| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Networked Machinists: High-Technology Industries in Antebellum America. By David R. Meyer. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. xiv, 311 pp. $49.95, ISBN 0-8018-8471-3.)

In 1916, a professor of mechanical engineering at Yale University named Joseph W. Roe published a study, English and American Tool Builders, that sought to identify important English and American machinists and machine tool makers, and to demonstrate how those makers were related in a seeming genealogy or network. Roe's work has served generations of historians of business, technology, and industry, as well as economic historians, whose work has, in some way, intersected with the history of machine tools and their makers. Machine tools are machines that make machines—lathes, drilling machines, milling machines, planers, shapers, grinding machines, and now computer-driven universal machining centers—on which both a modern manufacturing economy and a postmodern consumer economy rest. Economists call them capital goods and use their sale as an important indicator of the health of an economy. Especially in New England and the Middle Atlantic regions, the nascent machine tool industry served as the antebellum equivalent of today's high-tech industry and, argues the Brown University geographer David R. Meyer, machinists of that era correspond to the much-vaunted workers and entrepreneurs of our own era's Silicon Valley, who shift from firm to firm, spreading know-how and picking up yet more knowledge, only to move on, often founding new enterprises that exploit the knowledge and skills acquired along the way.

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