Cornelius Vanderbilt
Thomas Edison created the first vacuum tube, so-called because of the absence of air in its interior, in 1880 for his newly invented incandescent light bulb. After his carbon-filament lamps had burned for a time, they would develop an obscuring black stain on the inside of the glass envelope, reducing their light output. Always a careful observer, Edison noted that every darkened bulb displayed a thin, clear line perfectly in line with the plane of the filament. Apparently some kind of current flowed from the filament to the glass envelope. Edison then constructed an experimental bulb with a second element, a metal plate attached to a lead-out wire. When he powered up this bulb, a current flowed from the filament to the plate. In a time before the discovery of the electron, this ability of current to flow without any visible conductor was inexplicable. Furthermore, if the current-carrying wire were attached to the plate’s lead wire, no current flowed to the filament. Although Edison had no way to explain the phenomenon, he made sure to patent his discovery just in case it should prove useful in the future. Since Edison saw no practical use for it, he moved on to other things.
In 1884 samples of Edison’s modified light bulbs were passed to John Ambrose Fleming, a British engineer working with the Edison and Swan Light Company of London. Curious, he conducted a number of experiments and discovered they could turn an alternating current into direct current. However, it seemed to have little practical use until 1901, when Guglielmo Marconi first made radio waves carry information in the form of Morse code. Marconi’s initial system used a Branley coherer, a device containing iron filings that would clump together when they detected radio energy. However, they had to be tapped apart after each dot or dash, which made a Branley coherer too slow to keep up with many code operators trained on the wire telegraph. Fleming’s two-element tube, or diode, proved at best a weak detector of radio waves. Many radio enthusiasts instead turned to a germanium crystal to create crystal radio sets. However, these primitive point-contact transistors were finicky, since nothing was known about how or why they worked. A crystal would have “sweet spots” that would work for a while, but after a time they became ineffective.
Lee De Forest (sometimes spelled Deforest) was experimenting with various modifications of the diode tube when he added a third element between the cathode and plate. If he attached the antenna wire to the lead for this third element, which he called a grid, it would impose the radio signal upon the current traveling between the cathode and plate. Not only did it detect radio waves, but it also amplified faint signals from distant transmitters. De Forest called his tube the Audion, as he saw it primarily in terms of radio detection and amplification. However, the triode could also serve as a very effective electronic switch. One of the first applications of the triode as a switch was in telephone switching systems, which were rapidly outgrowing the capacity of electromechanical switching. Another was in the early development of the computer, particularly in the code-breaking efforts of World War II.
As radio technology developed through the 1920s and 1930s, triodes proved increasingly inadequate for broadcast audio. As a result, tube builders began to experiment with adding additional grids to better control the signal on its way from antenna to loudspeaker. The development of television also led to the development of more complex tubes. Philo Taylor Farnsworth developed the multipactor, a tube in which electrons were used to release additional electrons from the internal elements. Both Farnsworth and television coinventor Vladimir Kosma Zworykin developed vacuum tubes that could translate an optical image into electronic signals, although Farnsworth’s image dissector and Zworykin’s iconoscope worked on different principles. However, both of them used the cathode ray tube or CRT, a vacuum tube that emits a tightly focused beam of electrons that can be shone on a phosphor screen as their video receivers. The development of radar in World War II led to various forms of cavity resonance tubes, particularly the magnetron and the klystron. After the war, the discovery that microwaves could heat food led to the development of the microwave oven, at first for the restaurant trade and eventually as a domestic electronic product.
The period immediately after World War II also saw the development of the transistor by Bell Laboratories. These small, compact devices soon pushed the vacuum tube out of many of its former jobs in radio and television. At first transistor radios were high-status items, and televisions with transistorized circuitry were prominently proclaimed as being “solid state.” By the 1980s it became expected that the operating circuitry of a radio or television would consist of transistors, either in discrete form or increasingly as integrated circuits. However, the CRT continued to hold its own in the television screen. As the general-purpose digital computer became a consumer product in the 1980s and 1990s, it generally included a CRT as a monitor. Only where small size was essential, such as portable devices, did the liquid crystal display or LCD take pride of place.
At the turn of the twenty-first century new manufacturing techniques made large LCD panels cheaper and more reliable. For the first time flat-panel desktop monitors and televisions began to overtake CRTs. LCD monitors were touted as a solution to greenhouse gas emissions, as they used less power than a CRT of equivalent size. In addition, they were shallower and thus could be installed in a workspace where a deeper CRT monitor would not fit. The only remaining vacuum tube in many homes of the 2000s was the magnetron in the microwave oven.
See also: Electricity; Great Britain.
—Leigh Kimmel
Further Reading
De Forest, Lee. Father of Radio: The Autobiography of Lee De Forest. Chicago: Wilcox and Follett Co., 1950.
Fisher, David E., and Marshall Jon Fisher. Tube: The Invention of Television. Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1996.
Lewis, Tom. Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio. New York: Edward Burlingame, 1991.
Sobel, Robert. RCA. New York: Stein and Day, 1986.
Stokes, John W. 70 Years of Radio Tubes and Valves, 2nd ed. Chandler, AZ: Sonoran, 1997.
In 1938, the United States found itself unprepared to deal with the material and equipment requirements to support the effort of World War II. All types of metals such as steel, copper, bronze, tin, and nickel were in short supply for use in needed products such as automobiles, aircraft, and electrical systems. Their costs were skyrocketing. Engineers at General Electric’s Schenectady, New York, division began to question why certain materials and components were required, the methods that were used in their manufacture, and if alternatives might be considered in designs. During these endeavors to find substitutions for materials and processes, the replacement systems were often found to be more practical and economical than the original designs. Lawrence D. Miles, an employee in the purchasing department at General Electric, is credited with refining and developing the process of function analysis, which has evolved into the field now known as Value Analysis, often referred to as Value Engineering.
During the 1950s the use of Value Analysis spread to other companies and government agencies. Various individuals and organizations have contributed to the practice of Value Analysis and related methods such as Target Costing, which originated at Toyota in 1959; Charles Bytheway’s development of the Functional Analysis System Technique Diagram in the 1960s; and Quality Function Deployment, which was introduced by Yoji Akao in 1966. As the value methodology gained in popularity, practitioners formed an educational society in 1959 known as the Society of American Value Engineers, which is today known as SAVE International. These developments have made Value Analysis an important tool today for design and quality engineers, operations management, and financial personnel.
Products and services are considered to have good value if they have appropriate performance and cost. Value is commonly represented by the relationship: Value = Function/Resources, whereby function is measured by customer performance requirements and resources are measured in materials, labor, price, schedule, and so forth. Value is increased if costs are decreased and performance is maintained. Value is also increased if performance is increased and costs are maintained, and the customer needs, wants, and is willing to pay for increased performance. Value categories have been defined as:
Value Analysis can be defined as a problem-solving system that can be applied to products and services that use a specific set of techniques, knowledge, and skills that are used to identify product costs that provide either quality, life, extension, function, or utility. Value Analysis has been refined into an engineering discipline providing an organized approach to improvement studies rather than relying on individual designers to improve products. Central to the Value Analysis process is identification of the function of a particular product or component and determination of the most economical manner for accomplishing a particular function. Functions may also be identified as either use functions or aesthetic functions, either of which may cause a customer to purchase a product. Each of these functions is provided at a cost. Evaluation of product and service functions requires breaking a design into individual components, understanding the various functions entirely, creating alternative methods for achieving each function, assigning costs to functions, and establishing values for desired functions. Questions designers typically consider in addressing the cost to provide these functions include:
The Value Analysis process typically uses an organized, multifunctional team approach to answer these and other applicable questions using creative thinking to identify alternative ways to improve functions and reduce costs while matching designs with manufacturing capabilities. Organizations also use a structured approach to identify projects and products that are in need of Value Analysis activity. Pareto analysis, cost overruns, product complexity, and schedule problems, for example, may serve as logical indicators of projects and products with problems. Once projects or products are identified for analysis, studies commence with information gathering, progressing into a function analysis phase and through idea generation, to evaluation and development periods. The time at which Value Analysis is applied during the life cycle of a product is also a consideration, with early application in the product-design phase providing the greatest savings.
Today, tools such as checklists, matrixes, logic diagrams, and software can be used to facilitate the Value Analysis process. With increased competition among businesses and industries, the appropriate allocation of costs, materials, and resources is essential. Value Analysis continues to be a useful tool for making systems, products, and processes more efficient.
—Jeff Cunion
Further Reading
Evans, James R. Production/Operations Management: Quality, Performance, and Value. Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN: West Publishing, 1997.
Juran, Joseph, and A. Blanton Godfrey. Juran’s Quality Handbook, 5th ed. New York: McGraw Hill, 1999.
Miles, Lawrence D. Techniques of Value Analysis and Engineering, third edition. Eleanor Miles Walker, Lawrence D. Miles Value Foundation, USA, 1989. http://wendt.library.wisc.edu/miles/book/preface.pdf.
Russell, Roberta, and Bernard Taylor. Operations Management: Focusing on Quality and Competitiveness, 5th ed. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2006.
