The Dawn of Innovation (16 page)

Lowell's mother's family, the Cabots, declined to invest at all. They and other Bostonians, after all, had built fortunes importing British goods. Many of them had been burned two decades previously by the Beverly Cotton Manufactory, an ill-starred, pre-Slater spinning venture that required an embarrassing bailout from the state legislature.

The first critical hire outside the group was Paul Moody, a brilliant young machinist. Lowell had approached Jacob Perkins, a machinist, nail manufacturer, and prolific inventor, to join the enterprise. Perkins recommended Moody, who was an inspired choice, for he had first trained as a
weaver—under Scotsmen, who were known for their high-craft weaving tradition—and only then as a machinist under Perkins.

Lowell's strategic vision was as bold as his financing approach. Yarn making and weaving had always been viewed as a separate industries, like flour manufacturing and baking. The two trades had also mechanized at different rates. The Cartwright power loom was patented in 1785, twenty years after the Arkwright spinning frame, and was still an immature technology. British weaving was mostly on the “putting-out” cottage industry basis, and few plants had both power-spinning and power-weaving operations.

But Lowell wanted an integrated production line from the start. He and Jackson bought a vacant paper mill on the Charles River at Waltham and designed a three-story factory in which raw cotton would be cleaned and processed on the ground floor, spun into yarn on the second floor, and woven into cloth on the third. It is an interesting decision, for yarn production multiplied his technology challenges, and good yarns were readily available from established companies quite near his new plant. But Lowell, in true American spirit, was driving for economies of scale and had apparently decided he could not risk
not
controlling the entire production process.

It took nearly a year for Lowell and Moody to get their first loom working. The challenge wasn't conceptual, but as with the English, it was a matter of capturing the micro-motions of weaving without unacceptable breakage. The Lowell-Moody approach was to simplify the problem. Rather than try to create highly flexible power trains, they focused on tough fabrics with sturdy threads.

The first successful Lowell-Moody loom was actually a fairly crude instrument. For instance, there was no stop-action on the batten—the wood piece that banged the weft threads together after each shuttle pass. Instead it was stopped just by the resistance of the cloth. That would have been unacceptable for high-margin, finer-threaded fabrics, but that wasn't the market that Lowell and Moody were interested in.

Where they did lavish attention was on achieving a single flow-through model of cotton cloth making. Moody's 1818 warping and dressing machine was a major advance in that direction. It first sized the threads—rolled them
through a starch mixture to strengthen them for the weaving—and then automatically dressed the loom, the once-tedious task of loading each of the individual warp (long) threads into the proper heddle positions. (A stop-action mechanism suspended the operation if a thread broke, so an operator could repair it.) Other innovations, like conical pulleys to adjust thread speeds and faster spindles to increase thread twists for a harder, more durable thread, were all designed to achieve higher processing speeds and fewer interruptions. The narrow range of output also ensured uniform machinery, quicker repairs, and shorter downtimes, exactly the ticket for high-volume manufacturing.
^y

Lowell made yet another historically original contribution. Both he and Appleton had come away from their trips to Great Britain deeply disturbed by the human degradation in the great textile mills. They feared that Britain was teetering on the brink of social upheaval and did not want to replicate British conditions in America. They were also ready to pay higher than normal wages if they could get the assurance of a reliable work force. Lowell's solution was to create decent mill housing for young farm girls willing to work away from home for a few years to earn their own cash stake—for a dowry, to pay for training as a teacher, or to help out the rest of the family. The hours were long but the work not too physically demanding, and by the standards of the day, the housing was spartan but clean. When Charles Dickens visited the new town of Lowell, the second great development of Boston Company mills, in 1840, he was deeply impressed, even moved:

Dickens's favorable impression would have been reinforced by the design of the mill village. The attractive arrangement of the buildings, the walkways and plantings along the canals, the attention to cleanliness and order, as recently reconstructed, is quite beautiful. (The Scottish “new town” movement was much in the air when Lowell was in Scotland, although he doesn't seem to have visited any sites.) And farm girls who had never been far from their villages were easier to impress than Dickens. They had much more privacy at the mill than on the farm, and compared to mill work, farmwork was dirty, brutally hard, and often dangerous. Farm life could also be isolating, and the girls seem to have taken great delight in meeting and living with so many girls of their own age. It's no surprise that most of them seem to have remembered the mills with fondness.

The first Waltham mill started operations in February 1815 with twenty-three yarn-making machines—carders, rovers, and spinning jennies of various kinds—and twenty-one looms, seven wide and fourteen narrow ones. The initial machinery was rapidly added to, replaced, and rebuilt,
as operations expanded and Moody piled on his process improvements. One of Nathan Appleton's firms, a wholesale distributorship, took care of the marketing at a modest 1 percent of sales.

It was hardly an auspicious time for a textile venture. If 1812 had been a bad time to embark on a new venture, 1815 may have been the worst possible time to open a new mill. Manchester textile mills had been amassing unsold yarn and cloth for three years. When the war ended, they poured it into the American markets at rock-bottom prices. Slater survived handily in Providence, but the dumping wreaked havoc among the rash of new textile mills that proliferated during the war. Nevertheless, the Boston Company sailed serenely through. In October 1817, a month after Lowell's death, it declared its first annual dividend, a handsome 17 percent, and for the rest of the first decade it averaged a stunning 18.75 percent.

