Soon shall thy arm, UNCONQUER’D steam! afar
Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car . . .
—Erasmus Darwin, 17811
America is the country of the future. It is a country of beginnings, of projects, of vast designs and expectations.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 18442
In 1851, the first world’s fair, the Great Exhibition, opened in London. The industrial supremacy of Britain was demonstrated by the British products on display and symbolized by the Crystal Palace, a vast structure of cast iron and glass designed by the gardener and architect Joseph Paxton. Dominating global industry, leading the world in the transition from agrarian civilization to urban, industrial society, Victorian Britain was the center of the world economy. Other countries had the option of finding a place in an economic order centered on Britain—or competing with the first industrial nation on its own terms.
Developed at first in Britain by Thomas Newcomen and James Watt to pump water out of coal mines, steam power was soon applied to manufacturing and to transportation, in the form of steamboats and steamships and then locomotives. The steam engine marked a radical advance in civilization. No longer would societies be dependent in doing work on the muscle power of humans and animals or diffuse sources of energy like water, wind, or fires stoked by wood and other kinds of biomass. Machines powered by coal, oil, natural gas, and other fossil fuels, and later by nuclear energy, would free most human beings from farm labor to live in cities and suburbs and work in a proliferating variety of occupations that did not require constant, heavy labor.
The geographic and institutional scale of societies, too, would be transformed. Industrial transportation and communication infrastructures—first railroads and telegraph lines, then automobiles, planes, telephones, and radios, and then computer networks like the Internet, satellites, and massive container ships—would shatter old methods of production and enable the growth of vast enterprises in national and global markets. The struggles of societies to adapt to the forces unleashed by the new technologies would topple empires and dynasties in the Old World and contribute to civil war in the New.
The United Kingdom led the way, as the richest and most technologically advanced country in the world. The loss of its American colonies was more than compensated for by its status as the first industrialized nation. Britain led the world in the adoption of steam-powered manufacturing, railroads, and the shift of its population from agriculture to industry. In the early nineteenth century, British manufacturing equaled the combined output of Russia and France.3
Britain pioneered not only industrialization but also the productivity-driven shift of workers and jobs out of agriculture. In 1800, only 36 percent of the population of England was employed in agriculture, as a result of the industrial revolution. As late as 1815, according to the first census, 95 percent of Americans were rural, living on farms or in small towns. British industrial supremacy was reinforced by global naval supremacy and by the centrality of the City of London in global finance.
The story of American technology in the first industrial revolution was for the most part one of American adoption and adaptation of technologies invented in Britain and continental Europe.
INDUSTRIAL ESPIONAGE AND THE AMERICAN MILL INDUSTRY
Britain tried to preserve its lead in industry in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by banning the emigration of skilled mechanics and the transfer of intellectual property to other countries. Just as later-developing nations would pirate American intellectual property, the early United States built up its industrial capacity in part by encouraging skilled emigration in defiance of British law and the theft of British industrial designs.
The most important immigrant to bring British technology to the United States was Samuel Slater. Slater spent six years apprenticed to a British textile manufacturer, then emigrated to the United States in 1789. He went into business with two Rhode Island merchants, William Almy and Moses Brown, and, relying on his memory, constructed water frames in their factory in Pawtucket. He and his partners hired children between the ages of seven and twelve and provided jobs as construction workers and guards for their fathers, who considered factory work degrading. As his business expanded, Slater continued his paternalist approach, building cottages and churches for his employees.
By the early 1800s, Slater had his own firm, Samuel Slater and Company. He developed a number of small mill towns or “Arkwright Villages” at small waterpower sites, including one named Slatersville. At Amoskeag Falls on the Merrimac River, Slater established an integrated factory complex which grew into Manchester, New Hampshire, a leading manufacturing city named for Britain’s major industrial center.4
During a visit to England in 1810, Francis Cabot Lowell, a thirty-six-year-old member of a Boston Brahman dynasty that would produce a Harvard University president, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, and a famous poet, Robert Lowell, arranged to be taken on a tour of a British textile mill. He memorized the details of the machinery and reproduced them back home in Waltham, Massachusetts. Lowell formed the Boston Manufacturing Company with other investors and hired a mechanic to build an imitation of the mill he had seen. The company made history with its adaptation of mechanized technology. The company also pioneered the practice of raising money by selling shares.
