John Maynard Keynes
This fire was in a factory in Thailand and resulted in the deaths of 188 people, and it was regarded as the worst industrial factory fire in history. More than five hundred other people were seriously injured, and questions were asked over safety in Thailand’s factories, but also whether the nature of Western businesses requires goods to be made at the lowest possible prices regardless of the safety of the workers.
The Kader Toy Factory was located in the Sam Phran District of Nakhon Pathom Province to the west of Bangkok, the capital of Thailand. The city boasts the largest chedi (bell-shaped burial chambers) in the country, and it has been continuously settled since the fourth century, making it one of the oldest cities in the region. The factory was used to make manufactured stuffed toys, and it also licensed plastic dolls largely for export to the United States and other developed countries. It employed hundreds of people, mainly young female workers from rural families. The exact ownership has been disputed. The Thai company, Kader Industrial (Thailand), was 40 percent owned by Kader International, a Hong Kong toy maker, with the Charoen Pokphand Group owning 40 percent and the remaining 20 percent owned by investors from Taiwan. The chairman of Kader International, Kenneth Ting, denied that his company was in charge of running the factory. He said that his company was “a passive investor with no management on the ground in Thailand.” The Charoen Pokphand Group (CP) also denied that they ran the company, with an unnamed spokesman stating that he was “definitely 100 percent sure CP is not involved in Kader.” However, the Thai press later reported that CP had guaranteed the loans that the Siam City Bank made to the factory, also claiming that Jaran Chiaravanont, a director of CP, was closely linked to the Kader Toy Factory.
The main problem with the fire was that there were many flaws with the design of the factory. There had been two previous fires at the site. One in 1988 had reduced the entire factory to ashes, and there had been another in September 1989 that had caused one of the buildings to collapse. However, the problems still had not been fixed. It was reinforced with uninsulated steel girders, which meant that when the fire broke out, the walls and ceiling collapsed easily. Furthermore, the fire exits that were on the plan when the factory was being built were not incorporated into the final design, and when the fire did break out, most of the exit doors were locked. By contrast, Japanese companies operating in Thailand insisted that the factories were only one story high, precisely to prevent problems with fires.
The Kader Toy Factory fire started on May 10, 1993, on the first floor in a room where finished products were being stored. After the fire, factory personnel believed that the fire had been caused by an electrical fault. By contrast, the Thai fire investigators suggested that it was more likely caused by a cigarette that had been discarded close to flammable items. Either way, when the fire was noticed, workers were initially told the fire was relatively small and being controlled and that they should continue working. After the fire started, the fire alarm within Building One did not sound. Because of the nature of the products, many of them burned very fast, giving off a noxious smoke. However, with the alarm going off in Building Two and Building Three, all the workers in these buildings were able to escape.
As the fire started spreading, the workers who were on the ground floor found the exit doors were locked, and they tried to head upstairs. However, some of the staircases collapsed under the strain. Workers from the second, third, and fourth floors smashed windows and jumped to safety, often suffering severe injuries in the process and some dying. It was not until 4.40 p.m. that the fire brigade arrived, and they found that Building One was about to collapse. When the fire brigade searched through the charred building, they found that many of the victims had died when the northern stairwell of Building One had collapsed. There people had died from the flames and from smoke inhalation, as well as from the collapse of the building structure itself.
Chuan Leekpai, the prime minister of Thailand, traveled to the scene of the tragedy, and there was immediate focus on the lax safety standards and also the fact that the factory did not meet any of the building code design requirements. Sanan Kachornprasart, the Minister of Industry, demanded that factories that did not meet safety code requirements should be closed down. Other companies stated that they would immediately conduct safety audits of their factories in Thailand, with a number of foreign giftware companies demanding strict safety standards from factories they used. Kader quickly hired Kroll Associates to try to work out the cause of the fire, but there were disputes over exactly how it began.
Neil Kearney, general secretary of the International Garment and Leather Workers’ Federation based in Brussels, Belgium, commented, “The development process is an important and difficult one. But the quest for inward investment and export earnings must not be paid for by the blood and lives of young women workers.” The Kader Factory Fire killed more than in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, but it received less attention, although it was featured in a song by the New Zealand singer Don McGlashan.
See also: Bhopal Catastrophe; Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station; Great Chicago Fire of 1871; Halifax Explosion of 1917; Seveso Disaster; Texas City Disaster; Three Mile Island; Times Beach, Missouri, Disaster.
—Justin Corfield
Further Reading
Clifford, Mark, and Paul Handley. “Burning Questions: Thai Factory Blaze Gives Investors Pause for Thought.” Far Eastern Economic Review, May 27, 1993, 69–70.
Haines, Fiona. Globalization and Regulatory Character: Regulatory Reform after the Kader Factory Fire. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2005.
The Kaiping Mines, located in the north of China in Hopei Province, were the first modern mines in China, established with capital provided by the Chinese government in 1877 and modeled on the mines operating in Britain and Australia at the time. It was similar to the plans that led to the building of the Shanghai Cotton Cloth Mill in 1879. The two Chinese officials, Li Hung Chang (Li Hongzhang, 1823–1901) and Tang Ching-hsing, were responsible for establishing the Kaiping Mining Administration to work the mine, with an initial capital injection of 800,000 taels by the Chinese government. It was, in essence, a private joint-stock company but was supervised by Chinese government officials. Li Hung Chang helped with the development of the mines by encouraging the extension of the Chinese railway to the mines that connected them to Tientsin (Tianjin), one of the main treaty ports in northern China. Initially some hundreds of tons of coal were extracted, but this rose to 39,000 tons in 1897 and to 732,000 tons in the following year. The demand for coal was great, and much of it was used on steam ships that Li Hung Chang had been promoting as a way of modernizing Chinese trade.
However, in 1900, with the Boxer Uprising and foreign military forces invading China, Chang Yen-Mao, the managing director of the Kaiping Mines, was worried that because the business was profitable, it might end up being seized by the foreign powers. Since 1895, Li Hung Chang had used the businessman Gustav Detring for advice, and on this occasion Chang decided to ask Detring to help plan to thwart any seizure. Detring was appointed as general manager and attorney for the company, and he started negotiating with a local Tientsin-based engineer Herbert C. Hoover, who represented the British firm of Bewick, Moreing and Company. Hoover had been in China and had been active in the fighting around Tientsin in the Boxer Uprising; he was later president of the United States. Detring managed to get Hoover interested, and on July 30, 1900, an agreement was signed establishing the Chinese Engineering and Mining Company, which was registered under British laws. It was declared to have capital of £1 million, with one million shares valued at £1 each. The existing shareholders of the mine would receive 375,000 shares, and the rest of the shares were open for subscription to raise more capital for the business. Another agreement was made on February 19, 1901, in which there would be equal rights between Chinese and foreign shareholders, with a board in China and another in London. Chang Yen-Mao remained the general manager of the Chinese firm. The plan was for a Sino-British company, with the Chinese still in control. However, the British outmaneuvered the Chinese and paid some £15,000, with Moreing and associates taking all the 625,000 shares.
In 1903 the Chinese government came to hear of developments and threatened legal action against Chang Yen-Mao. Two years later he was sent to London to try to take back the company, but failed. As a result, Yuan Shikai, the emerging power in the Chinese government, decided to establish the Lanchow Mining Company close to the Kaiping Mines. It had capital of five million taels, some six hundred thousand provided by the local provincial government and the rest from Chinese capitalists. In 1910 when the Kaiping Mines were producing 1.159 million tons of coal, the Lanchow mines were only generating a third of that. However, they were selling in the same market as the Kaiping Mines, especially with the emergence of the Hanyang Iron Factory.
From 1907 until 1910 the Chinese again sought to regain control of the Kaiping Mines and decided to embark on a price war. With the price for coal dust halving and both sides losing money, the Chinese government eventually decided to try a new stratagem. In 1911 the Chinese Revolution saw the end of the Imperial Family and the rise of Sun Zhongshan (Sun Yat-sen). In 1912 Yuan Shikai became the president of China, and in that year, the Kaiping Coal Mine Company combined with the Chinese-owned Luanzhou Coal Mine, and these were merged to form the Kailuan Coal Mine, which stated that it was a “Sino-foreign joint enterprise.” It expanded quickly and continued to operate for twenty years under British management with easy access to the Chinese labor force, but it became increasingly criticized by Nationalists who felt that these foreign-managed enterprises hindered the development of Chinese entrepreneurs, and by the Communists, who were against all foreign control of companies operating in China. In 1937 the Japanese took control of the region, but the partial British ownership of the mine kept it operating. The Japanese took it over in December 1941. The company continued operating until 1949 when it was taken over by the Communists led by Mao Zedong.
See also: Chinese Communist Party; Shanghai, China.
—Justin Corfield
Further Reading
Carlson, Ellsworth C. The Kaiping Mines, 1877–1912, 2nd edition. Cambridge, MA: East Asian Research Center, 1971.
Hou, Chi-ming. Foreign Investment and Economic Development in China 1840–1937. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965.
Lyons, Eugene. Herbert Hoover: A Biography. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979.
Spector, Stanley. Li Hung-chang and the Huai Army: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Chinese Regionalism. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964.
Kalashnikov, Mikhail (1919–2013)
It was estimated that in 2005 there were between seventy and one hundred million AK-47s in circulation worldwide. It is a weapon created by a former Russian peasant and World War II tank commander, Mikhail Kalashnikov, and it is perhaps the most reliable automatic weapon in the world. It is also one of the cheapest, selling for about $10 in Afghanistan. As a result, it has become the favorite weapon of revolutionaries and third-world armies, including the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War. It has set the standard for the manufacture of automatic rifles.
