The Dawn of Innovation (32 page)

Bird was correct about Cincinnati's annual hog-processing volume, which had expanded by a factor of ten in just twenty years. “It was
Cincinnati,” a wag said, “which originated and perfected the system which packs 15 bushels of corn into a pig, packs the pig into a barrel, and sends him over the mountains and over the ocean to feed mankind.”
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Besides its favorable siting as an Ohio River entrepôt, Cincinnati was conveniently near the large salt deposits required for a packing center. During the antebellum period, western meatpacking was all about hogs. Beef cattle were easier to drive, and their meat harder to preserve, so they usually traveled to eastern markets on the hoof.

To ease the hog traffic in the city streets, local merchants and traders organized stockyards just upriver of the main city through the 1830s. Butchers who had doubled as hog slaughterers relocated around the stockyards and gradually consolidated into several dozen industrial-scale operations—“something on the plan of the abbatoirs of Paris,” Bird suggested.
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Most of them were sited on the Miami-Erie Canal, so slaughtering waste could be dumped to float away on the once-blue Ohio. A last rationalizing step was the integration of slaughtering, packing, and by-products processing to create the first midwestern high-volume, continuous-flow factories.
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The scale of the industry was enormous. A contemporary survey showed 96 packing points throughout the Midwest during the 1843–1844 season, shipping the meat of 1.25 million hogs. A decade later 216 packing points processed 2.6 million hogs. Cincinnati was the highest-volume producer throughout the prewar era, although its volumes stabilized near the half million mark. Cincinnati's efficiency and the competitive forces in the industry suggest that they were probably operating near an economic maximum.

Slaughtering was a manual process, so efficiencies were derived primarily from work rationalization and topped out at lower volumes than in, say, the Waltham-Lowell textile mills. The biggest antebellum hog packers packed around 20,000 animals a year. Since the point of maximum efficiency in postbellum beef packing plants has been estimated at 100 animals a day, hog packers were running their plants at a high level.

Transportation was the next critical factor. Cincinnati was well positioned for distributing the finished product to market, but its access to the
live animals was limited to the number that could be raised within droving range. As local railroads proliferated through the Midwest, it became more economical to shorten droving times by building stockyards and Cincinnati-style slaughterhouses at interior rail depots, and then rail-shipping the processed meat to the closest Ohio River ports. The internal logic of the industry led to a broad decentralization of efficient but medium-sized packing plants.
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The rationalization of slaughtering evolved over more than a quarter century. In the late 1850s, an English traveler reported that it took hardly two hours “from the first hammerstroke until [the carcass] was singed, cleaned, cut up, placed in brine, and packed in a cask for exportation.”
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A skilled team could separate a carcass into its constituent parts in less than a minute.

Since time immemorial, slaughtered animals had been hung upside down on hooks to drain and for most cutting and cleaning operations. In the early Cincinnati “disassembly line,” slaughterhouse workers lifted the animals from one worker's station hook to the next. (Pregutting, a standard Cincinnati hog weighed about two hundred pounds.) In the 1840s, the hooks were attached to a wheeled chain to move carcasses from the slaughtering floor to cooling rooms. It took another twenty years to finally evolve the continuously moving hook array traversing all the slaughtering and trimming steps. Henry Ford later remarked that the meatpacking disassembly line had been one of the inspirations for his famous Model-T plant.
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The Cincinnati disassembly line was a signal achievement. It was not nearly as complex as a New England cotton mill, but rethinking the sequence and content of manual operations to fit the space-time units available to each worker was a big step toward the rational factory. A decade later, the beef disassembly lines in Chicago had up to seventy-eight processing steps. A knocker stunned a steer with a sledgehammer, and it was
swept up on a hook and sped past gutters, slicers, splitters, skinners, rump sawyers, hide droppers, and trimmers. It was fast, hard, dangerous work, and the blur of wickedly sharp instruments exacted a fearful toll among the workers. The Chicago plants became a lurid wonder of the world, a tourist attraction that the famed actress Sarah Bernhardt pronounced “a horrible and magnificent spectacle.”
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As volumes expanded, Cincinnati's packinghouses were regularly reengineered to keep pace. A favored design was a multistory packinghouse. The animals were driven up a ramp and slaughtered on the top floor, cut and dressed on the next, with hams, ribs, bacon, and other cuts dropped into chutes leading to their various curing and salting tanks in the cellar. Over time, rendering of the lard and other wastes became part of a seamless flow. As the scale of investment increased, the packers moved to year-round operations. Packinghouses were rebuilt with giant ice cellars: during the winter they were loaded with tons of river ice that was covered with layers of sawdust. As the weather warmed, fans circulated air over the ice and through vent systems to the operating floors.

By the 1830s, Cincinnati slaughterers were learning to harvest more and more of the valuable hog by-products—selling “all but the squeal,” as the slogan went. Hides went to tanners, bristles to brush makers, bones to eastern button factories, and newly arriving German butchers took the intestines for sausage casing. Packers began to pay drovers for the privilege of slaughtering, cutting their deals well in advance of the season. Rendering plants sprang up alongside the slaughtering and packing clusters around the stockyards. The variety and quality of marketable by-products grew steadily as processing innovations conferred better and better control over outcomes.