Lowell proved to be an astute, able political entrepreneur. Following the end of the War of 1812, his firm and others in the infant American textile industry were threatened by British imports. Textile manufacturers like Lowell wanted a protective tariff, but they knew that a high tariff would be opposed by southern planters who sold cotton to the mills of the British Midlands. Lowell’s solution was ingenious. Because the primitive technology in his mill could only produce coarse cloth, there would be a higher tariff on coarse cotton goods, which Britain made with cotton from British India, and a lower tariff on finer cloth, much of it made from American cotton. Lowell himself drafted the relevant provisions of the Tariff of 1816.
At one stroke Lowell had appeased the South, sacrificing the high-end luxury market while monopolizing the low-end American textile market for American firms. In the twentieth century, Japan, the “Little Tigers” of East Asia, and China followed a similar strategy, using nontariff barriers or currency manipulation to protect low-end industries. Benefiting from a strategy of “learning by doing,” with government backing the native firms would then gradually move up the chain of added value.5
Like Samuel Slater and his associates, Lowell experimented with a paternalistic form of welfare capitalism, employing young women in decent conditions. In time, as immigrants poured into the country from Ireland, Germany, and other countries, a low-wage workforce replaced children and young women. Following Lowell’s death in 1817, the company purchased land along the Merrimack River. The new mill town of Lowell became one of the leading centers of large-scale manufacturing in the United States.
Only gradually did the steam engine displace the waterwheel in mechanized manufacturing in textile manufacturing and other industries. As late as 1869, water provided 48.2 percent of the overall energy and steam power only 51.8 percent.6
Technological innovations also spurred productivity in American agriculture. In 1834, Cyrus McCormick invented the McCormick reaper, a horse-drawn machine that radically reduced the time needed for harvesting.7 In 1837, John Deere invented a steel plow that was stronger and more durable than cast-iron plows, founding a company that continues to flourish in the twenty-first century.8
STEAM NAVIGATION IN AMERICA
Some of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention held in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 witnessed a demonstration of an early steamboat by John Fitch. The early history of this technology in the United States revolves around another inventor, Robert Fulton, and the investor Robert Livingston.
Livingston, known as Chancellor Livingston, was one of the rich patroons of the Hudson River valley. He held the highest judicial office in New York for a quarter of a century, and it was in that capacity that he administered the presidential oath of office to George Washington in 1789 in New York, then the temporary national capital. Livingston served his country as part of the five-member committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence, as secretary of foreign affairs under the Articles of Confederation, and as US minister to France, where on behalf of the Jefferson administration he negotiated the Louisiana Purchase of 1803.
When Livingston arrived in 1801 in France as US minister, he met the inventor Robert Fulton, who had been given a twenty-year monopoly on steamboat navigation on New York rivers by the state legislature, on condition that he provide working steamboats, versions of which already existed in Western Europe and the United States. Fulton’s monopoly had expired, but after funding experiments on the Seine, Livingston went into business with Fulton. They renewed the monopoly on August 17, 1807, when Fulton’s steamboat, later named the Clermont, traveled from New York City to Albany in around thirty hours and back in about the same amount of time.
In 1809 Fulton and Livingston, hoping to expand their monopoly over steamboat navigation in New York State to the continental interior, hired their fellow New Yorker Nicholas Roosevelt, the great-uncle of Theodore Roosevelt, to visit the Mississippi. When Roosevelt returned from a trip he undertook with his wife with encouraging reports, Fulton, Livingston, and other investors, including DeWitt Clinton, one of the champions of the Erie Canal, formed the Ohio-Steamboat Navigation Company. Roosevelt then supervised the construction of a steamboat called the New Orleans in Pittsburgh. With his pregnant wife on board, Roosevelt took the New Orleans down the Ohio River to Cincinnati and then from Louisville to New Orleans, where the party arrived on January 10, 1812. Their adventures included experiencing the effects of the 1811 earthquake in the vicinity of New Madrid, a Mississippi river town in what would later be Missouri. A wall of water covered the island to which the boat was moored and nearly sank it.
