Components of Industry

Industry uses technical and organizational skills, engineering knowledge, and energy to transform natural resources into useful products. (Our definition of industry excludes such late-twentieth-century coinages as “banking industry,” “leisure industry,” and “culture industry.”) When we carry on industry, we alter the landscape by using natural resources, by releasing wastes, and by building workplaces, industrial communities, and transportation systems. The components of industry include the skills and technical knowledge of the participants as well as the landscape and natural resources devoted to industrial activity. We cover the industrial landscape in Part II; in this chapter, we introduce the human and natural resources used by industry. The work skills of artisans, the organizational skills of managers and entrepreneurs, and the engineering skills of designers and innovators have always been as essential as natural resources to industrial success. Although scientific skills had relatively little place in most industrial enterprises until the late nineteenth century, they are now essential to the success of many industries. The skills in consideration here are the mental and physical capacities of individuals to do difficult tasks. These “genuine” skills are not necessarily the same as the “socially constructed” skills that are defined by job descriptions or established as barriers to control entry into a trade or profession. Among work skills, those of artisans are the most poorly re corded and are, consequently, the most difficult for historians to interpret; additionally, artisan’s skills are sometimes ignored, or even denigrated, by authors seeking to describe industrial work in terms of exploitation of workers or to inflate the accomplishments of inventors or entrepreneurs. Some skills that were essential in industrialization, sueh as those used in mining and burning coal, are hardly described in the historical record because they developed gradually and were difficult for observers to perceive. Firing a furnace with coal seems to be a simple, physically demanding task, but it requires judgment and experience to do well in a locomotive, a crucible steelworks, a glasshouse, or other heat-using industries. The stoker’s skill often went unrecognized until attempts were made to transfer technology dependent on burning coal elsewhere.

Coal, Canals, Railways, and Industrial Cities

During the decades after the 1820s, Americans reshaped the industrial landscape by gradually substituting coal for the wood and flowing water they were using as energy sources and iron for wood in structures and machinery. The amount of power they could obtain from wood or water at a given place was limited, but coal resources were so large that more was always available. Coal could be transported to distant consumers by the newly built canals and railways. With it, the resource constraints that had led entrepreneurs to favor small, dispersed mills and factories were less important. Production of coal was concentrated in Pennsylvania in the first part of the nineteenth century. At first, the largest markets were in the East, and as long as the Appalachians were a barrier to shipment of bituminous coal from the West, the anthracite coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania remained the principal source of industrial fuel. Ironmasters using anthracite to smelt ore mined in eastern Pennsylvania dominated American ironmaking until the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Industrialists west of the Appalachians experimented with bituminous coal and with coal converted to coke. They built furnaces around Pittsburgh and Cincinnati (where rivers provided good access to coking coal), and then through Ohio, Indiana, and, eventually, Illinois. But it was in eastern Pennsylvania that artisans and entrepreneurs established many of the economic and social practices followed by American heavy industry well into the twentieth century. Industries based on wood and water starkly contrasted with those based on coal and iron. Death and injury from mine accidents, social strife in mining communities, and environmental degradation from mine wastes were new costs of wealth created by the digging of anthracite. Because coal could be hauled long distances and still be sold at a lower cost per unit of energy than locally cut. wood, it could be shipped profitably to distant customers. They used it to make primary materials, such as iron, glass, and brick, and to convert these materials into finished, high-value-added goods. The social and environmental costs of getting the coal were left behind at the mines.

