The Dawn of Innovation (14 page)

John's son, Alexander Hamilton Holley, succeeded to the business but was also active in politics, served a term as governor, and was a founding member of the local bank. It was Alexander who finally made the decisive break of “closing the store” to concentrate on the ironworks. He and a local partner, George Merwin, started a knife-making shop in 1844, which was incorporated as Holley Manufacturing in 1854. It was a major area employer until it closed in 1946.

Over time, the Holleys had become the leading family of the town. They certainly lived well, with a gracious house but not a mansion. The children all went to good schools, and they had carriages and some servants. (But American servants in this period had become “help” and tended to think and act like contracted employees.
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) With all of that, the Holleys were never rich: almost all of them worked hard, and their cash mostly went into their businesses. When Luther died in 1826, he left an estate valued at $34,000, to be divided among six children. Much of it was personal inventory like furniture and silver, and some of the children had already borrowed against their shares. (Several had overborrowed, so their brothers and sisters had to take their notes when the estate settled.) Alexander's correspondence and diary fragments frequently mention money pressures, and the same pressures are also reflected in the letters
his oldest son, Alexander Lyman Holley, wrote home from college. (We'll meet Alexander Lyman again, because he became a great figure in the nineteenth-century steel industry.)

Rothenberg's farmers and proto-industrialists like the Holleys dissolve an old interpretive conflict. Historians long divided over whether or the degree to which America's nineteenth-century agrarians were apple-cheeked prelapsarian Jeffersonians, ripe for exploitation by commercially minded interlopers. The reality seems to be that
both
the sons of the soil and merchant-industrialists were intensely commercial, profit-seeking animals, and
both
were deeply rooted in their communities. The behavior of both the entrepreneurial merchant and the farmer was constrained within local webs of obligation: mortgages and mercantile credits were extended, old farm hands kept on, seasonal patterns of work and leisure respected, local celebrations and rituals honored.

The iron districts of Pennsylvania and New Jersey display the same intricate interlacing of farming and industry from early days. The district's iron industries employed an estimated 4,000 workers by the late 1770s, a far denser concentration than any in New England; by 1810 the region accounted for 61 percent of national iron furnace output.
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Iron was quintessentially a rural industry. With seemingly inexhaustible wood supplies, Americans smelted iron with charcoal, which is far freer of impurities than coal, so blast furnaces were typically located in deep woods.

The Martha Furnace opened in 1808 in the pine woods of southern New Jersey, financed by Philadelphia merchants and iron traders, and has been documented in great detail by the historian Thomas Doerflinger. The furnace proprietors owned timber and bog iron
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rights to a section of
the pine woods bigger than Manhattan, and its development had the character of a modest-sized town. Based on a lake with a busy dock, it was centered around a thirty-foot blast furnace and a collection of industrial buildings: a bellows house, charcoal storage sheds, and a sand-molding works for casting iron into blocks of pig or end-products like pots and stoves. There were also a grist mill, a saw mill, and a stamping mill, stables, a carpentry shop, and a smithy, plus housing for about seventy workers on a year-round basis, a store, and food warehouse facilities.

The core staff were the skilled artisans who kept the furnace running and executed the crucial annual shutdown, hearth rebuild, and restart. Other skilled men built the cast-iron sand molds, ran the mills, and built and maintained the waterworks and a small fleet of ore boats. The work force was filled out with teamsters, wood cutters, and ore raisers, the nastiest job of all, entailing long, wet days of dredging mud with a clam shovel. All together, there were between seventy and eighty full-timers, all of them resident on-site.

Except for the skilled iron men, the work force was mostly recruited from the local villages. The skilled men tended to be recent immigrants, mostly Irish and Germans, although with a scattering of skilled African Americans. Labor was treated as a scarce resource: the works don't exhibit any of the rigid disciplines of, say, a Carnegie factory later in the century, and bouts of absenteeism and drunkenness were usually overlooked. Camaraderie among the skilled iron men and the management was high—with “days at the beach” and group partying at the local taverns.

Work in general trades like carpentry and wood chopping was scheduled to mesh with the agricultural cycle, so chopping and charcoal making peaked in the winter, much of it with part-time workers from the local farms. Bulk pork and corn supplies were shipped in by Philadelphia-area merchants, but all dairy products, most vegetables, bread, and other meats were sold at the ironworks by the locals. Most of the bigger farmers also had side businesses—tavern keeping, wagon building, and the like—and Martha Furnace was their most important customer. In other words, it was the same industrial-agricultural symbiosis that Rothenberg uncovered
in Massachusetts. In early nineteenth-century America, “rural” wasn't synonymous with “agricultural.”

As a formula for national growth, it clearly worked. For 135 years, from 1778 to the eve of the First World War, America achieved an average 3.9 percent annual economic growth, in constant dollars. No other country has yet come close to achieving such sustained rapid growth for so long a period of time. The economic historian David Landes attributed Great Britain's sudden rise to commercial and industrial dominance to its culture: its empiricism, its relative social mobility compared to the rest of Europe, its commercialism, its respect for numbers and contracts. By comparison with eighteenth-century Britons, Americans were strivers on steroids.

The sharpest contrast between British and American industry was the intense focus of American companies on large-scale production and distribution of ordinary goods. Historians have from time to time focused on one industry or the other, like gun making, as the quintessentially American industry. But the dominating American characteristic across nearly all major industries was the push for scale—adapting the production methods, the use of machinery, and the distribution to suit the product. This chapter will look at five different early American industries: clocks and textiles in some depth, along with shorter takes on shoes, stoves, and steam engines.