Mikhail Kalashnikov was born November 10, 1919. The Russian territory that he was born in, Altai Krai, is in the southern part of the Siberian Federal District and borders on Kazakhstan. It is a mostly mountainous region with the stereotypical frigid Siberian weather, though it is not the worst of the Siberian territory. His parents, Timofey and Aleksandra Kalashnikov, were peasants who had migrated nearly 2,500 miles to Altai from the Cossack village of Otradnoe in the Northern Caucasus. This was a voluntary, state-organized move in which they were given free land—unlike the traumatic displacement they would suffer later. They settled in the small village of Kurya, which today has a population of just a little more than four thousand and is located on the steppes of the mountains.
The seventeenth of nineteen children (only eight survived), Mikhail Kalashnikov lived in Kurya until 1930. About this time, the new Soviet regime forced collectivization on the population and took away private property. The Bolsheviks took the Kalashnikovs’ livestock and anything else they considered “surplus.” For good measure, they burned their house down. Along with other peasant landowners, the Kalashnikov family was then forcibly exiled north to the Tomsk region near the settlement of Voronikha. Here they began their new life living in barracks under Siberia’s truly harsh conditions.
Timofey died after his first winter there, and Aleksandra remarried. In 1933, at age fourteen, Kalashnikov forged papers of “rehabilitation” and with a friend ran away from Siberia back to his hometown of Kurya. There they found themselves in trouble for possessing a Browning pistol. Arrested for a week, Kalashnikov then made his way quickly to Matai, Kazakhstan. There he began work with the Turkistan-Siberian railway first as an accounting clerk and then as technical secretary.
In 1938 he was drafted into the Red Army and was stationed in the Kiev special military district. There his exceptional mechanical talents (despite no formal training) began to show. In Kiev, he was sent to a training school for tank mechanics, and after graduation he was assigned a job as a tank driver. He created a mechanical means to enhance the effectiveness of the “TT” self-loading pistol as used in tanks and then created a meter for calculating the tank’s running time. Soviet general G. K. Zhukov praised his meter, and the army posted him to Leningrad to act as a technical advisor at a factory created to manufacture the meters. But his stay in Leningrad was interrupted by the German invasion of Russia on June 22, 1941. He was posted to the front lines as a tank commander. It was here that he would experience an emotionally charged trauma that would spur him on to the creation of the AK-47.
His unit ended up at the battle for Bryansk. His tank was hit by German artillery, and Kalashnikov was wounded. He was taken by truck, along with other Russian soldiers, to a nearby village. Kalashnikov, a lieutenant, and the driver left the truck to scout for possible enemy in the village. They returned to see that the Germans, using submachine guns (Maschinenpistoles), had mowed down their fellow soldiers with a quick burst of their guns. The Russians at that time had no assault weapon of equal tactical firepower.
While recuperating from his wounds, he began to consider possible designs for an automatic assault weapon. Posted back to Matai, he put together a prototype weapon. This first design was rejected by the authorities as too complicated, but they saw promise in Kalashnikov and sent him to a school to develop his talents. Then, responding to a government contest to design an automatic weapon using a new-sized cartridge, a 7.62 × 39 mm round, he put together the AK-47 (for Automatic Kalashnikov 1947—the year he finished it).
The weapon is unique for its simplicity and its reliability even under the harshest, dirtiest conditions. It has a free-floating firing pin and a gas-activated short-stroke piston that is used to load and eject cartridges at six hundred rounds per minute. To help keep dirt from jamming the rifle, the bolt rotates as it seats the round, and the weapon has loose-fitting parts, which allows dirt to be blown off as the rifle fires. Kalashnikov successfully tested the weapon after it had been dragged through a sand pit, and American colonel David Hackworth successfully fired an AK-47 after it had been buried for a year in mud.
The weapon was originally manufactured in Izhevsk, Russia, in what was known as Motor Plant 524. This was not, in fact, a motor plant but a secret weapons factory. But the design was easy to imitate, and many other countries have manufactured their own AK-47s. The Russians (under the Soviet Union) gave their allies the necessary design plans to manufacture their own; some countries and businesses have simply done it illegally. Kalashnikov has also designed other weapons, including the AKM and the AK-74 and at least thirteen other conventional weapons.
Perhaps no other modern conventional weapon has had such an impact on warfare. It has been the weapon of choice for millions of soldiers and revolutionaries since the mid-twentieth century. Its reliability and ease of use has made Mikhail Kalashnikov a hero in Russia and has even spurred the United States to design its own automatic assault rifle, the M-16. Kalashnikov died in December 23, 2013.
—William P. Toth
Further Reading
Cutshaw, Charlie, and Valery Shilin. Legends and Reality of the AK. Boulder, CO: Paladin Press, 2000.
Kahaner, Larry. AK-47: The Weapon That Changed the Face of War. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2007.
Kalashnikov, Mikhail. The Gun That Changed the World. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2006.
Tenner, Ed. “Kalashnikov’s Gun.” Technology Review, March 2005, 68.
The Kawasaki Jukogyo (“Kawasaki Heavy Industries Ltd.”) is a part of the Kawasaki Group, with its headquarters in both Chuo-ku, Kobe, and in Minato-ku, Tokyo. It currently employs some 29,200 people, and in the fiscal year ending March 31, 2007, its revenue was 1,438,619 million yen. The company makes a wide range of items but is usually best known for its popular sale of motorcycles and its all-terrain vehicles.
The group of companies traces its origins back to 1878, some thirteen years after the Meiji Restoration, when the Kawasaki Tsukiji Shipyard was established in Tokyo by Kawasaki Shozo (1837–1912). He had been born in Kagoshima, in the southern part of Kyushu Island, his father being a merchant selling kimonos. When he was seventeen he went to Nagasaki, and by the age of twenty-seven, he was operating his own shipping business at Osaka. The business failed when its cargo ship sank in a storm. Later Kawasaki was involved in the expeditions to the Ryukyu Islands where Japan was sourcing its sugar. In April 1876, with the support of Matsukata Masayoshi, the then vice minister of finance, who was also from Kagoshima, he leased land along the Sumidagawa River from the government and established the Kawasaki Tsukiji Shipyard there two years later.
With new finance Kawasaki was able to open the Kawasaki Hyogo Shipyard at Kobe in 1886, and ten years later he merged the shipyards at Tokyo and Kobe, and these formed the Kawasaki Shipyard (or Dockyard) Company that was incorporated on October 15 of that year. The business prospered and diversified so much that in 1939 it was renamed Kawasaki Heavy Industries Ltd.
As the company expanded, it formed a number of other separate but related companies. One of these was the Kawasaki Steel Corporation, which was incorporated in 1906 with its own business identity but still was very much a part of the Kawasaki Group. In 1919 the Kawasaki Kisen Kaisha Ltd. was separated from the main company and incorporated as a separate business identity, although it retained links with its parent organization. It traded under the name “K” Line, and it offered extensive ocean freight services, including for tankers and container ships. During the 1930s it expanded its network around most of the Pacific, causing some countries to worry that the shipping line was effectively a method for Japanese commercial expansion into the region to help with eventual military conquest, which in 1941 to 1942 did happen. During World War II and afterward, it was involved in the manufacture of naval ships and submarines, as well as offshore structures. This led to the company designing and making marine machinery and equipment, including main engines, propulsion systems, steering wheels, and also deck and fishing material.
In 1906 with Japan expanding its railway network, Kawasaki Heavy Industries moved into the field of trains and carriage construction, and now Kawasaki Heavy Industries has become the largest manufacturers of rolling stock in the country. It makes express trains, commuter trains, freight trains and subway cars, locomotives and monorails, and nowadays it has devoted many resources to the development of new transit systems.
After World War II, the company continued to develop many new technologies and was involved in the construction of many oil supertankers and ships capable of carrying liquefied natural gas. From the early 1970s Kawasaki Heavy Industries set about expanding rapidly into markets around the world. This saw Kawasaki setting up sixteen subsidiaries overseas with ten offices in Brazil, the Philippines, the United States, and other countries, all reporting back to the headquarters that remained in Kobe. By this time the company was involved in the manufacturing of ships, aerospace equipment, industrial machinery, motor engines, aircraft, motorcycles, rolling stock, and the design and building of industrial plants. It was also involved in subcontracting work for a number of large foreign companies.
In the field of aerospace, Kawasaki has been involved in the joint development and production with Boeing of the Boeing 767 and Boeing 777. It was also working heavily with Embraer-Empresa Brasileira de Aeronáutica on their 170, 175, 190, and 195 jets. Mention should also be made of the extensive work that Kawasaki carried out with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. This led to the development and also the production of the payload fairings, payload attach fittings, and also the construction of the launch complex for the H-II rocket. It has also been in the forefront of research in Japan into the development of reusable launch vehicles. As well as manufacturing items, Kawasaki has had a long history of building major infrastructure projects, including the development of storage solutions for liquid nitrogen gas.
In 1950 the Kawasaki Steel Corporation had become independent of the parent company and was reorganized into four different sectors covering steel, engineering and construction, chemicals, and a new wing dealing with electronics, information services, and communications. It maintains overseas subsidiaries, most of which use the Kawasaki name. However, the subsidiaries also include Armco Steel Company, California Steel Industries Inc., Companhia Siderurgica de Tubarao, NBK Corporation, and the Philippine Sinter Corporation.
See also: Bank of Japan; Japan; Mitsubishi; Mitsui.
—Justin Corfield
Further Reading
Chen Wai-Fah. My Life’s Journey: Reflections of an Academic. Hackensack, NJ: World Scientific Publishing Company, 2007.
Chida, Tomohei, and Peter N. Davies. The Japanese Shipping and Shipbuilding Industries: A History of Their Modern Growth. London: Athlone Press, 1990.
A British inventor, he came up with the design of the flying shuttle, one of the key contributions to the Industrial Revolution. John Kay was born on June 17, 1704, at the Park, in the village of Walmersley, Bury, Lancashire, in England. His parents were Robert Kay and Ellin (née Entwistle). Little is known of his early life, but he may have been educated abroad. His father was certainly wealthy, and when John became an adult Robert put John in charge of a family business for the production of wool in Colchester.
In 1730 Kay went back to Bury, where he started work as a reed maker. Late in 1730 he took out his first patent (No. 515) for an engine “for making, twisting and carding mohair, and twining and dressing of thread.” No description of the machine has survived. Soon afterward Kay tried to improve on the reeds used in weaving looms, with the aim of making them last longer. Finally, in 1733 Kay took out a patent (No. 542) for the invention that made him famous: the flying shuttle. It changed weaving, eliminating the time-consuming process of hand passing the shuttle through the warp. Now this step could be done mechanically, with the additional benefit that the width of the loom and thus the cloth was no longer constrained by the physical reach of the weaver.
Kay’s design of the flying shuttle increased the speed of weaving dramatically. The shuttle carried the weft through the warp threads much more quickly beyond the width of handheld shuttles. Looms now produced larger cloth more quickly. The production of cotton yarn could not keep up with the demand. Additionally, many weavers believed that the design would put them out of work. As a result people started ostracizing Kay, and some of his looms with flying shuttles were attacked and vandalized.
Kay attempted to expand his interests beyond the volatile textile industry. His next patent, lodged in 1738 (No. 561), was for a windmill that would power working pumps and also an improved chain pump. That year he had moved to Leeds. By this time Kay was involved in battles against people illegally using his flying shuttle. He began prosecuting people using the flying shuttle and infringing on his patent rights. Although Kay nearly always won ensuing court cases, the money expended on legal costs severely drained his resources.
Moving back to Bury by 1745, Kay lodged another patent (No. 612) for a small-ware loom operated by mechanical power rather than by hand. This power loom threatened the very livelihood of many of the workers who were already having problems over the flying shuttle. In 1753 a mob of Luddites broke into Kay’s house in Bury. Kay just escaped while the mob destroyed everything of value in the house.
Kay was angered by the attack and, unable to get help and protection in England, he left for France in 1747, where he planned to set up a business. He had managed to smuggle some of his machines out of England some years earlier. In France, he tried to sell his invention but was unsuccessful. He died there in 1780, the date uncertain because of his obscurity and poverty. On June 29, 1725, he had married Anne Holt, a daughter of John Holt of Bury. Their son Robert, who had worked with and for his father for many years, remained in England and developed the drop box that allowed people using looms to use wefts of many different colors. In 1846 Kay’s great-grandson Thomas Sutcliffe sought some financial compensation from Parliament for Kay’s invention but got no response from the government.
John Kay is commemorated on a mural painting by Ford Madox Brown at the Manchester Town Hall. He is occasionally called “John Kay of Bury” to differentiate him from John Kay, the clockmaker from Warrington, who was around at the same time and worked with Richard Arkwright on the spinning frame.
—Justin Corfield
Further Reading
Baines, Sir Edward. History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain. New York: A. M. Kelley, 1966.
Wadsworth, A. P., and J. de L. Mann. The Cotton Industry and Industrial Lancashire. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1931.
A clockmaker from Warrington, Lancashire, in the north of England, John Kay was involved in the invention of the spinning frame in 1767 and its subsequent use by Richard Arkwright. He is often known as “John Kay of Warrington” to differentiate him from John Kay of Bury, also in Lancashire, who designed the flying shuttle at around the same time. Quite a number of mid-nineteenth-century books such as Profiles of Warrington Worthies, published in London in 1854, confuse the two, and this also happened with later writers.
John Kay seems to have spent most of his life in the town of Warrington, which had established a local reputation for clockmaking with Edward Barlow, a vicar in the seventeenth century who developed the first repeating clock, and Peter Litherland in 1794, who invented the rack-lever for watches. John Kay was a partner of Thomas Highs, who was the original inventor of the spinning frame, and Highs used Kay to make a small model of his design. Kay was particularly intrigued by the use of the rollers, part of the secret to the machine made by Highs. Somehow Richard Arkwright heard about the invention, and with Highs having run out of funds, Arkwright seems to have decided that he might make his own spinning frame. However, Arkwright lacked the expertise and the machinery to make his frame. In 1767, according to evidence that Kay gave at the subsequent trial over the origin of the spinning frame, Arkwright approached John Kay and asked him to “bend some wires and turn some pieces of brass,” which Arkwright was wanting to use to make his own spinning frame. It seems probable that Kay and Arkwright already knew each other, and even that Kay was the one who told Arkwright about the original design by Highs, possibly, according to tradition, after Arkwright bought Kay a large number of drinks at a local public house. Kay was also then involved in making some wooden models, using four wheels fashioned from wood, for Arkwright, and the two combined on making some of the bulkier parts of the invention with Kay using his clockmaker skills to make some of the cogs and more complicated parts.
With the prototype for Arkwright’s spinning frame, Kay accompanied Arkwright to Preston, where they met with John Smalley, who was a local liquor merchant and painter. Arkwright and Kay then used a parlor of a house belonging to the Preston Free Grammar School where, in secret, the two were involved in putting together the spinning frame. Because the place was so secluded, rumors started that Arkwright and Kay were involved in devilry and sorcery, with the noises that the machine was making inspiring some of the wilder stories of the locals. Soon afterward Arkwright moved to Nottingham, leaving Kay to return to Warrington.
It seems that Kay became disenchanted with what happened, obviously hoping that Arkwright would pay him, or pay him more. With Arkwright making a fortune, Kay turned against his former business partner. In 1785 when Highs complained that Arkwright had infringed on his patent, copying his design of the spinning frame, a court case began before the King’s Bench. In this Kay was the prime witness during the subsequent trial, in which the clockmaker confirmed that he had worked secretly with Arkwright making the spinning frame. Kay’s wife also confirmed what her husband said and that Arkwright had thanked Kay for keeping the making in Preston of the spinning frame secret. Kay moved back to Warrington, and nothing more is known for certain about the rest of his life. If he did not move far from Warrington, he could be the John Kay who died in 1794 and was buried on July 10, at the churchyard of St. Martin’s Church of England, Ashton upon Mersey, Cheshire.
See also: Industrial Revolution; Textile Industry.
—Justin Corfield
Further Reading
Crabtree, John Henry. Richard Arkwright. London: The Sheldon Press, 1923.
Daniels, George William, and Samuel Crompton. The Early English Cotton Industry. London: Longmans Green & Co., 1920.
Guest, Richard. The British Cotton Manufactures, and a Reply to an Article on the Spinning Machinery. Manchester: Henry Smith (printer), 1828.
Hills, Richard Leslie. Richard Arkwright and Cotton Spinning. London: Priory Press, 1973.
An American inventor, William Kelly was a metallurgist who experimented with ways of developing cast iron. He was born on August 22, 1811, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of John Kelly and Elizabeth (née Fitzsimons). Kelly’s father was a prosperous landowner and built the first two brick houses in Pittsburgh, and he educated his son at local schools. As a young man, William studied metallurgy at the Western University of Pennsylvania and then was planning to work as a scientist. However, he, his brother, and their brother-in-law started a dry goods and commission business, which became known as McShane & Kelly. In 1847 Kelly and his brother John Kelly moved to Eddyville, Kentucky, after their warehouse had been destroyed by fire.
In the year before their move to Kentucky, the two Kelly brothers had bought an iron manufacturing plant located on the Cumberland River in Lyon County. It had been known as the Eddyville Iron-Works, and they renamed it Kelly & Company. Around this time he married Mildred A. Gracy, whose father, a wealthy tobacco merchant, helped finance the move to Eddyville. Kelly was also involved in developing the Suwanee Iron Works and Union Forge, where he was a manufacturer of sugar kettles that were used by local sugar farmers. His factory technology was soon outdated by the introduction of the multiple-effect evaporating system developed by Norbert Rillieux. Kelly’s kettles were wrought from pig iron, and he used a very large amount of fuel. Kelly began experimenting with methods of making strong iron but using far less energy, as he was worried about running out of charcoal.
He initiated work on an “air boiling” process that involved blowing air through molten iron. This reduced significantly the carbon content of the iron. However, Kelly quickly discovered to his surprise that the injected air did not cool the molten iron but actually combined with carbon in the molten mixture, causing it to start to boil and burn violently. This dramatically reduced the carbon and improved the quality of the iron, converting it into good-quality steel. Between 1851 and 1856, Kelly had seven experimental converters secretly built to try out his method of making steel. The same process was, however, very soon afterward developed (probably independently) by the English engineer Henry Bessemer, who patented the procedure.
Kelly was angered by the news that Bessemer had patented the process, and he later claimed that one of the English workmen whom he employed in Kentucky must have informed Bessemer of his experiments. Nevertheless, Kelly was able to get a patent in 1857 (no. 17,628). The core claim of the patent was “blowing blasts of air, either hot or cold, up and through a mass of liquid iron, the oxygen in the air combining with the carbon in the iron, causing a greatly increased heat and boiling commotion in the fluid mass and decarbonizing and refining the iron.”
