The Dawn of Innovation (54 page)

4
Robert W. Fogel,
The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700–2100
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 11.

5
Jim Downs,
Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering During the Civil War and Reconstruction
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 4, 21–30, 170–180; Fogel,
Escape
, 16–18.

6
Albert Fishlow, “The American Common School Revival: Fact or Fantasy?” in
Industrialization in Two Systems: Essays in Honor of Alexander Gerschenkron
, Henry Rosovsky, ed. (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1966), 40–67.

7
“Special Report of Joseph Whitworth, 1854,” in Nathan Rosenberg, ed.,
The American System of Manufactures: Report of the Committee on the Machinery of the United States, 1855
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1969), 388–389.

8
Stephen N. Broadberry and Douglas A. Irwin, “Labor productivity in the United States and the United Kingdom During the Nineteenth Century,” Working Paper 10364, National Bureau of Economic Research, March 2004, 22 (Table 3).

9
There is no biography of Bird; the information here is from Wikipedia, which cites a biographical note from an introduction to one of her travel books, which I was not able to find.

10
Isabella L. Bird,
The Englishwoman in America
(London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1856), 141.

11
Isabella L. Bird,
A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains
(New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1879–1880), 91.

12
Ibid., 294.

13
Ibid., 295–296; “Historical Background for the Rocky Mountain National Park” (
www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/berkeley/rensch3/rensch3f.htm
). The details of Nugent's death, such as they are, and the “cowardly” comment are from the National Park Service literature on Estes Park, where Bird lived. Given the backgrounds of Evans
and Nugent, it seems unlikely that Evans, who was usually drunk, could have killed Nugent in a fair fight. Estes Park was also the area where Alfred Bierstadt executed his famous Illuminist-school Rocky Mountain paintings.

14
Bird,
Englishwoman
, 114.

15
Ibid., 117–118.

16
Ibid., 118.

17
Ibid.

18
Ibid., 121–122.

19
Ibid., 125.

20
Rudolf A. Clemen, “Waterways in Livestock and Meat Trade,”
American Economic Review
16, no. 4 (December 1926): 640–652, 646.

21
Bird,
Englishwoman
, 125.

22
Steve C. Gordon, “From Slaughterhouse to Soap-Boiler: Cincinnati's Meat Packing Industry, Changing Technologies, and the Rise of Mass Production, 1825–1870,”
Journal for the Society of Industrial Archaeology
16, no. 1 (1990): 55–67; Charles T. Levitt, “Aspects of the Western Meat-Packing Industry, 1830–1860,”
Journal of Business of the University of Chicago
4, no. 1 (January 1931): 68–90.

23
Levitt, “Western Meat-Packing,” 76–80. For more information about the footnote on page 205, on plant decentralization, see Robert Adudel and Louis P. Cain, “Location and Collusion in the Meatpacking Industry,” in
Business Enterprise and Economic Change: Essays in Honor of Harold F. Williamson
, Louis P. Cain and Paul Uselding, eds. (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1973), 85–117.

24
Gordon, “From Slaughterhouse to Soap-Boiler,” 56.

25
David Hounshell,
From the American System to Mass Production
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 241.

26
“People & Events: Philip Danforth Armour (1832–1901),” PBS, n.d.,
www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/chicago/peopleevents/p_armour.html
.

27
See, e.g., Lynn Siprelle, “Make Your Own Lard,” The New Homemaker, 2007,
www.thenewhomemaker.com/makeyourownlard
.

28
Except as indicated, the detailed descriptions of lard processing are from Gordon, “From Slaughterhouse to Soap-Boiler.”

29
Procter and Gamble, “Our History—How It Began,” n.d.,
www.pg.com/en_US/downloads/media/Fact_Sheets_CompanyHistory.pdf
.

30
Richard L. Bushman and Claudia L. Bushman, “The Early History of Cleanliness in America,”
Journal of American History
74, no. 4 (March 1988): 1213–1238.

31
Thomas L. Ilgen, “‘Better Living Through Chemistry': The Chemical Industry in the World Economy,”
International Organization
37, no. 4 (Autumn 1983): 647–680, 650.