SAVE International. Value Standard and Body of Knowledge. Save International: The Value Society, June 2007. http://www.value-eng.org/pdf_docs/monographs/vmstd.pdf.
van Marken, Jacob Cornelis (1845–1906)
Jacob Cornelis van Marken was a Dutch businessman who was a pioneer in the factory production of food during the late nineteenth century. However, he is better known for his design of a garden “city” where his workers lived in considerable comfort, in a form of utopian socialism, although there were criticisms of this in the twentieth century.
He was born in 1845 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, the son of a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church. After a liberal education at school, attending the Polytechnische Hogeschool (now the Technical University) at Delft, Jacob van Marken became interested in industry and went to Australia to study techniques in manufacturing. On his return to the Netherlands, he set about developing a more reliable source of yeast for the country since currently most of the supply came from the spirit distillers at Schiedam. In 1869 he established the Nederlandse Gist- en Spiritusfabriek (“Dutch Yeast and Spirits Makers”) in his hometown at Delft. The factory quickly diversified to allow for the production of alcohol, glue, and gelatine. Indeed, it was not long before he established his own printing and publishing arm, known as the J. C. Van Marken Press. The printing press issued shares that were numbered, and then these were retired at par when money became available. This would allow for the workers to be gradually given shares in the company with a 6 percent dividend, and the remaining profit being divided, with 25 percent to the managers, 50 percent to the workmen, 3 percent to the commissioners, and 12 percent to the founders, Van Marken and his family.
With the success of his factory, in 1885 van Marken appointed Martinus Willem Beijerinck (1851–1931) as the new director of the laboratory being built in Delft. Beijerinck was a lecturer at the Agricultural University at Wageningen, and in the previous year he had been elected to the Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen (Royal Academy of Sciences) in Amsterdam. A prominent bacteriologist, Beijerinck researched the properties of yeast as well as alcohol production, and also the effects of lactic acid bacteria on food. He never studied any human diseases, and as a result, was not as well known as other people in his field. Van Marken was most struck by his work, and he funded a Chair in Microbiology at the university for Beijerinck, a post he held until he retired in 1921, also managing to establish the Delft School of Microbiology. He was awarded the Leewenhoek Medal for his work in 1905.
Making a large fortune from his work, van Marken was also interested in looking after his workers whom he provided with life insurance, health insurance, and regular paid holidays. He also set up facilities for them to relax, including a library. In 1875 van Marken went a step further by establishing de Kem (“the kemel”), which was a council where they could express their views. By the time he had finished there were shops, laundry houses, bath houses, and other amenities.
In order to beautify the surroundings of the workers’ cottages, in 1882 van Marken hired the prominent landscape architect Louis P. Zocher (1820–1915) to come up with a design for the “company village.” The village was named Agneta Park after his wife, Agneta Wilhemina Johanna Mathes, whom he had married in 1869. Zocher placed the houses in short terraces, with the first workers moving in by 1884. Van Marken also funded the Gemeenschappelijk Eigendom, a limited liability corporation that helped look after the community. In 1914 the village was enlarged, and a new community center called de Tent was built—it is now the Lindenhof Conference Center. When the village needed to expand in the 1920s, the Nieuwe Agnetapark (“New Agneta Park”) was constructed. It did, however, have one problem with the rent (a part of which was put aside toward shares for buying the residence) being too low to allow the tenants to become co-owners of their homes in a short enough period of time. This meant that few could expect to own them. There was also criticism of Van Marken embarking on a paternalist system of factory ownership whereby he employed his own tenants and the place and society had to conform to his idea of society. Some of the same criticisms were leveled against the British industrialist Sir Titus Salt and others who also had a system of providing “garden cities” for their workers. There was also criticism that the workers for van Marken were often paid a minimum wage calculated to support them, and their share in the profits was paid into a savings account that, as soon as it reached 100 florins, would then be used to buy stock in the company. With the printing company the new purchasers of stock would buy off the older ones in the order in which the shares had originally been issued. This meant that the workers could only collect their money after ten or fifteen years, by which time some of the workers had died and others had left the employment of the company.
Jacob Cornelis van Marken died in 1906. A statue of him stands over Agneta Park, and the factory is now owned by the Hellman Group, where salad dressings and sauces are manufactured.
—Justin Corfield
Further Reading
Crowther, Samuel. Common Sense and Labour. London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1920.
Small, Albion W. “A Dutch Cooperative Experiment.” American Journal of Sociology 7, no. 1 (July 1901): 80–90.
Vanderbilt, Cornelius (1794–1877)
One of the famous American entrepreneurs of the nineteenth century, Cornelius Vanderbilt made his fortune in shipping and railroads and was heavily involved in political machinations in Central America. In most instances Vanderbilt did not pioneer new businesses but rather took over existing ones that he managed to develop further.
Cornelius Vanderbilt was born on May 27, 1794, at Port Richmond, Staten Island, New York, the son of Cornelius Vanderbilt, a farmer who operated a ferry in New York harbor, and Phebe (née Hand). The Vanderbilt family were descendants of Jan Aertsen, a Dutch migrant who had moved to New Amsterdam (New York) as an indentured servant in 1650. Aertsen was originally from the village of De Bilt, near Utrecht, taking that as his surname “van der Bilt,” later “Vanderbilt.” As a boy Cornelius Vanderbilt left school by the age of eleven—his father disliked schools and formal education—and by the time he was sixteen, he borrowed money from his mother and operated his own ferry which took passengers and cargo from Staten Island to Manhattan. He also started trading in food and some manufactured goods. He married his cousin, Sophia Johnson, in 1813; they had thirteen children.
During the War of 1812 Vanderbilt was awarded contracts moving supplies around the various forts in New York harbor. Gradually he came to expand his operations, and in 1817 became the business manager for Thomas Gibbons operating a steamboat that went from New Jersey to New York. At that time there was a monopoly on steamboats in New York waters, which was operated by Aaron Ogden, who was licensed by the descendants of Robert Livingston and the steamboat designer Robert Fulton. Gibbons was anxious to break this monopoly with Vanderbilt, and he successfully challenged this in the U.S. Supreme Court. At the same time, the family lived at New Brunswick, and Sophia Vanderbilt ran a successful tavern. By the time that Vanderbilt stopped working for Gibbons in 1829, he was worth $30,000. With this capital he enhanced his Dispatch Line, which combined shipping with taking passengers by stagecoaches to various parts of New York City. He then sold the business and the family moved to New York, but Sophia was unhappy at having to give up running her tavern.
Very soon Cornelius Vanderbilt operated a shipping line that operated between New York City and Peekskill. He destroyed a rival, Daniel Drew, by reducing his charges and forcing Drew to sell his business to him. He then extended the service to go as far as Albany and used faster boats that ensured that people could travel between Albany and New York City in only twelve hours. Taking on his competition, he was involved in a price war and eventually sold the business to the rivals for $100,000. At this point Vanderbilt decided to move his attention to operating a shipping line between Long Island Sound and Providence, Rhode Island. He then expanded it to take in Boston and Portland, Maine, which led to the use of more powerful boats. It was not long before he established other shipping routes in the region, and by 1838 he had acquired the nickname “the commodore,” which he kept for the rest of his life. The money that he made allowed him to build a large mansion next to his father’s farm on Staten Island.
Vanderbilt’s focus became international in 1849 after the California gold rush started. With many people traveling by ship to Panama and then crossing the peninsula there, catching another ship to California, Vanderbilt established business operations in Nicaragua, upgraded the local roads and enlarged the dock facilities. This made him a fortune, and by 1853 he was said to be worth $11 million. However, he faced a challenge when the American “filibuster,” William Walker, decided to launch a daring military adventure in Central America. Walker hoped to create a situation by which the U.S. government might annex much of Central America, and this threatened Vanderbilt’s links with the existing politicians there. Walker managed to get himself chosen as president of Nicaragua, but Vanderbilt conspired against him, and it was not long before all of Central America was engulfed in a war that was to involve seven countries; Walker’s forces were defeated and Walker himself was executed.
During the Civil War the Confederate raiders wreaked havoc on the U.S. shipping lines, and Vanderbilt was forced to sell his Atlantic Line ships as insurance premiums for U.S. vessels soared, allowing the British to undercut him. This led to Vanderbilt deciding to move into railroads, managing to buy some cheaply during the first years of the Civil War. He was able to expand this in the industrial boom that followed the war, and in 1867 to 1868 he tried to take control of the Erie Railroad, fighting Jay Gould and others. However, some of the stock that Vanderbilt bought turned out to be fraudulent, and he decided to curb his financial activities, especially when his wife died in 1868 after many years of unhappiness in their brick mansion at 10 Washington Place, New York City; she had gradually come to like the house at Staten Island and had been sad to move from there. After marrying again, Cornelius Vanderbilt gave $1 million to establish Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. He was worth about $100 million when he died on January 4, 1877.
Cornelius Vanderbilt
See also: Capitalism; Rockefeller, John Davison.
—Justin Corfield
Further Reading
Dando-Collins, Stephen. Tycoon’s War: How Cornelius Vanderbilt Invaded a Country to Overthrow America’s Most Famous Military Adventurer. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2008.
