatpins. Soon he was selling walking canes as well. He earned his own tuition to Yale by teaching in local schools, and graduated with a law degree, but finding few opportunities headed for Georgia to take a tutoring job.
Along the way he fell in love with Catharine Littlefield Greene, the mistress of Mulberry Grove. That was all right; everyone did. “Caty” Greene was herself a transplanted Yankee and the belle of the Revolution. Married to Washington’s most capable commander, Nathanael Greene, Caty bore him five children, while following the army and even sticking it out for the winter at Valley Forge. Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, even Washington himself were all smitten by her extraordinary vivacity.
Mulberry Grove was a plantation, a gift from the state of Georgia to General Greene, partial payment for the huge debts he’d incurred financing his own troops in the field, but the native Rhode Islander soon died of sunstroke. Caty Greene and Phineas Miller, the supervisor—the friend of Whitney’s who had set up the tutoring job for him—kept the plantation going, but it was hard work. Like many of their neighbors, they were bedeviled by the question of how to make cotton pay.
In a classic male effort to impress, young Whitney busied himself fixing everything he could find around the plantation. Impressed, Greene introduced him to local planters also looking for some way to get seeds out of cotton, telling them, “Gentlemen, apply to my young friend, Mr. Whitney. He can fix anything!”
What Whitney came up with, just nine days later, was the cotton “gin” (short for “engine”). The picked cotton was fed through two contra-rotating drums edged with teeth that pulled the cotton from the seeds. The fibers were then fed through a wire-mesh sieve, leaving the seeds behind, while a fast-rotating brush swept away the lint.
The cotton gin was almost infinitely expandable. In the course of a working day, the amount of cotton that could be processed by a single individual using a hand crank rose from one pound to fifty. Powered by horses or a water mill or, later, a newfangled steam engine, a bigger gin could clean up to one thousand pounds of cotton a day. All it required was one or two people—that is, enslaved people—feeding it through the drums, and another couple to gather the seedless cotton fiber on the other end.
The story would later spread that the design of the cotton gin was really the work of Caty Greene, as women were not allowed to file patents at the time. This is dubious, considering Whitney’s demonstrated mechanical skills, but Greene and Miller—now married, alas!—did back Whitney’s invention with all their money and connections. His patent was signed by President Washington himself. But cotton planters throughout the South had been working on some sort of gin for years, and Whitney made a fatal error by first trying to charge them one-third of their cotton to use his machine.
They violated his patent at will, engaging him in years of nasty and ruinous court battles. Whitney switched to manufacturing cotton gins for sale, perfecting a better version of his machine that used a fine-toothed circular saw for the teeth. He invented one that even bagged the cotton as well, at his new factory in New Haven, Connecticut. But a series of local fevers and a catastrophic fire delayed production, and by the time the courts finally ruled in his favor in 1807, Whitney was nearly bankrupt. He had, in any case, moved by then into a new line of work: manufacturing guns.
Meanwhile, the share of all the world’s cotton grown in the United States rose from 9 percent in 1801 to 68 percent by the Civil War—even though cotton production around the planet had tripled. By 1860, the South was producing 2.275 billion pounds of raw cotton, 60 percent of all exports from the United States, supplying over 80 percent of the cotton for clothing manufactured in Britain and every bit of what was used in New England’s fast-growing mills.
Perversely, the triumph of mechanization had rendered agricultural slavery economically viable again. Freed from cleaning cotton, more slaves than ever could be put to work planting it, picking it, and clearing the land to grow still more of it. By 1860 there were nearly four million slaves, making up three-eighths of the total population of the South, and a majority of several southern states. Civil war loomed—a tragic consequence of an invention magnificent in its simplicity.
The picked cotton was fed through rotating drums with their pointed edges, or “teeth,” to remove the seeds (top), then cranked out through a wire-mesh sieve (bottom), leaving the seeds behind.
How momentous is an invention when it is able to help push a whole country hundreds of miles west—and into the future?
Oxen-pushed reapers were used by ancient Celts and Romans before being lost to the Dark Ages. By the early 1800s, after more than a thousand years of grains being harvested mostly by men with scythes, reapers were being reinvented in England and Scotland, but they had become almost a mania in America. The harvest was a time of maximum peril for the farmer, for if it was not to spoil, grain had to be brought in as soon as it ripened, something that often meant paying top dollar to hire unknown drifters to work and live with your family for weeks.
