7 Labor unrest during the 1880s and early 1890s over pay and the eight-hour working day led to strikes and shutouts. The Clark thread company fired many of its workers and imported others from Europe and Canada. The Panic of 1893 severely affected the textile mills and loom machinery companies as well as the thread companies. Many of the companies failed or were close to bankruptcy. In 1898, thirteen independent thread and yarn companies, including Willimantic and Merrick, merged to form the American Thread Company, based in Willimantic, Connecticut. Eight woolen mills were saved in 1899 through the efforts of William Madison Wood Jr. and Franklin Ayer, who formed the American Woolen Company, with its headquarters in Boston. By 1921 American Woolen owned 54 mills and was one of the largest textile companies in the world with 40,000 workers. The prominence of the New England mills and loom makers began to decline early in the 20th century as the textile industry shifted from the Northeast to the South and Midwest (Rosenberg 2007).
8 The Dodge company had a long life until 1967, when it merged with Reliance Electric to built power transmissions for automobiles. Years later Reliance-Dodge became part of Rockwell Automation.
9 In 1879, the Michigan Car Company took on the 16-year-old Henry Ford as an apprentice machinist. Ford was fascinated with steam and gasoline engines and went on to establish his own automobile company.
10 Henry Van Brunt was born in Boston in 1832 and attended Harvard College. He was a partner in the firm of Ware & Van Brunt, which designed the Memorial Hall at Harvard College and the Episcopal Theological Seminary at Cambridge among many other distinguished buildings. In 1888 he opened an office in Kansas City, Missouri. Van Brunt was one of a number of Harvard and MIT-trained architects who moved west to design grander buildings than conservative Boston would allow.
11 Westinghouse Electric also built large steam turbines to provide electric power to ocean-going vessels. With his work in electricity now well established, Westinghouse applied himself to the next big thing and built compressed-air shock absorbers for automobiles. Around the time of the Fair there were many Westinghouse companies in the United States, Canada, and Europe with 50,000 employees. George Westinghouse died at age 67. His chief competitors Thomas Edison and Elihu Thomson died in their mid-80s.
12 The first practical electric washing machine was marketed in 1906. The electric refrigerator replaced the icebox in the 1920s. In 1907 James Murray Spangler, working as a janitor in Canton, Ohio, was troubled by a bad cough. He concluded that the cause was the dust churned up by his manual carpet sweeper. He attached an electric fan to a soapbox supported by a broomstick and developed the world’s first electric vacuum cleaner. After more refinement he formed the Electric Suction Sweeper Company. One of the first customers for his electric sweeper was a relative, William Hoover (1849–1932) who owned a tannery business in the town. Hoover bought the patent and the Spangler vacuum cleaner was henceforth the Hoover. Since 1910, “hoovering” has been a synonym for vacuuming.
13 During the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) the Majestic was used to transport British troops to South Africa. In 1902, White Star was merged with several other shipping lines into the International Mercantile Marine Company, financed by J. Pierpont Morgan. Later, White Star built the “unsinkable” ships Olympic and Titanic. On April 14, 1912, the 46,000-ton Titanic struck an iceberg 400 miles off Newfoundland, Canada, on its maiden voyage, and sank with the loss of 1,000 lives. During World War I, several of the North German Lloyd ships sought refuge in American ports where they were seized and later sold for war reparations. The Teutonic was requisitioned by the Royal Navy as an armed merchant ship. After the War, the German company rebuilt its fleet, with the 774-foot, 35,000-ton Columbus, launched in 1924, the largest ship on the high seas. At the outbreak of World War II, the Columbus attempted a run to its home port but was pursued by British and American ships. Cornered, the Columbus was scuttled, but all 579 members of the crew were rescued by the Allied ships.
14 In 1901 Allis joined with Chalmers to form Allis Chalmers, which specialized in farm equipment, especially tractors. The steam compressors for the Fair were supplied by Ingersoll, Sargeant, and the Rand Drill Company. In 1905 these companies merged to form the Ingersoll-Rand Company. Most of the other companies displaying their power machinery in the annex of Machinery Hall have long since disappeared through merger or failure.
15 Nordyke & Marmon was a thriving agricultural machinery company until it shifted direction with its fascination for the automobile. From 1902 to 1933 Nordyke & Marmon was both a milling and an automobile company. One of their great cars was the Wasp, introduced in 1909. On May 30, 1911, a Marmon Wasp driven by Ray Harroun won the $10,000 first prize for the first Indianapolis 500-mile automobile race, in six hours and 42 minutes, with an average speed of 75 miles per hour. In 1916 a team of drivers drove a Marmon 34 across the country in a record time of under six days. The glory days of the Marmon car company came in the early 1920s when it built luxury convertibles. In 1926 Nordyke & Marmon sold its milling business to Allis-Chalmers but its car company failed in 1933 during the Great Depression.
16 Frick moved from Pittsburgh to New York, where he lived in a splendid mansion on East 70th Street and converted much of his wealth into masterpieces of art, including works by El Greco, Holbein, Titian, Rembrandt, Constable, and Goya. His mansion and its artworks form the Frick Collection, one of the cultural treasures of New York.
17 Brown Shoe was a major sponsor of the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, where it introduced its Buster Brown line of children’s shoes. The 1925 School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis was named for George Warren Brown. The company achieved its highest level of shoe production during the 1930s, with 30,000 employees working in 150 factories. By the 1980s Brown Shoe, together with all other American shoe companies, had reduced domestic production and shifted manufacturing abroad. The last of the Brown shoe manufacturing plants in the United States closed in 1995. The Brown Shoe Company has kept its presence in St. Louis for well over 100 years, but now imports the shoes it sells.
18 In the 1920s, Pratt & Whitney began to build aircraft engines. Still headquartered in East Hartford, Pratt & Whitney is now part of the conglomerate United Technologies, which makes jet engines, helicopters, elevators, and air-conditioning systems, among other products.
19 The Krupp exhibition in Chicago was not the first time the German company had displayed its guns on American soil. The mighty Krupp guns also drew huge crowds at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Krupp made precision armaments for the Russian and Turkish armies, and for any other country that could afford them. Krupp guns proved to be instruments of war and not protectors of the peace, however. The Boers used Krupp field guns against the British during the Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902 (Pakenham 1979). During World War I Krupp manufactured guns and cannons for the German Kaiser. The company’s formidable Big Bertha mobile howitzer (named for Friedrich’s daughter Bertha Krupp) was used with devastating effect against the French at Liege. During World War II, Krupp used slave labor to build armaments for the Nazis.
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