Howden Smith, Arthur D. Commodore Vanderbilt: An Epic of American Achievement. New York: McBride, 1927.
Hoyt, E. P. The Vanderbilts and Their Fortunes. New York: Doubleday, 1962.
Josephson; Matthew. The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists, 1861–1901. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1938.
Lane, Wheaton J. Commodore Vanderbilt: An Epic of the Steam Age. New York: Knopf, 1942.
Stiles, T. J. The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt. New York: Knopf, 2009.
Philip Vaughan, an ironmaster from Carmarthen in Wales, is regarded as the inventor of ball bearings, which reduce friction in moving parts and allow loads to be supported smoothly. This was first used on the axle of a carriage, and Vaughan patented the use of these iron radial ball bearings. By the 1860s ball bearings were being used for bicycle wheels, and later their use spread to other machines and several new inventions. They are now used in the transmission system in cars, their wheels, and in many other items of machinery. Vaughan is still regarded as the inventor of them, although archaeologists have found that some Roman Nemi ships dating from about 40 CE incorporated them into their design, and Leonardo da Vinci in the early sixteenth century is credited with first coming up with the principle behind ball bearings, although he did not use them for his inventions. Another Italian, Galileo, described the use of a caged ball. After Vaughan used them, in 1883 Friedrich Fischer came up with a method of production that included milling and then grinding the metal to produce balls of exactly the same size. It was not until 1907 that Sven Wingquist from Sweden was awarded a patent for the overall design, and Sweden remained an important location for the making of ball bearings until well into the twentieth century.
Little is known about Philip Vaughan—indeed, some books cite the invention as having been in 1749. It is known that Vaughan came up with his design for the ball bearings in the coastal town of Carmarthen in southern Wales, and these ball bearings were incorporated into a new design for the wheels and axles of carriages.
Carmarthen, where the invention was made, had been an important strategic base until the Black Death of 1347 to 1349, which had devastated the town. Gradually the local economy was rebuilt; although the town was captured by Owen Glendower, and the area became an important location for agriculture and also wool. A local bishop was burned to death there in the 1550s for refusing to give up his Protestant views, but the township was otherwise fairly unremarkable, although there was a small iron ore smelting plant by the late seventeenth century. Beginning with the 1730s, there was an important tin works in the town, which supplied the Bristol merchants Messrs. Allen, Coram and Vaughan with tin. However, this collapsed following the death, in 1806, of a merchant named Benjamin Haselwood, and in fact the business had been in a difficult financial position for years. Philip Vaughan, who at that stage lived in Carmarthen, was one of the people who took over the running of the tin works in 1807, continued production and was relatively successful in this as well as his nearby iron works. In 1818 when Vaughan made an application to become a burgess of Carmarthen, he listed his occupation as “tinplate manufacturer.” Subsequently Vaughan tried to keep production going, and indeed did so for about seven or eight years, but ran into severe financial problems, and there was little hope to save the business. After persevering for many years, Vaughan, by this time being one of the tenants running the place, gave up his tenancy. There is a reference in a local history to a Philip Vaughan who lived at Kidwelly in Carmarthenshire in 1821. Although the surname is relatively common in the area, it seems likely that it might well be him. That man bought a sloop Actives from George Buckle and William Davis, using it to carry tin from Cornwall, but the ship was later lost at sea.
See also: Steel.
—Justin Corfield
Further Reading
Rowland, K. T. Eighteenth Century Inventions. Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1974.
Stolarski, T. A., and S. Tobe. Rolling Contacts. London: Professional Engineering Publ. Ltd., 2000.
Thorstein Veblen was a sociologist and reformer whose most influential book, The Theory of the Leisure Class, written in 1899, analyzed the effect of wealth on human behavior. It is a scathing indictment that has as much validity today as it did more than a century ago.
Veblen was the sixth of twelve children born to an affluent Minnesota farmer on July 30, 1857. His parents emigrated from Norway in 1847 and settled at first in Wisconsin. After a few years, the family moved on to Minnesota where, Andrew, Veblen’s father, acquired 290 acres of rich and productive land and proceeded to make good use of it. All of his children were well educated, graduated from high school, and went to college. Some of them, including Thorstein, also earned graduate degrees.
The institution attended by the Veblen family was Carleton College located in Northfield, Minnesota. It was not a particularly good school, but nevertheless it boasted a few first-rate instructors. One of them was John Bates Clark, an economist who would later make a name for himself at Columbia University. Clark became Veblen’s mentor; he thought well of him and encouraged him to make the most of his education. Clark also noticed that Veblen was somewhat eccentric, but he tried to make light of his peculiarities, such as his essays defending drunkenness and cannibalism.
Veblen graduated near the head of his class in 1881 and went on to Johns Hopkins University to pursue a PhD in philosophy. He disliked it there and left before the term ended to begin what would be a lifetime of wandering over the American academic landscape. His next stop was Yale, where he met sociologist William Graham Sumner, the American disciple of Herbert Spencer. Veblen must have been somewhat influenced by Sumner, because his later writings exhibit a strong suggestion of Spencer. Veblen never made natural selection the basis of his thinking, but he used it as a handy explanation for the fact that some people survive and prosper while others do not.
After receiving his PhD in sociology in 1884 at Yale, Veblen sought a teaching job but could not find one. He went home to the Minnesota farm and stayed there for seven years, spending most of his time reading and writing. In 1891, he resumed his academic wandering by registering as a graduate student in economics at Cornell where he met J. Lawrence Laughlin. Laughlin, a senior professor of economics, was immediately impressed by Veblen’s demeanor and his academic background. He went to the president of the university and secured a special grant in order to give Veblen a fellowship. Two years later, when Laughlin moved on to become head of the Department of Economics at the new University of Chicago, he took Veblen with him. There, Veblen taught, wrote, and served as editor of the Journal of Political Economy. One of his writings during this period was The Theory of the Leisure Class in 1899.
Veblen’s first and greatest book is a comprehensive tract on snobbery and social pretense as well as a masterpiece of English prose. Its greatness is that it is timeless. It was written to describe and discuss certain aspects of society at the height of Gilded Age of capitalism in the United States, but it is in many ways still relevant today. It is a brilliant and truthful illumination of the effect of wealth on behavior. It demonstrates more clearly than anything ever written before or after that possessions and consumption are the banners of achievement. The brilliance of Veblen’s work lies in the fact that his attack upon wealth and its consequences is presented in such a way that it appears to be a sociological and anthropological treatise. His use of the term leisure class refers to the rich, not necessarily those who are successful but merely those who are rich and are parasites on society. He uses the term conspicuous consumption to refer to the grotesque exaggeration of materialism flaunted by those who are rich but not necessarily useful. He abhors such people and their lifestyle, but in his text there appears not a single venomous or hateful word. This approach was taken deliberately by the author, for at the time there was no such thing as academic tenure and professors could easily be dismissed for political or ideological reasons. While it is true that Veblen’s eccentricities frequently caused him trouble, he was never dismissed from a position for reasons having to do with academic freedom.
Veblen continued to write, and during the period from 1900 to 1925 he produced nine additional books: The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts (1914), Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution (1915), An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of Its Perpetuation (1917), The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Businessmen (1918), The Vested Interests and the Common Man (1919), The Place of Science in Modern Civilization and Other Essays (1919), The Engineers and the Price System (1921), Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times: The Care of America (1923), and The Laxdaela Saga (1925).
The Theory of the Leisure Class made Veblen famous but did little to advance his career. He continued to move from school to school and never achieved high rank or high pay. He was a poor classroom instructor, paid little attention to rules, and had several clandestine romantic affairs which caused him to suffer two broken marriages. After leaving Chicago in 1906, he spent three years at Stanford. From Stanford he moved to the University of Missouri, and from there he went to Washington to work for the government during World War I. After the war he made his way to New York, where he worked as an editor and taught at the New School for Social Research.
Although his first book was his best, his additional writings revealed clearly his genius as an analyst of American economic and social institutions. Yet he received no honors or rewards and was essentially regarded as a pariah by the more orthodox members of the academic community. Moreover, his work had little influence on the nature of American society. The Theory of the Leisure Class received some positive reviews, but few copies were sold to the public. Much the same was the fate of his later works. His reputation among scholars was highest in the 1930s when the Great Depression was seen as a vindication of his critique of the business system. In the mid-1920s, now silent, tired, and broke, he retired to California and died on August 3, 1929.
See also: Alger Jr., Horatio; George, Henry; Bellamy, Edward; Capitalism, Morgan, John Pierpont; Rock-efeller, John Davison; Vanderbilt, Cornelius.
—Kenneth E. Hendrickson Jr.
Further Reading
Dorfman, Joseph. Thorstein Veblen and His America. New York: Viking, 1934.
Duffus, R. L. The Innocents at Cedro: A Memoir of Thorstein Veblen. New York: Macmillan, 1944.
Edgell, Stephen. Veblen in Perspective: His Life and Thought. New York, London: Sharpe, 2001.
Jorgensen, Elizabeth W., and Henry I. Jorgensen. Thorstein Veblen: Victorian Firebrand. New York, London: Sharpe, 1999.
Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class, 2nd edition. New York: Macmillan, 1912.
A foundryman from the Netherlands, Verbruggen designed several techniques involving machine tools that were used for making cannon for wars in Europe, the Americas, and Asia. Subsequently, his techniques were used to fashion other objects that were important in the development of the steam engine. He was born in 1712 at Enkhuizen, West Friesland, the Netherlands, and was initially trained as an architect and artist. In 1746 he was appointed as Master Founder for the Admiralty of West Friesland, and within a year of taking up that position, he started to introduce new methods of making cannon from solid castings. Prior to this, cannon in Europe had been cast as tubes and then machined to the required tolerance levels in machines with vertical bores. The new system that was used had the canons cast solid and then rotated in horizontal machines, with the cutters being driven by water-powered tools. In part he used techniques that had been refined by Johann Maritz, the Master Founder at Burgdorf, Switzerland, which had then been used by Maritz’s sons in Spain and also in France where they were being used at the French Royal Foundry at Douai by the 1730s. The foundry was totally rebuilt after the destruction of the city in 1710 to 1712 during the latter part of the War of Spanish Succession. The Dutch initially wanted to hire Maritz himself, but they found him too conservative, and he also wanted a far larger salary than they were prepared to pay.
In 1734 Jan Verbruggen married, and his son, Pieter, was born in the following year, later becoming an important assistant to his father. In the early 1750s, with war looming in Europe, Verbruggen was appointed as the Master Founder at the state-run Royal Foundry at The Hague. It was being overhauled with the prospect of war because of unresolved issues from the War of Austrian Succession in the 1740s. Jan Verbruggen came up with a new design for the foundry and was helped by two others, his young son, Pieter Verbruggen (1735–1786), who had just qualified as a lawyer, and by John Siegler, who had spent fifteen years working at the French arsenal at Douai. The work was carried out under the direction of General de Creuznach, but in his absence in 1759, Verbruggen had the foundry totally rebuilt. Arguments raged about whether or not Verbruggen had the authority to do this; the furnace that had been destroyed to build the new foundry was designed and built by General de Creuznach. When the general found out, he was furious, and when Siegler tried to mediate in the arguments, Verbruggen fired him, feeling that he was disloyal. The rift between de Creuznach and Verbruggen ended with Verbruggen and his son leaving for England, where they found work at the Woolwich Arsenal in 1770, with the new Royal Brass Foundry.
The foundry at Woolwich started making cannons during the War of the Spanish Succession in the early 1710s. It had been in continuous production ever since and as a result had been badly maintained. Verbruggen spent four years reorganizing the cannon foundry and producing high-quality ordnance on a large scale for the British and Loyalist armies in the American War of Independence.
The Verbruggens wanted their technology involving the horizontal boring machine remain secret. However, John Wilkinson (1728–1808), one of the main British ironmasters of that time, who was also involved in the making of cannons, managed to discover it and in 1774 he patented his machine. His used steam engine cylinders that proved to be more powerful, stronger, and more accurate for boring into solid iron. Wilkinson later improved on his machine but considered that the new design had already been covered by his earlier patent, although this was rejected by the British Board of Trade.
Both Jan Verbruggen and his son were keen artists, and there are about fifty of their watercolor paintings of cannon foundries that have been published. As a result these are some of the most crucial pictorial records for our knowledge of the set-up of eighteenth-century military industrial operations. Jan Verbruggen’s three-story house in London is preserved at the Woolwich Arsenal, and his guns are held by a variety of military collections in Europe and North America. Jan Verbuggen died in 1781, and his son died five years later.
The cannon cast by Verbruggen were used all around the world, with some of his early Dutch cannon being used during the Seven Years’ War and then in the American War of Independence, as well as by the Dutch East India Company in India and Southeast Asia. Many of them were subsequently used in the Napoleonic Wars, and a few were still in use in the middle nineteenth century, although by that time many were used as more decorative pieces in remote colonies. However, the machines made by Jan Verbruggen were also to be very important in the Industrial Revolution in Britain, with their use subsequently to fashion parts for steam engines.
—Justin Corfield
Further Reading
Black, Jeremy. European Warfare 1660–1815. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.
Jackson, Melvin Hoffman, and Carel de Beer. Eighteenth Century Gunfounding: The Verbruggens at the Royal Brass Foundry. Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1973.
Rolt, Lionel T. C. Tools for the Job: A History of Machine Tools to 1950. London: HMSO, 1986.
Vermuyden, Cornelius (1590–1677)
A Dutch engineer specializing in drainage and waterways, Vermuyden was responsible for developing many of the techniques that were important in the Netherlands and introducing them to England. He was born in 1590 in Tholen, in the province of Zeeland, and when he was a young man he went to England where he worked on the embankments of the Thames Estuary protecting the English capital from being flooded. He was involved in building a sea wall at Dagenham and also in the reclamation of land at Canvey Island in Essex, from 1621 until 1623, the latter being financed by a Dutch haberdasher Joas Croppenburg, to whom Vermuyden was related by marriage.
In 1626 Vermuyden was invited to return to England by King Charles I, who wanted him to supervise the drainage of Hatfield Chase in the Isle of Axholme, on the borders of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. The king either came across some work he had undertaken at Windsor or on his work at Canvey Island, and he decided to use Vermuyden’s skills at Hatfield Chase, payment for which would be a third of the land drained, the Crown keeping one-third and the remainder to go to the local community. To finance the project, Vermuyden offered shares in this land to French Huguenot and Walloon refugees who were responsible for most of the work. The use of these foreigners led to anger from some of the local people who not only expressed xenophobic views but also were angered that draining the swamp would stop them from hunting for ducks and fishing. The work was partially successful, with the straightening of the River Don into the River Aire, which in turn led to flowing in Fishlake, Sykehouse, and Snaith. A lawsuit against the draining led to Vermuyden digging what became known as the Dutch River, which provided a direct route from the Don into the River Ouse near the village of Goole. This cost Vermuyden some of the land he was going to get, and many of the migrant workers settled at Sandtoft on Hatfield Chase. However, it also provided Vermuyden enough money to buy about four thousand acres of land at Sedgemoor in Somerset, and also at Malvern Chase, Worcestershire, and he also bought into a partnership in lead mines at Wirksworth in Derbyshire in central England.
During the 1630s Vermuyden began supervising work at his lead mines in Wirksworth and then came up with a scheme to make the River Derwent navigable by draining the “Great Fen” (also known as the Bedford Level) in the Cambridgeshire Fens. This took up most of his time from 1629 until 1637, and was financed by a number of individuals, the most important being Francis, Earl of Bedford. To accomplish this he built the Old Bedford River and also the “Forty Foot Drain,” which were waterways that drained much of the land, leaving a large amount of prime agricultural land available for farming. This also involved building a channel that was 70 feet (21 meters) wide and 21 miles (34 kilometers) long. Work finally started by again bringing some Dutch workers to England, and they were settled at Thorney in the Cambridgeshire Fens. It took two years to build the canal in spite of opposition by many locals, including Oliver Cromwell, a member of Parliament who supported the opponents of the drainage scheme.
A map of the Battle of Sedgemoor.
The project was almost completed when the English Civil War broke out in 1642. The parliamentary forces flooded the region during the war, undoing much of Vermuyden’s work. Their aim was to hinder the Royalists who were strong in Yorkshire from advancing on London. One of Vermuyden’s family, probably his brother (although some authors argue that it was his eldest son), served in the parliamentary forces at Marston Moor, leaving them to move to the Netherlands just before the Battle of Naseby. Vermuyden also seems to have sided with the parliamentary forces, and from 1649, after the execution of King Charles I, he was hired by the new government to work until 1652, draining the fens by excavating the “new” Bedford River and draining some sixteen thousand hectares of land.
Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector appointed Vermuyden to serve as English ambassador to the Netherlands from 1653. Cromwell wanted an alliance with the Netherlands, seeing their Protestant Republican form of government as close to that in England. Vermuyden was sent to the Netherlands to get the Dutch States-General to consider a treaty that offered Asia to the Dutch in return for the English taking the Americas, excepting the small part of South America already occupied by the Dutch. The Dutch declined to agree to this, and Vermuyden returned to London.
Returning to England in the late 1650s, Vermuyden was involved in drawing up a drainage system for Sedgemoor in Somerset, and also Malvern Chase, land that he had bought before the Civil War. Following the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Vermuyden kept a low profile. He had thirteen children, and his son was a founding member of the Royal Society in 1663. He died in October 1677 in London. As well as the land that he had cleared, mention should be made of the drainage ditches that were built at Sedgemoor. In July 5, 1685, when the rebel forces under the duke of Monmouth decided to launch a surprise nighttime attack on the Royal Forces of James II at Sedgemoor, it was some of these ditches that caused them to confuse their attack in the darkness, allowing them to be slaughtered in the battle the following day, in the last battle fought on English soil.
Vermuyden School at Goole was named after him, as was a comprehensive school on Canvey Island and also the Vermuyden Hotel in Goole. The motto on Vermuyden’s coat of arms, Niet Zonder Arbyt (“Not without Work”), is retained in the motto of the South Cambridgeshire District Council.
