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Reviewed by:
  • Ed Bacon: Planning Politics, and the Building of Modern Philadelphia by Gregory L. Heller, and: Engineering Philadelphia: The Sellers Family and the Industrial Metropolis by Domenic Vitiello
  • Roger D. Simon
Gregory L. Heller. Ed Bacon: Planning Politics, and the Building of Modern Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). Foreword by Alexander Garvin. Pp. 320. Illustrations, notes, index. Cloth, $39.95.
Domenic Vitiello. Engineering Philadelphia: The Sellers Family and the Industrial Metropolis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013). Pp. 288. Notes, index. Cloth, $35.00.

Urban planning takes many forms. Ed Bacon was a planner by profession, and, as Gregory Heller shows in this sympathetic but balanced biography, Bacon’s ideas and plans have profoundly shaped the direction and landscape of Philadelphia since the mid-twentieth century. The industrialists of the Sellers family were not self-conscious planners in the same sense, but, as Domenic Vitiello persuasively argues in an excellent, multigenerational family biography, through their interventions in the economy, investments in the city’s infrastructure, and civic leadership, they shaped the future city just as much as Bacon.

In framing his study around two centuries of the same family, Vitiello enables us to see the critical importance of kinship and personal networks in building technical and entrepreneurial skills. He primarily focuses on the careers of Nathan (1751–1830), William (1824–1905), and Coleman (1827–1907) Sellers. From 1682 to 1780 the Sellers family ran mills and wove wire screens and sieves in Darby and Chester County. In 1780 Nathan relocated to Philadelphia and, together with his sons, grandsons, nephews, and cousins, over the next century produced the machine tools and equipment essential to the first and second industrial revolutions. Successive generations operated under various names, but mostly as Seller and Company and then as William Sellers and Company. Throughout the nineteenth century they reinvested their profits in their firms but also in city, turnpike, and canal bonds and in banks to build the infrastructure that solidified the city’s manufacturing dominance. The family’s interests also included Midvale Steel and Edge Moor Iron Works, among other firms. In the second half of the century William Sellers and Co. was the nation’s leading manufacturer of machine tools and power transmission equipment (shaft, gear, and pulleys). It developed interchangeable parts for a wide range of machines.

Sellers firms sat at the geographic and technological center of the city’s manufacturing economy. The machine tool works was located in the Bush Hill district (north of Vine Street, west of Broad), which they helped make [End Page 219] into a global center of machine builders. The industrialists and machine designers all knew one another and shared technical problems and knowledge. They drew on a dense network of highly skilled and well-paid machinists and draftsmen. William Sellers’s dominance in machine tools and gauges enabled him to establish the international standard scale for screw threads and to play a leading role in standardizing production practices across all heavy industry. William and his cousin, Coleman, consistently promoted and emphasized research on ways to improve production and products and collaborated with peers throughout the industry. The research they initiated at Midvale Steel on high-quality steel and on worker productivity they turned over to a young engineer named Frederick Winslow Taylor (brother-in-law of a Sellers partner). William and Coleman also made Philadelphia essential to the beginnings of the military-industrial complex. Midvale was the first American firm to produce steel for the new naval fleet. By the 1880s Midvale was the navy’s leading supplier of heavy ordinance. Dozens of other local firms produced parts and components for the new great warships, and most of them relied on the machine tools and equipment from William Sellers and Co.

By founding and nourishing the city’s key technical and cultural institutions, Sellers men and their fellow industrialists built in Philadelphia what Vitiello calls an educational-industrial complex. In addition to the Apprentice Library, the Social Science Association, and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, they were among the founders of the Franklin Institute and sustained it as the nation’s leading disseminator of technical knowledge during much of the century. They...

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