How to come up with something better? The basic design for a “mechanical reaper” was a wooden platform, pulled by horses walking to the side of the wheat. Sticking out from the side, rows of wire fingers grasped the wheat stalks; a revolving wooden flail pulled the stalks to the moving blades, which cut them, then lifted them back to a platform, where they could be swept off by a man with a rake. A main wheel kept the whole contraption running.
By 1833, the most successful such device was the Hussey Reaper, patented by Obed Hussey, a formidable ex-whaler from Maine, but he already had competition. Cyrus McCormick, a Virginia farmer whose father had spent twenty years trying in vain to invent a reaper, entertained the McCormicks’ neighbors with a machine that cut six acres of wheat in the time it took six men to do the same with scythes.
McCormick’s small (but crucial) innovation was to place a triangular metal wedge at the front of the reaper in order to separate the wheat being cut from the rest of the crop, and thus keep the field from looking like a bad punk haircut. Setting out to crush Hussey, McCormick and his family lost what came to be called “the War of the Reapers” in patent court but won in the fields. A large, grim, imposing individual with a massive head and beard, McCormick was “a great commercial Thor,” as one biographer called him. He personally challenged Hussey’s and others’ reapers to public grain-cutting competitions, which he won easily. Seemingly devoid of any other interests save church, McCormick worked fourteen hours a day, squeezing every last dime of extra expense out of his business.
Like many early American business titans, he possessed an almost innate feel for self-promotion, regularly touring Europe with his “mechanical man,” winning prizes and gold medals, and building a worldwide market for his product. At home, McCormick was an early believer in advertising and especially credit. He asked only $30 down for reapers that cost $120 to $130, accepting the rest on time and charging only the interest the banks charged him. If his machines did not cut at least one and a half acres in an hour, customers could have their money back: “One Price to All and Satisfaction Guaranteed.”
In a precursor to auto dealerships, agents were hired across the West to teach McCormick clients how to use their new machines, forging bonds that would last across generations. With the aid of his father and brothers, McCormick improved his reapers every season and bought up patents and companies from his many competitors. He was even able to acquire Hussey’s superior, sawlike cutting bar in 1850.
Yet his best move was west. McCormick was amazed by the size of the farms he encountered on the gently rolling prairies of Illinois—lands perfectly suited to his machines. He was perceptive enough to see that a ramshackle little mudhole of a town called “Chicago”—invented the same year as his machine—was ideally situated to become the new headquarters of his enterprise, but he had only $300 in capital on him. Problem solved by the settlement’s indefatigable booster, William Ogden (see Inventing a City: Chicago: Building the Big Onion from Scratch), who offered him $50,000, cash, in exchange for a half interest in his reapers.
McCormick accepted, and built a monolith for the time: a 40-by-100-foot, two-story factory, run by a 30-horsepower steam engine. By the end of his first year, he had made and sold 500 reapers. By the end of his second year, he’d made 1,500 more and was able to offer Ogden a 100 percent profit to buy back his half interest. Ogden cheerfully accepted, and not simply out of civic duty. McCormick’s reapers meant outbound freight for the rail lines Ogden was developing throughout the Midwest and all the way out to the Pacific. They meant countless golden bushels of grain going out, and grain-fed livestock coming back.
Above all, McCormick, twenty years before the Civil War, had moved his business out of the soil-draining, soul-breaking cotton and tobacco agriculture of the South and into “the broad, sunlit uplands” of the American future, where capital might be had and grains might be produced on a staggering scale. He didn’t do it alone. A bevy of other agricultural inventors pushed McCormick to make his own farm implements better and better—and were frequently bought out by him.
Jearum Atkins came up with a “self-rake” that would collect cut grain from the reaper platform. Charles W. and William Marsh added a harvester on which two men could stand at a table and bind the grain as it came up. Charles Withington and John Appleby invented mechanical binders that would do the same work automatically. Hiram Moore was the first to put it all together in huge “combine harvesters” pulled by sixteen or more horses, and by 1911 Holt Manufacturing had steam-powered mechanical combines harvesting everything from wheat to bananas. What had been weeks of backbreaking toil by two dozen men became a few hours’ work by a single driver in an air-conditioned cabin.
McCormick’s company would merge with several others into the global giant International Harvester. Along with the likes of Allis-Chalmers, John Deere, Gleaner Manufacturing, Minneapolis-Moline, and the Ford company’s trucks and tractors, they would increase exponentially, over and over again, the yield of American fields, at a tiny fraction of the cost and manpower. Their machines and methods would spread around the world, used and emulated even by the likes of the new communist regime in the Soviet Union. America would become the breadbasket of the world, able to export half its wheat to other countries.
the genius details
The “War of the Reapers” ended tragically in 1860 when the sixty-eight-year-old Obed Hussey, fetching water for a thirsty little girl, fell under a moving train.
In 1830, it took four people and two oxen ten hours to harvest two hundred bushels of wheat. By 1895, six people and thirty-six horses, working combine harvesters, could produce twenty thousand bushels of wheat in ten hours.
American wheat production tripled from 1869 to 1919, from 250 million to 750 million bushels. The United States exported 200 million bushels of wheat to war-torn, starving Europe between 1914 and 1922.
American wheat production peaked at 1.228 billion bushels a year in 1945–48. The United States sold 150 million to 440 million bushels a year to the USSR between 1963 and 1980.
McCormick’s descendants would build a newspaper empire around the United States, including the first American tabloid, the New York Daily News.
The layout of the first Piggly Wiggly supermarkets.
It all started thanks to an iceberg.
John Jacob Astor IV made the mistake of returning from England in 1912 aboard a spanking new ocean liner called the Titanic. When the fateful collision came, he helped his pregnant wife to a lifeboat, retired to the rail to smoke a cigarette, and was never seen alive again. Most of his $87 million real estate empire was left to his son, Vincent, a student at Harvard who had never shown much interest in anything but fast cars and model farming.
Taking the reins, Vincent embarked on an extraordinary array of rather beautiful building projects around Manhattan, including a twenty-one-thousand-square-foot, one-story market arcade at Ninety-Fifth Street and Broadway, completed in 1915. Made out of mottled travertine marble and festooned with banners, the market offered something new: stands where farmers and merchants sold all sorts of fresh meat, fish, produce, and other foodstuffs in one convenient location. It was perhaps—depending on how you see it—the world’s first supermarket.
Previously, shopping in America—and everywhere—had consisted mostly of going into countless individual shops and handing sales clerks lists of what you wanted. They then proceeded to fetch, measure, cut, and wrap them while you gossiped with your friends or, presumably, fell into a fugue state. A few stores, most notably the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, better known as the A&P, a former mail-order tea business, had grown into formidable chains by selling any number of “dry goods”—canned goods, coffee and tea, staples such as sugar or flour. But no one thought it a very good idea to add more perishable items, what with there then being one corner grocery for every four hundred Americans. So it proved with the Astor Market, which was out of business in two years, replaced by a skating rink.
Clarence Saunders thought this was wrong. A poor boy from Virginia, Saunders had left school at fourteen and bounced around the South for years, working at a coke plant in Alabama and a sawmill in Tennessee before moving to Memphis and organizing a wholesale grocery cooperative when he was twenty-one. There he became convinced that the biggest problems for most groceries were high overhead and bad credit losses.
By 1916, when he was still just thirty-five, Saunders had accumulated enough capital to put a better plan into action. He opened the world’s very first single-owner, self-service grocery store. After passing through a turnstile, customers were provided with a shopping basket and allowed to roam through the aisles on their own, picking out what they wanted before paying for it at cash registers near the front. No need for a legion of clerks to fetch items. Customers could now see full displays of all the store had to offer, creating a critical new revenue stream: impulse buys. At the checkout, it was cash only—no talking your neighborhood grocer into carrying you another week.
Saunders quickly patented “the Self-Serving Store,” which he named “Piggly Wiggly.” (Asked why, he would usually reply, “So you would ask me that.”) It looked more like a stockyard than a supermarket, with low railings and chain-link fencing, but it was the right store at the right time. America was about to enter World War I, which would send food prices soaring and enhance Saunders’s advantages of scale and savings on labor. A mastermind at marketing, he kept improving and publicizing his stores, with their unique pig-pink decor and low prices.
Piggly Wiggly fattened up with astonishing speed. Within six years, Saunders had 1,200 stores in twenty-nine states, Piggly Wiggly was listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and the poor-boy-made-good was building himself an only mildly grandiose mansion, from porcine Georgian marble, called “the Pink Palace.”
He would never live in it. Inclined to get ahead of himself, Saunders got embroiled in a battle over company stock with Wall Street short-sellers, and lost. He also picked a bitter, personalized fight with the all-powerful political boss of Memphis, E. H. Crump. Before the 1920s were out, Piggly Wiggly was off the stock exchange and Saunders was gone from his own company, out $3 million and forced into bankruptcy. The Pink Palace was sold off to the city of Memphis.