—Justin Corfield
Further Reading
Darby, H. C. The Draining of the Fens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956.
Harris, L. E. Vermuyden and the Fens. London: Clever-Hume Press, 1953.
Korthals-Altes, J. Sir Cornelius Vermuyden. London: Williams and Norgate, 1925.
During the period from the end of the Civil War in 1865 to the early twentieth century there occurred in the United States the rapid growth of very large industries generally known as “Big Business.” The most important of these dealt in such products as oil, iron and steel, beef, sugar, and tobacco. As they grew, practically all of these industries, and others, followed one of two routes toward bigness, vertical integration and horizontal integration. Few in those days could have predicted how significant these business tactics were to become in terms of their influence upon American society and economy.
A business that developed by means of vertical integration was one that would perceive a large potential market and find that to reach this market effectively, it had to engage in new functions. That is, it could not simply produce goods but had to do other things such as the marketing or shipping of its goods. In fact, a business that engaged in vertical integration usually engaged in a number of activities such as providing its own raw materials, producing goods, manufacturing them, and marketing them to consumers. Thus, a firm that did a number of things was said to be vertically integrated because it engaged in various activities on various rungs of the business ladder, ranging from raw materials through production to the consumer. A firm that began as a producer and then moved into marketing was said to integrate forward, while one that moved into owning its own raw materials was said to integrate backward. More often than not a firm would integrate in both directions.
A classic example of a business that became big in vertical integration is the meat-packing industry. Before 1870, this industry consisted of a number of small firms that slaughtered and packed pork in a midwestern center of the industry such as Chicago. Cured or salted pork would then be transported over long distances. Beef, however, was handled in a different way. Live cattle were transported to the East where they were slaughtered and the beef sold fresh. But this all changed when Gustavus Franklin Swift began slaughtering cattle in the Midwest and shipping the beef east in refrigerated railroad cars. He formed his new business in 1878. To be successful he had to acquire his own refrigerated cars, establish refrigerated storage facilities in the East, develop a marketing strategy, and, of course, build his own slaughterhouses. He did all this, and soon imitators like Philip Armour appeared on the scene. By the turn of the century, the beef industry had become a giant and successful oligopoly.
Another firm that experienced significant development through vertical integration was the United Fruit Company. It achieved success by making bananas available to consumers throughout the country. Before the Civil War bananas were not sold in the United States, but by the end of the 1860s a few shipments began to arrive in port cities. The problem was that bananas were so perishable that their market area was very limited. The innovator who created a national market for bananas was a Boston businessman named Andrew W. Preston. He founded the United Fruit Company in 1899 and soon created a nationwide network of distribution centers equipped with the necessary cooling and heating machines to allow sales in many areas. Within ten years of its creation, United Fruit had become the nation’s largest corporation. Unlike other giants such as Standard Oil, United Fruit controlled widely varying assets, from production to transport to finance, even government services, across many countries of Central and Latin America.
Yet another business that grew rapidly by means of vertical integration was the iron and steel industry. The leader in this field was Andrew Carnegie, who integrated the business during the 1870s and 1880s. Carnegie and his associate, Henry Clay Frick, acquired their own sources of iron ore and coal, their own railroad, and their own fleet of steamships. And, of course, they saw to the marketing of their own product. By the time he sold out to John Pierpont Morgan in 1902, Carnegie’s company dominated the iron and steel industry.
An understanding of such techniques as vertical and horizontal integration is essential to an understanding of the incredible growth of the American industrial economy that began in the late nineteenth century. Equally important is the fact that this growth led directly to public demands for the regulation of big businesses. These efforts began in the late nineteenth century, have continued to the present day, and have been only marginally successful. Big business continues to dominate many aspects of the social, economic, and political structure of the United States.
See also: automobile; Bell, Alexander Graham; Central Pacific Railroad; Depression of 1893; Eight-Hour Day; Ford, Henry; George, Henry; Gompers, Samuel; Great Depression; Insull, Samuel; Laissez-Faire; New Deal; Powderly, Terence V.; Roosevelt, Franklin Delano; Roosevelt, Theodore; Sherman Antitrust Act; Trusts; Veblen, Thorstein; Wilson, Woodrow.
—Kenneth E. Hendrickson Jr.
Further Reading
Josephson, Matthew. The Robber Barons. New York: Harvest/Harcourt Brace, 1995 reprint.
Kolko, Gabriel. The Triumph of Conservatism. New York: The Free Press, 1963.
Nevins, Allan. John D. Rockefeller: The Heroic Age of American Enterprise, 2 volumes. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940.
Wall, Joseph F. Andrew Carnegie. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.
Since ancient times, spring water has been thought to have special healing properties, with people traveling long distances to savor the waters. This led to the emergence of resorts such as Bath in England and Aachen in Germany. People also took bottled water with them, and a few decided to turn to commercial production. One of these was the town of Vichy in central France, which had become celebrated as a health resort in the eighteenth century. Altogether there were twelve springs at Vichy Spa, of which six were used for drinking water.
Vichy water was highly prized in early modern France, with bottled water from the spring there being used as a cure from at least Napoleonic times. This water came from Vichy Célestins and emerged through a strata of aragonite rock at 22°C (71°F). The layers of calcium carbonate have eroded over centuries, and hence the Vichy water was thought to be good at treating stomach disorders and also to help with the normalization of bile secretions, to reduce the symptoms of colitis, and to provide relief from food and drug allergies.
Bottling plants were established at Vichy. The water is collected but is initially separated from the carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide is then added back to the water at the same proportion when it is bottled. From the mid-nineteenth century, Vichy water was available around much of the French-speaking world, and also in other counties.
During World War II, Vichy became the capital of the pro-German government of Marshal Philippe Pétain and Pierre Laval, and for a while the drinking of Vichy water was also seen as a political act.
—Justin Corfield
Further Reading
Altman, Nathaniel. Healing Springs: The Ultimate Guide to Taking the Waters. Rochester, VT: Healing Arts Press, 2000.
Ferdinand Heinrich Gustav Hilgard was born in Speyer, Palatinate, on April 10, 1835. His family moved to Zwiebrücken in 1839, and it was there that he began his education. He attended the Gymnasium or Zweirücken (the equivalent of a high school), the French semimilitary academy at Phalzbourg, the Gymnasium of Speyer, and the universities of Munich and Würtzburg. In 1853, unknown to his parents, he immigrated to the United States and changed his name to Villard.
He gradually moved westward, stopping for short periods in various towns and often making his living as a newspaper reporter. For a while, in 1856, he was editor and part owner of the Racine, Wisconsin, Gazette and advocated the election of John Fremont as president. By the following year (1857), he was associated with the Staats-Zeitung, Frank Leslie’s, and Tribune in New York and the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette. He covered the Lincoln-Douglas debate and was a battlefield correspondent during the Civil War. On January 3, 1866, he married Helen Frances Garrison, daughter of abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison.
During the Panic of 1873, he became involved in railroad financing. By this time he was in Oregon, a booming sector of American expansion. By means of the skillful manipulation of railroad securities, he gained a strong position in the field of transportation featuring a controlling interest in the Northern Pacific Railroad and by 1881, he was president of the company. Building this line across the Northern Rocky Mountains temporarily bankrupted him, but he refinanced and bounced back. For a time, he was the most important railroad promoter in the United States.
The Northern Pacific operated between St. Paul, Minnesota, and Seattle, Washington. Chartered in 1864, it was financed by Jay Cooke until 1873 when Cooke went bankrupt. It was then that Villard stepped up and finished the project, but he suffered financial losses. The company was reorganized in 1890 by John Pierpont Morgan, who shared control of it with James Jerome Hill, whose Great Northern Railway Company was a competitor. They sought to combine their two railroads with the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy through an arrangement known as the Northern Securities Company. When Theodore Roosevelt became president in 1901, he saw the Northern Securities Company as a violator of the Sherman Antitrust Act and ordered the Justice Department to take action against it. Subsequently, the Supreme Court ruled against the company and ordered its dissolution. This was done, but the three companies remained financially linked, and in 1970 they were allowed to merge as the Burlington Northern that, in turn, acquired the St. Louis-San Francisco Railway Company in 1980 and the Southern Pacific Corporation in 1995.
Villard supported Thomas Alva Edison financially, and in 1889 he founded the Edison General Electric Company that eventually became General Electric Corporation. Meanwhile, he maintained an interest in journalism and bought a controlling interest in the New York Evening Post.
After Villard’s death in 1900, his wife became interested in social reform. She was involved in the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and founded the Women’s Peace Society. Their son, Oswald Garrison Villard (1872–1949), was a well-known journalist and writer. He was editor and president (1897–1918) of the New York Evening Post and owner of The Nation (1918–1932). His works included John Brown (1910), Germany Embattled (1915), Prophets True and False (1928), The German Phoenix (1933), Fighting Years (1939), and others.
The contributions of the Villard family to the growth of the American economy during the Second Industrial Revolution, to social reform, and to the field of journalism were very significant, but today they have been virtually forgotten except by historians.
