The Dawn of Innovation (18 page)

America has always been a nation of consumers. Probate inventories from the Middle Atlantic states show how one generation's luxury item, like
looking glasses, are middle-class necessities for the next, but simplified and standardized. As higher volumes drive down prices, the same products become commonplace even in poorer homes.
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Terry's, Slater's, and the Waltham/Lowell experience illustrate how new products could tap into deep peddler networks that ran westward through rural New England, southward down the Hudson to New York and beyond, by packet to Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New Orleans, and in the early days by wagon west of the Appalachians. But there were many other possible models for mass production and distribution businesses.

Lynn, a town about twelve miles north of Boston, traditionally had a small concentration of shoemakers, producing cheap shoes that merchants exported for West Indian plantation slaves. The distribution networks were expanded in the 1780s by a local merchant, a Quaker named Ebenezer Breed, to supply shoes to Southern slaves.

Shoemaking was a craft industry with many specialty tools but few power machines until mid-century. Merchants in and around Lynn organized a massive putting-out manufacturing system. The merchants bought and cut leather and supplied the leather and supplies to home shoe workers: women sewed liners and finishes, while men did the heavy-leather sewing. The Southern slave population exploded with the cotton textile boom of the early 1800s, drawing more and more of the Boston region into the shoe business. As volumes rose, towns began to specialize in specific types of shoes. Higher quality products expanded the market to farmers and working people. Shoe models were standardized, and organization improved, driving down prices and expanding markets even further. As established merchants began to stock standard sizes and models, the peddler network shifted from retail to wholesale distribution. By mid-century or so, the great majority of ordinary people were wearing store-bought shoes, and local shoemakers had been forced to shift their business to the repair of commercially made shoes. By 1860, New England produced about 60 percent of the nation's shoes.
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The history of stoves is necessarily different. Stoves were relatively easy to cast at iron foundries but too heavy for peddlers. Still, it was a killer product: every housewife with a bad back and burnt fingers from fireplace-cooking
dreamed of life with a “civilized” stove. The challenge was in marketing and distribution. No single manufacturer ever dominated the industry or constructed a Lowell-style master plan, but over fifty-some years, virtually any household that could afford the modest price had acquired a stove.

Clear signs of organization began to emerge in the 1820s in the iron district of Philadelphia and New Jersey. Instead of casting and selling individual stoves, the foundries began to produce stove plate, or the unassembled pieces of a stove, and ship it to Philadelphia for assembly at merchants' establishments. Initial sales were to upper-middle-class households in towns all along the available water routes, a market that was greatly expanded by the opening of the Erie Canal.

Decentralized production and distribution centers sprang up around major water routes—at Albany and Troy for the Erie Canal region, at Cincinnati and Louisville for the Ohio Valley, and at St. Louis for the Mississippi Valley. Local stove foundries, using cupola furnaces to melt scrap iron and steel, shortened transportation networks. As stoves proliferated, stove stores appeared in most medium-sized towns, typically with a catalog of designs and an assembly and finishing shop. Stove finishing became an important subtrade for tinplate craftsmen and simplified quality control at the foundry. Prices steadily dropped even as designs and quality steadily improved. In 1860, stoves accounted for a third of the value of all cast-iron products, with a value-added about the same as rail manufacture. By then, the industry was tilting toward maturity. A postwar shakeout left fewer, larger companies, which paid greater attention to branding and catalog selling, supplemented by retail stores and floor inventory in the biggest markets—in short, a modern industry.
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Steam engines, finally, illustrate the extreme end of the transportation challenge in early America. They were also a key to solving the transportation problem by improving water transport and freeing powered industries from water sites.

Oliver Evans was a Delaware merchant who became one of the most prolific of American inventors. (He patented a highly automated flour mill and sold one to George Washington.) He is best known, along with the
British inventor Richard Trevithick, as the father of the high-pressure steam engine. Newcomen and Watt engines condensed steam to create a vacuum and used the vacuum to move the piston. The Evans/Trevithick designs used steam expansively, pushing the piston with steam pressure. Evans came up with his design in 1801, when as one scholar put it, “No more than six engines could be mustered in the whole of the States; mechanical construction and skill were at least fifty years behind those of England.” Robert Fulton's steamboats used Boulton & Watt low-pressure engines imported from England.
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High-pressure engines used much more fuel but were much cheaper and easier to build. A 24-horsepower Evans engine—powerful enough to run a saw mill—weighed in at about 1,000 pounds, with a piston cylinder nine inches wide and about forty inches long. A Boulton & Watt 24-horsepower engine weighed four times as much and had a twenty-six-inch-diameter, five-foot-long piston. Most good American machine shops could execute an Evans piston by 1820 or so, but only a few in New York and Philadelphia could handle an equivalent Boulton & Watt–scale piston. In the words of Louis C. Hunter, the historian of American power, “The advantages of the simple, compact, low-cost high-pressure engine ... were so clearly manifest and so appropriate to American conditions—scarcity of capital and skilled labor, scarcity of repair facilities and limited scale of operations—that a wide consensus was early reached, with virtually no debating of the issue.”
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Unfortunately, high-pressure engines were very dangerous. With boiler pressures routinely as high as 100 pounds per square inch, small construction flaws could result in devastating explosions. Explosions on Hudson River steamboats in the 1820s were frequent enough that passengers sometimes insisted on being towed behind on “safety barges.”
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Improvements came very slowly. It took fifty years to develop accurate steam gauges. Safety valves were often poorly made or poorly maintained, and often intentionally disabled. Riveting was mostly by hand, often with rivets of dubious integrity and boiler plate of poor quality. Steamboat explosions were closely tracked, since they were so public. In
the twenty years from 1816 through 1835, there were forty steamboat explosions, causing 353 deaths; 88 percent of the explosions and 83 percent of the deaths were on western steamboats, which were almost exclusively powered by high-pressure engines. Even as much safer designs became available in the last half of the century, they were strongly resisted because of their cost. As steam engines proliferated, disasters kept rising. A study covering 1867–1870 showed about a hundred major explosions a year, killing about 200 people and injuring a similar number.
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The dominance of efficiency over any other value may have also been characteristic of American industries.