The financial crisis in the United States in 1857 drove Kelly into severe financial problems, and he was forced to sell his patent to his father for $1,000. Because his father considered his Kelly to be a poor businessman, he refused to return the patent. He did bequeath it to William Kelly’s sisters, it later passing to his (William’s) children. Meanwhile, Kelly persevered. In 1859 he built the first successful fitted converter at the Cambria Iron Works. The business nevertheless foundered, and Kelly declared bankruptcy. It was not until the fall of 1864 that the first steel made under the Kelly patent was produced commercially at the Wyandotte Iron Works, near Detroit, Michigan. Within a few years Bessemer was well known in Great Britain and the world while Kelly remained obscure. Kelly received only about 5 percent (about $450,000) of the patent royalties—totaling $10 million—that were paid to Bessemer, whose name now described the refined product: “Bessemer Steel.”
In 1871 the U.S. patent office granted Kelly a renewal of his patent for seven years, rejecting the renewal requests made by Henry Bessemer and also Robert F. Mushet, who had a similar patent. However, Kelly never prospered and spent the last part of his life in Louisville, Kentucky, making axes and working in banking and real estate. He died on February 11, 1888, at Louisville, and he was buried in the local cemetery. On October 5, 1925, the American Society for Steel Treating unveiled a bronze tablet testifying to Kelly’s contribution at the Wyandotte Iron Works.
—Justin Corfield
Further Reading
Boucher, John Newton. William Kelly: A True History of the Bessemer Process. Greensburg, PA: Boucher, 1924.
Casson, H. N. The Romance of Steel: The Story of a Thousand Millionaires. New York: Barnes, 1907.
Kempelen, Wolfgang von (1734–1804)
An Austrian nobleman and inventor, he was born on January 23, 1734, at Pressburg, in the Habsburg Empire (now Bratislava, Slovakia). The family had lived in the town for nearly one hundred years, and according to folklore they were of Irish descent. Wolfgang von Kempelen studied law and philosophy and then went to Vienna to further his studies, going to Rome for a period. Fluent in German, Hungarian, English, French, Italian, and Latin, he easily found work as a clerk in Vienna.
In 1770 he built the pontoon bridge in Pressburg, and then was involved in designing a steam turbine for a mill and also a prototype typewriter for a blind lady. According to tradition, he was at the court of Maria Theresa where there was a conjuring show being performed by François Pelletier. He was unimpressed and offered to build a better machine—he had been experimenting with a speaking machine.
The device that von Kempelen started to work on was “The Turk.” It was a chess-playing machine. The device had a desk, behind which sat a “robot” dressed in Turkish costume. To play, an aspiring chess player would move a piece, and The Turk would move its piece. This was exhibited around Europe from 1770 until the machine was destroyed in a fire in 1854.
Inside the machine was a range of cogs, but The Turk was actually operated by a person who hid inside the machine and moved the pieces manually. After its debut at the Schönbrunn Palace in 1770, the machine was taken on a tour of Europe. It was demonstrated at Versailles, the palace of the French kings, in 1783. It then was taken to London where it remained for a year. After it was brought back to Schönbrunn Palace, Wolfgang von Kempelen died on March 24, 1804. Napoleon I played The Turk in 1809 at the Schönbrunn Palace.
There had long been claims that there was somebody hiding inside the “machine,” and in the 1820s this was proven to be true. However, The Turk continued to tour the United States, where it was observed by Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote about it. Although the “machine” itself did not work as a computer, before it had been found to be fraudulent, it did lead to much interest in clockwork machinery and is believed to have helped to persuade Richard Arkwright to develop and improve on his power loom.
—Justin Corfield
Further Reading
Levitt, Gerald. The Turk, Chess Automaton. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. Inc. Publishing, 2000.
Standage, Tom. The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous 19th Century Chess-Playing Machine. London: Allen Lane, 2002.
Kettering, Charles Franklin (1876–1958)
An American inventor, as well as an engineer, scientist, teacher, and mechanic, Charles Franklin Kettering held up to three hundred patents for various machines and devices, many for the automobile industry. He was born on August 29, 1876, in Loudonville, Ohio, the fourth of the five children of Jacob Kettering and Martha (née Hunter). Since his childhood, Kettering always had bad eyesight and only with some difficulty completed his schooling at Loudon High School. After three years working as a teacher in country schools, he attended a summer school at the College of Wooster. He then studied electrical engineering at Ohio State University in 1904. Having to leave in his second year owing to failing eyesight, Kettering initially worked for two years helping construct and install telephone lines. He then returned to Ohio State University, where he graduated with a degree in electrical engineering. Kettering found work as a researcher for National Cash Register and later worked for the automotive industry.
Deciding to branch out by himself, in 1909 Kettering, with the support of Edward A. Deeds and Harold E. Talbott, established the Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company, which became known as Delco. It was bought in 1916 by United Motors, which was, in 1918, taken over by General Motors, and it became what was then called the General Motors Research Corporation. Kettering became the vice president in 1920 and was head of research for General Motors for the next twenty-seven years.
A keen inventor, Kettering, along with Henry Leland, developed a self-starter for the Cadillac—an invention that won a Dewar Trophy in 1913. In the following year Kettering established the Engineers Club of Dayton to help engineers and technicians in professional development. However, much of Kettering’s early work was taken up by designing a lightweight diesel engine. This research set the scene for diesel locomotives, the first of these being the Pioneer Zephyr developed for the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad. Kettering also spent many years working on a one-cylinder engine, the internal-combustion engine, and fuel. In 1916, he discovered a type of combustion that became known as “knock,” which limited the power of the gasoline engine. However, in the following year he set his research aside to work on military problems when the United States entered World War I. He concentrated on fuel for aircraft and military vehicle engines. After the war, Kettering went back to research to end “knock” with help from his assistants Thomas Midgley and T. A. Boyd. They discovered tetraethyl, which could suppress “knock.” They founded the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation with Kettering as the president of the company. While the product made millions of dollars, it was an ecological disaster and extremely toxic because of the significant lead content of the mixture.
As well as his inventions for the automobile industry, Kettering developed many other items, including using Freon in air conditioners and in refrigeration, an aerial torpedo used in World War II, an incubator for infants born premature, and a treatment for venereal disease. He also devised an engine-driven generator that when combined with storage batteries formed a Delco Plant. This device provided electricity for farmhouses and other places that was not served by the electricity grid.
In 1905 Kettering married Olive Williams of Ashland, Ohio. They had one child, Eugene Williams Kettering, born on April 20, 1908. In 1914 Kettering built the family home at Ridgeleigh Terrace, Dayton, the first home in the United States to have air conditioning. The Ketterings became wealthy through the inventions, and in 1945 they founded the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center to use industrial research techniques to help with cancer research. The Charles F. Kettering Prize of the General Motors Cancer Foundation is also awarded each year for research into cancer treatment. Charles Kettering remained at Ridgeleigh Terrace until his death on November 25, 1958. The Kettering Papers are held at the GM Research Laboratories, Warren, Michigan.
The city of Kettering, Ohio, incorporated in 1955 as a suburb of the city of Dayton, was named after Charles Kettering. Charles F. Kettering Elementary School in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and the Charles F. Kettering Senior High School in Detroit, Michigan, were also both named after him, as was the Kettering College of Medical Arts in Kettering, Ohio. In addition, in 1998, the GMI Engineering and Management Institute, formerly known as the General Motors Institute and located in Flint, Michigan, changed its name to Kettering University.
—Justin Corfield
Allen, Oliver E. “Kettering.” American Heritage of Invention and Technology 12, no. 2 (Fall 1997): 52–63.
Boyd, Thomas A. Professional Amateur: The Biography of Charles Franklin Kettering. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1957.
Leslie, Stuart W. Boss Kettering. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.
Kevlar is the registered trademark for a light, strong, para-aramid synthetic fiber developed at DuPont in 1965. Originally, it was intended for commercial use as a replacement for steel in racing tires. Eventually, it was found to have many applications ranging from bicycle tires to body armor.
Kevlar is best known for its use as body armor. The development of this application was a multiphase effort that took place over several years. First, Kevlar fabric was tested to determine if it could stop a bullet. Second, it was necessary to determine the number of layers required to protect against the most common threats: the .38 special and .22 long-rifle bullets. The conclusion was that it would require seven layers. Then, it was discovered that the penetration resistance of the product could be diminished when it was wet or exposed to sunlight or bleach. Thus, the final model of the bulletproof vest had to be made waterproof and covered with a fabric that would prevent exposure to sunlight or other degrading agents.
In addition to body armor, Kevlar has other important applications. These include rope and cable, sports equipment such as tennis rackets and hockey sticks, loudspeaker cases, drumheads, fiber-optic cable, brake linings, and expansion joints for hoses. Kevlar has also been used as a base textile for experimental electricity-producing clothing.
See also: Asbestos; du Pont, Pierre Samuel; Electricity.
—Kenneth E. Hendrickson Jr.
Further Reading
Joven, Ronald V. Manufacturing Kevlar Panels by the Thermo-Curing Process. Bogotá, Colombia: Los Andes University Press, 2007.
Kadolph, Sara J. Textiles, ninth edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education Inc., 2002.
Magat, E. E. “Fibers from Extended Chain Aromatic Polyamides: New Fibers and Their Composites.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London (1994): 463–72.
Tanner, D., J. A. Fitzgerald, and B. R. Phillips. “The Kevlar Story—an Advanced Materials Case Study.” Angewandte Chemie International Edition in English 28, no. 5 (1989): 649–54.
Keynesian Models of Business Cycles
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the economies of countries fluctuated with the agricultural cycle. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, although good or bad harvests continued to affect the economy, there were also fluctuations in the economy that economists have sought to explain.