See also: Central Pacific Railroad; Hill, James Jerome; Robber Barons; Transcontinental Railroad; Union Pacific Railroad; Vanderbilt, Cornelius; Gould, Jay.
—Kenneth E. Hendrickson Jr.
Further Reading
de Borchgrave, Alexandria Villard, and John Cullen. Villard: The Life and Times of an American Titan. New York: Doubleday, 2001.
Stilgoe, John R. Metropolitan Corridor: Railroads and the American Scene. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983.
Stover, John F. American Railroads. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961.
Strom, Clair. Profiting from the Plains: The Great Northern Railway and the Corporate Development of the American West. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003.
Volta, Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio (1745–1827)
An Italian electrical scientist who was a central figure in the development of electrical power, Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta helped develop the electric battery. He was born on February 18, 1745, in Como, in northern Italy, the son of Filippo and Maddalena Volta, and was from a clerical family. He had little formal training in either mathematics or natural philosophy and studied at the Regio Seminario Benzi di Como. However, he was fascinated by natural sciences, and as a young man he started corresponding with a number of prominent Italian scientists, including Giovanni Battista Beccaria at the University of Turin. In 1774 he was appointed a professor of physics at the Regie Scuole di Como [Royal School of Como]. During his time there he managed to experiment with a large variety of topics and had some successes. He read a paper by Benjamin Franklin on “flammable air,” and this led him to work on methods to isolate methane, which he managed to do in 1776. In 1779 he moved to Pavia, and for the next twenty-five years he was professor of experimental physics at the University of Pavia.
It was at Pavia that Volta began to investigate electricity and designed his first battery. He credited the work of William Nicholson, Tiberius Cavallo, and Abraham Bennet, which helped him design his battery. It was an electrochemical cell that had a zinc electrode and a copper one. His discovery made him famous at the time, and Volta was able to show the importance of his discovery to Napoleon Bonaparte, then to the First Consul, in November 1800. Napoleon made Volta a count. This was in spite of the fact that Volta had highlighted his new discovery for the first time in a British magazine during the Napoleonic Wars. In 1819 Alessandro Volta retired to his estate at Camnago, near Como, where he died on March 5, 1827. Two of his sons also became scientists. In 1880 the International Electrical Congress (now the International Electrotechnical Commission; IEC), approved the name volt to be the unit for electromotive force.
—Justin Corfield
Further Reading
Bellodi, G., F. Bevilacqua, L. Falomo, and G. Bonera, eds. Gli strumenti di Alessandro Volta. Il Gabinetto di Fisica dell’Università di Pavia. Milano: Hoepli, 2002.
Dibner, Bern. Alessandro Volta and the Electric Battery. New York: Franklin Watts, 1964.
Heilbron, J. L. Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries: A Study in Early Modern Physics, 2nd edition. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1999.
Mazzarello, Paolo. Il professore e la cantante: La grande storia d’amore di Alessandro Volta. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2009.
Pancaldi, Giuliano. Volta: Science and Culture in the Age of the Enlightenment. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.
The firm AB Volvo (the Volvo Group) is a group of related Swedish companies that produced automobiles (although these are now made by the Ford Motor Company) and now concentrate their production in trucks, buses, and construction equipment as well as drive systems for industry, marine applications, and also aerospace components.
The word Volvo means “I roll,” and the company was originally founded on April 14, 1927, in the city of Gothenburg in the southwestern coast of Sweden. It was established by the roller ball-bearing company S.K.F., hence its name, which had originally been registered as a company and as a trademark as early as May 1911 within S.K.F. AB. At a meeting in a restaurant in Stockholm in August 1924, the sales manager of S.K.F., Assar Gabrielsson (1891–1962), who had worked as a stenographer in the Lower House of the Swedish Parliament before joining S.K.F., and a friend and engineer Gustav Larson (1887–1968) decided to turn their attention to making cars and to invest their money in a new manufacturing plant. They planned to make at least one hundred cars by the start of 1928. As part of the agreement, Gabrielsson would invest his money made from commissions when he ran a S.K.F. subsidiary in Paris in 1921 and 1922, and if it failed Larson would have worked on the project without any reward. Assar Gabrielsson’s wife had died in a car accident, and he was determined to make a car that was as safe as possible. The board of S.K.F. was not interested in supporting the idea, so Gabrielsson and Larson went ahead together; Gabrielsson was allowed to remain with S.K.F. providing his work with Volvo did not interfere with his work for them. The design room was a spare room in Larson’s apartment, and a number of engineers such as Jan G. Smith and Henry Westerberg were involved in the work. However, it was not until August 10, 1926, when Gabrielsson and Larson held their board meeting and became involved in the physical production of cars. The first Volvo car, the OV4, left the factory at Hisingen, Göteborg, on April 14, 1927, and this is why this date is now used as the official date for the founding of the car company.
Of the first ten prototype cars built, only one was sold; it was bought by Sven Sjöstedt, the photographer for Volvo, and in the 1930s it was donated to the Volvo Industrial Museum. Some of the other early cars were used to transport material around the factory, with a few occasionally used as work benches for the manufacture of other cars. In the first year of operation, only 297 cars were built. In January 1928 the Volvo factory made the first truck, the Series 1. By 1930 production had increased, and Volvo was able to sell 639 cars. However, the company was little known outside Sweden at the time. By World War II, the company was involved with the production of other items, such as the building of marine engines. From 1929 the U-21 outboard engine was being manufactured on a regular basis, and it continued until 1962. In 1934 Volvo produced its first bus, which was named the “B1,” and during the 1940s it began making aircraft engines and other products.
By 1937, some twenty-five thousand cars had been manufactured, and another twenty-five thousand were made between 1937 and 1941. During World War II, Volvo had trouble sourcing enough rubber, and as a result they turned to the manufacture of agricultural tractors running on iron wheels. In 1943 the company began working with Kopings Mekaniska Verkstad (Koping Engineering Works), which helped diversify Volvo’s production. During the war the German Opel and the DKW started to sell well in Sweden, and as a result Gabrielsson decided that his company should focus on the building of small cars as well as the models that they were producing at the time. As a result, the PV444 was manufactured from 1944 and with increasing prosperity in Sweden, and with the end of World War II in the following year, the company boomed. Soon Volvo cars became well known around the world, gaining a reputation for safety and reliability as well as comfort and size. The Volvo Group has sponsored sporting events, including the Volvo Ocean Race, a yacht race around the world, and many other events. The phrase Building the Volvo Way, used since the 1920s, still describes the method of constructing cars and trucks with all parts of the process from design to manufacturing being organized by Volvo, and for cars, teams of workers being involved in the construction of individual cars moving around the factory rather than workers being fixed in one position in the manufacturing process. Volvo felt that allowing workers to be involved in the construction of entire vehicles gave them more of a sense of pride.
The Volvo Group, on January 28, 1999, sold the Volvo Car Corporation to the Ford Motor Company for $6.45 billion. This meant that the Volvo Group could concentrate on commercial vehicles. They decided to expand, and on January 2, 2001, they bought Renault V. I. (which included Mack trucks) and they renamed the entity Renault Trucks in the following year. They did not, however, take Renault S.A.’s stake in Iribus, but it still made the Volvo Group the second largest producer of heavy trucks in the world, dominating the North American market with Mack trucks and gaining a large foothold in southern Europe. In 2007 the Volvo Group expanded further by acquiring the truck division of Nissan Diesel from Nissan Motors, which allowed Volvo to expand further into the Asian market. Volvo remains one of the major industrial companies in Sweden, and Volvo cars are sold around the world.
—Justin Corfield
Further Reading
AB Volvo and the Volvo Group. Göteborg: AB Volvo Public Relations Department, 1965.
Gabrielsson, Assar. The Thirty-Year History of Volvo. http://www.volvoclub.org.uk/pdf/VolvoHistoryByAssarGabrielsson.pdf (accessed May 2008).
Georgano, Nick. Cars: Early and Vintage 1886–1930. London: Grange-Universal, 1985.
Kennett, Pat. Volvo. Cambridge, UK: P. Stephens, 1979.
Nicol, Gladys. Volvo. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976.
von Kleist, E. G. (c. 1700–1748)
Ewald Jürgen Georg von Kleist was a Dutch cleric and inventor who lived in Prussia, where he developed the design of what became known as the Leyden jar, an electric circuit element that could be used for storing electricity. This was a crucial invention, for the storing of electricity through batteries was fundamental to its development around the world.
Born in June 1700 in Prussian Pomerania, von Kleist was the son of a landrat (district magistrate) in the Prussian government. The region had been ruled by the Swedes, but it was now a part of Brandenburg-Prussia, ruled over by Frederick III. In 1701 Frederick III elevated the state to a kingdom with his assumption of the title of king in Prussia, and he renamed himself Frederick I of Prussia. Von Kleist studied at the University of Leyden during the 1720s where he became interested in electricity. At the time, Leyden in the Netherlands was one of the major centers of learning in western Europe, so much so that many people wanted to gain expertise from the Dutch, including the father of the British mechanical engineer, Andrew Meikle. Some twenty years later, the Swedish metallurgist Reinhold Rücker Angerstein spent a considerable part of his time there when he sought to discover as much as he could about the Industrial Revolution in Europe.
