Networked Machinists: High-Technology Industries in Antebellum America (review)

How did antebellum American industry grow? In The Roots of American Industrialization (2003), David R. Meyer argued that the success of diversified agriculture in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic drove the economic engine of rapid, innovative industrialization. Now in Networked Machinists he delves into the dynamics of innovation itself. How did American machinists—those who made, repaired, and invented metal-fabricating machinery and machine tools—so rapidly become world leaders in their industrial craft?

The answer, according to Meyer, lies in the personal and occupational networks that connected machinists in metalworking firms in the early nineteenth century. Concepts from sociology and network theory anchor Meyer's interpretation, most significantly the notions of communities of practice and the artifact-activity couple. Antebellum machinists learned their trade on the job. Apprentices and young journeymen picked up skills from master craftsmen. Shopmates worked together to solve mechanical problems. The most talented machinists jumped from job to job, drawn by the chance to solve bigger problems, build a whole factory, or earn princely wages. In each new place, machinists exchanged ideas, encountered new machines and methods, and taught one another.

Because the same skills were required for machine work in many industries, machinists moved freely between iron foundries and machine shops that made steam engines, textile factory equipment, locomotives, and firearms. Their alternating clustering and movement created communities of practice whose common skills and fraternal relations transcended business boundaries and outlived individual firms. Machinists formed a brotherhood; "they exhibited little loyalty to their firms" (p. 5) but gave lifelong support to their friends' careers. The locus of their learning and friendship was the artifact-activity couple, the common enterprise of machinists' work on machines.

Meyer provides a wealth of examples of communities of practice. These collectivities of skill became most cohesive and effective when a brilliant inventor or organizer stayed for some years at a large, heavily capitalized machine shop. Elisha Root's presence at Samuel Colt's Hartford Armory is one example. Such places and individuals became "hubs" that attracted other gifted machinists. "Nests" of machinists in manufacturing centers became rookeries of innovation. (Mechanical and organic metaphors alternate in Meyer's writing.) The leading centers are well known to industrial historians—Boston and Worcester, the Fall River and Blackstone Valley region, greater New York City, and Philadelphia and its industrial hinterland. What Meyer clarifies for the first time is how freely information flowed between industries because of the supra-institutional networks of skilled machinists. He provides a new image of mechanization as a broadly based yet closely integrated phenomenon. This insight is key to his revisionist argument that the machine tool industry emerged gradually from American manufacturing as a whole and that machine tool manufacturing remained a dispersed activity until after the Civil War.

Meyer indisputably proves that close personal connections and multiplying contacts among machinists facilitated intellectual exchange, which in turn spread best industrial practice within and between manufacturing centers. Network theory predicts that hubs (whether individuals or firms) with fewer or less diverse contacts would lose their competitiveness and produce fewer innovations than hubs with many and varied contacts. Meyer provides only one detailed example of the negative case: the lackluster performance of Harpers Ferry Armory, which suffered from being geographically isolated and managed by men of limited vision. He leaves it for others to test his interpretation in the antebellum South, where initially well-connected Northern mechanics and engineers established industrial operations far from the East Coast's metropolitan-industrial nexus.

As a systematic, thorough scholar, Meyer keeps a tight rein on his story. His book is an excellent synthesis of decades of scholarship. As a synthesis, it cannot answer all the questions it raises. The questions I find most compelling relate to the factors that promoted the proliferation of machinists' networks in the antebellum era. How important was the U.S. patent system in rewarding inventive machinists? Were machinists everywhere and at all levels of skill as...