The basic Keynesian model of business cycles was initially outlined by the British economist John Maynard Keynes in his groundbreaking The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936). In this he sought to explain the business cycles that affected the industrial world. Although he had outlined some of his concepts beforehand, the Keynesian model of business cycles with systematic cyclical fluctuations arose over concern in Britain and elsewhere over the Great Depression, and whether the governments in Britain were doing enough to deal with the problem, or even whether they could do so. To a large extent Keynes saw the downturn in the British economy and those of other countries from 1929 as part of a cycle whereby a fall in spending in turn leads to the lowering of demand, and hence contributes to a further fall in spending. Keynes felt that the government would be able to reverse this trend by increased public-sector spending. Thus Keynes was able to identify the cause (a shortfall in demand) and also a solution.
However, Keynes went much further in his work. He was influenced by the work of earlier economists who sought to find reasons for economic slumps in history. These were usually undertaken by studying the factors that contributed to economic booms and then tracing as the boom ends and an economic downturn follows. Keynes instead set out specifically to study the economic slump, and although Nikolai Dmitriyevich Kondratieff had managed to do this for the nineteenth century, Keynes had at his disposal a far greater amount of empirical economic data for the late 1920s and 1930s, and also information not only on Europe and North Africa but also on how the economic slump had impacted on newly emerging economies such as Japan’s, and also the effects on Argentina, Brazil, Australia, and other countries not included in Kondratieff’s work.
If, as Keynes identified, the business cycle was caused by this fall in demand—the fall in demand being the cause of the cycle, not just its effect (although it was an effect as well), the analysis then had to focus on why there was a sudden fall in demand. The obvious cause was a tightening of the money supply, such as banks being more cautious about advancing mortgages or loans. This reduction in credit in turn led to people being able to spend less. But Keynes saw that it was actually the dynamic of a fall in spending made by so many people who, independently, had come to their own conclusions about the need to cut back on expenditures. As to why these decisions were made at the same time was harder to analyze. Sometimes it was to do with technology. Certainly in the 1920s the boom was partly generated by the sales of the motorcar. And once a large section of the middle class in the world had a car, or access to a car, there was a decline in demand as the market became saturated with new cars. People were happy to keep their existing cars. Or there is a glut of secondhand cars, making these cheaper and a preferred option to new cars. This was also partly true of the computer industry in the early 2000s, when the difference in the speed of computers for mundane tasks hardly warranted the large expenditure of buying the latest model. Keynes also believed that there was the possibility of something happening in politics that might create uncertainty and hence a fall in expenditure.
Therefore, Keynes set about trying to explain how a government could “prime” the economy by creating more demand. This could come in tax cuts, but this was often difficult as these would come at a time when the government revenue base had fallen. Alternatively, it could come from a vast cash injection through increased government spending, incurring a short-term situation of debt in return for the breaking of the cycle leading to a further downturn. This could even come in cash. Maverick Illinois politician Francis Everett Townsend suggested that in the United States, large cash payments to elderly people would then lead to the obligation for them to spend their money. Although his Townsend Plan was regularly defeated in Congress, it did lead to the drafting and then passage of the Social Security Act of 1935.
One of the main problems to emerge from Keynes’s theory on business cycles was that if it was so easy to increase demand, this might take place for other reasons, especially political expediency. Michal Kalecki, a Keynesian economist who had been born in Poland, raised the idea as early as 1944. Kalecki came up with the political business cycle, by which governments could manipulate the business cycle to have boom periods with increased spending just before an election (which would inject confidence by the people in the incumbent government), and then governments would need to pay for this soon after the election, with the cycle able to be repeated ahead of the next election.
—Justin Corfield
John Maynard Keynes
Further Reading
Cate, Thomas, ed. An Encyclopedia of Keynesian Economics. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 1997.
Keynes, John Maynard. The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. London: Macmillan, 1936.
Skidelsky, R. J. A. John Maynard Keynes. London: Macmillan, 1983–2000.
Khalturin, Stephan (1857–1882)
Stephan Khalturin was a Russian revolutionary who was executed after having organized an assassination attempt on Tsar Alexander II of Russia by bombing the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. He was not the first person to use gunpowder to blow up a head of state—that had happened to Henry Darnley, husband of Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1567, and it had been planned by the Gunpowder plotters in London in 1605. However, Khalturin was the first to try this since the start of the Industrial Revolution, and by using dynamite. The historian Benedict Anderson famously remarked that with Khalturin’s actions, “Nobel’s invention had not arrived politically.”
Stephan Khalturin was born in 1857 at Vyatka (modern-day Kirov), in the northeastern part of European Russia. This city was used as a place of exile for people sentenced for political crimes from the reign of Catherine II, “The Great,” and it later became an important station on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Khalturin was the son of a peasant farmer. He found work as a carpenter and joiner, and he was employed in several factories around St. Petersburg, the Russian capital. With many others, he helped found the Moscow Workers’ Union.
Becoming involved in revolutionary politics, he joined the group known as Narodnaya Volya (“The People’s Will”), which was leading a struggle against the autocratic rule of the tsar. The group advocated for an elected constituent assembly, for freedom of speech, for a parliament elected by universal franchise, and for socialist reforms. A faction of them, which Stephan Khalturin and Aleksandr Ulyanov (the older brother of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin) became associated with, decided to plan terrorist actions.
In the autumn of 1879, under a false name (because he was a known organizer for the Northern Union of Russian Workers), Khalturin managed to get work at the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. The job allowed him to sleep in the palace itself. As a result, he was able to bring in dynamite, which he concealed with his bedding, and later in a nearby trunk. He planned to make a bomb in the basement of the building directly under the main dining room. He asked the revolutionary and Marxist theoretician Georgi Plekhanov about this idea, but Plekhanov wanted to distance himself from any assassination attempt. Khalturin himself even found Tsar Alexander II quite personable when he spoke to workmen, but he was determined to try to kill the Russian emperor anyway.
Security was lax at the time because Tsar Alexander II was not in residence. However, the German government managed to hear of the assassination attempt and warned the Russians. The Russian police searched the basement, and even captured a revolutionary who had a sketch of the palace with a red cross marking a spot in the basement. Khalturin continued his plans only slightly impeded by the police actions. He hoped to detonate the bomb on February 17, 1880, while the tsar hosted a reception in the room for Prince Alexander of Battenberg, the new king of Bulgaria. By chance Prince Alexander delayed coming to the Winter Palace, which in turn delayed the dinner. Khalturin had already set the fuse and left the palace. When the bomb exploded, the dining room was empty. Nonetheless, the blast killed eleven people and wounded fifty-six. All of those killed, and most of those injured, were soldiers from a regiment from Finland who were in the guard’s room under the dining room. The others were injured when walls collapsed and other floors gave way. Tsar Alexander II immediately established a Supreme Administrative Commission headed by General Loris-Melikov to investigate this and other revolutionary activities and to arrest all the members of Narodnaya Volya. Khalturin escaped this first sweep.
Managing to get to the Black Sea port of Odessa, Khalturin started plotting further revolutionary assassinations. A year after Khalturin’s assassination attempt, some other plotters did kill Tsar Alexander II. A year after that, in March 1882, Khalturin was finally arrested in Odessa, still plotting further assassinations. He stood trial there, and after being found guilty, he was executed that same month. By that time there was a major government crackdown on Narodnaya Volya, which by the following year had been totally crushed. That repression helped foment the political agitation that in the context of the Russo-Japanese War led to the Russian Revolution (1905).
—Justin Corfield
Further Reading
Moss, Walter G. Alexander II and His Times: A Narrative History of Russia in the Age of Alexander II, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky. London: Anthem Press, 2002.
Radzinsky, Edvard. Alexander II: The Last Great Tsar. New York: The Free Press, 2005.
Ulam, Adam Bruno. Prophets and Conspirators in Prerevolutionary Russia. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1998.
Khrushchev, Nikita (1894–1971)
Khrushchev was the first secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR, from 1953 to 1964. After joining the Communist Party in 1918, Khrushchev gradually rose through the ranks until he became leader of the party and the USSR in 1958. His greatest contribution was to de-Stalinize the Soviet system.
Khrushchev took over as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union at the death of Joseph Stalin, and from 1958 until 1964 he was also chairman of the Council of Ministers. Khrushchev did much during his eleven-year rule to introduce liberal reforms, reverse many policies of Stalin, and to try to build up the economy of the Soviet Union so that it could compete economically more easily with the United States.
Born on April 15, 1894, at Kalinovka, a very poor village near Kursk in the west of Russia, his father was a migrant worker, and Khrushchev was one of only two children. As a teenager he was able to complete some education before he become a herdsboy. When he was fourteen he moved to the town of Yuzovka (later Donetsk), and he found work as an apprentice to a metal fitter and then worked in a factory, where he became radicalized by the Lena Gold Field Massacre. The young Khrushchev was involved in collecting money for the families of victims. At the outbreak of World War I, Khrushchev, as a skilled metal worker, was exempted from conscription, and in 1917 he was elected to a newly established workers’ council (“soviet”). He was put in charge of it, initially being associated with the Mensheviks, and then joining the Bolsheviks. Serving in the Red Army during the Russian Civil War, he entered politics as the assistant director for political affairs for a mine at Rutchenkovo.
Initially a supporter of Leon Trotsky, he turned to support Joseph Stalin and became the Communist Party secretary of a district near Stalino (formerly Yuzovka, later Donetsk). He rose in the local Communist Party leadership as a protégé of Lazar Kaganovich, and he also became a friend of Stalin’s wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva. In Moscow, he was involved in the construction of the Moscow Metro, an ambitious project that, when it was opened in 1935, was hailed as one of the great marvels of Soviet endeavor.
