B005HFI0X2 EBOK (11 page)

In response to the California gold rush that began in 1848, Vanderbilt built his own canal through Nicaragua, to compete with a projected British-American canal across Panama under the Bulwer Treaty. His state-subsidized competitors in California paid Vanderbilt a fortune not to compete with them. Once again, he profited from greenmail.

When the Civil War began, Vanderbilt became the shipping agent for the War Department. He profited from the fact that he was both buyer and seller. Following the Civil War, Vanderbilt used the fortune he had made in shipping to invest in two other technologies: gas lighting and railroads.
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THE DAWN OF THE AGE OF RAIL IN AMERICA

In 1812, the American inventor Oliver Evans predicted: “The time will come when people will travel in stages moved by steam engines from one city to another almost as fast as birds fly—fifteen to twenty miles an hour. Passing through the air with such velocity—changing the scenes in rapid succession—will be the most exhilarating, delightful exercise. A carriage will set out from Washington in the morning, and the passengers will breakfast at Baltimore, dine at Philadelphia, and sup at New York the same day.”
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Unfortunately, Evans would not live to see his prediction come true. Apprenticed to a wheelwright, Evans moved in 1791 from his native Delaware to Philadelphia, the new nation’s temporary capital. His patent for an improved flour-milling machine was the third patent issued by the young federal government.

Along with Britain’s Richard Trevithick, Evans developed high-pressure steam engines as alternatives to James Watt’s low-pressure engines. In addition to building steam engines, Evans in 1804 provided the Philadelphia Board of Health with a device for dredging and cleaning the city’s docks, which he called the Oruktor Amphibolos (Greek for “amphibious dredger”). His work on a “steam wagon” did not succeed and, in 1819, worn out by business failures and money troubles, he collapsed of a stroke and died after learning that his shop in Philadelphia had burned down.
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In Britain in 1804, Richard Trevithick built the first steam locomotive. The technology developed rapidly until 1829, when George Stephenson’s
Rocket
won a widely publicized contest in Britain and inspired a railroad-building boom on both sides of the Atlantic. The United States imported locomotives from Britain before their domestic manufacture got under way in the 1830s. British imports also provided 80 percent of the iron rails used in American railroads before the Civil War.
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Among the American railroad pioneers were Colonel John Stevens and his sons. The elder Stevens was born into a wealthy landed New Jersey family with an interest in transportation; his father was a commissioner of the New Jersey turnpike system before the Revolutionary War and owned a merchant fleet. In 1826, with the assistance of his sons Robert Livingston Stevens, the mechanically adept member of the family, and Edwin Augustus Stevens, the colonel demonstrated a workable steam locomotive on a circular track on his wooded estate near Hoboken, New Jersey. In 1830, his sons founded the Camden and Amboy Railroad, which, together with a canal connecting the Delaware and Raritan Rivers, reduced travel time between New York and Philadelphia to a mere nine hours. The early railroads, like the canals, were built by cities competing with other cities to capture the trade of nearby areas.

Colonel Stevens wanted to develop his Hoboken property into a resort for Manhattanites. To serve as a ferry he completed a steamboat, the
Phoenix
, a year after Robert Fulton’s
Clermont
was launched. But the monopoly on steamboat navigation that Fulton and his financial backer Robert Livingston had secured from the New York legislature forced Stevens to use his boat on the Delaware River. To arrive there by traveling along the Atlantic coast the
Phoenix
became the first oceangoing steamship.
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FROM WOOD TO COAL

Until after the Civil War, when prices began to rise because of logging-induced deforestation, the abundance of wood from America’s forests delayed the transition in the United States from wood to coal that Britain had pioneered. For the same reason, the United States lagged behind Britain in shifting from the use of charcoal to that of coke in blast furnaces.

The earliest American trains burned wood rather than coal. This permitted them to be painted in gaudy colors instead of the black that became standard later when coal-burning engines emitted sooty smoke. Showers of sparks from the engines of early wood-burning trains burned holes in the clothes and luggage of passengers and ignited forests along the rail lines.

