The Dawn of Innovation (15 page)

Terry's breakthrough was breathtakingly simple. He placed the escapement wheel and anchor outside the movement container, so it was accessible just by removing the case. And he placed the anchor on a moveable brass fixture. After the craftsman placed the gear train and closed up the
movement, he simply moved the anchor fixture to a good alignment, then locked it in place with two small nails. Problem solved—not by increasing manufacturing precision but by increasing the allowable margin of error for producing an excellent clock. A bonus was that if an escapement became misaligned or clogged over the years, it could easily be removed for cleaning and readjustment. It was win-win all around. Costs were cut, and prices fell, but nobody could challenge Terry's advertising slogan that his “Clock will run as long without repairs, and be as durable and accurate for keeping time, as any kind of Clock whatever,” because it was true enough.
¹²

 

The central challenge of craft clock-making is to align all the gears so the escapement device works properly. Even in Terry's first mass-produced clocks, it was a time-consuming task for a skilled clockmaker. His most ingenious breakthrough was a simple adjustment mechanism that greatly increased the allowable margin of error in gear placement.

Terry duly patented his five-arbor clock, but any clockmaker could see what he had done. Some major manufacturers, like Seth Thomas, paid him license fees, but the design was widely pirated. The five-arbor shelf clock design became the standard for almost all Connecticut clocks, although with many variations, and production shifted decisively to large-factory modes.

As Terry, Thomas, and other Connecticut clockmakers proliferated inexpensive clocks, peddler networks quickly grew up to handle the distribution. New England tinware makers, who provided all manner of kitchen goods, had extended their peddler networks throughout the country after the turn of the century. Merchants like Levi and Porter seeded new peddler networks for clocks, an ideal peddling product because of its high value to weight. Well-established peddlers paid wholesale prices—often on credit—for their goods, kept the markups, and hired other peddlers on a salary and commission basis. New men often had to post security for their wares.

As markets expanded, leading merchants or manufacturers set up regional operations to supply their peddlers; tinware makers often created satellite factories. Water-powered clockmaking was not feasible in most of the country, but clockmakers, or merchant houses with a strong clock trade, frequently used local merchants as storage points for peddler networks and arranged regional clock-case construction with local cabinet makers.

The Yankee peddler became an iconic figure in the Southern press: readers were regaled with tales of sharpster peddlers hawking goods at a ten-times markup to dim plantation masters. “Peddling” has a derogatory connotation now, but in the national market revolution that took place in the years after the War of 1812, peddling was a reputable, and often a lucrative, first step into a career in merchandising.
¹³

The sharp depression of 1837 winnowed the weaker clock manufacturers. Chauncey Jerome, a former Terry apprentice, took advantage of falling brass prices to lead the transition to brass. By the 1850s, his annual production was up to 280,000 movements a year. Jerome was also the first American clockmaker to enter the English market. At first London shops
mostly scorned his product, but one dealer took a few on consignment. When they sold immediately—even with duty, they were a lot cheaper than British clocks—the dealer took more that sold just as fast. Jerome therefore sent a large shipment invoiced at $1.50 apiece, which was seized by customs as an obvious case of “dumping” below cost. Customs seizure rules, however, required that they pay the vendor the invoiced amount. Jerome was perfectly happy with that, so he sent another shipment, which was similarly seized and paid for. Delighted, he promptly sent yet another, whereupon customs decided they had their fill of brass movements and let them through.
¹⁴
By the 1860s, it was taken for granted that clocks in the average British home had American-made movements.

Terry's brother and three of his sons also went into the clock business; Terryville, Connecticut, is named after Eli Terry Jr., the most successful of Eli's relatives. Terry himself retired from business in 1833 at the age of sixty-one and died in 1852. At retirement, he was rich enough to give away $100,000 and leave sufficient principal to draw an income of $3,000 a year—more than enough to live comfortably, which was the extent of his aspirations. His retirement years were spent working on clocks, mostly new designs for very large church clocks, apparently just for the fun of it.

American entrepreneurs approached textiles much as Terry approached clocks. The focus from the start was on inexpensive, highly uniform, broadly distributed products of “good enough” quality for the average consumer. In the first half of the century, no other new industry could match textiles in financial returns, employment impact, and technology spin-offs.
¹⁵

The United States never disguised its avarice for British textile technology. It refused to recognize British patents, and American entrepreneurs openly advertised for British power-spinning experts, who were forbidden by law from emigrating. Tench Coxe, Alexander Hamilton's
deputy at the Treasury, even sent an agent to England to procure machine drawings, but he was arrested. Great Britain's cotton districts were crawling with surreptitious American agents offering dreams of wealth and preferment for skilled artisans willing to risk prison for flouting the technology embargo.

In fact, few mule-spinning foremen, or even plant managers, were actually able to build working machines, although many would take American money to try. Samuel Slater, only twenty-one, turned out to be the rare individual with the ambition, the intelligence, and the thorough understanding of both spinning and spinning technology to create a working plant from scratch.
¹⁶

Slater was a farm boy who had been put to work in an early Arkwright-style water-powered cotton mill and eventually caught the eye of the mill owner and manager Jedidiah Strutt, who had helped finance Arkwright's first mills and subsequently gone into business replicating them. Strutt opened a new mill when Slater was fourteen and took Slater to the new site as an apprentice, giving him direct experience of the mill construction and start-up process. As he finished the apprenticeship, Slater worried that there was little room for advancement in the British textile industry. So he decided to take his chances in America, embarking in 1789 under an assumed name to evade watchful British emigration officers.

