The Dawn of Innovation (51 page)

21
The account here including the Whitworth solution is drawn primarily from Goodeve and Shelley,
The Whitworth Measuring Machine
.

22
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
13, no. 1 (1852): 123–125, quote at 124.

23
Ibid., 124.

24
Doron Swade,
The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer
(New York: Viking, 2001), is the best modern account of Babbage and his calculating engines.

25
Charles Babbage,
Passages from the Life of a Philosopher
(London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green, 1864), 68–96, is his own account of the struggle over funding. Not all the dates agree with Swade's, which I take to be the definitive account.

26
Roe,
English and American Tool Builders
, chapter titled “Inventors of the Planer,” quotes from 52, 59.

27
Babbage,
Passages
. The disputed phrase quoted in the footnote is on 71.

28
The description of number two and the rejection note are from Swade,
Difference Engine
, 173–176.

29
Ibid., 117–119.

30
Ibid., 121.

31
Charles Babbage, “On the Method of Expressing by Signs the Action of Machinery,”
Philosophic Transactions of the Royal Society
, vol. 2, 1826, reprinted in
Charles Babbage and His Calculating Machines
, Philip Morrison and Emily Morrison, eds. (New York: Dover, 1961), 346–354, quote at 351, plates at 380–384.

32
Swade, personal communication.

33
Babbage
, Passages
, 452.

34
The account here is from Swade, “A Modern Sequel,” Part 3 in
Difference Engine
.

35
Swade,
Difference Engine
, 292.

36
Ibid., 305. Note that Swade and his team did not attempt to make Babbage's printer, which was of the same size and complexity of the DE2 itself.

37
Ibid., 201.

38
Charles Babbage,
On the Economy of Machinery and Manufacturing
(London: John Murray, 1846).

39
Joseph Bizup,
Manufacturing Culture: Vindications of Early Victorian Industry
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 8.

40
Ibid., 150.

41
The most detailed available history and analyses are Carolyn C. Cooper, “The Portsmouth System of Manufacture,”
Technology and Culture
25, no. 2 (April 1984): 182–225, and Carolyn C. Cooper, “The Production Line at Portsmouth Block Mill,”
Industrial Archaeology Review
6, no. 1 (Winter 1981–1982): 28–44. See also Richard Beamish,
Memoir of the Life of Marc Isambard Brunel
(London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green, 1862); Roe,
English and American Tool Masters
, esp. the chapter “Bentham and Brunel,” 22–31; Simon Sebag Montefiore, “The Bentham Brothers: Their Adventure in Russia,”
History Today
(July 2003), a UK-based web-based journal; and Gilbert,
Henry Maudslay
.

42
Gilbert,
Henry Maudslay
, 18.

43
Cooper, “Portsmouth System,” 198.

44
Ibid., 206.

45
See, for example, Alfred Chandler,
Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of Industrial Enterprise
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1962), 284, where Chandler dismisses the importance of manufacturing issues, on the grounds that managers “had plenty of information to go on” from the “scientific management” movement of the 1920s. For a withering indictment, see Robert H. Hayes and William J. Abernathy, “Managing Our Way to Economic Decline,”
Harvard Business Review
(July–August 1980): 67–77. Nevertheless, Hayes and Abernathy, both Harvard Business School professors, assiduously avoid mentioning the leading contribution of their own institution, or of their own previous writings, to the debacle they deplore.

1
Niles Weekly Register
, October 29, 1825, 128; November 12, 1825, 173–174.

2
Sydney Smith, The Works of the Rev. Sydney Smith,
vol. 1 (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green, 1859), “America,” 281–292, at 291.

3
Michael R. Haines, “The Population of the United States, 1790–1920,” in
The Cambridge Economic History of the United States
, vol. 2:
The Long Nineteenth Century
, Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman, eds. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 156 (Table 4.2).

4
Gordon S. Wood,
Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 706; Jack Larkin,
The Reshaping of Everyday Life, 1790–1840
(New York: HarperPerennial, 1989), 8.

5
Rothenberg's work first appeared in a magisterial series of articles in the
Journal of Economic History
, beginning in 1981. They are collected and updated in Winifred Barr Rothenberg,
From Market-Places to a Market Economy: The Transformation of Rural Massachusetts, 1750–1850
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

6
Naomi R. Lamoureaux, “Rethinking the Transition to Capitalism in the Early American Northeast,”
Journal of American History
90, no. 2 (September 2003): 456–457.

7
Robert B. Gordon,
A Landscape Transformed: The Ironworking District of Salisbury, Connecticut
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 29–30.

8
Ibid., 35–38, for a sketch of the Holley iron venture. The family tree and the personal details of the Holley family are all from Holley Family Correspondence, Connecticut Historical Society, and “Fragments of the Diary of Alexander H. Holley,” Town Archive, Scoville Memorial Library, Salisbury, Connecticut. Both of the archives have a great deal of information on family and social matters, but business references are usually sketchy.

9
Daniel Walker Howe,
What God Hath Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 555–556.

10
Thomas M. Doerflinger, “Rural Capitalism in Iron Country: Staffing a Forest Factory, 1808–1815,”
William and Mary Quarterly
59, no. 1 (January 2002): 3–38; furnace data output from Tench Coxe,
A Statement of the Arts and Manufacturers of the United States of America for the Year 1810
(Philadelphia, PA: A. Cornman, 1814), Tables by States, Territories, and Districts (Table 10).