The commemoration of the Declaration of American Independence on July 4, 1828, was marked by similar ceremonies in Washington, DC, and nearby Baltimore, Maryland. In Washington, President John Quincy Adams struggled in the heat with a beribboned spade to mark a new beginning for the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal to which George Washington had devoted so much effort. Meanwhile, in Baltimore, an elderly founder, Charles Carroll, laid the first stone for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. The B&O ultimately doomed the C&O; the canal would eventually reach only Cumberland, Maryland, and then fall into disuse, having lost traffic to the railroads.

At first the B&O employed horse-drawn rail cars. Then in 1830, the inventor Peter Cooper’s experimental locomotive
Tom Thumb
showed the company its future. The chief engineer of Charleston’s South Carolina Canal and Railway Company, Horatio Allen, observed: “There is no reason to expect any material improvement in the breed of horses in the future, while, in my judgment, the man is not living who knows what the breed of locomotives is to command.”
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Following the example of
Tom Thumb
, most locomotives switched from wood to coal. The American version of the locomotive developed its own distinctive features, including the cowcatcher. Collisions between early trains and livestock angered farmers, who sometimes pelted the outlandish vehicles with rocks or even shot at them.

By the beginning of the Civil War, US railroad mileage exceeded that of Britain, France, and the German states.
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The railroad network was thickest in the Northeast and Midwest. In 1860, the South had only 29.2 percent of the nation’s total railroad mileage.
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Unlike the British railroad industry, which used double tracks so that trains could pass one another, most American railroads used single tracking. This allowed much larger areas to be crossed sooner, but created dangers of collision that were ultimately reduced with the help of the telegraph.

WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT

Like most technologies, the telegraph evolved incrementally, with a number of people working on the same problems and producing similar innovations at the same time. “Inventors” should really be called “improvers.” While others preceded him in experimenting with using electricity to send messages, Samuel F. B. Morse, a painter and a professor at New York University, devised a system that used electric pulses along a wire to move a magnetic marker that wrote the symbols of Morse code on a strip of paper.

Much of the credit for the electric telegraph should go to Joseph Henry, the scientist who directed the Smithsonian Institution. In 1830, Henry caused a bell to ring by sending an electric current through a wire from a point a mile away. Building on Henry’s work and that of others, and funded by his business partners Alfred Vail and Leonard Gale, Morse obtained funding by Congress for a telegraph line linking Washington, DC, with nearby Baltimore, Maryland.

On May 24, 1844, Morse sent a line selected by the daughter of a friend from Numbers 23:23, “What hath God wrought?” to Baltimore from the chambers of the Supreme Court, then located in the Capitol Building in Washington. A few weeks earlier, on May 1, Morse’s business partner Alfred Vail had wired the news from Annapolis Junction, between Washington and Baltimore, of Henry Clay’s nomination as president by the Whig Party at its Baltimore convention.
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Overland telegraphy was followed quickly by submarine telegraphy, when the first submarine cable connected Dover and Calais in 1851. In August 1858, a transatlantic cable permitted President James Buchanan and Queen Victoria to exchange messages.

“HELL WITH THE LID OFF”

The Pennsylvania coal seam spreads across an area of more than eleven thousand square miles under the Appalachians from Pennsylvania to Alabama. Most of the coal is soft or bituminous coal. Much of the world’s supply of hard or anthracite coal, which burns more cleanly than soft coal and even wood, is concentrated in eastern Pennsylvania.

In the 1830s, skilled Welsh iron-goods makers, experienced in working with Welsh anthracite, were imported by coal-mine owners to transfer their skill in using anthracite in iron smelting. Improved iron-making technology led to dramatic decreases in the price of iron, enabling manufacturing enterprises using coal-fired steam engines and iron machines to flourish between the 1830s and the beginning of the Civil War. Among the earliest railroads in America were the rail lines that led out of the anthracite mines of Pennsylvania, where mules dragged carts of coal uphill along rails.

Coke is a compound of carbon and ash created by burning coal in controlled conditions to drive off gases. The British pioneered the use of coke made from soft coal to replace charcoal in making iron.

Eastern Pennsylvania was rich in anthracite coal that could only be used as a fuel in blast furnaces on a large scale after the “hot blast” method developed in Britain in the 1820s was adopted in the United States. Because coke had to be shipped by water or rail, Pittsburgh’s proximity to anthracite and bituminous coal mines gave it an advantage over other manufacturing cities. Already before the Civil War, the smoke from its factories combined with its glowing, volcanic furnaces inspired a journalist to name Pittsburgh “Hell with the lid off.”