Their monopoly meant that steamboat operators anywhere in New York had to pay Livingston and Fulton for licenses. In 1811, Livingston and Fulton received a monopoly from the Louisiana legislature as well. They now controlled the access of the hinterlands to the ports of New York and New Orleans.
One of their licensees in New York, Aaron Ogden, sued a former business partner, Thomas Gibbons, who became a competitor in the ferry business between New York and New Jersey. Gibbons claimed that the Federal Coastal Licensing Act of 1793 trumped the New York statute that provided Livingston and Fulton and their licensees with a monopoly. Lower courts ruled against Gibbons, but the US Supreme Court sided with him in Gibbons v. Ogden (1824). Chief Justice John Marshall, who shared the nationalism of his cousin George Washington, argued that the Commerce Clause of the federal constitution gave Congress power to preempt state and local laws affecting interstate commerce. In the twentieth century, Congress and the courts relied on the Commerce Clause to justify federal regulation of the economy and federal enforcement of civil rights, in the interest of creating a national market without the kind of internal barriers imposed by would-be monopolists like Livingston.
Although Fulton and Livingston had been granted a monopoly of steamboat navigation by the Louisiana legislature, in the South as in New York, their privilege was successfully contested in the courts and soon a number of steamboat companies were competing for the traffic of the Mississippi. Their ability to travel upstream against the current permitted the extension of plantation agriculture much farther inland than had been possible in the days of keelboats and flatboats. The geographic extension of cotton agriculture westward into Texas accelerated the forcible dispossession of the Indians and, by increasing the demand for slaves, entrenched the “peculiar institution” even more deeply into the economy and society of the South.
In the Midwest and the South, steamboats became the main carriers of staple crops. The steamboat dramatically reduced costs on journeys up as well as down the Mississippi. The average steamboat freight rate for the upstream journey from New Orleans to Nashville plunged from five dollars before 1820 to twenty-five cents in 1850–1859. The downstream savings in the same period were less striking but still important—from one dollar to 32.5 cents.9
THE COMMODORE
One rags-to-riches tycoon of the first industrial era in America was Cornelius Vanderbilt. “Corneel” started out as a Staten Island ferryman. With his ally Thomas Collins, Vanderbilt battled the Fulton-Livingston steamboat monopoly on the Hudson. The battle anticipated later ones, with bribes to legislators, judges, and officials and appeals to public opinion. When the Supreme Court’s decision in Gibbons v. Ogden in 1824 struck down the Livingston-Fulton monopoly, the race to dominate the new steamboat industry began.
Vanderbilt and Collins flourished, dominating passenger transportation between New York City and Albany. Striking out on his own, Vanderbilt threatened the Hudson River Steamboat Association, America’s largest, and received a handsome reward in greenmail, the purchase of his stock by his competitors.
Transatlantic steamboat travel was also initially organized in Britain as a government-chartered monopoly, by Canadian-born Samuel Cunard. Vanderbilt’s former partner Collins persuaded Congress to subsidize his American alternative to the Cunard steamship line. Vanderbilt now declared war on Collins, creating his own transatlantic service. After Congress cut off the subsidies to Collins in 1858, Collins was bankrupted and Vanderbilt dominated American steamships.
In response to the California gold rush that began in 1848, Vanderbilt built his own canal through Nicaragua, to compete with a projected British-American canal across Panama under the Bulwer Treaty. His state-subsidized competitors in California paid Vanderbilt a fortune not to compete with them. Once again, he profited from greenmail.
When the Civil War began, Vanderbilt became the shipping agent for the War Department. He profited from the fact that he was both buyer and seller. Following the Civil War, Vanderbilt used the fortune he had made in shipping to invest in two other technologies: gas lighting and railroads.10
THE DAWN OF THE AGE OF RAIL IN AMERICA
In 1812, the American inventor Oliver Evans predicted: “The time will come when people will travel in stages moved by steam engines from one city to another almost as fast as birds fly—fifteen to twenty miles an hour. Passing through the air with such velocity—changing the scenes in rapid succession—will be the most exhilarating, delightful exercise. A carriage will set out from Washington in the morning, and the passengers will breakfast at Baltimore, dine at Philadelphia, and sup at New York the same day.”11
Unfortunately, Evans would not live to see his prediction come true. Apprenticed to a wheelwright, Evans moved in 1791 from his native Delaware to Philadelphia, the new nation’s temporary capital. His patent for an improved flour-milling machine was the third patent issued by the young federal government.
