America at the Fair

by Chaim M. Rosenberg

  The American sewing machine had its start in 1845 when Elias Howe Jr. of Spencer, Massachusetts, found a way to link the thread of a needle with an eye near its point to a shuttle carrying a second thread. Howe received a patent for his invention on September 10, 1846, but had no luck in convincing local tailors to use it. In despair, Howe set sail for England in the hope of making his fortune there. During his absence from the United States, Isaac Merritt Singer, William Emerson Baker, and Thomas White and others had each modified Howe’s invention and developed their own sewing machines. Elias Howe returned to find that others had succeeded where he had failed. After years of litigation he successfully sued his competitors for patent infringement. Howe was awarded royalties on every sewing machine sold in America. Now a wealthy man, he opened his own sewing machine company in New York, but died two years later at the early age of 48. Between 1850 and 1900 over 250 companies in America built sewing machines. After Singer, the most successful companies were New Home of Orange, Massachusetts, and Thomas White’s company in Cleveland. Many of the American companies were represented at the 1893 Fair in the battle for recognition and success.

  Thread and yarn were essential components of the textile and sewing machine industries. Early in the 19th century, the village of Willimantic Falls in Connecticut became the home of several cotton factories. After the Civil War, spools of thread from the Willimantic Thread Company followed the sewing machine in every American home. All Singer sewing machines came supplied with Willimantic Six Cord spool cotton. Willimantic Thread grew to be one of Connecticut’s largest employers, giving Willimantic its title of “Thread City.” Other major thread companies were the Merrick Thread Company of Holyoke, Massachusetts, and J.P. Coats. The Clark family started spooling cotton thread in Paisley, Scotland, as early as 1812. In 1855, George A. Clark was sent to the United States to participate in the growing American market and to open a factory in Newark, New Jersey, making Clark’s O.N.T. (Our New Thread) thread. By 1893, the Clark factories in Paisley and Newark together employed over 5,000 workers. Thread and yarn led to the growth of the wooden spool industry, centered around the town of Egypt, Maine. Here, white birch wood was cut and fashioned into spools to hold the thread. At the time of the Fair, the Willimantic Thread Company alone needed 70 million wooden spools a year to meet demand for its thread. Willimantic, Clark, Merrick, and other thread companies competed for recognition at the 1893 Fair.7

  19th-century Information Technology

  By the close of the 19th century the dusty ledger books, letters written with quill by a practiced hand, and the dots and dashes of the telegraph used to record business transactions were giving way to the telephone, mechanical typewriter, calculating machine, cash register, dictating and recording devices, copying machines, filing systems, and ticker tape. Bookkeepers and secretaries were in great demand as businesses grew larger and more complex. Typewriter companies trained young women to operate their machines. Equipped with typing skills and Pitman shorthand, the secretary became an indispensable member of the businessman’s staff.

  Pens with reservoirs with enough ink for hours of writing were displayed at the 1876 fair in Philadelphia by Aiken Lambert & Company of New York. These expensive fountain pens came with 18-carat gold nibs. Fountain pens used small rubber sacs to store the ink, but they were unreliable and the ink often leaked out. Lewis E. Waterman (1837–1907), a Brooklyn insurance salesman, used a fountain pen in his work. One of his clients was about to sign a sizable contract when the ink from the pen spurted out to form a large puddle on the paper. The customer took this as a bad omen and refused to buy the policy. Waterman was determined that this would not happen again. After much effort he invented a reliable fountain pen with grooves to direct tiny quantities of ink to the nib and allowing air to enter the reservoir, thus avoiding the vacuum. This capillary action worked well and by 1883 the Waterman “Drip No More” fountain pen, with a fiveyear warranty, sold well as gifts to businessmen and college graduates. The Waterman fountain pen came with a gold or silver nib and intricate designs along the casing.

  The typewriter was invented in 1868 and was prominently displayed in the 1876 Centennial Exposition. Remington Firearms was one of the first companies to make typewriters. The Remington was named the official writing machine of the World’s Columbian Exposition.

  Fountain pens were all the rage at the time of the Chicago Fair. Another pioneer was Paul E. Wirt, a Pennsylvania lawyer who began his experiments in 1880. By 1890 the Wirt fountain pen company, using the endorsement of the American author Mark Twain in its advertisements, was expanding sales across the nation. Major competitors were the Providence, Rhode Island, pen company founded by A. T. Cross, and the Parker pen company. The Parker family first arrived in the New World in 1633, among the settlers sponsored by the Massachusetts Bay Company. One branch of the Parker family settled in Connecticut and then moved to Vermont. In the early 19th century, Norman Parker moved his family in covered wagons to start a new life in the Midwest. His seventh child out of eight was George Stafford Parker, born in Shullsburg, Wisconsin, in 1863. Young George was not suited to the farming life but studied telegraphy and worked as a telegraphy teacher in Janesville, Wisconsin. Always a tinkerer, George Parker fixed his interest on an improved fountain pen. In 1892, the Parker Pen Company was incorporated and joined Lewis Waterman, A. T. Cross, and Paul Wirt in selling pens to an ever expanding market. Walter Sheaffer (1867–1946), a jewelry store owner from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, was yet another competitor. The section of the Manufactures Building devoted to pens also contained a vast array of office products including stationery, envelopes, letter presses, ink stands, filing cabinets, rulers, and pencils.

  The American typewriter had its start in 1868 in the Kleinsteuber Machine Shop in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Christopher Latham Sholes (1819–1890), a journalist and printer, along with his friends Carlos Glidden and Samuel Soule, met there regularly to trade ideas on how to succeed in the Age of Discovery. Using parts from a telegraph transmitter, Sholes and his machinist friends developed the prototype of the typewriter and obtained the patent on June 23, 1868. The early typewriter wrote only in capitals and used the QWERTY keyboard. Sholes did not have the money to develop his machine, and turned to James Densmore, a friend from Pennsylvania, for financial backing. The typed letter Sholes sent impressed Densmore, who saw the vast potential for the typing machine in business and in government. Densmore advanced the money and gradually acquired all the shares and the patent rights to the Sholes typewriter.

  Densmore approached Remington & Sons, an established firearms company, to mass-produce his typewriter. Eliphalet Remington’s company in Ilion, New York, made rifles used in the Mexican-American War and the Civil War (Blair 1983). In 1873, Remington agreed to make typewriters for James Densmore (Beeching 1974). The Remington typewriters, at $125 apiece, were prominently exhibited at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia and were a commercial success. Remington developed markets abroad and its exhibit in Chicago in 1893 featured typewriters adapted to 40 different languages. Remington typewriters faced stiff competition from over 140 American and many European companies. The typewriter companies at the Fair included the Writing Machine Company of Hartford, the Columbia Typewriter Manufacturing Company and Yost Writing Machine Company of New York, the Philadelphia Typewriter Co, and Munson Typewriter and Hammond Typewriter Company of Chicago. There were also many companies making typewriter paper, carbon copy paper, and ribbons. During the Panic of 1893, five of America’s leading typewriter companies—Remington, Caligraph, Smith Premier, Densmore, and Yost—merged into the Union Typewriter Company of America, known as the Typewriter Trust.

  James Jacob Ritty, who owned a saloon in Dayton, Ohio, developed the cash register. Ritty was losing money because some of his employees were stealing the cash. With his brother John, a trained machinist, he designed a device to record every transaction and to reduce theft. He called it Ritty’s Incorruptible Cashier and took out a patent in 1879.
In 1884, he sold his business to a local businessman, John Henry Patterson, who had made his money in the coal industry. Patterson renamed the enterprise the National Cash Register Company (NCR). In less than 10 years “The Cash,” as it was known in Dayton, had over 1,000 employees making 54 kinds of cash registers costing from $10 to $250. All the concessionaires at the Fair used NCR cash registers. Back in Dayton, the entrepreneurial Patterson opened a business school. Among the many people he trained was Thomas J. Watson, who went to work for the Computing Tabulating Recording Company, later renamed the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM).