32
Chemistry was the first of the natural sciences to take root in American academia. See I. Bernard Cohen, “The Beginning of Chemical Instruction in America: A Brief Account of the Teaching of Chemistry at Harvard Prior to 1800,”
Chymia
3 (1950): 17–44; Glenn Sonnedecker, “The Scientific Background of Chemistry Teachers in Representative Pharmacy Schools of the United States During the 19th Century,”
Chymia
4 (1953): 171–200; and Daniel J. Kevles et al., “The Sciences in America, Circa 1880,”
Science
n.s. 209, no. 4452 (July 1980): 26–32.

33
Bird,
Englishwoman
, 122.

34
Vincent S. Clark,
History of Manufacturing in the United States, 1607–1860
(Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1916), 467–472. This is an older source, but it was the outcome of a decade-long project by the Carnegie Endowment to assemble the available contemporary sources. The sources for the study are primarily the census,
Niles Weekly Register
, and other sources that are still the starting point for the field.

35
J. Richards,
A Treatise of the Construction and Operation of Wood-Working Machines, Including a History of the Origin and Progress of the Manufacture of Wood-Working Machinery
(London: E. & F. N. Spon, 1872), 132–133.

36
Ibid., 121.

37
Joseph Whitworth, “Special Report,” in Rosenberg,
American System
, 346.

38
Except as indicated, information on Mitchell and Rammelsberg are from Donald C. Peirce, “Mitchell and Rammelsberg, Cincinnati Furniture Manufacturing 1847–1881,” in
American Furniture and Its Makers
, Winterthur Portfolio 13, Ian M. G. Quimby, ed. (Chicago: Published for the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum by the University of Chicago Press, 1979), 209–229.

39
Michael J. Ettema, “Technological Innovation and Design Economics in Furniture Manufacture,” in
American Furniture and Its Makers
, Winterthur Portfolio 16, no. (Summer/Autumn 1981) (Chicago: Published for the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum by the University of Chicago Press, 1981), 197–223. Richards,
Treatise
, includes detailed descriptions and engravings of specimens of all the machines mentioned here.

40
Richards,
Treatise
, iii–v, 30–35.

41
Quoted in Peirce, “Mitchell and Rammelsberg,” 217.

42
Rosenberg,
American System
, 7n.

43
David R. Meyer, “Midwestern American Manufacturing and the American Manufacturing Belt in the Nineteenth Century,”
Journal of Economic History
49, no. 4 (December 1989): 921–937.

44
T. J. Stiles,
The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 99–103, 123–127.

45
John H. Morrison,
History of the New York Ship Yards
(New York: Sametz, 1909), 95–96, 102.

46
David Budlong Tyler,
Steam Conquers the Atlantic
(New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1939), 164–169.

47
Cedric Ridgely-Nevitt,
American Steamships on the Atlantic,
(Newark Del.: University of Delaware Press, 1981) 149
–
177; Tyler,
Steam Conquers
, 181–183.

48
Stiles,
First Tycoon
, 194–212.

49
Ibid., 199–200.

50
Ibid., 227–233; Ridgely-Nevitt,
American Steamships
, 222–248.

51
Tyler,
Steam Conquers
, 336–337; Morrison,
New York Ship Yards
, 155–156.

52
Tyler,
Steam Conquers
, 352–353; Charles R. Morris,
The Tycoons
(New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2005), 277–281.

53
Except as indicated, this account is drawn from John K. Brown,
The Baldwin Locomotive Works, 1831–1915
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).

54
Malcolm C. Clark, “The Birth of an Enterprise: Baldwin Locomotive, 1831–1842,”
Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
90, no. 4 (October 1966): 423–444, 426.

55
Clark, “Birth of an Enterprise,” has a detailed account of Baldwin's financial scramblings. For company rankings, see Brown,
Baldwin Locomotive
, Appendix B.