THE AMERICAN SYSTEM OF MANUFACTURING

The federal government played a limited but important role in technological development before the Civil War. The US Army assigned some of its engineers and officers to conduct surveys for railroads. In the 1830s, the federal government gave Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute a grant to study the causes of steamboat boiler explosions. The research produced innovations in the industry.
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The most important contribution of the federal government to early industrialization in America came from the army arsenals at Springfield, Massachusetts, and Harpers Ferry, Virginia. They were the incubators of the “armory system” that revolutionized manufacturing in the United States and the world. The phrase “the American System,” used to describe Henry Clay’s program for national economic modernization by means of tariff-based import substitution, a central bank, and infrastructure investments, is also used to describe the system of using interchangeable parts in manufacturing.

The American system of manufacturing ought to be called the French system, because it originated as “le système Gribeauval.” Jean-Baptiste Gribeauval was a French general who proposed to rationalize French arms production by assembling standard weapons from standardized components. Gribeauval’s idea was developed by Honoré Blanc. While serving as the US minister to France, Thomas Jefferson reported on his visit to Blanc’s factory in a 1785 letter to Secretary of War Henry Knox: “Supposing it might be beneficial to the U.S., I went to the workman. He presented me with the parts of 50 [musket] locks taken to pieces and arranged in combination. I put several together myself taking pieces at hazard as they came to hand, and they fitted in the most perfect manner. The advantages of this, when arms need repair, are evident.”
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Jefferson sent a copy of a pamphlet by Blanc to Knox. In 1793, a French military engineer who had served in the American War of Independence with Lafayette named Major Louis de Tousard fled the French Revolution and joined the US Corps of Artillerists and Engineers when it was formed in 1795. Tousard’s 1798 proposal for a school of artillerists and engineers influenced the design of the US Military Academy at West Point, and in 1809 he published a three-volume treatise, the
American Artillerist’s Companion
.
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The ideas of Gribeauval, Blanc, and Tousard were brought with them by the American military engineers who worked at the federal arsenals founded in 1794 at Springfield and at Harpers Ferry in 1798. The army negotiated contracts with private arms makers. Eli Whitney promoted the idea of mass-producing muskets, but failed to deliver. Simeon North was more successful, creating a milling machine that allowed quick creation of uniform parts to help him carry out a large contract for pistols.

The first head of the US Army Ordnance Department, Colonel Decius Wadsworth, who had served with Tousard in the Corps of Artillerists and Engineers, along with his assistant and eventual successor George Bomford, used his authority over the federal arsenals to work with private contractors to develop interchangeable-parts assembly. One contractor, Thomas Blanchard, invented the Blanchard lathe, which reproduced irregular shapes like musket stocks or ax handles in wood. A Maine craftsman, John H. Hall, developed a breech-loading rifle he had invented. (He was forced to share the royalties for his invention with William Thornton, the commissioner of patents, who insisted that he be named as coinventor.)

By the 1830s, Hall at Hall’s Rifle Works at Harpers Ferry and Simeon North in his Massachusetts factory were refining what became known as “the Armory practice.” Between that period and the Civil War, the Springfield Armory under the leadership of its superintendent, Roswell Lee, led the way in developing advanced machine tools and training mechanics who diffused armory-practice techniques through emerging civilian industries.

One of those industries was civilian gun manufacturing. After failing in his first attempt to manufacture his patented revolver, Samuel Colt succeeded when he hired a former master armorer from Springfield named Thomas Warren. Lebbeus B. Miller, a veteran of a firearms company in Newark, introduced what was by now known as the American system of manufacturing to the sewing-machine industry, when he was hired in 1863 by Isaac Merritt Singer. Cyrus McCormick, the inventor of McCormick’s reaper, struggled with the production of his product until he hired a veteran of Colt’s company and other firearms companies named Lewis Wilkinson. When the British safety bicycle made bicycling popular in the United States, armory practice spread to that industry as well. George A. Fairfield, a former contractor at Colt’s Hartford plant, became superintendent of the Weed Sewing Machine Company, which in spite of its name manufactured a variety of products, including the early bicycles of the leader in the industry, the Pope Manufacturing Company, and then early automobiles.
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