It has been suggested that while von Kleist was at Leyden, he may have come across Professor Gravesande, who was interested in electricity, and that he did take part in some demonstrations in experimental physics for students at the university. Although von Kleist’s father had hoped he would go into the government bureaucracy, after graduating von Kleist decided to go into the church. He returned to Pomerania, although the exact details of his entire career are not known.
At that time there was a great interest in electricity, and in Berlin in the 1740s, there were a number of experiments undertaken by scientists. Professor G. M. Bose of the University of Leipzig conducted some of these, and in January 1744 Frederick the Great opened the Berlin Academy of Sciences. There, the staff and students experimented greatly with electricity, and there are accounts of demonstrators using alcohol, turpentine, gunpowder, and other substances that were ignited using electrical sparks.
Probably in early October 1745, von Kleist came up with his design of the Kleistian jar, later named the Leyden jar. It had a fundamental electric circuit element for storing electricity, which was now called a capacitor. A similar device was independently discovered at around the same time by Pieter van Musschenbroek, who investigated it in more detail but whose invention remains less well known than the Leyden jar. By this time von Kleist was the dean of the Cathedral at Kammin (Köslin) in Prussia and an expert on church law. He became a member of the Hofgericht (High Court of Justice) at Kammin.
It seems clear that von Kleist was stimulated in his experimentation by the work of Professor Bose; some later scientists have even credited Bose with the actual invention of the Leyden jar itself. Certainly Bose’s experiments encouraged von Kleist to build his own electrical machine, as many other people had done. His aim was to test the strength and also the reliability of the electrical flare, and then work out some way of measuring its reliability. During one of these experiments with his electrical machine he connected the machine’s prime conductor onto a metal wire at one end, and the other was placed in a jar that had been filled with water. Von Kleist had read the work of the French scientist Charles du Fay, who had suggested that insulating the jar would increase the spark. The result was not what von Kleist had expected. By holding the jar in one of his hands while charging it with the electrical machine, the nail in the jar served as a positive pole.
It is not known exactly on which date von Kleist made his discovery. However, on November 4, 1745, he started writing about the discovery, and one of the first letters was to Dr. Lieberkuhn, a famous physician and a physicist who was a member of the Berlin Academy. Lieberkuhn reported on this find to the Berlin Academy soon afterward, and this excited much interest. Von Kleist’s next letter was to Paul Swietlicke in Denmark, dated on November 28, and after that, in December, he wrote to Professor Johann Krueger at Halle in Saxony. Subsequent letters were sent in early 1746 to Professor Winkler of Leipzig, and then to a professor who worked at the Academy of Liegnitz. Apparently all the correspondents tried to replicate the experiment but failed in their attempts.
In early 1746 Krueger published details of the Leyden jar in Geschichte der Erde, in Halle. By this time von Kleist was anxious to try to reproduce his earlier success. After connecting the nail to his electrical machine, he electrified it, and when he touched the nail, he received a bad electric shock. Von Kleist then wrote to all his correspondents again with some new ideas, but when they again tried, they failed to replicate the experiment. It seemed that von Kleist had not explained to them that the bottle was held in his hands while being charged, and this helped ground the charge.
By this time von Kleist had tried yet another approach to work out how his experiments worked and those by others did not. It is possible that his jar may have contained alcohol, water, or even some mercury. By this time Swietlicke had shared his copy of von Kleist’s letter with another Dane, Daniel Gralath, who initially failed to repeat von Kleist’s discovery. After getting more information, mainly that a metal wire worked better than a nail and that a medicine phial could be replaced with a barometric tube, on March 5, 1746, Gralath managed to repeat the experiment. By then the news that Professor Petrus van Musschenbroek, a Dutch professor at Leyden, had also come up with the capacitor and had named it the Leyden jar, and he had already published the news in some parts of Europe. Even though von Kleist is now acknowledged as being the first person to discover the capacitor, the name Kleistian jar did not last, and it became called the Leyden jar because of the work of van Musschenbroek. Ewald Jürgen Georg von Kleist died on December 10, 1748.
The importance of the discovery and the manufacture of the Leyden jar is that it could be used by electrotherapists, and by 1752 there were publications throughout Europe suggesting its medical use. By 1789 there were some seventy different suggested uses in medicine and only thirty in physics, although it still remained in use by scientists when undertaking experiments for the public.
—Justin Corfield
Further Reading
Dorsman, Cornelis, and Charles August Crommelin. “The Invention of the Leyden Jar.” Janus 46 (1957): 274–80.
Heilbron, John L. “G. M. Bose: The Prime Mover in the Invention of the Leyden Jar.” Isis 57 (1966): 264–67.
Lodge, Sir Oliver. The Discharge of a Leyden Jar. London: Printed by William Clowes & Sons, 1889.
Maxwell, James Clerk. A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
von Siemens, Carl William (1823–1883)
A prominent German engineer, Carl Wilhelm Siemens was born on April 4, 1823, in the village of Lenthe, near Hanover in northwest Germany. His father, Christian Ferdinand Siemens, was a tenant farmer who worked land belonging to the Crown, and his mother was Eleonore Deichmann. Carl Wilhelm, known throughout his life as Wilhelm and then William, was the fourth son of fourteen children; Werner von Siemens was his older brother.
When William was sixteen, his father died. The four Siemens brothers all worked together in various related businesses. William went to a commercial school in Lübeck and then attended a technical school at Magdeburg before proceeding to Göttingen University. Much interested in mechanics, as was his brother Werner, William went to England in 1843 to try to find a market for an electro-plating machine designed by other members of the family. He managed to sell it for £1,600, and on returning to Germany he resigned from his job at a factory in Stolberg where he had been working and returned to London with two more inventions. One was a “chronometric governor” for use on steam engines, which had been invented by Werner. This led to a close business connection with England. William became the only one of the brothers to settle in the country, however.
William Siemens was by this time acknowledged as an innovative mechanical engineer, and in 1847 he had a paper published in Liebig’s Annalen der Chemie, which covered some of the ideas on the nature of heat as a form of energy. By the end of the year Siemens was in England working at John Hock’s factory in Bolton, where he was developing a method to use superheated steam. This showed some promise, and two years later Siemens continued his research at the factory of Fox, Henderson & Company of Smethwick, near Birmingham. By this time he had discovered some serious problems with studying superheated steam, but the Society of Arts was impressed by his work and awarded him their Gold Medal for his design of a regenerative condenser.
Interested in telegraphy, in 1852 Siemens was involved in plans to lay a submarine cable across the English Channel from Dover to Calais, an attempt that had failed the previous year. By 1858 Siemens was so heavily involved in telegraphy that he opened a branch of Siemens & Halske; he had previously worked for the company Halske, which was based in Berlin. This led to the building of a small factory. By 1859 Siemens was spending most of his time designing electrical inventions, many to do with telegraph cables. He established the Siemens Telegraph Works at Charlton, southeast London, and in 1872 he became the first president of the Society of Telegraph Engineers (later the Institution of Electrical Engineers, and later still the Institution of Engineering and Technology). When it came time to establish telegraph lines across Europe and the Middle East, Siemens was involved in helping from England, with his brothers working from Germany. This led to the building of a telegraph line from Prussia to Persia, the line terminating in Tehran. It was 2,750 miles long and was the start of a telegraph line linking London with British India. In 1874 the company was involved in laying the cable across the Atlantic Ocean from Ireland to Canada. The ship used to do this was the Faraday, named after the inventor Michael Faraday, designed by William Siemens and built in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and launched in 1873. During the ship’s seagoing life of forty-seven years, it was involved in laying fifty thousand miles of cable.
Although he spent much of his energy on the telegraph system, the most famous single invention by Siemens was the regenerative furnace. This used a system that became known as the Siemens-Martin process, or the use of the “open hearth furnace” for steelmaking. Siemens invented an electric furnace in 1879, but few suitable applications were found for it. He also designed the electric pyrometer that linked together Siemen’s research into electricity and metallurgy. In addition, he was also one of the first people to suggest the possibility of the transmission of power by electricity, and in 1883 he was able to use electricity at the Portrush railway.
In March 19, 1859, Siemens was naturalized as a British citizen, it was the same day that he and his fiancé agreed to get married. The following year he was made a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers, and two years later he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. He received honorary doctorates from the universities of Oxford, Dublin, and Glasgow. On July 23, 1859, he married Anne Gordon, sister of Lewis Gordon, a professor of engineering at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. In April 1883 he was knighted by Queen Victoria, and in the same year he was awarded the Howard Prize of the Institution of Civil Engineers. He died on November 19, 1883, and after a funeral service at Westminster Abbey, he was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery. A window was set up in Westminster Abbey in his honor. His widow died on April 12, 1901.
—Justin Corfield
William von Siemens
Further Reading
Feldenkirchen, Wilfried, and Eberhard Posner. The Siemens Entrepreneurs: Continuity and Change, 1847–2005, Ten Portraits. Munich: privately published, 2005.