Along with Britain’s Richard Trevithick, Evans developed high-pressure steam engines as alternatives to James Watt’s low-pressure engines. In addition to building steam engines, Evans in 1804 provided the Philadelphia Board of Health with a device for dredging and cleaning the city’s docks, which he called the Oruktor Amphibolos (Greek for “amphibious dredger”). His work on a “steam wagon” did not succeed and, in 1819, worn out by business failures and money troubles, he collapsed of a stroke and died after learning that his shop in Philadelphia had burned down.12
In Britain in 1804, Richard Trevithick built the first steam locomotive. The technology developed rapidly until 1829, when George Stephenson’s Rocket won a widely publicized contest in Britain and inspired a railroad-building boom on both sides of the Atlantic. The United States imported locomotives from Britain before their domestic manufacture got under way in the 1830s. British imports also provided 80 percent of the iron rails used in American railroads before the Civil War.13
Among the American railroad pioneers were Colonel John Stevens and his sons. The elder Stevens was born into a wealthy landed New Jersey family with an interest in transportation; his father was a commissioner of the New Jersey turnpike system before the Revolutionary War and owned a merchant fleet. In 1826, with the assistance of his sons Robert Livingston Stevens, the mechanically adept member of the family, and Edwin Augustus Stevens, the colonel demonstrated a workable steam locomotive on a circular track on his wooded estate near Hoboken, New Jersey. In 1830, his sons founded the Camden and Amboy Railroad, which, together with a canal connecting the Delaware and Raritan Rivers, reduced travel time between New York and Philadelphia to a mere nine hours. The early railroads, like the canals, were built by cities competing with other cities to capture the trade of nearby areas.
Colonel Stevens wanted to develop his Hoboken property into a resort for Manhattanites. To serve as a ferry he completed a steamboat, the Phoenix, a year after Robert Fulton’s Clermont was launched. But the monopoly on steamboat navigation that Fulton and his financial backer Robert Livingston had secured from the New York legislature forced Stevens to use his boat on the Delaware River. To arrive there by traveling along the Atlantic coast the Phoenix became the first oceangoing steamship.14
FROM WOOD TO COAL
Until after the Civil War, when prices began to rise because of logging-induced deforestation, the abundance of wood from America’s forests delayed the transition in the United States from wood to coal that Britain had pioneered. For the same reason, the United States lagged behind Britain in shifting from the use of charcoal to that of coke in blast furnaces.
The earliest American trains burned wood rather than coal. This permitted them to be painted in gaudy colors instead of the black that became standard later when coal-burning engines emitted sooty smoke. Showers of sparks from the engines of early wood-burning trains burned holes in the clothes and luggage of passengers and ignited forests along the rail lines.
The commemoration of the Declaration of American Independence on July 4, 1828, was marked by similar ceremonies in Washington, DC, and nearby Baltimore, Maryland. In Washington, President John Quincy Adams struggled in the heat with a beribboned spade to mark a new beginning for the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal to which George Washington had devoted so much effort. Meanwhile, in Baltimore, an elderly founder, Charles Carroll, laid the first stone for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. The B&O ultimately doomed the C&O; the canal would eventually reach only Cumberland, Maryland, and then fall into disuse, having lost traffic to the railroads.
At first the B&O employed horse-drawn rail cars. Then in 1830, the inventor Peter Cooper’s experimental locomotive Tom Thumb showed the company its future. The chief engineer of Charleston’s South Carolina Canal and Railway Company, Horatio Allen, observed: “There is no reason to expect any material improvement in the breed of horses in the future, while, in my judgment, the man is not living who knows what the breed of locomotives is to command.”15
Following the example of Tom Thumb, most locomotives switched from wood to coal. The American version of the locomotive developed its own distinctive features, including the cowcatcher. Collisions between early trains and livestock angered farmers, who sometimes pelted the outlandish vehicles with rocks or even shot at them.