Lowell died in 1817, just as his great enterprise was getting off the ground. His last contribution to the company was to lobby through a textile tariff bill that basically eliminated British competition in the low-end textile market (predominantly from re-exported and very cheap Indian cotton). Both Appleton and Jackson seem to have adopted Lowell's vision completely as their own, and the company proceeded on an orderly course of steady expansion.

Three mills on the Charles River at Waltham were the most the site could support, so in 1820 the company commenced development on a new site on the Merrimack River, at a location that the directors named Lowell. After the first Lowell mill was up and running, the company made yet another conceptual leap, creating a new kind of organization not unlike the business network the Japanese call a
keiretsu
—an intricate alliance of affiliates and subsidiaries acting as if guided by a single intelligence. The Lowell Locks & Canal Company offers a good window into its operations.

The waterwheel is one of the most ancient of mechanical power sources, but it needs reliable rainfall, hilly contours, fast, narrow rivers, and bedrock
river bottoms to minimize silting—in other words, countrysides much like those of Scotland, England, and New England.

From medieval times, Great Britain was dotted with water-powered grist mills, saw mills, and fulling mills (washing and pounding woven wool cloth for a tighter finish). In earlier periods they were more often simple paddle wheels sitting in streams, but by the early eighteenth century hydraulic power was transforming into quite serious technology. Mill operators built dams and mill races, or artificial channels, to raise the height and velocity of the water. Gates controlled mill-race water flow and directed surpluses into storage ponds for dry spells. Overshot wheels, in which wheel buckets were loaded from the top, greatly increased power. The water entered the wheel buckets at higher velocity, and because the buckets on the descending side were all full, the wheel's descent weight and momentum were much higher.

New England operators, however, standardized on the “breast-fed” wheel, in which water enters at a point below the apex of the wheel. While it is theoretically not as efficient as the overshot wheel, it worked far better in practice, especially in fast water conditions.
^z
Well maintained breast-fed wheels achieved energy conversion rates in excess of 60 percent. Gating and metering systems were developed to measure and modulate the quantity and velocity of the water flow, and hydraulic engineers in both England and the United States chipped away at the basic mathematics of fluid dynamics and energy conversion.
²¹
The British, however, were much quicker to shift to steam, since the urban concentration of their industry did not lend itself to waterpower.

The Boston Company's 1820 expansion to Lowell and the Merrimack River was accomplished by taking over the financially strained Pawtucket Canal in East Chelmsford, about twelve miles from the site in Waltham.
Although the directors stipulated that they had conducted an extensive search for a suitable property, Patrick Jackson's father was a major Pawtucket shareholder who must have been anxious to unload a white elephant.
²²

The site was nearly ideal for hydraulic power development. The canal had been built to circumvent the falls of the Merrimack River, which had a total head, or drop, of thirty feet within the East Chelmsford area. The river was also fed by several large lakes, so it had an unusually reliable year-round flow, even during dry summers. The existing canal intercepted the Merrimack just before the falls and then circled to the south for about thirteen miles before rejoining the river at its Concord branch to the east of the village. There were two locks to step down barge and other boat traffic. The Boston Company had to maintain those, since the Pawtucket Canal charter required that it be open to public transportation.

After striking an unpublicized deal with the canal company, the directors quietly assembled the land of nearly the entire island encompassed by the Merrimack and the canal, including all associated water rights. (Ransom had to be paid, however, when one sharp-nosed landowner sniffed out what was going on and started buying sites in competition.) Design and development of the site was assigned to Kirk Boott, who had just graduated from Sandhurst, the British military academy. He was good at math, but like most American engineers of the time, he was entirely self-taught in his new profession. Boott did fine, although Moody, who was building the water-mill machinery, was at his side at every stage. Boott also consulted with leading engineers of the day, including Myron Holley, Alexander H.'s uncle, who was one of the senior engineers on the Erie Canal.

The land in the vicinity of the falls was all rocky outcrop unsuitable for mill building, so Boott devised a plan whereby the mills would be located on the relatively flat plain on the western end of the island. The old canal, which was badly deteriorated, was widened and extensively rebuilt, and was intercepted by the new Merrimack Canal running about a half mile across the island to the river. Both canals had good heads, or water drops, followed by long flat runs ideal for mill siting. Work started in the spring of 1822, with as many as five hundred laborers on site at one time.

The first mill wheel, a breast-fed thirty-foot monster on the upper level of the Merrimack Canal, started turning in September 1823. Like Moody's wheels at Waltham, water flow was controlled by gates that were opened and closed by a fly-ball governor. The device consisted of spinning iron balls on a vane driven from the wheel shaft. As the shaft speeded up, the balls extended horizontally, and as it slowed down, they fell toward the vertical, in each case moving a set of levers that modulated the gate settings accordingly. Watt used a similar device on his early steam engines.

Shortly after that first mill opened, the directors made a critical, and as it turned out, brilliantly right decision. Appleton and Moody had calculated that the Merrimack site could support up to sixty mills, but as they began to plan the next few years' development, they were daunted by the potential management and financial challenges of such a massive enterprise. They therefore recommended spinning off the canals and waterworks as the Locks & Canal Company, with a separate but interlocking board of directors. In effect, they created a wholly owned subsidiary operating as a hydraulic power utility, open to any customer who could pass muster within the still tightly knit core group of the original founders and investors.