Saunders tried to recoup by opening a new chain in 1928, the “Clarence Saunders Sole Owner of My Name” stores. Even with that moniker, Saunders’s new enterprise flourished, reaching 675 “Sole Owner” stores and $60 million in sales within a year. A football team he sponsored for promotional reasons—yes, the “Clarence Saunders Sole Owner of My Name Tigers”—thrashed the Green Bay Packers and received an invitation to join the NFL—which, of course, he declined.
The Great Depression soon put paid to Sole Owner, but Saunders moved on to his next idea, a sort of supermarket automat or giant vending machine that he called “Keedoozle,” for “Key Does All.” All products were displayed in glass cases. Customers were handed a key on entering the store, which they plugged into a slot beneath the product they wanted. They then pulled a trigger on the key to indicate how many of each item they wanted. This would be recorded on a punch tape, which activated back-office machinery, leading to the chosen goods being assembled and put on a conveyor belt to the cashier, where the bill was totaled by a machine reading the punch tape.
If you’re asking yourself what could possibly go wrong with such a system and answering, “Everything,” you will not be surprised to learn that Keedoozle was soon keeput. Still undaunted, Saunders was planning yet another automatic store at the time of his death in 1953, a forerunner of self-checkout in which the customer, using an early sort of handheld computer, or “shopping brain,” would “act as her own cashier.”
“I can handle a $2 million volume with only eight employees,” he calculated.
We will never know. But there is no doubt that Saunders’s Piggly Wiggly inspired the inception and expansion of countless supermarket chains across the country. The A&P began selling perishables and creating its own brands soon after World War I. From 1915 to 1975, it was the largest food or grocery retailer in the United States; from 1915 to 1965, it was the largest retailer in the United States, period.
By the 1960s, the competition had sparked all sorts of innovations to draw customers. Patrons earned discounts and gifts by collecting “green stamps”—think club cards—and stores routinely gave away, week by week, entire sets of children’s encyclopedias and histories of the world or the United States. (The author was the proud owner of three different sets by the age of eight.) As America became more and more of an affluent, car-oriented, suburban nation after World War II, individual supermarkets became larger and larger, carrying more and more products of all kinds, including medicines and toiletries and prepared foods. They also added conveyor belts of steel rollers, with the bagged groceries placed in boxes and slid right out of the store, to be collected at curbside by the driver at her leisure.
Clarence Saunders would have been proud.
The Los Angeles Aqueduct today, bringing water 225 miles to the city.
When El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles passed into the hands of the United States at the end of the Mexican War, it was an agricultural community of 1,610 souls who eked out a living on land irrigated from the shallow, meandering Los Angeles River. Little more was thought to be possible. Unlike San Francisco, Los Angeles had no harbor and no nearby goldfields, and it averaged only fifteen inches of rain a year.
It started to grow after the Civil War, thanks mostly to an ambitious chamber of commerce and local sanitarium doctors who made L.A. “the best advertised city in the country.” By 1900, Los Angeles was a bustling city of over one hundred thousand, but the surrounding desert had not gone away. The lack of water obsessed William Mulholland. An itinerant Irish immigrant, Mulholland had come to California in 1877 as a common sailor, walking across the Isthmus of Panama because he could not afford the train fare. Unimpressed by L.A., he started for the port of San Pedro to take to the sea again but was offered a well-digging job along the way. Soon he was cleaning the open ditches and log pipes of the privately owned Los Angeles Water Company. Within eight years he was superintendent.
“The city is condemned to grow,” he liked to say—but only if there was enough water. Mulholland instituted water meters in 1889, far ahead of his time. They cut per capita consumption by a third—but the city kept growing.
“If you don’t get the water, you won’t need it,” Mulholland warned, with Yogi Berra–like pith.
Fred Eaton, Mulholland’s former boss, who went on to become mayor of Los Angeles, made the water company a city department. A camping trip with Joseph B. Lippincott, regional engineer of the US Bureau of Reclamation, gave Eaton his first inkling of where more water might come from: Owens Valley, a bucolic farming and ranching community nestled under the slopes of the Sierra Nevada, 225 miles away. Eaton hired Lippincott as a city “consultant” on water rights, a de facto bribe. Lippincott then helped Eaton buy up water rights in Owens Valley, telling the locals the purchases were all part of an irrigation system he had promised them.