11
Donald R. Hoke,
Ingenious Yankees: The Rise of the American System of Manufactures in the Private Sector
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 43–99, is the essential essay on Terry and his manufacturing innovations. The primary source for Eli's career and early Connecticut clockmaking is Henry Terry (one of Eli's sons), “A Review of Dr. Alcotts History of Clock-Making,”
Waterbury American
, June 10, 1853. It is reprinted, along with much other primary material, in Kenneth D. Roberts,
Eli Terry and the Connecticut Shelf Clock
(Bristol, CT: Kenneth D. Roberts, 1994), 30–39, 45–61, 170–175.

12
Roberts,
Eli Terry
, 61.

13
Joseph T. Rainier, “The ‘Sharper' Image: Yankee Peddlers, Southern Consumers, and the Market Revolution,”
Business and Economic History
26, no. 1 (Fall 1997): 27–44.

14
David S. Landes,
Revolution in Time
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 311–313.

15
David J. Jeremy,
Transatlantic Industrial Revolution: The Diffusion of Textile Technologies Between Britain and America, 1790–1830s
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), is invaluable, with considerable detail on both the industry and specific machines and technologies; James Montgomery,
A Practical Detail of the Cotton Manufacture of the United States of America
(Glasgow: John Niven, 1840), has clear descriptions and drawings of contemporary spinning machines in both England and America.

16
For Slater, Barbara M. Tucker,
Samuel Slater and the Origins of the American Textile Industry, 1790–1860
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), and the traditional source, George S. White,
Memoir of Samuel Slater
, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia, 1836).

17
The partnership agreement is in White,
Memoir
, 74–75.

18
David R. Meyer,
Networked Machinists: High-Technology Industries in Antebellum America
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 59. Wilkinson's lathe was designed for cutting large industrial screws for fine manipulation of heavy industrial machinery.

19
Robert F. Dalzell Jr.,
Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World They Made
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); Robert Sobel,
The Entrepreneurs: An American Adventure
(1986; rept., Washington, DC: Beard Books, 2000), 1–41; George S.
Gibb,
The Saco-Lowell Shops: Textile Machinery Building in New England, 1813–1949
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950).

20
Charles Dickens,
American Notes
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985), 60–63.

21
A. Stowers, “Watermills,” in
A History of Technology
, vol. 4:
The Industrial Revolution, c. 1750-c.1850
, Charles Singer, et al., ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), 199–213.

22
Patrick M. Malone,
Waterpower in Lowell: Engineering and Industry in Nineteenth-Century America
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009) is the definitive work on the Locks & Canals Co.

23
Gibb,
Saco-Lowell Shops
, 179.

24
Louis C. Hunter,
A History of Industrial Power in the United States
, vol. 1:
Waterpower in the Century of the Steam Engine
(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1985), 322–342, 569–574.

25
Constance McLaughlin Green,
Holyoke, Massachusetts: A Case Study of the Industrial Revolution in America
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1939), 19–63, and Vera Shlakman,
Economic History of a Factory Town: Chicopee, Massachusetts
, Smith College Studies in History 20 (Northampton, MA: Department of History, Smith College, 1935), 24–80.

26
Dalzell,
Enterprising Elite
, 95–108.

27
Harriet H. Robinson, “Early Factory Labor in New England,” in Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor,
Fourteenth Annual Report
(Boston: Wright & Potter, 1883).

28
Paul G. E. Clemens, “The Consumer Culture of the Middle Atlantic, 1760–1820,”
William and Mary Quarterly
62, no. 4 (October 2005): 577–624.

29
David R. Meyer,
The Roots of American Industrialization
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 69–71, 227, 228.

30
Howell J. Harris, “Inventing the U.S. Stove Industry, c.1815-1875: Making and Selling the First Universal Consumer Durable,”
Business History Review
82 (Winter 2008), 701–733.

31
H. W. Dickinson,
A Short History of the Steam Engine
(Cambridge, UK: The University Press, 1935), 94–95; Harley I. Halsey, “The Choice Between High-Pressure and Low-Pressure Steam Power in America in the Nineteenth Century,”
Journal of Economic History
16, no. 4 (December 1981): 723–744. Halsey concludes that economics alone drove the choice of the Evans-style engine; safety considerations were not a major issue.

32
Hunter,
Steam Power
, vol. 2,
History of Industrial Power
, 353.

33
T. J. Stiles,
The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 84.

34
Hunter,
History of Industrial Power
, vol. 2,
Steam Power
, 371.

1
Library of Congress, Statutes at Large, 5th Congress, Session 2, chapters 33 and 47; and Session 3, chapters 31 and 76. The Congress authorized a “provisional army” of 10,000 men in addition to the current force level, which I take to include a previous authorization for a regiment of artillerists and engineers. (A full-strength regiment was about 1,000 troops and officers.) The pre-existing national force was about 3,500 men, so I round the “authorized” total to 15,000. The additional power for an emergency troop raise was for twenty-seven regiments of infantry and cavalry, plus some additional riflemen and artillery. Some sources carry the emergency authorization at “50,000,” but I can't find grounds for that in the statutes. The authorizations were mostly repealed once the “Quasi-war” with France ended in 1800. For background, see Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick,
The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788-1800
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 561–599.

2
Michael S. Raber, Patrick M. Malone, Robert B. Gordon, and Carolyn C. Cooper,
Conservative Innovators and Military Small Arms: An Industrial History of the Springfield Armory, 1794-1968
(Boston, MA: National Park Service, 1989), 54–55, 173–181. For Harpers Ferry, Merritt Roe Smith,
Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology: The Challenge of Change
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 52–53.

3
William Avis, “Drilling, Reaming and Straightening Rifle Barrels,”
Machinery
22 (October 1915): 671–680, lays out the dozens of separate steps in producing a barrel at early-twentieth-century armories.