During the 1930s Khrushchev was involved in the purges organized by Stalin. This may have been because he genuinely supported them, or from fear. Certainly Khrushchev did not intervene to save former friends and colleagues. Khrushchev was promoted, and in 1937 he became the head of the Community Party in Ukraine, then moving to Kiev. Two years later he took part in the Red Army’s invasion of eastern Poland. He was back in Kiev in June 1941 when the German army launched Operation Barbarossa, which resulted in the German capture of Kiev. Involved in fighting near Kharkov, and then at Stalingrad, Khrushchev was also involved in the Battle of Kursk.
During World War II (known in the USSR as the Great Patriotic War), Khrushchev served as a political commissar. He coordinated the defense of Ukraine against the Nazi invasion in 1941, and he was political commissar at the Battle of Stalingrad. From the end of the war until Stalin’s death in 1953, Khrushchev carried out Stalin’s orders without question and came to be known as “the Butcher of the Ukraine.”
Ukraine was devastated during World War II, and Khrushchev had the task of helping with the rebuilding of it. This allowed him to see firsthand the problems that faced the country and the destruction of its industrial base that had taken place during the war, problems exacerbated by a failed harvest in 1945. Khrushchev managed to push through forced collectivization in western Ukraine, which had been controlled by Poland until 1939, and then by the Soviet Union briefly, and then by Germany. Ill and tired, Khrushchev returned to Moscow where he became a part of Stalin’s inner circle.
After Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953, there was a struggle for power between two factions led by Lavrentiy Beria and Khrushchev. Khrushchev’s faction won out, and Beria was killed. Khrushchev became party leader in September of 1953 and soon emerged as the most powerful man in the USSR. In February 1956, he made a famous speech in which he denounced Stalin. This led to a failed effort by a conservative faction in the party to remove him, but by March 1958, he became prime minister. He was now leader of both the party and the state.
Khrushchev recognized the great economic potential of the Soviet Union but also saw the major problems that had prevented this from happening. He had a strong power base in the party and used this to criticize the actions of Stalin. He was sharply critical of the purges in the Soviet Union under Stalin, and he stated that this had caused the initial Soviet defeat in war. He also sought to ameliorate Stalin’s excesses by allowing peoples such as the Kalmyks to return to their homelands. Whole populations had been denounced for collaboration with the Germans and had been sent into internal exile by Stalin during World War II—Khrushchev was eager to help heal the wounds created or exacerbated during the war.
Khrushchev’s aim was to rebuild the economy of the country, and at the UN General Assembly he claimed to the United States, “We will bury you.” His plan was for a massive industrial program that would transform the economy of the Soviet Union and make it a prosperous country. His educational and agricultural programs were successful, but what injected a new dynamism into the country was its space flights with Yuri Gagarin’s Vostock 1 flight in 1961 and Valentina Tereshkova’s Vostock 6 flight in 1963. This showed the world that the Soviet Union had—however briefly—gained a major technological advantage over the United States. Although the USSR had appeared to have the lead in space technology with the launching of Sputnik 1 in 1957 and the subsequent flight of Yuri Gagarin, in fact the size of their missile forces remained small and cost Khrushchev the support of the armed forces. Nevertheless, fear of the Soviet missile capability was real in the West and was an issue in the presidential campaign of 1960. This fear also led to the so-called missile crisis in 1962. Then President John F. Kennedy, learning that the USSR had sent medium-range missiles to Cuba, demanded their removal. After two weeks of almost unbearable tension in October 1962, Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles from Cuba in exchange for an informal agreement for the United States to remove missiles from Turkey.
In terms of domestic economic policy, Khrushchev did not attempt to roll back the collectivization of agriculture. Instead, he promoted what he called the “Virgin Lands Campaign,” arguing that the USSR could meet and surpass Western agricultural production by using modern techniques and experimenting with new crops. The effort failed.
While Khrushchev’s actions in the Cuban missile crisis led to praise in the West, it did not lead to any support from the Soviet military. Khrushchev’s policies and his boorish personality alienated much of the Communist Party leadership, and eventually a group led by Leonid Brezhnev set out to remove him. They accused him of making major political mistakes such as mishandling the Cuban missile crisis, relations with China, and disorganizing the Soviet economy, especially the agricultural sector. The building of the Berlin Wall was followed with disputes with China, and Leonid Brezhnev and others conspired to replace Khrushchev, which took place in October 1964. At a special meeting of the Presidium of the Central Committee on October 13, 1964, the Presidium voted to remove Khrushchev from all his positions in the party and the government. Two days later he resigned.
For the last seven years of his life, Khrushchev lived in virtual house arrest under the supervision of the KGB. He was able to write his memoirs, which were smuggled to the West, but he did little else. He died on September 11, 1971, and was buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow. He was denied a state funeral and interment in the Kremlin wall.
Khrushchev must be given some credit. He maintained a more or less efficient economy, and during some years the USSR had growth rates higher than many Western nations. He was also known for his liberalization policies, which resulted in amnesty for many political prisoners. Also, his de-Stalinization policy led eventually to the replacement of hardlines by more liberal Communist leaders. Mikhail Gorbachev, who became the leader of the USSR in 1985, was inspired by it, as was evident in his policies of glasnost and perestroika.
On the other hand, Khrushchev was justly criticized in the West for his ruthless crackdown on the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and his encouraging the East Germans to build the Berlin Wall in 1961. He also persecuted the Russian Orthodox Church mercilessly. He had very poor diplomatic skills, which gave him the reputation of being a crude, uncivilized clown.
The West had mixed feelings about Khrushchev, but they had reason to view his era with nostalgia because his successors, led at first by Leonid Brezhnev, soon began to backtrack on many of his liberal reforms.
See also: Bolsheviks; Hitler, Adolf; Imperialism; Kropotkin, Peter; Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich; Marx, Karl; Marxism; May Day; Mensheviks; Russia; Russian Revolution (1905); Russian Revolution (1917); Soviets.
—Justin Corfield and Kenneth E. Hendrickson Jr.
Nikita Khruschev (right) at the Suez Canal. Photograph courtesy Eric Vahl Meyer.
Further Reading
Crankshaw, Edward. The New Cold War: Moscow vs. Pekin. London: Penguin, 1963.
Fursenko, Aleksandr, and Timothy Naftali. Khrushchev’s Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008.
Khrushchev, Nikita. Khrushchev Remembers. London: Andre Deutsch Ltd., 1971.
———. Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, three volumes. Edited by Sergei Khrushchev. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004–2007.
Khrushchev, Sergei. Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000.
Kulavig, Erik. Dissent in the Years of Khrushchev. London: Palgrave, 2003.
Pearson, Raymond. The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire. New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2002.
Schwartz, Harry. The Soviet Economy since Stalin. London: Lippincott, 1965.
Taubman, William. Khrushchev: The Man and His Era. London: Free Press, 2004.
Taubman, William, Sergei Khrushchev, and Abbott Gleason. Nikita Khrushchev. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.
Tompson, William J. Khrushchev: A Political Life. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995.
The Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor—usually known simply as the Knights of Labor—was established in 1869, and during the second half of the nineteenth century it became one of the major American labor organizations that sought to transform American conditions of labor.
The Knights of Labor was founded in 1869 by five Philadelphia tailors, and it was led by Uriah Stephens, who had originally planned on becoming a Baptist minister but then decided to work as a tailor. A Freemason and an Odd Fellow, in 1861 he had taken part in the National Convention of Workingmen, who were opposed to the Civil War. In the following year he had organized the Garment Cutters’ Association of Philadelphia, and when it dissolved seven years later, he decided to establish the Knights of Labor. Unlike many other labor groups at the time, the Knights of Labor were much more progressive by accepting women members, and they also accepted African Americans after 1878. However, they did support the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and campaigned against the migration of Asians. In November 1885 a branch of the Knights of Labor in Tacoma, Washington, wanted the expulsion of all Chinese, who made up almost 10 percent of the population.
In terms of their policies in regard to labor conditions, they wanted an end to child labor, convict labor, and they urged for equal pay for women. In addition on a wider front, they wanted a progressive income tax and also the introduction of cooperative employer-employee ownership of factories and other businesses. In 1885 they were the leading opponents of the Contract Labor Law. The Knights of Labor encouraged people to join but excluded some sectors of the economy whom they regarded as unproductive elements. These were bankers, lawyers, gamblers, stockholders and investors, and liquor manufacturers.
Four years after it was founded, the National Labor Union collapsed and the Knights of Labor grew under the enthusiastic leadership of Terence V. Powderly, who had taken over as Grand Master from Stephens in 1879. Stephens had wanted the Knights of Labor to be the focus for a cooperative commonwealth with boycotts used for companies rather than strikes—Stephens wanted to reject the views of class consciousness. By contrast, Powderly had been born in Ireland—Stephens was from New Jersey—and he was a machinist whose father had been a teamster for a coal-mining company. He saw the Knights of Labor as an educational organization that was going to educate the working class so that they could rise and improve their position in society. This expanded membership began to change the Knights of Labor, which then started to take on the traditional role of a trade union.
In 1886 some 750,000 people were members of the Knights of Labor, by which time they had been involved in a number of strikes and boycotts, having come to use strikes against companies against which they were campaigning. In 1884 the Union Pacific Railroad Strike was probably their greatest triumph. In the following year they continued with the Wabash Railroad Strike against the railroad run by Jay Gould. Eventually, Powderly met with Gould and the two were able to agree to a compromise, with Gould allowing the Knights of Labor to organize. Soon there were moves to establish groups overseas. In about 1890 some members of the Australian labor movement, including William Lane and W. G. Spence, were involved in establishing the Knights of Labor in the period that saw clashes between the new Australian trade unions and the employers.