Hog lard is one of the most desirable animal fats. Gourmet pastry chefs still prefer it as shortening, and it's actually healthier than butter or hydrogenated vegetable fats.
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Lard contains multiple fats and oils that are important constituents of soap, candles, waxes, and lubricants.
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The annual
lard rendering for soap and candles was the most exhausting, dirty, and dangerous of the farmwife's tasks, exposing her to caustic lyes. But rising American wealth and production efficiency gradually brought store-bought, scented, noncaustic soaps and long-lasting candles within the reach of the average home. Lard-based lubricating oils—odorless, nonexplosive, with excellent viscosity in cold weather—were ideal for finely meshing mechanical parts, while lard-oil illuminant was much cheaper than the ever-scarcer spermaceti oil, and its bright flame made it the first choice of lighthouse operators on foggy shores.

A signal invention came from a Cincinnati meatpacker, Ebenezer Wilson, in 1844. Industrial lard rendering had been just a larger-scale version of the farmwife's lard boiling: the same open-flame cooking, but in 100-gallon kettles. Quality control was spotty at best, and the lard was easily scorched. Wilson reduced the lard with superheated steam in 1,200- to 1,500-gallon pressure cookers. With experience, he learned he could reduce virtually the entire carcass—offal and all—and still produce a highly purified lard with minimum residuum, as well as a variety of oils and glue. By 1847, he was operating four processing tanks in Cincinnati, was turning out 35,000 tons of prime lard annually, and had opened plants at meatpacking centers in Kentucky and Indiana.

Wilson may also have been the first to integrate slaughtering, disassembly, and rendering in a single plant. By 1851, the newest and largest integrated plant, in Covington, Kentucky, packed 23,500 hogs, more than all of Chicago's packers. The entire operation, including nine curing cisterns and a Wilson rendering system, ran within a single building the size of a football field, sited on its own wharf so the packed meats went directly from the plant into riverboat holds.

New soap-boiling apparatuses developed by a Baltimore chemist combined the mixing and boiling steps while preserving the best qualities of the lard. Cincinnati soap makers naturally adopted the same kind of continuous-flow factory principles as the meatpackers. Steam-heated conduits piped the soap through each step in the manufacturing process. After cooling into blocks, wire machinery cut and shaped uniform soap bars; fancier soaps could be poured directly into molds.

 

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Ebenezer Wilson greatly improved by-product recovery by treating the post-packing hog carasses with superheated steam in a rendering tank at pressures up to 100 pounds per square inch for up to fifteen hours. As in a petroleum refinery, the resulting fractions separeted by weight into lard, tallow and various iols, which were drained off by the petcocks to the left of the tank. The small amount of gelatinous residue was drained off at the bottom.
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To make quality soap the raw lard, which was easily burned, had to be heated and vigoriously stirred to create a smooth consistency. The apparatus shown used steam power to turn the tubular mixer at high speed, and a the same time super-heated the tubes with high-pressure steam

Mastery of the chemistry of lard facilitated the production of pure glycerine for a host of applications. It was important to tanners, a useful solvent, and widely used in the production of pharmaceuticals and food. Purified stearine, another lard derivative, was far superior to the farmwife's tallow for candle making. It was odorless, maintained its shape much better under heat, and could be easily molded and dyed—clear “opal” candles were a Cincinnati specialty. From the mid-1840s to the mid-1850s, Cincinnati's soap exports increased twentyfold, while candles, chemicals, lubricants, and other lardoil products jumped at comparable rates. As Cincinnati's processing sophistication rose, the area sprouted a number of industrial chemical plants making inorganic acids, pigments, dyes, and other chemicals used in metal and food industries.

A major consumer company was born in Cincinnati when an English candle maker and an Irish soap maker, named William Procter and James Gamble respectively, married sisters, and their new father-in-law convinced them to go into business together in 1837. By 1859, their turnover passed the $1 million mark.
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Their timing was perfect, for they were selling into a new middle-class gentility boom. About a century before, the English gentry had become interested in personal cleanliness. Regular bathing, though rarely with soap, became commonplace. Upper-class Americans, always eager for cultural clues from England, began to emulate the custom. When Boston's elegant Tremont Hotel opened in 1829, it included “eight bathrooms” in the basement. America's new and ever-alert middle class were quick to jump on the cleanliness bandwagon. Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick, who “had no particular dislike of dirt” as a street urchin, was transformed by a good bath and clean clothes. Missionaries to more benighted lands began to insist that the natives wash.
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The processing of lard and its derivatives was America's first true chemical industry. (New England textile makers generally bought their bleaches and dyes from the British.
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) Lard processing also offered a prototype for the postbellum oil-refining industry. In its early stages, oil refiners were an assemblage of mom-and-pop operations, not much different from whiskey distilling. But they rapidly morphed into the same kind of
large-scale continuous-flow operation as lard processing, with the additional benefit of a good native base in academic chemistry.
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Lucy Bird spotted another Cincinnati specialty besides pigs when she stopped at a mass-production, machine-based furniture factory, which she recognized as something new under the sun: