American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  One innovation, the twine binder, hardly looked imposing enough to revolutionize harvesting, but so it did. Men had for centuries walked behind reapers and rake, binding the straw into bundles—a slow and costly task. Then a new mechanical wire binder delighted farmers, until they discovered that bits of wire were showing up in cattle straw and even in flour. The twine binder, made of imported Manila jute and sisal rather than wire and employing an automatic knot-tying device, solved this problem so well that Cyrus McCormick sold over 15,000 of the new product in the single year of 1882.

  Tunnels and mines—iron and steel—jute and sisal: still other fields would attract the innovators. During the first decade after the Civil War, Samuel Van Syckel installed an oil pipeline near Titusville, Pennsylvania; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology opened with fifteen students; Congress legalized the metric system (but did not require its use); Maria Mitchell became, at Vassar College, the nation’s first woman professor of astronomy; America’s first refrigerated railroad car was built in Detroit; the American Naturalist magazine was founded; George Westinghouse invented air brakes; the Federal Meteorological Service was established as part of the United States Army Signal Corps; Luther Burbank undertook experiments with plant breeding; Popular Science Monthly began publication; Louis Agassiz founded the first American school to concentrate on oceanography. During the following decade, James Sargent and Halbert Greenleaf patented a time lock for bank vaults; Josiah Willard Gibbs applied the laws of thermodynamics to physical chemistry in his On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances; the American Chemical Society was founded; Asaph Hall, astronomer, discovered two moons of Mars; America’s first copper refinery was established in Connecticut; George Eastman patented a process for making dry photographic plates; the Archeological Institute of America was founded in Boston and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in New York; Hiram Maxim invented a machine gun and a self-regulating electric generator; surgeons began to use silk sutures instead of catgut; Lewis E. Waterman patented a practical fountain pen; smokeless gunpowder was developed; and all through this decade Thomas Edison and others were patenting invention after invention in the field of electricity, culminating in the decking out of the Statue of Liberty with electric arc lamps as she waited to be dedicated in New York Harbor.

  Americans seemed to be bursting with ideas, experiments, inventions, enterprises, projects. And why not? The nation offered an almost ideal setting for ambitious young men, inventive tinkerers, innovating leaders, risk-taking entrepreneurs. Its “relatively open and uncluttered scene,” in economist John E. Sawyer’s words, “the abundance of natural resources, the availability of labor and capital from abroad, the timing of 19th Century American expansion in relation to the long evolution of technology and of the institutions of market capitalism in the Western world—these constituted a set of conditions and objective possibilities without historical parallel....” A fluid social structure, largely unorganized labor, and a generally noninterfering national government doubtless helped. And the fact that white Americans were perhaps the best-educated population in the world helped even more; the investment in popular schooling in the 1840s and 1850s was now paying off.

  Marx, Engels & co. were not surprised by all this. They knew that the very heart of bourgeois rule was its technological dynamism, its incentives for higher productivity, its capacity to exploit scientific knowledge in manipulating the natural environment so as to satisfy human wants, whatever its colossal human cost in the end. There was a law, Marx said in Wage-Labor and Capital, a law of competition that gave capital no rest and continually whispered in its ears: “Go on! Go on!”

  If capitalistic incentive was the mainspring of progress, experimentation was the method. The test of successful experimentation was simple: What worked? And the test of what worked was simple, on the face of it: that which satisfied economic demand reflecting human wants and needs. This practical, empirical, utilitarian test had long been familiar, going back to Benjamin Franklin and his contemporaries. While paying tribute to Franklin’s earlier emphasis on things that were “useful,” Jefferson had complimented Thomas Cooper on the practicality of Cooper’s chemistry, in contrast to the chemists who had not, Jefferson felt, been attentive “to domestic objects, to malting, for instance, brewing, making cider... bread, butter, cheese, soap....” He hoped Cooper would make his chemistry “intelligible to our good house-wives.”

  It was the old American tradition of practical experimentation—but it held possible dangers to longer-run progress. Technological development in America had typically consisted of experimental, step-by-step advances, conducted “by guess and by God,” in specific, narrow fields calling for mechanical skill and ingenuity. The tinkerers and inventors had not conceptualized outside their fields because of the tradition of practicality, the immediate needs of hoped-for investors and customers, and the fact that their technical educations had been in the shop rather than in the science laboratory or lecture hall. “Our greatest thinkers,” a practical man boasted, “are not in the library, nor the capitol, but in the machine shop.” This view was understandable; before 1870 the nation had no journal wholly devoted to the subject of chemistry. But it meant that inventors might become imprisoned within specialities becoming obsolete, like mechanics improving the horse carriage while ignoring the advent of steam.

  Alexis de Tocqueville had glimpsed the problem. Americans, he said, “always display a clear, free, original, and inventive power of mind.” But hardly any of them, he went on, “devotes himself to the essentially theoretical and abstract portion of human knowledge,” to the “loftier spheres of the intellect.” Still, he granted, all the “energy and restless activity” could “bring forth wonders.”

  That Americans were developing a capacity both to bring forth wonders and to exploit broader scientific concepts began to be apparent, however, toward the end of the nineteenth century. It occurred in a world far beyond that of the horse, the steamboat, the locomotive; it occurred in the mysterious field of electricity. Early in the century, André Marie Ampère of France and Michael Faraday of England had pioneered with theories of electromagnetism. The main early work in the United States was carried on by men who came to be entranced by electricity and spent their lives studying and applying it. Thus Joseph Henry of Albany advanced the technology of the electromagnet as he increased the magnetic power of its core by means of thickened insulation. Thomas Davenport, a Vermont blacksmith, without training in electricity or any science, for “some unaccountable reason” saw in a new magnet a possible source of power, built a crude little machine with four battery-powered electromagnets, fixed two of the magnets in a wheel, and found that he could revolve the wheel as he applied current. This discovery made possible the first commercially successful electric motor.

  Alexander Graham Bell had been following still another tune, and one that at the start had little to do with electricity. Son of an Edinburgh phonetician who specialized in acoustics and teaching speech to deaf children, Bell had emigrated with his family to Ontario in 1870 and soon moved on to Boston, where he began to conceive a way to transmit the actual sound of the human voice through an electric current. For many months Bell and an assistant, Thomas A. Watson, experimented with pairs of telegraph instruments until one day, when Bell was in one room, routinely tuning the receiving reeds, and Watson was in another, plucking the transmitting reeds to send the right pitch, Watson tapped a stuck transmitter to start it vibrating. Suddenly Bell heard a “twang” on his receiver that he knew instantly to be sound from the vibration induced by a current over the wire from Watson. Amid mounting excitement, Bell had Watson pluck the reed again and again while Bell held the variously tuned receiver reeds against his ear.

  By the end of that afternoon, Bell knew that speech could be transmitted electrically. But nine more months of experimentation passed before the two men could transmit intelligible words at their true pitch and loudness. After many tests of more sensitive transmitters
and receivers, Bell, one Friday in March 1876, made his last adjustment—adding a speaking-tube mouthpiece—and shouted into the mouthpiece to Watson two rooms away: “Mr. Watson—come here—I want to see you.” When Watson burst into his room, Bell was delighted but still not sure. Repeat my words, he told his assistant. Watson: “You said, ‘Mr. Watson—come here—I want to see you.’ ” Then Bell knew for sure.

  By the late seventies, it appeared that the man who might eclipse Bell and all other Americans in the field of electricity was the practical experimenter par excellence: Thomas Alva Edison. Everything in Edison’s early life had seemed to conspire to make him a mere tinkerer. He was born to a family so little concerned about his formal education that his parents let him leave school at about age twelve to do odd jobs around Port Huron, Michigan, and sell newspapers and candy on the local railroad. With his rumpled clothes, his cowlick, his rough speech (partly because of early deafness), and his tobacco chewing and spitting, he became a kind of Huck Finn of the railroads as he knocked about the Midwest. All the while, he showed a devouring interest in mechanics, saved his money to buy chemicals and batteries, developed an amazing facility both in mastering telegraphy and in turning an unused smoking compartment into his own personal laboratory, and patched up the crude machines of the day. Within a few years he devised improved telegraphy, a legislative vote recorder, a stock ticker, a carbon telephone transmitter, and—most originally—a phonograph.

  Nowhere was Edison’s empirical style of innovation more vividly illustrated than in his search for a practical incandescent lamp. In the 1870s, Americans were already lighting their city streets, department stores, hotels, and factories with arc lamps. Consisting essentially of two electromagnets between which an arc flared when voltage was applied, these lamps produced such an intense light that people came from miles around to watch them turned on, and even fell to their knees in fear and awe. Their intensity and size, however, along with a tendency to flicker, made arc lamps unsuitable for less public places; what was needed was a moderate, steady, easily controlled light. For years, inventors had been experimenting with incandescent lights, but they could not find a filament that would glow with a white heat and not be quickly consumed.

  Edison’s search for this filament became one of the great sagas of empirical investigation. “Somewhere in God Almighty’s workshop,” he is reported to have said, “there is a dense, woody growth with fibers almost geometrically parallel and with practically no pith, from which excellent strands can be cut.” He and his associates tested thousands of plants and grasses—even hairs clipped from the beards of staff members—and sent investigators to the jungles of South America and Asia until a species of Japanese bamboo seemed to work. More successful was a carbonized cotton filament that burned for forty hours.

  All through this and succeeding experiments—on electrical distribution, on a fluoroscope, on the magnetic separation of iron, on the storage battery, on a dictating machine and a mimeograph and a moving picture machine—Edison continued to pride himself on being the practical experimenter, to poke fun at theoretical scientists, to disdain the upper-class pretensions of the academic elite. Yet he had read deeply in Faraday and other scientists, he openly exploited scientific ideas, and he employed a mathematical scientist in his laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey. In effect he was an innovative and imaginative “man of science,” if not a man of strikingly original theoretical ideas. Perhaps more than any other inventor of note, he personified the marriage of science and technology in late nineteenth-century America—a marriage that would spawn both benign and malignant progeny in the century ahead.

  Investors: Eastern Dollars and Western Risks

  It was not easy to be an investor, even in the heyday of American capitalism and even when you inherited money. Charles Francis Adams, Jr., as he commuted between his idle and cheerless Boston law office and the ancestral home in Milton that could only remind him of his famous ancestors, alternated between periods of boring aimlessness and acute anxiety. His life was empty, “dull as ditchwater,” he confided to his diary. At times he felt like “tearing things.” Especially agonizing were the financial panics that periodically threatened his—and his wife’s—small fortunes.

  Adams felt too that he lacked courage, combativeness, the capacity to take risks and enjoy doing so. With sneaking admiration as well as disdain, he had written after visiting the New York Stock Exchange that he had seen “men as nature made them, with every affectation cast aside.”

  Investing called for more than available funds; it called also for a daring, an imagination, and an unquenchable confidence that were still remembered from the Boston of old and set the style for new entrepreneurs elsewhere. Men who had long sought their fortunes around the periphery of the Atlantic, in the Near East and the Far East, now turned to the uncharted resources of the American Midwest and West. And if the investors tended to define the West as anything the other side of the Connecticut River, or even of Dedham, they had overcome problems of terrain and technology, as in piercing the Hoosac barrier, that would anticipate greater challenges across the Appalachians and, later, the Rockies.

  “A happy New Year to you, my beloved husband!” Susan Sedgwick of Stockbridge had written in the early days of 1828 to Theodore Sedgwick, who had just proposed the building of the Boston & Albany Railroad at state expense. “May it preserve to you all your blessings, multiply your strawberries, extend your grapes, & build your RAILROAD!” Amid failing health and jeering skepticism, Sedgwick had seen the line extended from Worcester to Springfield before he died.