Evans died in 1819; by then his Mars Works in Philadelphia had produced more than one hundred steam engines for both water transportation and industrial power. After his patents expired in 1824, his designs were widely copied and improved on. Robert L. Stevens, an important railroad executive, may have been the most original American contributor to steam-engine technology after Evans.

There was an adroit division of labor in the early manufacturing and distribution of Evans-model steam engines. Eastern manufacturers, who had the most advanced metals operations, constructed the pistons, the flywheel, shafts, and other moving parts, while local contractors, perhaps with on-site supervision from the eastern supplier, executed the heavy castings for the engine housing and boiler and assembled the engine. Even with those arrangements, the distribution of Evans's engines still clearly tracks established waterways and so was likely limited by high overland transport costs. By mid-century, manufacturing of engines was becoming quite decentralized at cities like Pittsburgh, Louisville, and Cincinnati, while the western steamboat had opened many smaller waterways to freight traffic.

THERE WAS NO SIMPLE MODEL OF AMERICAN MASS PRODUCTION manufacturing. In clocks, a series of brilliant manufacturing insights of
Eli Terry made it possible to make ordinary clocks on a mass scale. Clocks were a relatively lightweight product and were readily picked up by peddler networks built to distribute buttons and cloth. Textiles were already a mass market in Great Britain when the Boston Company was founded. Lowell and Moody focused on creating a single-line, mechanized-flow manufacturing system tuned to the mass-market, working-class customer using existing distribution networks. Mechanization was not invariably a prerequisite for moving to a mass-market scale: Shoes were a mass-manufacturing industry well before the advent of shoemaking machinery. Stoves and steam engines were mass-scale industries without any mass manufacturers. Both were extremely heavy products, so the ingenuity went into the distribution and assembly. Indeed, it is likely that through much of the first half of the century, as many homes had stoves as had clocks.

The most famous example of American mass production, however, was the manufacture of guns, which will be the subject of the next chapter.

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OR THE TWO DECADES BEFORE THE WAR OF 1812, THE UNITED STATES was constantly on the edge of being drawn into the escalating conflict between Great Britain and France. The prolonged tension overcame the American aversion to standing armies and triggered a serious round of weapons procurement. The Springfield armory in Massachusetts was directed to commence musket production in 1795, and a new armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, was opened the following year with the same mission. A war scare with France in 1798 led to a rush of legislation. Congress voted to create a 15,000-man standing army, with authorization to call up twice that number more in an emergency. Commensurate increases were authorized to beef up naval and harbor defenses. That same legislation authorized the outsourcing of 30,000 muskets to private contractors.
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And thereby arose perhaps the most famous story of American industrialization : making small arms by special-purpose machinery to such a level of precision that parts could be freely interchanged between weapons. While the tale has been much embellished, it is mostly true—a prime example of the American impulse toward ever greater manufacturing scale. Gun making is therefore an important thread in the American mass production story. While it is far from the main story as it once seemed, it was still a notable piece of a much larger tapestry.

The gun-making story gained such prominence because it drew accolades from Great Britain in mid-century—a time when British opinion makers tended to react to alleged American achievements with withering scorn. Parliament discovered American gun making as the country was nearing a war with Russia with its small-arms procurement system in a dreadful snarl. An investigative commission gave a ringing endorsement to the American approach, which they dubbed the American system of manufacturing. The full parliament authorized a new small-arms factory at Enfield, outfitted with American machinery and initially staffed with American managers. Enfield was a signal success, and the new machinery greatly accelerated weapons procurement. But while the American accomplishments were real enough, the inevitable exaggerations by parliamentary advocates for their adoption were uncritically taken up by historians for much of the twentieth century (see Chapter 7).