The Dawn of Innovation (33 page)

Lumber and finished wood products were one of America's leading industries in 1850, well behind textiles and cotton but in an approximate tie for second place with leather and its products, metal and its products, and transport equipment and machinery. From colonial days, there was industrialized logging in Massachusetts, Maine, New York, and Pennsylvania, both for coastal ship builders and for export to England.
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Commercial exploitation of the great forests of the Midwest was underway by the 1830s and, like all of the region's industries, was heavily reliant on the high-pressure steam engine. A characteristic innovation was the development of large, portable circular saws packaged with a steam engine that could be trucked from one logging area to another.

 

Rough-sawing raw logs at the logging site greatly improved transportation efficiencies. Midwestern loggers developed steam-powered portable saws that could handle logs up to thirty feet long.

Rough sawing in the forest greatly reduced transport costs. A portable forest mill, with a crew of two or three men and a 40-horsepower engine, could process 15,000 to 20,000 board feet of timber a day. One such mill, manufactured by a Cincinnati company, Lane & Bodley, could handle logs up to thirty feet long and forty-eight inches in diameter.

A survey in an 1872 British text noted that such forest mills in the Midwest had become

All Europeans criticized the wastefulness of American lumbering practice. Running big logging saws at high speeds and keeping them true required very heavy, thick saw blades, so the kerf, or width of the wood ground up by the blade, was as much as a half inch.
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Big timber-producing states like Maine, Michigan, and Wisconsin each processed routinely 200 to 300 million board feet a year, so those half inches added up. To forest-deprived Britons, it was a continuing scandal.

From the earliest periods, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia were centers for fine furniture making, much of it exported to wealthy planters in the West Indies. Americans showed great imagination in chair making; the rocking chair is apparently an American invention. The
Niles Weekly Register
recorded a shipment of 12,000 chairs dispatched from Baltimore in 1827 for a trip around the Horn, with delivery points up and down both of the South American coasts.

Before the 1820s, furniture was a small-shop, mostly handcrafted product. Fine cabinetmaking was almost entirely a bespoke business. Some local carpenter shops might make modest quantities of workaday furniture for sale but would otherwise produce to order. By the 1830s, New York craftsmen were already complaining that machine-made product was driving down the price of common furniture, but the most intensive development of furniture factories was pursued in the Midwest after 1840. Whitworth also reported on the American furniture industry, but it was only in the eastern states. He does not report on any large factories but details several “interesting machines,” like an apparatus for shaping the arms and legs of chairs.
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The Mitchell and Rammelsberg plant memorialized by Bird offers a fine case study of the industry's evolution. The company's founders, Robert Mitchell and Frederick Rammelsberg, were two successful Cincinnati cabinetmakers who joined forces in 1847. The factory that Bird visited was steam-powered. Rough plankings were delivered and finished on the first floor; manufacturing processes took place on the middle floors, with finishing, varnishing, and drying on the top floor and roof.
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There is a surviving equipment list from a factory expansion in 1859. Two basement steam engines drove all the machinery, which included sixteen
lathes, dovetail cutters (for joining the corners of drawers), planing machines, varieties of rip saws and crosscut saws, mortise and tenoning machines, routers, boring machines, and a variety of trimming equipment—scroll saws, friezing machines, and a molding machine.

A number of these machines, like the mortising machine, date from the Brunel-Bentham-Maudslay Portsmouth block factory a half century before. (The mortise is the female joint of the mortise-and-tenon system for joining wooden corners; the machine is a steam-powered chisel preset to the desired cut.) Most decorative machines, like the friezing machine and various carvers, are developments of the original Blanchard principle of a profiler/carver: an independently powered cutting tool directed by tracing a pattern of the finished product.
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The 1859 factory had thirty-six carvers for decorative work, working both by hand and with the aid of powered equipment. The scroll saw was a narrow reciprocating blade passing through a table and held in tension by a spring. A carver could draw a pattern on a workpiece and make a manually guided rough cut with the scroll saw before finishing it by hand. More advanced profiling carvers were developed after the Civil War, but precise effects usually required a dozen or more progressively finer cutting tools and tracing styluses, and the tool changes were time-consuming. Spindle carvers were small, fixed rotary cutters projecting horizontally from a base. The carver would hold a workpiece against the cutter and manipulate the piece to create decorative flourishes. The blade type determined the nature of the cut, but the carver free-handed the pattern.