  Yet another business machine innovator was William Seward Burroughs, born in 1857 in Rochester, New York, who made his way to St. Louis where he worked in a bank. Burroughs spent his free time at Joseph Boyer’s machine shop devising a machine that could do calculations and avoid human error. In 1885 he was awarded a patent for his calculating machine. He first called his company the American Arithmometer Company, but later renamed it the Burroughs Adding Machine Company.

  Heating and Cooking Equipment

  Kitchen stoves began to replace the open hearth early in the 19th century. Local blacksmiths fashioned cooking ranges and stoves from bog iron, but after 1830, factory-based mass production began to dominate. In 1838, Jeremiah Dwyer moved from Brooklyn to Detroit, where he apprenticed in a foundry to learn the metal-trade. In 1861 he started the Detroit Stove Works. He sold his business in 1869 because of failing health. Two years later, he was well enough to get back into business and established the Michigan Stove Company, makers of the Garland-Branch stove. One of the most remarkable sights in the Manufactures Building at the Fair was the mammoth Garland Stove, hailed as “The World’s Largest Stove” but made largely from wood. It was 25 feet tall, 30 feet long, and 20 feet wide, and stood on a large platform with several standard, iron Garland stoves underneath. Jeremiah Dwyer’s brother James established the Peninsula Stove Company. The Dwyer brothers and others built Detroit into the capital of the American stove industry. At the end of the Fair, the massive Garland stove was shipped back to Detroit where it remained for years. No one in 1893 could have guessed that stovemaking in Detroit would soon decline, as the machinists and iron workers shifted their skills to the newly established automobile industry.

  Marburg Brothers of Baltimore sold North Carolina tobacco. Tobacco leaves were pressed together into a solid plug and then finely cut. Taverns of the period provided spittoons for customers who chewed tobacco.

  The Michigan Stove Company was one of 80 stove and range companies that exhibited their products at the 1893 World’s Fair. Others on display included the Taunton Iron Works and the Magee Furnace Company from Massachusetts, the Spicer Stove Company of Rhode Island, Peckham Cooking Stoves of New York, and the Richmond Stove Company of Virginia.

  The parlor stove and the kitchen range provided heat and hot water during the winter months, as well as surfaces for cooking. Wood and coal hauled from outdoors were the usual fuels. The experimental all-electricity kitchen displayed in the Electricity Building caused a stir, but it took many more years before gas and electricity—much easier to handle and more efficient—were safe enough to replace old-fashioned coal and wood.

  Tobacco, Cigars, and Cigarettes

  The 1893 Fair had over 100 exhibits of tobacco and smoking paraphernalia. The tobacco plant was indigenous to the Americas and for centuries was used in ceremonies and as a medicine by the indigenous peoples. Christopher Columbus brought the plant to Europe, where the habit of smoking the dried leaves developed. Pipe smoking, chewing tobacco, and the taking of snuff entered into the character of British life. The invention of the cigarette-making machine in the 1880s reduced the price and made cigarette smoking increasingly popular. Early in the 19th century Pierre Lorillard opened a shop in New York to sell hand-rolled cigars and cigarettes. Over the generations, the Lorillards made their fortune from tobacco. Pierre Lorillard IV owned The Breakers in Newport, Rhode Island, which he sold to Cornelius Vanderbilt II. The Lorillards were followed by Philip Morris, who started his tobacco company on Bond Street, London, before expanding to the United States. Richard Joshua Reynolds, based in Winston, North Carolina, began selling chewing tobacco in 1875. From chewing tobacco R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company got into the mass production of cigarettes. Tobacco shops opened in towns across the nation, selling chewing tobacco, snuff, pipe tobacco, cigars, and cigarettes, as well as spittoons and pipes. At a time when many could not read or write, the wooden likeness of an Indian was set on the sidewalk to direct passers-by to the nearest tobacco store. Many of these “cigar store Indian” carvings were featured along the shopping streets up and down America. These carvings, along with the tobacco shops they advertised, went out of fashion in the 20th century and are now seldom seen.