Industrial Archaeology

The prominence of industry in the culture of the North Atlantic nations has provoked thoughtful people to ask penetrating questions about the roots of innovation and the social and environmental consequences of industrial technology. One cluster of questions, long of interest to scholars, focuses on how and by whom new technologies were created and how their selection, use, or rejection has been influenced by cultural values. In the past quarter century, the impact of technologies and industries on the environment has become a widespread concern among citizens of the industrialized nations. People are raising questions about the past and present uses of natural resources and how their availability influences economic growth. They are concerned about the consequences of releasing industrial wastes and effluents into the air and water. They are also exploring their personal experiences with mechanisms and technological devices—how these artifacts enter work, play, and art, and how they express cultural values. Because the field of the history of technology is relatively new, scholars have approached it within the framework of established disciplines. The work of historians with the written record and of economists with numerical data is securely established in the academic world. We would add to these the material record, the domain of the industrial archaeologist. Evidence from artifacts is particularly important for the study of workers (because the written record is sparse), of inventors (because much of the secondary literature simplifies the complexities of invention), and of the industrial landscape. To discover the texture of industry, we need to examine both the documentary and the material record; artifacts as well as documents must speak for the experiences ot past workers. An artifact, in the words of historian Brooke Hindle, is “a solid piece of the past in a way that no quotation can ever be.”' Students of industry must rely heavily on material evidence because few participants in industry left written records of their experiences and because some aspects of technology cannot be expressed effectively in words.

Introduction

As people in northern Europe and North America industrialized their societies, they transformed the scale and the social setting of work and created opportunities for the use of new skills. They consumed forest and mineral resources, diverted rivers, and discarded wastes on a scale previously unknown. They placed rural and urban workplaces and transportation networks on the face of the land and increasingly detached patterns of daily life from their agricultural roots. With their new transportation and communication systems, Europeans, joined later by Americans, spread the influence of Western industry worldwide, first in the exploitation of distant, natural resources for use by the industrial nations and, later, by the delivery of industrial products to traditional societies. Until about A.D. 1000, Europeans used technology in much the same way as peoples in other parts of the world, but their adoption of water power for industry was a harbinger of change. In 1086, the Domesday survey of England revealed one water-powered grain mill for every fifty households. Europeans began using mechanical power in tasks that included beermaking, fulling, tanning, and ironmaking. A conjunction of conveniently available natural resources, weak national governments, and religious beliefs that assigned dignity to work and that did not hinder technological enterprise helped Europeans to nucleate industrialization. They subsequently brought their industrial heritage to North America. In the early decades of the republic, Americans began the stage of industrialization that soon came to dominate much of the landscape and most people’s lives. The rate at which Americans created an industrial society was slow compared with the rapidity with which they are now dismantling it. Already young Americans have lost most of their opportunities to see or experience the transformation of materials into finished products or to learn about the properties of wood and steel or about the handling of tools through personal experience. During the years of industrial growth, the village smithy often stood under a spreading chestnut tree, a place where . . . . . . children coming home from school Look in at the open door; They love to see the flaming forge, And hear the bellows roar, And catch the burning sparks that fly Like chaff from a threshing-floor. . .

Scarce Metals and Petroleum

Lured by the potential for substantial wealth, Americans have focused a disproportionate share of their industrial effort on extracting and processing resources that are both scarce and in high demand. Gold and silver were always valuable and eagerly sought, but in the nineteenth century, the demand tor other nonferrous metals and (or petroleum rose to unprecedented levels. Obtaining these scarce, nonrenewable resources brought new patterns of industrial land use and new environmental consequences. The continuing effects on our land, water, and air are serious concerns in American society today. The hope of finding gold and silver, the metals of wealth and display, drew numerous adventurers to North America in the seventeenth century. In the East, those hoping to repeat the Spanish experience in South America and Mexico were disappointed. Although colonial prospectors did discover small deposits of nonferrous-metal ores on the east coast and in the Appalachians, most of the metals were not in the precious category. There was a demand for utilitarian metals as well: English colonists depended on lead for pipes, window carries, and shot; they cooked with copper kettles, drank the products of copper stills, and set their tables with pewter (a tin alloy) tableware. Nevertheless, Americans generally found it cheaper and easier to use imported nonferrous metals until the mineral resources of the center of the continent were exploited in the nineteenth century. Iron was the only metal extensively mined in the English colonies. One of the few relicts of pre-Revolutionary nonferrous metallurgy is the Simsbury Copper Mine in East Granby, Connecticut. This mining enterprise obtained its charter in 1706. The state now preserves the site, not as an industrial monument but because the mine served for a time as the state prison. Visitors can enter the underground workings. Physical evidence of the first gold discovery in the United States, in 1799, exists at the Reed Gold Mine, a state historic site near Georgiaville, North Carolina. Most of the milling survivals are from later development at the mining site in 1854 and 1896. North Carolina led the nation in gold production until the California gold rush of 1849.