The nineteenth-century American furniture industry is sometimes cited as an example of the armory tradition of manufacturing interchangeable precision parts with specialized machinery. But that seems a stretch. The Mitchell and Rammelsberg achievement is best understood as a brilliant product/marketing strategy—creating a cornucopia of styles and price points to suit both the newly well-to-do nonconnoisseur and the middle-class clerks, craftsmen, and hog farmers brightening their homes with a nice-looking table-and-chair set. In an age of heavy, ornately decorated furniture, different-size wooden orbs, flat squares, and cubes with beveled edges could be combined into a near-infinity of treatments of
newel posts, leg bases, bed headboard posts, and other ornamentation. A variety of machine-molded edges added finish and style to flat shelving. Standard engravings, friezes, and carved crests were combined on beds and sideboys. Headboards could be flat with simple crests or have inset panels with contrasting veneers and more ornate flourishes. Veneers were widely substituted for expensive hardwoods, while stains turned oak into rosewood. Manufacturing tolerances were not highly demanding, but machinery construction was technically challenging since the machines typically ran much faster than metal-cutting machinery and had heavier blades, which stretched the limits of current ball-bearing technology.
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A Philadelphia architectural magazine sneered in 1861:

The critic did not name any specific manufacturers, but the article's descriptions of both furniture types and manufacturing processes, absent the sarcasm, was a dead-on portrait of Mitchell and Rammelsberg. By that time, the company seems to have been the trendsetter for the industry and had opened substantial stores throughout the major cities of the region.

An English observer had a better understanding of what was afoot, however, when he wrote in a catalogue of an American exhibition in London a decade earlier: “The absence in the United States of those vast accumulations of wealth which favour the expenditure of large sums on articles of mere luxury, and the general distribution of the means of procuring the more substantial conveniences of life . . . [directs American industry] to increasing the number or the quantity of articles suitable to the wants of a whole people, and adapted to promote the enjoyment of the modest competency which prevails among them.”
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A.
Dovetailing machinery was proliferating in mid-century, judging by a caustic reference in an 1872 textbook. They were a standard fixture even in modestly-sized furniture factories by the 1880s.
B.
Nineteenth-century furniture factories in the Mitchell and Rammelsberg tradition were quick to exploit Blanchard's concept of duplicating profiler/carvers. For inscribing cuts like the one shown, up to a dozen cutters might be driven off a single pattern guide.

By 1860, the Midwest was a major manufacturing center in its own right, mostly centered around the big Ohio River cities like Cincinnati and Louisville. Chicago was gaining rapidly in population—110,000 to Cincinnati's 161,000—but Cincinnati still had a nearly six-to-one edge in manufacturing employment. Food processing and its by-products were the largest single industry, but the Midwest was developing a large transport sector: steam engines, steam boats, and, increasingly, rails and rail cars.

In the first few decades of the Midwest's rise as a manufacturing power, the east-west transportation barrier acted like a protective tariff. Trade between the eastern states and the Midwest was dominated by easy-to-transport goods: the West sold packed meat and lard products and bought shoes, clocks, and textiles. At the same time, improving riverine transit, the construction of nearly 1,000 miles of canals in the 1830s and 1840s, and the spectacular burst of 1850s railroad construction welded the Midwest into a large and more or less cohesive economic unit that could support its own substantial manufacturing base. By the time a national railroad network nearly eliminated transport barriers, Midwest manufacturers were able to hold their own, especially in piping, valves, steam engines, agricultural equipment, and other heavy machinery.
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The skill-based industries of the East, by contrast—shoes and textiles, brass clocks and fine instruments, the light machinery of the Connecticut River Valley—were there mostly by accidents of history. That deepening skill base created a regional advantage in newer industries like sewing machines, typewriters, and watches. But skill-based eastern manufacturing also included very heavy fabricated products—locomotives, large mill machinery, and large printing presses. We will look at those in the rest of this chapter, along with the one eastern industry that was driven purely by locational factors—open ocean–sailing vessels.

The steamship industry may be the only instance in which the United States plausibly seized, or was in position to seize, leadership from Great Britain but quickly gave up its advantage and for all practical purposes exited the business.

Competition in the East Coast steamboat industry was ferocious. By the 1830s and 1840s, the boats were of oceanic proportions, roughly twice the size of Fulton's
Clermont/Steamboat
and far heavier and faster. Competing lines raced, and occasionally jostled, each other on the water, rather like NASCAR racers. There was no dominant owner, but the active presence of Cornelius Vanderbilt kept all the lines at a knife-sharp point of tension. His strategy was to move into and out of the trade opportunistically—launching price wars against complacent operators to gain control of their routes, then selling out at a profit. Vanderbilt had become by far the richest of the operators and the only one who could order and pay for major steamboats from his own resources—rich enough even to shrug off the loss of a major new boat,
The Atlantic
, a 321-foot behemoth. (It was driven on rocks during a fierce storm in Long Island Sound, with the loss of fifty of the seventy passengers and crew.) Unlike many buyers and sellers of companies, Vanderbilt was also a superb manager and nearly always turned lackluster properties into profit machines.
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