  Not even the trials and tribulations of railroading, however, could compare with the agonizing problems and dizzying profits of Boston’s greatest feat—opening up the copper lodes of Michigan. Mined by Indians for arrowheads and ornaments long before Columbus, the copper deposits lay in a small peninsula jutting out into Lake Superior. Everything seemed to conspire against profitable investment: the isolation of the copper country; the cost of shipping copper by lighters and shallow vessels on Superior’s waters, and then of unloading and reloading at Sault Sainte Marie; crude mining techniques that had miners digging by candlelight, hauling carts by their own labor, climbing up and down 100-foot ladders. But the Bostonians persevered, raising more capital and enlisting governmental aid. Their men on the peninsula installed steam hoists and pumps, modernized stamping and washing processes through “much trial-and-error fumbling” in William B. Gates’s words, and eventually solved the “special problems of the native, low-content rock.” Nevertheless, a host of old Bostonians lost their starched shirts as mines folded in the face of heavy costs and unstable world demand.

  Then persistence paid off for some in the discovery of sensational lodes at the Calumet and Hecla properties, later combined. Louis Agassiz, already renowned as a Harvard naturalist, reported to his brother-in-law, Quincy Adams Shaw, that with some of the lodes yielding an incredible 15 percent of copper, the value of Calumet and Hecla was “beyond the wildest dreams of copper men.” Between 1867 and 1872 the percentage of Michigan copper shipped by Calumet and Hecla rose from 8 to 65.About eight hundred predominantly Boston stockholders waxed for years on Calumet and Hecla dividends; owning C & H became a mark of financial perspicacity and a badge of social status. Some of the shareholders were far more equal than others in the huge fortunes they extracted from the mines; for decades the Shaws alone mined yearly dividends of almost $300,000 from the distant lodes on Superior.

  Still, it was railroading that seemed most to arouse the avarice and passions of Boston investors. John Murray Forbes, who had returned home from China at the age of twenty-four after making a fortune in Canton representing a Boston countinghouse, came to exemplify the bold “general entrepreneur” defined by Thomas C. Cochran as owning a big share in many ventures but tying himself down to none. Reluctant at first to break away from the world of seafaring and trading, he eventually plunged into railroad investment, led a group of capitalists in buying the unfinishe
d Michigan Central Railroad from that state for $2 million, pushed the Central to Lake Michigan and then to Chicago, and thereafter carried his little empire farther West to the Mississippi River and across Iowa.

  Some of these railroad leaders were self-made men; Chester W. Chapin, with only a few years of schooling, owned an ox team, tended bar, and operated steamboats on the Connecticut, before making enough money to promote western New England railroads and head the Boston and Albany. Most of the railroaders, however, were “college men” knit by family membership or close friendship into the economic and social elite of Boston. Many did their investing through Lee, Higginson, which in itself united a host of old New England families. It was to Henry Lee Higginson, a fellow Union officer who proudly bore a Confederate saber cut on his face, that Charles F. Adams, Jr., would turn for solace and advice.

  Within a decade or two of Appomattox, however, the old entrepreneurial spirit seemed to be dying out in Boston. Thomas Gold Appleton honored his father Nathan for building a vast fortune out of shipping and textiles, but he could not emulate him. Thomas, a Harvard man, had no interest in moneymaking and liked to spend his time abroad writing poetry, painting, and composing essays. His despairing father might well have wondered: Would John Adams have approved of this kind of third generation? Capital tied up in family trusts, according to Frederic Jaher, was often unavailable for new and bold business ventures. Men now concerned more with promoting education, religion, and the arts were increasingly distanced from the rough and grimy world of railroads, copper, and iron. Perhaps the most poignant symbol of all this was the fate of Daniel Waldo Lincoln, Chapin’s successor at the Boston and Albany, who fell from the observation train while watching the Yale-Harvard boat race in 1880 and died.