  Miscellaneous Exhibits

  The American-made goods on display at the Manufactures Building were largely machine-made and mass-produced. Still, many of these products showed elegance and sophistication to appeal to an affluent market that previously preferred the foreign-made. The Brunswick-Balke Company exhibited its billiard tables, complete with cues and balls. Several furniture makers from Rockford, Illinois, commissioned the famous architect Henry Ives Cobb to design a model house in which to display their offerings. The show house had the “appearance of a perfectly furnished residence in every detail, which had been temporarily vacated by the owners in order to visit the World’s Fair” (White & Ingleheart 1893). The Rookwood Pottery Company of Cincinnati displayed its faience, made from clay deposits in the Ohio valley.

  C. G. Gunther’s Sons of New York had a display of fur coats, and Morton Converse & Company of Winchendon, Massachusetts, showed its wooden toys and children’s furniture. The latest in home heating was on display by A. A. Griffing Iron Company of Jersey City, and the American Lamp and Brass Company showed its line of products. The American pharmaceutical industry was rapidly moving away from quackery and folk remedies and toward a scientific foundation. Pfizer, Upjohn and Smith, Kline & Company began in America. Merck & Company, long established in Germany, expanded to the United States in 1891 and sponsored an impressive exhibit at the Fair.

  American mass-produced goods long competed with imports on price. The 1893 Fair showed that both the luxury and mass-produced goods made in America could also compete on variety and quality.

  7. AGRICULTURAL BUILDING

  The elegant building to house the agricultural exhibits was designed by the New York architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White. Charles McKim, the first among equals, was educated at Harvard and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He returned to the United States and worked for two years with America’s leading architect, Henry Hobson Richardson, before forming his own firm. His partner William Rutherford Mead was educated at Amherst College. The third partner was Stanford White, who honed his talent as Richardson’s principal assistant. The firm designed many distinguished buildings including the Boston Public Library, the Morgan Library in New York, and the Rhode Island State Capitol. The Agricultural Building stood in the southeastern area of the World’s Fair, close to the Forestry, Dairy, and Livestock pavilions. It was 800 feet long and 500 feet wide and occupied some 10 acres, with an annex half again as large.

  The foreign exhibits were clustered in the eastern part of the ground floor of the Agricultural Building. Among the spectacular agricultural displays was a mammoth cheese made by J. A. Ruddick of Perth, Ontario. The 22,000-pound cheese stood six feet tall and was 28 feet in circumference. Over 200,000 pounds of milk were used to make it. On April 17, 1893, the Canadian Pacific Railway Company ran the special World’s Fair Cheese Train to carry the giant cheese from Perth to Chicago. The Canadians also displayed their grains, jams, and beers. New South Wales showed bales of wool, the French displayed their champagne, wines, truffles, chocolates, and pâté de fois gras. The Maillard Company of France had a colossal statue of Columbus done in chocolate that weighed 50 tons. Nearby stood the 38-foot-high statue German
ia, built by the Stollwerck company out of 30,000 pounds of chocolate. The British displayed their fine hams, cheeses, beers, ales, and teas and brought over a model of a horse stable complete with saddles and harnesses. Scottish and Irish whiskeys, German canned and preserved foods, Japanese teas and silks, Brazilian grains and coffees, and Mexican tobacco, coffee, and liquor were all on display as well.

  Over 550 American companies and 33 states occupied the bulk of the main floor in the Agricultural Building to display the “unending variety and untold wealth of our natural resources” (Flinn 1893). Grains from Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio, and Missouri; rice from Louisiana; fruit from California; fine leaf tobacco from Kentucky; and tobacco, peanuts, and cotton from North Carolina filled the display areas. A veritable cornucopia of America’s breads, biscuits, sugars, syrups, tobaccos, whiskeys, fruits, vegetables, grains, cider, liquors, and canned goods was on show. The Heinz Pavilion on the upper gallery of the Agricultural Building displayed the products of this Pittsburgh-based company. Henry J. Heinz started out in 1869 by marketing his mother’s horseradish in glass jars. After horseradish came celery, pickled cucumber, sauerkraut, and many other products, until Heinz reached and exceeded his famous “57 varieties.” For the 1893 Fair, Heinz hit on the clever advertising device of handing out small green pins shaped like a pickle. Visitors attached the pins to their lapels and advertised Heinz products all over the fairgrounds. Millions of pickle pins were given out at Chicago and other fairs, carrying the Heinz name all over the world.