Mechanical clocks had been around for nearly five hundred years in 1800, but it took only a generation for American clockmakers, led by Eli Terry, to show the world how to make decent clocks easily and cheaply and to make them by the million.

The mechanical clock was invented sometime in the late thirteenth century and very quickly reached a remarkably stable basic design. A clock needs a power source, like a falling weight or a coiled spring. It needs a pulsing mechanism, like a pendulum or an oscillating balance wheel. It needs an escapement device that breaks the clock's motion into precisely timed segments. And finally it needs a gear train to transmit the timed pulses to the display mechanism.

 

The heart of a mechanical clock is the escapement mechanism, a pulsing device that breaks up the gear actions into precisely timed segments. In the illustration, the pulse is provided by the pendulum, which tilts the anchor from side to side to interrupt the turning of the escapement wheel at top. Note the very precise shape and fit of the anchor tips and escapement wheel teeth.

The evolution of clocks marched to the accelerating tempo of commerce. The workdays of farmers and peasants extended from dawn to dusk, but the quitting whistles at Massachusetts's new textile factories were governed by the clock, and owners tracked output by the minute. Before Terry, American clockmakers worked to order, making expensive products for commercial men, who actually needed them, or for the wealthy, who merely enjoyed them as display and conversation pieces. The standard American clock was a pendulum-driven “tall-clock” design.

Almost all clockmaking was machine-assisted, for few craftsmen could cut out a seventy-eight-tooth gear by eye. Since the machinery was mostly
executed in wood, however, only remnants have survived. Turn-of-the-century clockmakers usually powered their tools with hand cranks and foot treadles, although water-powered machines were coming into wider use. Small mechanical saws cut gear teeth. (Jigs were used to clamp several gears together so the saw could cut a number of gears at a time, ensuring that they were uniform.) Indexing devices moved the tool the precise distance to the next tooth. Simple dies were used to draw hot metal into proper-diameter wire. All were supported by a great variety of special-purpose measuring tools and gauges.

Despite Eli Terry's importance in the history of clockmaking, he left a frustratingly sparse record.
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He was born in Connecticut in 1772 and served as an apprentice to two well-known clockmakers, one of whom, Benjamin Cheney, specialized in wooden clock movements. Hardwood gears, usually of lignum vitae, were quite durable and much cheaper than brass.
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In 1793, Terry went into business on his own, making both brass and wooden clocks. In his early years in business, he would make three or four clocks at a time and then take to horse as a peddler, with the clocks strapped around his body on the saddle. He was also an experimenter. In 1797, he was awarded a patent on an “Equation Clock,” showing both solar and solar mean time, an impressive achievement,
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but too expensive for his market.

It was Terry's disappointment with the Equation Clock that sparked his interest in the trade-off between volume and price. In 1802, Terry
found sufficient sales outlets to drop his peddling and built a small water-powered factory that employed several apprentices and workmen. When he announced his intention to build clocks by the thousand, a local wag mockingly guaranteed to purchase the thousandth—and was soon forced to make good his bargain.

Then in 1807, Terry made a historic contract with two merchant-brothers, Levi and Edward Porter, to supply them 4,000 clocks over three years. Terry spent the whole first year creating and organizing a larger water-powered factory in a converted grist mill. He produced 1,000 clocks in the second year, and the remaining 3,000 in the third. (Terry produced only the movements, or innards of the clocks, which was normal practice; the Porters contracted with others for the decorative cases.)

And then Terry retired, selling his business and licensing his patents to two joiners who had worked at his plant, Seth Thomas and Silas Hoadly. The Thomas-Hoadly partnership did well, but the two soon went their separate ways. Hoadly became a locally successful clockmaker, while Seth Thomas clocks became a national icon. All of Thomas's early clocks were Terry designs.

But Terry had retired only to rethink his clock designs, and he resurfaced in 1814 in a new factory dedicated to his Connecticut shelf clock, one of the two or three greatest manufacturing successes of the first half of the century. No previous clock had come close to achieving such durability and accuracy in such a portable form at such a low price point. The pendulum and weight hangings were much shorter and cleverly rearranged so they could fit inside a shelf-sized case.

But it was Terry's final iteration of the shelf clock that embodied the truly critical insight. Volume manufacturing requires rethinking product design along with manufacturing processes.
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The larger the number of
interacting moving parts, the greater the likelihood that small errors will propagate into large outcome variances. The hard way to solve that is to eliminate all the small errors. It's often better and easier to reduce the number of parts or, perhaps easiest of all, if the variances are not too gross, to build in a final adjustment at the last stage of manufacturing. That was the strategy Terry followed in his 1822 five-arbor shelf clock.

The tolerances required for gear trains to move clock hands or strike bells were tight by traditional standards but readily achievable with the current clockmaking technology. The quality of small gear-cutting machines and jigs and gauges had reached the point at which clockmakers could farm out gear making to home craftsmen. Scholars have remeasured stocks of contracted wooden gear teeth from early-nineteenth-century clockmaking shops, and they are indeed interchangeable: not exactly the same, but with variances well within the margins for acceptable performance.

The escapement tolerance, however—the accuracy with which the anchor
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impinged on the gear teeth of the escapement wheel—was much more demanding. As the motion of the pendulum jogs the anchor back and forth, its two tips slide in and out of the escapement wheel's gear teeth. Even small misalignments disrupt the movement. The most time-consuming task in clockmaking was (and still is in craft-centered watchmaking and clockmaking) the depthing. A depthing tool is a complicated vise that allows the craftsman to hold gears in proper alignment to drill their shaft placements on the clock plate. Placing the entire train so the anchor and escapement wheel emerged in near-perfect alignment required a master craftsman and took time.