Jeans, William T. The Creators of the Age of Steel. London: Chapman and Hall Ltd., 1884.
Pole, William. Life of William Siemens. London: John Murray, 1888.
Scott, J. D. Siemens Brothers 1858–1958: An Essay in the History of Industry. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1958.
von Siemens, Werner (1816–1892)
The prominent German industrialist, electrical engineer, and inventor, Werner von Siemens gave his name to the unit of electrical conductance, the “Siemens.” However, he also was crucial in the expansion of the telegraph network around Europe and further afield. Ernst Werner Siemens (his full name at birth) was born on December 13, 1816, at Lenthe, near Hanover, Germany. He was the fourth of fourteen children of Christian Ferdinand Siemens, a tenant farmer, and his wife, Elenore (née Deichmann), and he was the brother of Charles William von Siemens.
Werner von Siemens left school without completing his final years there and joined the army where he was able to train as an engineer. During this time he invented a telegraph system that used a needle to point to the correct letter rather using Morse code, which was used by most telegraphers during this period. In about 1845 or 1846 Werner Siemens had seen a model of the indicator telegraphy made by Sir Charles Wheatstone during his time in Germany. This telegraph line only extended across the garden, and Werner Siemens was convinced that he could make a better system. Werner Siemens had to persuade the skeptical Prussian army that the telegraph would be important for military purposes. Many of the military high command saw the vulnerability of the telegraph, more so than its speed, and as a result the Prussian authorities decided to have a buried telegraph line from Berlin to Grossbeeren, the wires insulated with gutta-percha. This led to him establishing his company Telegraphen-Bauanstalt von Siemens & Halske, which was formally founded on October 1, 1847 and starting work manufacturing telegraph equipment on October 12. Werner Siemens had one brother, William Siemens, represent his company in Britain, and another brother, Carl von Siemens, to represent it in Russia, with a branch office at St. Petersburg. Their father died in 1839, and the brothers remained close to each other for the rest of their lives.
With a major input into telegraphy in Europe, Werner Siemens had to resign his position in the Prussian army in June 1849 and work on telegraphy full time. He started making telegraph equipment, and this was used to connect various cities. However, there had not been any serious attempts to connect places across the sea. In 1853 the first underwater telegraph line was laid connecting England and Ireland, with cables laid across the English Channel later the same year. A cable was established with the British commanders in Crimea during the Crimean War, and it was not long before engineers from France laid a cable to Corsica, and from there to Sardinia, and from Sardinia to the city of Bone in Algeria. Werner Siemens made much of the equipment including some of the cables, and his company became wealthy with such large contracts. The major line to be laid by Werner Siemens, with help from William Siemens in England, was that from Berlin to Tehran, Persia, as the major stage in getting a telegraph line connecting London with British India.
The laying out of the telegraph lines led to rapid communications all around the world, and it also meant newspapers could have stories “wired in” by their correspondents from relatively remote locations. Important news was also sent by private companies and government departments alike, with telegraph companies making fortunes and establishing further lines to more cities and towns. Werner Siemens helped William with the laying of the cable across the Atlantic Ocean, reaching from Ireland to Canada.
Subsequently, Siemens enlarged his company to cover many spheres of electrical engineering, including the tubes that were used by Wilhelm Konrad Rontgen when he was investigating x-rays. Siemens also seems to have independently invented the dynamo, which had first been invented by the Italian inventor Alessandro Volta many years earlier. Siemens then trialed and tested the Elektromote, the trolleybus, on April 29, 1882. This technology rapidly spread around Germany and overseas with the establishment of trolley buses as a major means of public transport in cities in Europe, North America, and later South America and some major cities in Asia and Africa.
Because of the success of his business, Werner Siemens was ennobled in 1888, becoming Werner von Siemens. He retired from the company two years later and died on December 6, 1892. He had married twice. His first wife, whom he married in 1852, was Mathilde Duman. They had two sons, Arnold and Georg. Mathilde Siemens died in 1867, and Siemens then married Antonie Siemens; they had a daughter, Hertha, and a son, Carl.
Werner von Siemens
The company that Werner von Siemens had established became Siemens & Halske AG, and then Siemens-Schuckertwerke; in 1966, it was renamed Siemens AG, which remains one of the largest electrotechnological firms in the world. In January 2008 it had 480,000 employees, and it had an annual revenue in the preceding year of some $110.82 billion. In November 2007 it underwent a restructure but continues to operate in some 190 countries around the world.
—Justin Corfield
Further Reading
Feldenkirchen, Wilfried. Werner von Siemens: Inventor and International Entrepreneur. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University, 1994.
Feldenkirchen, Wilfried, and Eberhard Posner. The Siemens Entrepreneurs: Continuity and Change, 1847–2005, Ten Portraits. Munich: privately published, 2005.
Jeans, William T. The Creators of the Age of Steel. London: Chapman and Hall Ltd., 1884.
Pole, William. Life of William Siemens. London: John Murray, 1888.
Scott, J. D. Siemens Brothers 1858–1958: An Essay in the History of Industry. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1958.
von Siemens, Werner. Inventor and Entrepreneur: Recollections of Werner von Siemens. London: Lund Humphries, 1965.
Vulcanization is a curing process used to strengthen natural rubber. It usually involves the addition of sulfur and some additional agents to rubber under high heat. A chemical change occurs, resulting in a material that is harder, more elastic, smoother, and more resistant to heat, chemicals, and abrasion than untreated rubber. Vulcanized rubber can be used to make tires, shoe soles, hockey pucks, gaskets, hoses, and dozens of other commercial products. The process is named after Vulcan, the Roman god of fire and blacksmiths. The terms vulcanization and cure are often used interchangeably, which can cause some confusion, although the former term is sometimes used more specifically for the sulfur-curing process.
Thomas Hancock (1786–1865), a British inventor who had for some decades been trying to create water-resistant fabrics by coating textiles with rubber, applied for the first patent to vulcanize rubber using sulfur in the United Kingdom in 1843. It was granted the following year. However, the American inventor Charles Goodyear (1800–1860) is generally credited with discovering vulcanization in the early 1840s by cooking sulfur and latex together on his wife’s stove. Some accounts suggest that Goodyear’s discovery happened accidentally when he spilled some of the mixture on the hot iron stovetop and observed it curing. Goodyear later denied this. In either case, it is clear that he had been experimenting with rubber for several years prior to his seminal discovery. In June 1844, Goodyear was awarded United States Utility Patent #3633 for Improvement in India Rubber Fabrics, which described the curing process. There were a number of patent disputes between Hancock and Goodyear, who both claimed to have invented the sulfur-curing process, but in the end each kept their patents. The Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, established in 1898, was named after Charles Goodyear, although neither he nor any other family members were involved in its founding.
Natural rubber, the raw material for the original vulcanized rubber, is usually harvested from the sap of the Para rubber tree (Hevea brasiliensis). This sap, or latex as it commonly called, is somewhat soft and sticky. It can deform easily at warm temperatures, but it becomes brittle when cold. It is also elastic, meaning that it can be stretched out but will return to its original shape. Natural rubber molecules are polymers, namely long chains made up of identical units called monomers. In this case, the monomer is isoprene, also known as C5H8 or 2-Methylbuta–1,3-diene. When rubber is heated with sulfur, some of the carbon-hydrogen bonds in the isoprene are broken and replaced by sulfur bonds that form across the long polymer chains. These cross-links, or sulfur “bridges,” help to create a three-dimensional network that strengthens the material and improves its elasticity up to tenfold. Synthetic rubber can also be vulcanized to similar effect.
The amount of sulfur added to the rubber during vulcanization must be controlled. Too much sulfur could produce too many cross-links, resulting in a brittle, nonelastic material called ebonite. When vulcanization was first introduced during the late 1800s, about 2.5 parts per weight of sulfur were used per 100 parts of rubber. This measurement could be reported as 2.5 pphr or 2.5 phr; (parts per hundred rubber). Today, with the addition of one or more accelerator chemicals that improve the rate of cross-linking, about 0.5 pphr sulfur is sufficient to vulcanize rubber. Generally speaking, temperatures of 150 to 200°C are used in the vulcanization process, and it can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours of heating depending upon the specific treatment. Although sulfur is the most common vulcanizing agent, other chemicals such as sulfur chloride or peroxide can also be used to harden rubber. When sulfur is not the principal agent used, the material is often referred to as “cured” rather than “vulcanized” rubber. Vulcanization is a nonreversible process, meaning that it is difficult to return the rubber to its original, softer state after it has been treated. This leads to some difficulties in recycling rubber, although there have been some more recent successes in “devulcanizing” rubber.
—Hsiao-Yun Chu
Further Reading
Mark, James E. The Science and Technology of Rubber, 3rd edition. New York: Academic Press, 2005.
Rogers, Brendan. Rubber Compounding: Chemistry and Applications. New York: CRC, 2004.
Slack, Charles. Noble Obsession: Charles Goodyear, Thomas Hancock, and the Race to Unlock the Greatest Industrial Secret of the Nineteenth Century. New York: Theia, 2003.