56
Brown,
Baldwin Locomotive
, 95.

57
Except as indicated, this section is drawn from Louis C. Hunter's splendid
A History of Industrial Power in the United States, 1780–1930
, vol. 2:
Steam Power
(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1985). Chapter 5 is devoted entirely to the Corliss engine; the quote is at 264. I have also reviewed the patent descriptions, the most important one of which is the first, United States Patent Office: Geo. H. Corliss of Providence, Rhode Island, Cut-Off and Working the Valves of Steam Engines, No. 6, 162, dated March 10, 1849.

58
John S. Ritenour, “Master Minds of Type and Press,”
Inland Printer
57, no. 2 (May 1916): 205–207.

59
The material on printers is all drawn from Robert Hoe,
A Short History of the Printing Press and of the Improvements in Printing Machinery from the Time of Gutenberg up to the Present Day
(New York: privately published, 1902). This Robert Hoe was the nephew of Robert Hoe III, the grandson of the founder who was still running the firm at the time of publication.

60
Luther D. Burlingame, “How We Came to Have the Micrometer Caliper,”
Machinery
22 (September 1916): 58–59.

61
Phillip Scranton,
Endless Novelty: Specialty Production and American Industrialization, 1865–1925
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 363n62.

1
“Specification of the Patent Granted to James Hartley, of Sunderland, Glass Manufacturer, for Improvements in the Manufacture of Glass,” enrolled April 7, 1848,
The Repertory of Patent Inventions
, enl. series 11 (London: Alexander MacIntosh, 1848), 297–298.

2
David W. Shaw,
America's Victory: The Heroic Triumph of a Gang of Ordinary Americans—and How They Won the Greatest Yacht Race Ever
(New York: Free Press, 2002), 155–156.

3
Except as indicated, the account here is drawn from Shaw,
America's Victory
; for the Baltimore Clippers, Geoffrey M. Footner,
Tidewater Triumph: The Development and Worldwide Success of the Chesapeake Bay Pilot Schooner
(Mystic, CT: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1998), 101–109.

4
Shaw,
America's Victory
, 184.

5
Ibid., 213.

6
Ibid., 213.

7
Ibid., 217, 218.

8
Nathan Rosenberg, Introduction to
The American System of Manufactures: The Report of the Committee on the Machinery of the United States 1855
, Nathan Rosenberg, ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1969), 1–53, at 7–8. The events of the exhibition and the
Punch
doggerel are drawn from Rosenberg's account.

9
Except as noted, the Collinsville account is drawn from Donald R. Hoke,
The Rise of the American System of Manufactures in the Private Sector
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 102–130. Paul Uselding, “Elisha K. Root, Forging and the ‘American System,'”
Technology and Culture
15, no. 4 (October 1974): 543–568, is still useful, but his technical discussion has been superseded by Hoke.

10
Robert B. Gordon, “Material Evidence of the Development of Metalworking Technology at the Collins Axe Factory,”
Journal of the Society for Industrial Archaeology
9, no. 1 (1983): 19–28.

11
E. K. Root, Punching Mach., Patent No. 1027, December 10, 1838.

12
For Colt, beside the Colt correspondence at the library of the Connecticut Historical Society (hereafter Colt Correspondence, CHS), I use Barbara M. Tucker and Kenneth H. Tucker Jr.,
Industrializing Antebellum America: The Rise of Manufacturing Entrepreneurs in the Early Republic
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 13–71 (for family and background); Herbert G. Houze, Carolyn C. Cooper, and Elizabeth Mankin Kornhouser,
Samuel Colt: Arms, Art, and Invention
, (New Haven, CT: Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, 2006); Charles T. Haven and Frank A. Belden,
A History of the Colt Revolver and Other Arms Made by Colt's Patent Fire Arms Manufacturing Company from 1836 to 1940
(New York: William Morrow & Co., 1940).

13
Tucker and Tucker,
Industrializing
, 30; Houze,
Samuel Colt
, 66.

14
Houze,
Samuel Colt
, 66–67.

15
The dispute is captured in Christopher Colt to Samuel Colt, April 10, 1837; Dudley Selden to Samuel Colt, July 1 and 3, 1837, in Box 1, Colt Correspondence, CHS.