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Reviews
| Networked Machinists: High-Technology Industries in Antebellum America. By David R. Meyer. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2006. xi+311 pp., tables, charts, maps, notes, bibl. essay, index. $49.95 hb (ISBN 0-80018-8471-3).
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David Meyer, professor of sociology at Brown University with a PhD in geography, has tackled the daunting task of documenting the spread of technical knowledge among firms in the antebellum United States. Situated in the decades preceding the advent of American Machinist trade journal and before the Journal of the Franklin Institute had reached an extensive audience, this study details the circulation of machinist tools and techniques among major manufacturing sectors. Meyer finds that machinist networks accelerated the spread of technical knowledge among industries but at the same time reinforced regional competitive advantages in production.
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Elegantly spanning the fields of geography, sociology, business history, and the history of technology, this book should readily appeal to the diverse readership of Industrial Archeology. In spite of its interdisciplinary nature, Networked Machinists is very well organized. It provides smooth transitions among industries and guides the reader through complicated webs of firms and individuals, all the while maintaining a regard for chronology. Overall, it is quite approachable. Meyer avoids esoteric machine-tool terminology and provides clear explanations for his sociological jargon. Generously, he provides his readers with a concise essay on sources.
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Using patent data, U.S. censuses, personal correspondence, and assorted congressional documents, Meyer provides convincing evidence that the most successful antebellum manufacturing firms were linked by a network of highly mobile machinists. Antebellum machinists were not skilled operators of machine tools. Rather, they were multi-talented mechanicians, responsible for the design, maintenance, and continued improvement of capital equipment. Their careers were punctuated by frequent "job-hopping" among northeastern iron foundries, armories, locomotive builders, and textile producers. Meyer notes dozens of instances in which entrepreneurs made conscious efforts to transfer mechanical knowledge through the careful selection, recruitment, and remuneration of senior machinists. These connections were reinforced by frequent (and well-documented) visits among machinists seeking advice on technical issues. Intriguingly, the author does not indicate that management or workers demonstrated distress over the communal nature of intellectual property.
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Networked Machinists is divided into two parts. The first traces the formation of trade networks from 1790 through 1820, with chapters dedicated to iron foundries, textile mills, and armories. Meyer stresses the pivotal role of class structures in industrialization. As a social elite, leading machinists were the "quintessential successful bourgeois men" who used their ties to British industries to import advanced production equipment and talented mechanics (p. 5). As an economic elite, those machinists associated with early foundries "furnished potent support for the insertion of steam engines into urban and industrial life" (p. 31). Projects such as waterworks, factories, and steamboats proved especially provocative, and, when necessary, these craftsmen mobilized their political connections to attract government funding and protect the occasional budding monopoly. Significantly, while these foundry entrepreneurs regularly filled custom orders beyond their local markets, production runs did not present enough repetitive metalworking to rationalize intensive investment in innovative tools or techniques.
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During this time, American industry began to retool itself in response to a chronic shortage of machinists. Meyer makes the compelling argument that this deficit accelerated the flow of technical information among networked firms. In spite of their respectable salaries, senior machinists often shifted employment, and firms were hard pressed to control their movement. As a result, businesses connected to major hubs had access to the most talented craftsmen and the latest technological advancements. Often, these mobile craftsmen migrated from one industrial sector to another. Firms made advances toward primitive mechanization, not so much to drive down the cost of production or to reduce expenditures on wages but to offset shortages in skilled machinists. Thus Meyer's chapter detailing firearms manufacture is complementary to the works of Merritt Roe Smith and Robert Gordon, illuminating the uncertain, incremental, and geographically distributed nature of innovation that led to uniformity—but not yet interchangeability—in parts manufacture.
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Part II, The Elaboration of Networks, 1820–1860, details the steadily increasing real value of equipment per capita among iron foundries, locomotive builders, textile mills, and finally the budding machine-tool industry proper. Metalworking operations used to build capital equipment were in many respects transferable among these sectors. Thus, as equipment and men circulated among firms, developments in turning, cutting, grinding, power transmission, feed mechanisms, and metallurgy agglomerated within the network. This is not to imply that nascent demand for specialized machinery industry was evenly dispersed geographically or fiscally. By 1860, the production value of steam engines and related equipment ($47 million) towered over that of locomotives and textile machinery ($5 million each). Regardless of the substantial demand for steam engines in the South, the overwhelming majority of production remained entrenched in the northeast—among firms tapped into lively hubs of tradesmen. Although they differed across sectors and time, these primary network hubs included New York City, Philadelphia, Providence, and Boston.
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Meyer contends that, together, these sectors provided a seedbed for craftsmen and machines that precipitated the 1880s emergence of independent machine-producing firms turning out "extraordinarily sophisticated equipment." However he specifically dismisses the possibility that these advances were attributable to postwar firms, reasoning that the Civil War and 1873–79 Recession posed "economic disruptions," deterring technological development. Meyer concludes: "one can assume that these machines were already highly refined by 1860 without being produced in specialized firms, which implies that antebellum machinists had achieved significant advances in metalworking machinery" (p. 218). While it is easy to concede that antebellum machinists did initiate considerable technological advances, Meyer's thesis might be better served if he had defined what precisely amounted to "extraordinarily sophisticated" machine innovations and provided clearer evidence that features commonly attributed to the 1880s had in fact been present in machine tools for two or more decades.
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This book is not a celebration of machine tools. Meyer refutes the possibility that antebellum metalworking equipment could achieve the more exacting tolerances of hand operations such as filing or hand scraping. Tellingly, not one illustration contains a machinist or machine tool. Instead, Meyer has channeled a considerable amount of effort into collecting and assembling dozens of charts, graphs, and maps documenting the trends that influenced the supply and demand of manufacturing equipment in the antebellum U.S.
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| Yet this is not solely an account of successful careers, booming economies, and profitable firms. The author allows that many shops—mostly in the hinterlands—were not tapped into machinist networks. Meyer adroitly explains that because the networks themselves functioned as repositories of knowledge, they mitigated the effects of personal and institutional failure. In his own words: "technical knowledge and skills were embedded in networks; they were not solely the property of individuals or firms." Moreover, machine tools "embodied technical knowledge that was transmitted to other locations ... where local machinists could copy them and make further adaptations" (p. 253). Thus, producer durables—ranging from power looms to lathes—functioned as conduits of mechanical knowledge, legible to and transferred among networked communities of skilled workers. Of all plausible audiences, this observation ought to resonate most clearly with the readers of IA. |
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