By the beginning of the Civil War, US railroad mileage exceeded that of Britain, France, and the German states.16 The railroad network was thickest in the Northeast and Midwest. In 1860, the South had only 29.2 percent of the nation’s total railroad mileage.17
Unlike the British railroad industry, which used double tracks so that trains could pass one another, most American railroads used single tracking. This allowed much larger areas to be crossed sooner, but created dangers of collision that were ultimately reduced with the help of the telegraph.
WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT
Like most technologies, the telegraph evolved incrementally, with a number of people working on the same problems and producing similar innovations at the same time. “Inventors” should really be called “improvers.” While others preceded him in experimenting with using electricity to send messages, Samuel F. B. Morse, a painter and a professor at New York University, devised a system that used electric pulses along a wire to move a magnetic marker that wrote the symbols of Morse code on a strip of paper.
Much of the credit for the electric telegraph should go to Joseph Henry, the scientist who directed the Smithsonian Institution. In 1830, Henry caused a bell to ring by sending an electric current through a wire from a point a mile away. Building on Henry’s work and that of others, and funded by his business partners Alfred Vail and Leonard Gale, Morse obtained funding by Congress for a telegraph line linking Washington, DC, with nearby Baltimore, Maryland.
On May 24, 1844, Morse sent a line selected by the daughter of a friend from Numbers 23:23, “What hath God wrought?” to Baltimore from the chambers of the Supreme Court, then located in the Capitol Building in Washington. A few weeks earlier, on May 1, Morse’s business partner Alfred Vail had wired the news from Annapolis Junction, between Washington and Baltimore, of Henry Clay’s nomination as president by the Whig Party at its Baltimore convention.18
Overland telegraphy was followed quickly by submarine telegraphy, when the first submarine cable connected Dover and Calais in 1851. In August 1858, a transatlantic cable permitted President James Buchanan and Queen Victoria to exchange messages.
“HELL WITH THE LID OFF”
The Pennsylvania coal seam spreads across an area of more than eleven thousand square miles under the Appalachians from Pennsylvania to Alabama. Most of the coal is soft or bituminous coal. Much of the world’s supply of hard or anthracite coal, which burns more cleanly than soft coal and even wood, is concentrated in eastern Pennsylvania.
In the 1830s, skilled Welsh iron-goods makers, experienced in working with Welsh anthracite, were imported by coal-mine owners to transfer their skill in using anthracite in iron smelting. Improved iron-making technology led to dramatic decreases in the price of iron, enabling manufacturing enterprises using coal-fired steam engines and iron machines to flourish between the 1830s and the beginning of the Civil War. Among the earliest railroads in America were the rail lines that led out of the anthracite mines of Pennsylvania, where mules dragged carts of coal uphill along rails.
Coke is a compound of carbon and ash created by burning coal in controlled conditions to drive off gases. The British pioneered the use of coke made from soft coal to replace charcoal in making iron.
Eastern Pennsylvania was rich in anthracite coal that could only be used as a fuel in blast furnaces on a large scale after the “hot blast” method developed in Britain in the 1820s was adopted in the United States. Because coke had to be shipped by water or rail, Pittsburgh’s proximity to anthracite and bituminous coal mines gave it an advantage over other manufacturing cities. Already before the Civil War, the smoke from its factories combined with its glowing, volcanic furnaces inspired a journalist to name Pittsburgh “Hell with the lid off.”
THE AMERICAN SYSTEM OF MANUFACTURING
The federal government played a limited but important role in technological development before the Civil War. The US Army assigned some of its engineers and officers to conduct surveys for railroads. In the 1830s, the federal government gave Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute a grant to study the causes of steamboat boiler explosions. The research produced innovations in the industry.19
The most important contribution of the federal government to early industrialization in America came from the army arsenals at Springfield, Massachusetts, and Harpers Ferry, Virginia. They were the incubators of the “armory system” that revolutionized manufacturing in the United States and the world. The phrase “the American System,” used to describe Henry Clay’s program for national economic modernization by means of tariff-based import substitution, a central bank, and infrastructure investments, is also used to describe the system of using interchangeable parts in manufacturing.