However, it was not long before the Knights of Labor had overplayed their hand. The Haymarket Affair of 1886 caused them to lose support, and in the same year they were unsuccessful in their role in the Missouri Pacific Strike. The formation of the American Federation of Labor, also in 1886, led to an outflow of members, and it was less than one hundred thousand in 1890, and three years later it fell to seventeen thousand. Powderly left, and the Knights of Labor was led by James Sovereign from 1892 until 1901, and then by John Hayes until 1917. Most of its surviving members joined the Industrial Workers of the World, but the Knights of Labor continued as a shell, running a central office until 1917, holding occasional conventions until 1932, and remaining in existence until 1949.
See also: Trades Union Congress.
—Justin Corfield
Further Reading
Browne, Henry J. The Catholic Church and the Knights of Labor. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1949.
Fink, Leon. Workingmen’s Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983.
Kealey, Gregory, and Brian Palmer. Dreaming of What Might Be: The Knights of Labor in Ontario, 1880–1900. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Levine, Susan. Labor’s True Women: Carpet Weavers, Industrialization, and Labor Reform in the Gilded Age. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1984.
McLaurin, Melton Alonza. The Knights of Labor in the South. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1978.
Ware, Norman J., and John W. Hayes. The Labor Movement in the United States, 1860–1895: A Study in Democracy. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1929.
Koenig, Friedrich Gottlob (1774–1833)
A German inventor, Friedrich Gottlob Koenig became well known around the world because of his work with Andreas Friedrich Bauer on the high-speed printing press, which transformed the printing and publishing industries, making the printing of newspapers much quicker and cheaper.
Friedrich Gottlob Koenig was born on April 17, 1774, at Eisleben (modern-day Lutherstadt Eisleben), in Saxony, Germany, a center for the local mining industry and the hometown of the theologian Martin Luther (1483–1546). When Koenig was born, the town was a part of the lands of the Counts of Mansfeld, but in 1780 it became a part of the Electorate of Saxony. During the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars, Saxony supported the French. It would appear that Koenig was more of an Anglophile, and he was a bookseller and printer. After working at Leipzig, in 1804—at the height of the Franco-Saxon alliance—he moved to London. There, six years later he was granted a patent for his printing press, which he built in cooperation with a London watchmaker Andreas Friedrich Bauer. In 1811 a sheet of the Annual Register was printed on this new machine, and production of the machines for commercial sale started in earnest. Essentially, until Koenig started work on his machine, the design of the printing presses had not changed much since the time of Johannes Gutenberg and William Caxton in the fifteenth century. Koenig felt that it was possible to make a much faster machine, therefore, he dispensed with the traditional method of having the lead type laid flat on blocks—the bed and platen system—as had been the case for centuries. Instead, he decided to embed the lettering in a series of “rollers” or letterpress cylinders. This had not been possible before because the traditional press was worked by hand whereas this new system needed an external form of power. Koenig’s engine was driven by steam power, which forced the paper through “rollers,” speeding up the printing and making it far faster than any other printing press of the period. As a result of the use of these cylinders, Koenig’s machine is sometimes known as the “letterpress cylinder printing machine.”
Although Koenig was comfortable about his new design, he felt that it should undergo a public trial. The press had its first major trial run in April 1812, with the machine set up in Koenig’s workshop. Many people were invited to see it in action, and one of those present, John Walter of the British newspaper The Times, was very impressed with the result. He then bought the press and ordered another, which was quickly made. These were then taken to the newspaper office, and the first edition of The Times printed with Koenig’s press was on November 29, 1814. The press was capable of printing at the rate of 1,100 sheets per hour.
Although he had been a success in London, Koenig wanted to return to Germany—Eisleben was now becoming a part of the province of Saxony in the kingdom of Prussia. The Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815, and two years later, Koenig returned to Germany, where he decided to build a factory. He chose the site of this manufacturing plant, an abandoned monastery in Würzburg in Bavaria in southern Germany, and he established what became known as Koenig and Bauer. Printing presses began selling to Danish, Dutch, French, German, and Russian printing houses between 1822 and 1830, with some British publishers following suit. Koenig died on January 17, 1833, by which time his machine was being used around Europe. The British and Foreign Bible Society had started printing bibles using the machine from 1824, and in 1834 the Oxford Press (later Oxford University Press) installed two machines. Thirteen years later it had six in use, with the University of Cambridge installing them between 1838 and 1840. Although the nature of the printing press designed by Koenig made it so much quicker, and hence cheaper, to print books, it had a far bigger impact on the printing of newspapers—where speed in production was much more important—leading to a proliferation of them around the world. The press also allowed the flourishing of many weekly literary and news magazines that proliferated from the 1850s until the 1900s, as well as allowing for the production of small print runs of novels.
—Justin Corfield
Further Reading
Meggs, Philip B. A History of Graphic Design. New York: John Wiley & Sons Inc., 1998.
Plant, Marjorie. The English Book Trade: An Economic History of the Making and Sale of Books. London: Allen & Unwin, 1974.
Simon, Irving Bernard. The Story of Printing: From Wood Blocks to Electronics. s.l.: Harvey House, 1965.
Smiles, Samuel. Men of Invention and Industry. London: John Murray, 1884.
Smith, Adèle Millicent. Printing and Writing Materials: Their Evolution. Philadelphia: The Author, 1912.
A Canadian-U.S. entrepreneur, inventor, and industrialist, James Lewis “J. L.” Kraft founded J. L. Kraft & Bros. Company, which later became Kraft Foods, Inc. The company first captured markets through the sale of processed cheese during World War I and gradually developed many other items that sold throughout the United States and overseas.
James Lewis Kraft was born on December 11, 1874, at Fort Erie, Stevensville, Ontario in Canada. His parents, George Franklin Krafft [sic] and Alice (née Tripp), were Mennonite farmers. It is not known when the family first changed their name to the current spelling. James attended schools in Fort Erie and worked there as a retail clerk before moving to the United States in 1903. He then went to a business college in Buffalo, New York, working his way as a janitor. In 1904 he moved to Chicago, where he remained for the rest of his life. Naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 1911, he was already on his way to making a fortune in cheese production.
As soon as he arrived in Chicago, Kraft established a business selling cheese. He invested his small savings buying a horse and wagon, using $65 as operating capital to start a cheese delivery service. In the first year of operations Kraft lost $3,000 and his horse. However, he persevered and soon turned in a profit. In 1906 his brother, Charles Kraft, joined him, and the two started processing cheese for distribution to area retailers. Three years later, with another brother joining them, the trio organized J. L. Kraft & Bros. Company.
Kraft realized that the major problem with making cheese was waste. Cheese was made in large wheels, with customers buying a wedge. Areas around the wedge dried and shops had to regularly cut off these sections, wasting large amounts of the product. By 1916, after much experimentation, Kraft was able to grind down natural cheese, blend it, and pasteurize it. He quickly patented the procedure. This meant that cheese could be made in any shape, packaged and sold much more easily, and would keep much longer than normal cheese. By the end of the year he was selling packaged cheese in four-ounce cans, with many being sold to the U.S. armed forces in World War I. Not only did the wartime contract result in many sales, it also gave great publicity to processed cheese when many returned servicemen continued to buy it and other Kraft products.
In 1917 Kraft’s company was incorporated with a capital of $150,000 and gross sales of $2 million. Five years later, Kraft held a number of patents for processing cheese. He settled with a competitor, the Phenix Cheese Company, to share certain rights that were in dispute. In 1923 company sales totaled nearly $22 million, with factories in many parts of the United States and also in Canada. The Kraft Company grew enormously by 1938 when the patents expired. In 1928 they had merged with the Phenix Cheese Company, and by 1931 there were Kraft-Phenix factories in thirty states as well as overseas, with ten thousand people working for the company producing a million pounds of cheese every day. People in the United States increased their consumption of cheese by more than 50 percent between 1918 and 1945.
James Kraft ensured that the company would diversify. By 1928 they produced salad dressing, and later oleomargarine—the precursor of margarine. They also sponsored what became the Kraft Music Hall. In 1931 Kraft-Phenix was bought by the National Dairy Products Company, with James Kraft remaining as president of the subsidiary company, renamed the Kraft Foods Company in 1945. Four of his brothers became principal operating officers in the business, with three more working in management in the company. James Kraft retired as director of the holding company in 1948, and three years later he stepped down as chairman of the board of Kraft Foods, succeeded by his brother John.
In 1909 James Kraft married Pauline Elizabeth Platt, and they had one daughter. One of Kraft’s hobbies was making rings with semiprecious stones, and he gave some away to employees in the company. He was keen on having personal acquaintance with his employees. Eventually, as the company grew and diversified, and in particular established branches around the world, this level of contact became impossible. He remained a very active Baptist, serving as superintendent of the North Shore Baptist Church in Chicago for more than thirty years. In 1952 he was given the Gutenberg Award of the Chicago Bible Society. He died on February 16, 1953.
In 1969 National Dairy Products Corporation changed its name to Kraftco Corporation, and seven years later it became Kraft, Inc. From 1980 until 1986 the company was a part of Dart Industries Inc.; Kraft Inc. split off from it in 1986. Two years later Kraft was bought by Philip Morris Companies, which changed its name to the Altria Group in 2003. By that time Nabisco had also been bought by Philip Morris, and the company integrated Kraft’s products into Nabisco.