After Slater landed in New York, he worked briefly in a yarn factory, confirming the backwardness of American technology. Hearing that Moses Brown, a Providence merchant and a cofounder of Brown University, was seeking an experienced spinning mechanic, Slater contacted him and traveled to Providence. Brown had been burnt by useless yarn machinery, and an agreement was reached on a partnership to construct an Arkwright-style cotton mill, financed by Brown's advance of $10,000. The partners were Brown's son-in-law, William Almy; Smith Brown, a cousin; and Slater, who had a half share in both the profits and the debt from the advances.
¹⁷

Slater was the genuine article and, within a year, had an operating yarn factory, with water-powered carding (combing the raw cotton), roving (creating rough tubes of fibers), and spinning machinery. While he
worked on the factory, he boarded with the family of Oziel Wilkinson, the local machinist who actually built the equipment. He married Wilkinson's daughter, Hannah, who later won a patent on an improved cotton thread, and he frequently partnered with her brother, David, also a machinist, who earned a place in machining history for building a high-precision screw-thread/slide-rest lathe several years before Henry Maudslay.
¹⁸

The first small mill was operated with children, but Slater discovered that he would have to develop a different staffing model. American farmers didn't give up their children as easily as the British, and they kept vigilant eyes on their working hours. Slater's solution was to hire whole families. The father, who often kept working as a farmer on leased, mill-owned land, managed a contract for family production at the mill.

Americans had long-established merchant and peddler distribution systems for British yarns and cloth that Slater could tap into. It took a while for sales to catch on, since American-made yarns had a terrible reputation, but yarn merchants understood value, and word soon spread that Slater was producing basic yarns of British quality at excellent prices.

By 1799, the group had three mills up and running: the original one, another taken over by Almy and Brown and converted by Slater, and a third owned by Slater and Wilkinson—each one bigger than the last. Slater had no patent rights in any of his machines, but it was some years before he faced serious competition. Although the artisans he trained dispersed throughout the northeast, merely understanding the machinery wasn't enough. Cotton varies widely in its fiber lengths and tensile strength, and mill practices, process flows, and thread tensions all needed constant vigilance by experienced supervisors to maintain high-volume production.

Providence soon became the center of a new yarn-making district. Mills often sold both yarns and cloth, although the cloth making was contracted to home weavers using mill yarns. Slater-type spinning mills spread rapidly eastward into Connecticut and Massachusetts—a number of them with Slater capital and technology—and then to New York, where Utica became a major yarn center.

Samuel Slater was a fine technologist, but Francis Cabot Lowell was a visionary who, within just a few years in a sadly short career, created a uniquely American textile industry.
¹⁹
Born into one of Boston's elite merchant and shipping families, Lowell did a stint on one of the family merchantmen, concentrated on mathematics at Harvard, went into one of the family countinghouses, and eventually prospered in his own trading business. His health seems to have been delicate, and in 1810, at age thirty-five, wealthy but worn down by the constant stresses of his business,
^x
he took his family on an extended trip abroad. Wartime conditions curtailed plans for a continental tour, so the family spent most of their two-year sojourn in Scotland and England.

Whether Lowell intended to pirate British technology from the start isn't clear, but he made no doubt of his intentions when he met Nathan Appleton, his fellow Bostonian and merchant, in Scotland early in his trip. “Cotton Manufacture” was Lowell's primary focus, Appleton later recalled, for he thought it the kind of business that, if properly set up, could produce a reliable stream of steady, stress-free profits.

Lowell's mercantile friends gained him access to the mills; one can imagine him strolling through the plants, feigning languorous inattention while picking up countless trade secrets—the process flows, the details of gearing, and much else. Before he embarked for America, he also managed to secure copies of machine drawings that he slipped by customs. If that story is true, it seems vaguely dishonorable, and his friends may have been embarrassed when it was revealed what he had been up to.

When Lowell returned to Boston, he set about organizing his Boston Manufacturing Company. Everything about it was bold. The War of 1812
was just underway, and Massachusetts mercantile houses were staring at economic disaster. (Lowell's return ship, in fact, was taken by a British frigate, and he was briefly held in Nova Scotia.) It was created as a joint-stock company, an unusual form for the time, which preferred partnerships. The initial financing goal was enormous: $400,000, forty times more than the start-up investment in the first Brown-Almy-Slater spinning mill. But Lowell wanted to be absolutely sure of enough capital to carry the business through any reasonable early setbacks. His circular letter proposed an offering of one hundred shares, at $4,000 apiece, $1,000 of which would be paid at closing, with the remainder drawn from time to time as the company required.

The initial investors were an extremely tight group. Lowell's brother-in-law, Patrick Tracy Jackson, with whom he was quite close, took twenty shares, and Lowell himself took fifteen. Jackson was appointed agent, effectively the CEO of the new company.

The remaining shares were very much a “friends and family” offering. Jackson's two brothers took fifteen; two of Jackson's in-laws, John Gore and James Lloyd, took fifteen; while two of Lowell's relatives, Benjamin Gorham and Warren Dutton, took five between them. The roster was rounded out from among their merchant friends. The senior and junior Israel Thorndikes took twenty, and Uriah Cutting took five. The remaining five went to Nathan Appleton, who hesitated considerably before investing. He was probably the wealthiest of Lowell's close friends, and his reluctance evidences the skittishness of the investment climate.