Work in Factories

Factories, and the factory system, are at the heart of the American industrial experience. Since the 1790s, Americans have developed many different types of factories and varieties of work within each of them. It is a terrible mistake to think of factory workers as simply automatons who do some type of mindless, repetitive task, day in and day out. The average American has never been in a factory and knows very little about what actually goes on there. Typically, there are dozens of employee classifications in one of these highly organized and hierarchical workplaces. A person employed in a factory might be a sweeper, vatman, machine operator, machine fixer, machinist, toolmaker, millwright, stockroom supplier, shipper, overseer, foreman, draftsman, electrician, or engineer. Machine operation, only one form of factory work, requires widely varying levels of skill, depending on the type of machine and the pace of production. Some jobs are routine and undemanding, but others challenge the intellect and manual dexterity of even the most skilled and experienced employees. There are tasks to be performed by one person as well as group activities that require extensive social interaction. The work culture of the factory is, and has always been, far more complex and dynamic than an organizational chart would imply. Although factory work frequently included operations done by hand and processes that did not require any motive power, all true factories used some power-driven machinery. Mechanization was a key element in the development of the factory system. Additionally, the owners of many factories followed the principle of uniformity, aiming to make standardized products from parts that were, to some degree, interchangeable. The first American factories, as we have seen in Chapter 8, were textile mills; but soon after Americans began to make yarn in places like the Slater Mill, they were also shifting the manufacture of products such as clocks, firearms, and edge tools from craft shops to factories. In the 1790s, Samuel Slater’s youthful operatives tended a sequence of special-purpose machines powered by a waterwheel.

The Factory

With Samuel Slater’s textile mill (1793, in Pawtucket, Rhode Island) and Eli Whitney’s armory (1798, in Whitneyville, Connecticut), American entrepreneurs began to make in factories products that had formerly been made in homes or craft shops. Another new concept in manufacturing, the principle of uniformity (sometimes described as “interchangeability”), was also winning converts in America. Factories making uniform products increasingly used power-driven machinery in the production process. However, it is a mistake to conflate mechanization, factories, and uniformity. Mechanization was used in colonial craft shops as well as in nineteenth-century factories. Until the late nineteenth century, factory managers achieved uniformity primarily through improved handwork skills and gauging rather than with machinery. Chapter 9 will cover the mechanization of work in factories as well as efforts to achieve uniformity in machine parts. Many of the best examples of early American factories are in New England, where there was a serendipitous combination of water power, entrepreneurial capital, and the artisanal skills necessary to build mills and machinery. The textile mills erected there had a powerful influence on the evolution of American factory architecture. As we look closely at a number of New England mills, remember that similar patterns of structural development can be found in other regions of the United States and that the basic forms of the textile factory were readily adapted for other types of industry, including the manufacture of wood, metal, and paper products. Factories were not the first industrial buildings in America, nor did they represent more capital expenditure than some of the early and costly ironworks. Two processes of textile manufacturing and finishing, the carding of fibers and the fulling of woven cloth, had been powered by waterwheels (and occasionally by draft animals) before the first successful factory was built in Pawtucket in 1793. Proprietors of shops and country mills usually operated their enterprises directly with little of the managerial hierarchy and division of labor that would appear in the full-blown factory system. Shops lacked the factory’s sequential organization of powered machinery and its extensive mechanization through multiple stages of production.

Countryside, Shops, and Ships

In the early seventeenth century, Americans began setting up shops to manufacture items such as soda ash, gunpowder, glass, charcoal, iron, casks, and wagons on a larger scale than they could manage in their homes. In some establishments, the proprietor was a practicing artisan (usually designated a “craftsman” today), while in others, such as glasshouses and ironworks, a manager coordinated the efforts of a dozen or more people. By the early nineteenth century, many Americans were participating in these industries, either full time or as an adjunct to farming. When we look at surviving artifacts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we find evidence that American artisans were steadily increasing the range and depth of their industrial skills. There were few socially constructed barriers to the range of skills that an individual could practice at work, and imaginative artisans could cross the conventional boundaries between trades, enriching the different technologies of each. The diversity of their work experiences contributed to a growing technological sophistication that helped Americans gain industrial maturity in the nineteenth century. Many people, including children, learned about artisans’ capabilities as they visited workplaces. The mechanization of work in America is sometimes associated with the advent of factories, but it was already under way in tasks such as sawing timber, grinding grain, and forging iron by the mid-seventeenth century. Americans gradually adopted machinery to ease the labor of producing goods, and learning about mechanical technology became part of everyday life in agricultural and frontier communities as well as in towns. Machinery became increasingly important in the work of craftsmen such as silversmiths, gunsmiths, and furniture makers, hut work in other industries was never extensively mechanized. Archaeological evidence tells us about work processes in some of these types of enterprises. American Indians possessed higher levels of technological skill than many of us realize. The physical evidence of their craftsmanship and well-organized efforts to extract natural resources stand in sharp contrast to the assertions of Indian primitiveness that fill many historical studies.

Fuel and Materials

As American entrepreneurs enlarged their undertakings and began to shift them from waterpowered shops in the countryside to factories in the cities, they created a demand for new sources of energy and larger quantities of raw materials. The coal and, later, oil that they used to power their factories were brought to manufacturing centers on canals and railways and by coastal or river shipping. They used the wood and water resources of North America more heavily than ever, but they also created new kinds of workplaces. Their workplaces in the coal and oil fields, on canals and railways, in mills that made iron with mineral coal, and in the nonferrous-metal mines and mills were outside any previous experience of American artisans. Often, these workplaces were not adequately described or recorded before they were replaced. Material evidence helps us fill this gap in the historical record. In mining anthracite, both miners and mine operators faced a complex underground environment where there were few reliable clues to guide their work (Chapter 4). Geologists could help little, and, as anthracite was not much used elsewhere in the world, mining expertise could not be easily borrowed; instead, mining methods were developed through experience and error on the part of individual miners. The technological and social practices that endured in anthracite mining were largely established in the years between 1827 and 1834 by inexperienced adventurers whose aim was to obtain coal quickly and with the least trouble. Many of these practices were later adopted in underground bituminous mines. We can reconstruct a picture of the work of anthracite miners from study of the remaining mines, artifacts, and accounts of mine operation. Each breast in a mine was worked by a miner, who was paid on piece rate. He directed and paid one or two helpers, for whom he provided the necessary tools and supplies. They reached the breast where they worked by walking through the haulage ways and gangways that were the common ground in the mine.

Wood and Water

The early Spanish adventurers came to America primarily to mine precious metals. Some colonists in eastern North America also had hopes of finding gold and silver, but more turned to the abundant timber and water resources of the New World and undertook lumbering and ironmaking to produce goods for export to the mother country. Through the next 200 years, most American industrial entrepreneurs used energy from wood and from flowing water. Water was a renewable resource, while wood was so abundant that new sources were easily found when a local supply was depleted. The years in which wood had a dominant place in American technology have been described by historian Brooke Hindle as “America’s Wooden Age”; on much of the continent, metal was used only where wood would not serve, as in nails, gun barrels, and cooking pots. Iron was the only metal made in significant quantities in North America during the Wooden Age. Settlers along the American coast reached the roadless interior by ascending the numerous rivers and, until well into the nineteenth century, preferred to move heavy or bulky cargoes by boat or raft. They used the flow and drop of water in streams as their principal source of mechanical power for industry, and only after 1870 did Americans generate more power with steam engines than with waterwheels.” Visitors to Old Sturbridge Village, a living-history museum in Massachusetts that re-creates community life in the early years of the nineteenth century, find wooden buildings, tools made of wood and iron, the smell of wood smoke, and machinery powered by waterwheels. Along the east coast, wood, water in lakes and streams, and iron ore were abundant but had to be used near where they were found until entrepreneurs with access to capital and technological expertise built canals, railways, and, later, electrical power-transmission systems. A craftsman who started a shop with human-powered machinery in town and subsequently wanted to use water power often had to move to a rural site. As more people did this, they spread manufacturing over the landscape or the Northeast.