—Justin Corfield
Further Reading
Garraty, John A., ed. Dictionary of American Biography, Supplement Four 1951–1955. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1977.
Price, Walter V., and Merlin G. Bush. “The Process Cheese Industry in the United States: A Review.” Journal of Milk and Food Technology (March and April, 1974).
A Russian anarchist and revolutionary, Kropotkin helped develop anarchism as a political theory, holding that all forms of government authority are unnecessary and undesirable and advocating a society based voluntarily on cooperation and free association to individuals and groups. The word was used only pejoratively until Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865), a French journalist, now regarded as the founder of anarchism, adopted it in his book, What Is Property? published in 1840.
Peter (Pyotr) Kropotkin was born in Moscow on December 9, 1842. His father, Prince Alexei Petrovich Kropotkin, owned nearly 1,200 serfs and much land, so young Kropotkin had access to the best kind of life that nineteenth-century russia had to offer. In 1857, at the age of fifteen, he entered the Corps of Pages at St. Petersburg, a combination military and educational institution open only to children of the nobility. He remained there until 1863, and he read widely, especially the works of the French encyclopedists. During this period he became interested in the plight of the Russian peasantry, and he came under the influence of the new liberal-revolutionary literature.
In 1863, Kropotkin entered the army, electing to join a Siberian Cossack regiment where he hoped to have only administrative duties. In fact, he disliked his position, and in 1864 he accepted charge of a geographical expedition in Manchuria. After that experience, he participated in another expedition. Both of these expeditions yielded valuable geographical information, and Kropotkin decided to devote himself entirely to scientific exploration. In this, he was very successful.
Kropotkin quit the army in 1867 and enrolled in the University of St. Petersburg. At the same time, he became secretary of the geography section of the Russian Geographical Society. In 1871, having become more and more interested in politics and the problems of Russian society, he joined a revolutionary group in St. Petersburg. The following year he visited Switzerland and joined the International Workingmen’s Association in Geneva, but he soon grew tired of the many levels of socialism and committed himself to anarchism. Upon his return to Russia he joined the Circle of Tchaikovsky and began to spread revolutionary propaganda.
In 1873, Kropotkin was arrested and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul fortress. He escaped in 1876, made his way to London, and then on to Switzerland where he joined the Jura Federation. He became the editor of La Révolte, a revolutionary newspaper of the Federation, and he also published numerous revolutionary pamphlets.
Kropotkin was expelled from Switzerland in 1881 and again made his way to London. After a short stay there of about a year, he went to France. There he was arrested, tried on grounds that he had belonged to the IWA, and was sentenced to five years in prison. However, as a result of repeated agitation on his behalf in the French Chamber, he was released in 1886 and returned to Great Britain. There, he traveled about, living for a time in London, Harrow, Ealing and Bromley, and Brighton. In England, he met, dealt with, and befriended numerous socialists including William Morris and George Bernard Shaw, but he remained a steadfast anarchist.
While in London, Kropotkin became cofounder of Freedom, a British anarchist magazine. During the 1890s he devoted himself primarily to writing. Most of his works were designed to reflect an anarchist-communist view of society. Between 1901 and 1909 his material was aimed primarily at Russian readers in the hope of promoting revolution. He was deeply disappointed by the failure of the 1905 revolt.
He returned to France in 1909 and remained there until the outbreak of the war, whereupon he returned to Great Britain. From there, he actively supported the war against Germany, and as a result he alienated many of his associates. He also supported the 1917 revolution in Russia and he returned there in early 1917 to join the provisional government. But when the Bolsheviks seized power in November, he curtailed his activities. He hated Lenin, and once said of him, “Lenin is not comparable to any revolutionary figure in history. Revolutionaries have ideals. Lenin has none.”
Kropotkin died on February 8, 1921, in Dmitrov, Moscow province. He was buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.
Kropotkin was of Russia’s foremost anarchists and one of the first advocates of anarchist-communism—the idea of a communal society free from a central government. His ideas are spelled out in detail in his many books.
See also: Engels, Friedrich; Marx, Karl; Marxism; Mensheviks; Reed, John.
—Kenneth E. Hendrickson Jr.
Peter Kropotkin
Further Reading
Cahm, Caroline. Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism, 1872–1886. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Kropotkin, Peter. In Russia and French Prisons. London: Ward and Downey, 1887.
———. Memoirs of a Revolutionist. London: Smith, Elder, 1899.
———. The Great French Revolution, 1789–1793. New York: G. P. Putnam and Sons: London William Heinemann, 1909.
———. Russian Literature: Ideals and Realities. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1915.
———. Anarchism: A Collection of Revolutionary Writings. New York: Dover Publications, 2002.
Woodcock, George, and Ivan Avakumovic. The Anarchist Prince: A Biographical Study of Peter Kropotkin. New York: Schocken Books, 1971.
Alfred Krupp, known as der Kanonenkönig (Cannon King), was a notable iron and steel magnate of nineteenth-century Germany. The eldest son of Friedrich (1787–1826) and Therese (1790–1850) Krupp, he was born in Essen (Renania) on April 26, 1812. He inherited the family-owned Krupp Gussstahlfabrik (Cast Steel Works) after the death of his father in 1826. At that time, the small iron and steel factory was almost bankrupt. Though Therese helped Alfred a great deal in reviving the business, for some years Krupp enjoyed only limited success. His fortunes revived in 1837 after exporting parts of a coin-minting machine to the United States and developing novel methods for producing large quantities of seamless steel. Thus began a long history of international industrial cooperation and partnerships. In 1849, Krupp negotiated a deal to supply the Philadelphia Mint. Krupp steel also made inroads in the supply of American railroads.
Prior to 1871, Germany was not a single, united nation. Krupp successfully penetrated the markets of the various German states, creating a nationwide firm ahead of political unification. The German Customs Union had been formed in 1834, and the next year saw the construction of railroads. Krupp worked diligently to become the most important supplier of the burgeoning German iron and steel market. He developed a new machine roller in 1841. Krupp rolling mills were used in government mints. He enriched himself greatly with these contracts and invested the money in new technologies for casting large steel pieces. In 1847, this allowed him to stun European arms manufacturers by perfecting cannon made not of bronze but from solid cast steel. The Pennsylvania Railway Company made use of Krupp steel from 1848 onward. The rail axles manufactured by the Krupp factory were also used by Railway Companies of Buffalo and New York.
The massive steam hammer which Alfred Krupp named “Fritz.”
The London exhibition of 1851 at the Crystal Palace made Alfred Krupp world famous. Displaying a six-pound gun made from a solid steel ingot, the Krupp exhibit received wide publicity. Throughout the 1850s, the firm churned out thousands of steel wheels for trains and hundred of miles of steel rails. On the basis of these huge profits, Krupp expanded into arms manufacture. He became known as the Cannon King because of his success in producing the world’s first breech-loading artillery made of steel. These canons outperformed muzzle-loaders both in accuracy as well as in rapid reloading.
The ongoing wars for Italian and German unification gave a fillip to the European arms industry, and Krupp became the man of the hour. His monopoly over the armament market in Germany began when he received orders to supply three hundred large guns to the Prussian army. His firm also supplied steel cannons to the Habsburg Empire on the eve of the Austro-Prussia War of 1866, thus supplying both combatants. Krupp guns performed very well in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), and his factory received further orders for supply from different governments of Europe. Creating a vertical integration of his business, Krupp maintained his own shipping company in the Netherlands and iron mines in Spain, which facilitated supply, production, and transport. He had thirteen patents in Spain in between 1863 and 1884. Gradually, he acquired many coal and iron mines and power plants as well as transport companies to expand his commercial empire. He also continued to invest in new technologies, particularly the Bessemer Process and the open-hearth method of steel casting.
The innovation in Krupp industries served as a blueprint for managing industrial concerns. He created and maintained a separate management department. With long-term survival of the company in mind, he had set up certain principles. Profit earnings accrued to the company alone, and a single heir, his only son, Friedrich Alfred, was the successor of the organization. As a paternal Chief Executive Officer of his company having 20,200 employees, the older Krupp introduced welfare schemes, which served as models for social legislation for the unified German Empire. Krupp worker insurance comprised a comprehensive welfare scheme including housing projects, health insurance, pension funds, and consumer cooperatives. The dependents of the workers also received pensions if workers died. But Krupp was also a strict disciplinarian, asking for unquestioned loyalty from the employees. As a die-hard conservative, he believed in a patriarchal attitude toward the workers and was against any form of trade unionism.
Alfred Krupp was an unassuming person, devoting his time to company business. He never joined any political body nor accepted any title. He spent his retirement in his Villa Hugel, where he wrote about company affairs and entertained select business associates. He died on July 14, 1887, leaving behind him the world’s largest industrial company. It was a significant manufacturer of railway materials worldwide. The armament production accounted for half of Krupp’s total output. The majority of Krupp products shipped globally. Krupp’s entrepreneurial accomplishments made him one of the most powerful and richest industrialists of nineteenth-century Europe.
—Patit Paban Mishra
Berdrow, Wilhelm. Alfred Krupp. Berlin: Hobbing, 1961.
Manchester, William R. The Arms of Krupp: 1587–1968. Boston: Little, Brown, 2003.
Mason, Peter. Blood and Iron. New York: Viking Penguin, 1985.
Muhlen, Norbert. The Incredible Krupps: The Rise, Fall, and Comeback of Germany’s Industrial Family. New York: Henry Holt, 1959.
Showalter, Dennis E. Railroads and Rifles: Soldiers, Technology, and the Unification of Germany. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1975.