Their corrupt bargain was backed by some of the most powerful men in California. The Owens Valley farmers and ranchers protested bitterly when they found out what the real deal was, insisting that Los Angeles did not need nearly as much water as the city was claiming but wanted to use the excess to power electrical plants and develop land in the San Fernando Valley. Their congressional representative appealed all the way to President Theodore Roosevelt himself—who found in favor of Los Angeles, ruling that the water “is a hundred or a thousand fold more important to the state and more valuable to the people as a whole if used by the city.”
Mulholland assembled a workforce that reached 3,900 men, most of them immigrants from Europe and Mexico, to build a four-thousand-foot aqueduct from the valley to the city. It was an epic construction project. The aqueduct operated by gravity but required the building of five hundred miles of road, the laying of a 120-mile railway, and the stringing of 377 miles of telegraph and telephone wires just to transport men and materials. It also took six million pounds of blasting powder to blow out forty-three miles of tunnel, and the building of three cement plants to construct the aqueduct itself.
Crossing desolate Jawbone Canyon alone required a 3,126-ton, 8,095-foot-long steel siphon with plate as much as an inch thick. There were ninety-eight miles of covered conduit, some of it wide enough to drive a car through, and fully exploiting the water it brought would require the construction of two hydroelectric plants, six storage reservoirs, and 218 miles of power lines. Scheduled to take five years, it was finished twenty months ahead of time.
As the aqueduct’s waters swirled into a canal on November 5, 1913, Mulholland told the crowd of forty thousand thrilled Angelenos who turned out to see the tap opened: “There it is. . . . Take it.”
His words would become an operating slogan for the city of Los Angeles. By the time the aqueduct was finished, Mulholland had predicted, L.A. would have 260,000 residents. Instead, there were 485,000, then 1 million by 1920, and nearly 2.6 million by 1930. Growing eleven times faster than New York City, it became one of the world’s great polyglot cities, drawing immigrants from all over the world and providing rare opportunities for even the poorest of them. Los Angeles also grew from 61 to 440 square miles. Not yet a car city, it remained a remarkably clean, healthy metropolis, run by the electricity all that water power generated.
Meanwhile, the Owens Valley farmers rebelled, launching eleven separate dynamite attacks on Mulholland’s aqueduct in what became known as “the Water Wars.” But by 1928 the city had won. It owned 90 percent of the water in Owens Valley, and almost all agriculture there was finished. The alkaline residue from its now dry lake bed created some of the worst air pollution in the country.
Fred Eaton, who had been compensated by the city for the $450,000 in water rights he’d bought for L.A. from Owens Valley residents, now demanded $1 million for land he owned in order to build a dam and storage reservoir. Mulholland refused, building more storage reservoirs himself. There were soon signs that one of them, the St. Francis Dam, forty miles north of Los Angeles, was on the verge of collapse. Mulholland went to inspect it on March 12, 1928, and deemed it safe. Hours later, the dam gave way, loosing a seventy-five-foot wall of water over most of Ventura County. An estimated six hundred people were killed, most buried by mud. It was one of the worst peacetime disasters in American history, and Mulholland, accepting full responsibility, immediately resigned. Eaton never did get his price and died bankrupt.
“The water octopus of Los Angeles,” as the Los Angeles Times called it, continued to grow. Extending its tentacles to the Mono Basin and Feather River, six hundred miles distant, then to a bold new dam the federal government was building on the Colorado River (see Inventing a City: L.A.—Southern California Aqueduct), it added a second aqueduct, and more dams and reservoirs, over the twentieth century. But the demands of other states and cities, and California’s extended drought in the twenty-first century, would finally pull it back to an emphasis on conservation. Having slipped all predicted bounds in its past, the City of Angels awaits a new sort of ingenuity to help it flourish on a warming planet.
the genius details
The aqueduct originally had six storage reservoirs. Altogether, including unlined and open canal, the water traveled 233 miles.
By the time the aqueduct opened, Los Angeles was already drawing people from around the world, including 250,000 Mexican Americans, 40,000 Japanese Americans, and close to 50,000 African Americans, most of them from the South.
Workers on the aqueduct were paid $2.25 a day. They lived in fifty-seven camps along the construction sites, in sleeping tents and bunks. A total of forty-three workers died on the job because of accidents.
A 2006 ceremony at the same site where Mulholland had started the flow of the aqueduct into L.A. diverted some of the water back to the Owens River. David Nahai, president of the L.A. Board of Water and Power Commissioners, said on the occasion, “There it is. . . . Take it back.”
Today the entire aqueduct system provides 430 million gallons of water to Los Angeles every day.