Technology

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TECHNOLOGY

The first generations of colonists brought their traditional tools with them from their homelands. Faced with a new environment, they soon supplemented their well-known practices with the skills and knowledge of Native Americans and enslaved Africans imported to North America. Although the word "technology" had been introduced in the seventeenth century, colonists spoke of the "mechanick arts," "tools of husbandry," "useful arts and sciences," and "ingenious improvements," all reflecting the combination of practical knowledge and artifacts.

Early American technology involved simple hand tools, made largely of wood, and consumer goods produced, like the tools themselves, one at a time by skilled artisans. Improvements came haphazardly, indicated directly by the experience of tool users, and tended to have only local, fleeting impact. However, colonists recognized the limits of their knowledge, the constraints of their tools, and the potential benefits of improvements. Thus they learned how to adopt, adapt, and invent technologies.

Between 1690 and 1780 Americans revolutionized their technological and material world as well as their political world. Indeed, technology would come to have a special role in the development of an American identity and political ideology. Technology's political significance was every bit as important as its role in the new nation's economic system and the everyday lives of its citizens.

innovations

Despite innovations in agricultural technology, such as Thomas Jefferson's plow design and the evolution of the cradle scythe for wheat harvesting, the major influences on agricultural practice came from mechanical innovations in processing. Hand tools were augmented by complex machines and inanimate power sources. Eli Whitney's 1793 cotton gin increased the efficiency of preparing cotton fibers for spinning and weaving, permitted the use of short-staple cotton, which was better suited to the inland climate and soil conditions, and encouraged the western spread of a cotton monoculture tended by slaves. The automatic flour mill invented by Oliver Evans in 1795 not only increased the efficiency and quality of milling but demonstrated the principles of product flow, mechanical systems, and automation through mechanical contrivances.

Woodworking, textile, and papermaking machinery required higher speeds, greater precision, and improved durability of machine components. To meet this need, iron was substituted for wood. However, because those skilled in these fields recognized that machinery might be improved or replaced before it wore out, wood, the less expensive material, often sufficed. Still, at the time of the Revolution, America was the world's third-largest producer of iron and also produced steel needed for edged tools and arms. After the Revolution both trades were decimated by the importation of cheap British iron. The drive to succeed inspired an extensive and increasingly sophisticated machine-tool industry. These "machines to make machines" enabled the necessary and continuous changes in technology.

The adoption of steam power for manufacturing was slowed by the abundance of the more familiar, less expensive waterpower available to Americans. But the very existence of America's extensive river system made the application of steam power to transportation even more attractive. John Fitch's pioneering work in 1787 and the prominent success of Robert Fulton's North River Steamboat of Clermont—better known as the Clermont—in 1807 began a rapid expansion of steam-powered water commerce, communication, and travel. By 1830 America had steam locomotives traveling some thirty miles of track and, within the decade, more than two thousand miles.

The need for easily repairable rifles led government gun makers to seek interchangeable parts, a concept that Jefferson had encountered in France and the British had come close to developing in the production of naval block-making machinery. Eli Whitney promised to produce guns with interchangeable parts in 1798 but failed to deliver. Between 1812 and 1830 innovators such as Roswell Lee, John Hall, and Simeon North in Springfield, Massachusetts, and later Harpers Ferry, Virginia, developed the system by employing uniform gauges, special-purpose machine tools, and a division of labor that focused each man on a specific tool or task. They also learned that these new techniques required the imposition of a new sense of discipline and organization among workers. Connecticut clock maker Eli Terry employed similar techniques in the quantity production of identical wooden-movement clocks between 1800 and 1830.

Seeking to exploit a growing worldwide demand for cloth and new British inventions, entrepreneurs organized textile production outside of the traditional household. The organization of production into factories challenged traditional family roles and community structures. Change began with the arrival in the United States of Samuel Slater, a British mechanic, who knew how to build spinning machines modeled after Richard Arkwright's seminal invention. Funded by the Quaker merchant Moses Brown and his son-in-law, William Almy, Slater's mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, began operation in 1790. In 1810 Francis Cabot Lowell formed the Boston Manufacturing Company with a dozen investors and hired a mechanic, Paul Moody, to construct a power loom. Lowell developed the pattern of combining waterpowered spinning and weaving machines under one roof and employing young women to tend them. Waltham and, after 1825, the company town of Lowell, Massachusetts, became the symbols of factory towns. Smaller mills spread throughout rural areas used similar technologies but hired entire families as workers and offered a different image of industry amidst a rural environment. Whether located along a rural stream or in a planned city, tended by "Lowell girls" or men and their families, these factories effectively combined innovative technology with an equally innovative vision of society.

ideologies

In technology as well as politics and morals, a "spirit of improvement" appealed to Americans. Yet they debated how technology related to their notions of freedom, progress, and perfectibility. What would be the role of manufactures in establishing economic independence and social stability in the new, over-whelmingly rural nation? Would innovations provide prosperity and would prosperity contribute to republican virtue or inequality and despotism?

Thomas Jefferson, well-known as a gentleman inventor, initially opposed manufacturing, fearing the growth of poverty, class distinctions, and urban blight. By 1812, however, he had moderated his views in light of the nation's economic needs. Laborsaving devices might even allow women and children to tend machines while men stayed in the fields; Jefferson's main hope for democracy lay in the maintenance of an agrarian society of economically independent small property owners. Philadelphia merchant Tench Coxe became the most prominent promoter of a political economy and republican virtues based on factory production.

For better or worse, technical innovation involving broad social consequences as well as immediate, practical results was now a common American experience, seemingly self-reinforcing and unremitting. When the Harvard lecturer Jacob Bigelow brought the word "technology" to the general public's attention with the 1829 publication of his Elements of Technology, Americans finally had a single word to convey the concept.

bibliography

Cowan, Ruth Schwartz. A Social History of American Technology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Hawke, David Freeman. Nuts and Bolts of the Past: A History of American Technology, 1776–1860. New York: Harper and Row, 1988.

Kasson, John F. Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America, 1776–1900. New York: Penguin Books, 1977; New York: Hill and Wang, 1999.

Rosenberg, Nathan. Perspectives on Technology. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976.

William S. Pretzer

Encyclopedia of the New American Nation