The American system of manufacturing ought to be called the French system, because it originated as “le système Gribeauval.” Jean-Baptiste Gribeauval was a French general who proposed to rationalize French arms production by assembling standard weapons from standardized components. Gribeauval’s idea was developed by Honoré Blanc. While serving as the US minister to France, Thomas Jefferson reported on his visit to Blanc’s factory in a 1785 letter to Secretary of War Henry Knox: “Supposing it might be beneficial to the U.S., I went to the workman. He presented me with the parts of 50 [musket] locks taken to pieces and arranged in combination. I put several together myself taking pieces at hazard as they came to hand, and they fitted in the most perfect manner. The advantages of this, when arms need repair, are evident.”20
Jefferson sent a copy of a pamphlet by Blanc to Knox. In 1793, a French military engineer who had served in the American War of Independence with Lafayette named Major Louis de Tousard fled the French Revolution and joined the US Corps of Artillerists and Engineers when it was formed in 1795. Tousard’s 1798 proposal for a school of artillerists and engineers influenced the design of the US Military Academy at West Point, and in 1809 he published a three-volume treatise, the American Artillerist’s Companion.21
The ideas of Gribeauval, Blanc, and Tousard were brought with them by the American military engineers who worked at the federal arsenals founded in 1794 at Springfield and at Harpers Ferry in 1798. The army negotiated contracts with private arms makers. Eli Whitney promoted the idea of mass-producing muskets, but failed to deliver. Simeon North was more successful, creating a milling machine that allowed quick creation of uniform parts to help him carry out a large contract for pistols.
The first head of the US Army Ordnance Department, Colonel Decius Wadsworth, who had served with Tousard in the Corps of Artillerists and Engineers, along with his assistant and eventual successor George Bomford, used his authority over the federal arsenals to work with private contractors to develop interchangeable-parts assembly. One contractor, Thomas Blanchard, invented the Blanchard lathe, which reproduced irregular shapes like musket stocks or ax handles in wood. A Maine craftsman, John H. Hall, developed a breech-loading rifle he had invented. (He was forced to share the royalties for his invention with William Thornton, the commissioner of patents, who insisted that he be named as coinventor.)
By the 1830s, Hall at Hall’s Rifle Works at Harpers Ferry and Simeon North in his Massachusetts factory were refining what became known as “the Armory practice.” Between that period and the Civil War, the Springfield Armory under the leadership of its superintendent, Roswell Lee, led the way in developing advanced machine tools and training mechanics who diffused armory-practice techniques through emerging civilian industries.
One of those industries was civilian gun manufacturing. After failing in his first attempt to manufacture his patented revolver, Samuel Colt succeeded when he hired a former master armorer from Springfield named Thomas Warren. Lebbeus B. Miller, a veteran of a firearms company in Newark, introduced what was by now known as the American system of manufacturing to the sewing-machine industry, when he was hired in 1863 by Isaac Merritt Singer. Cyrus McCormick, the inventor of McCormick’s reaper, struggled with the production of his product until he hired a veteran of Colt’s company and other firearms companies named Lewis Wilkinson. When the British safety bicycle made bicycling popular in the United States, armory practice spread to that industry as well. George A. Fairfield, a former contractor at Colt’s Hartford plant, became superintendent of the Weed Sewing Machine Company, which in spite of its name manufactured a variety of products, including the early bicycles of the leader in the industry, the Pope Manufacturing Company, and then early automobiles.22
The transfer of technology to the United States was made easier by the existence in the northern states of a population with a high level of basic literacy and mechanical skill.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the United States lagged behind Britain and Western Europe in science and higher education. According to Putnam’s Magazine in 1854, “The genius of this new country is necessarily mechanical. Our greatest thinkers are not in the library, not the capitol, but in the machine shop. . . . Our education is no genial culture of letters, but simply learning the use of tools.”23 In the Northeast and Midwest, a society of craftsmen and tinkerers formed, in part because of public schools. By 1830, the United States was second only to Germany in the proportion of its population in school. If southerners, white and black, were factored out, the antebellum United States might have been the most educated nation in the world.24
As early as 1851, Colt’s firearm exhibit at the Great Exhibition in London impressed British observers with what became known as the American system of manufactures. The British government sent commissioners to study American manufacturing. Colt, who opened a factory in Britain, told a parliamentary committee: “There is nothing that cannot be produced by machinery.”25