Waterpower in Lowell: Engineering and Industry in Nineteenth-Century America (review)

Historians of technology may well wonder if there is anything more to say about Lowell, Massachusetts, and its textile mills. The answer is yes. Water-power in Lowell offers a fresh interpretive framework and new research, focused at the intersection of environmental and technological history. Patrick Malone chiefly describes the design and operation of the city's unique resource—the natural and technological system of water-generated energy that powered its massive brick mills for over a century. He tells that story from many angles, returning across the narrative to the remarkable career of James B. Francis, the longtime chief engineer/manager of waterpower at Lowell. With extensive original research, Malone goes well beyond all the earlier Lowell studies to describe Francis's remarkable career. The book's other major accomplishment is its unique blend of environmental and technological history. Textile mill operations and profits depended on a vast range of environmental factors mediated by technology and law, factors ranging from the water levels of New Hampshire ponds to legislative protections for spawning fish. Malone offers a great model for integrating technological and environmental history.

The book's coverage is straightforward. Chapter 1 lays out the geographic endowments that eventually drew the Boston Associates to Lowell. Chapter 2 gives the now-familiar story of how Lowell came into being. Here the main (and novel) focus is on the work of designing and building the new power canals. Malone also explains in detail the unique corporate structure that would govern Lowell, with a single firm developing its water-power endowments, then leasing those "millpowers" to textile firms. In the cozy world of the Boston Associates, the textile firms ultimately controlled the power company—Locks & Canals—through interlocking directorates. This structure avoided the market failures that often stymied riparian development elsewhere. At Lowell, no single firm could dominate riparian rights, raising dams and hogging water at the expense of its neighbors. This chapter also describes the design of sluices, gates, and waterwheels that powered the first mills.

The next chapter outlines the main challenge that confronted James Francis over his half-century career with Locks & Canals: how to expand overall power supplies to the ten mills in the system while ensuring fair treatment to each. Francis had to devise methods to manage an endlessly dynamic system. Each night, Locks & Canals impounded water upstream of Lowell for release into the power canals on the following day. Each season called for precautions against flood or drought, while each year brought business pressures to expand the system. Francis (and Malone) paid a lot of attention to the hydrologic cycle; nature ultimately governed the system. But nature could be improved. By the 1850s, Locks & Canals bought up much of the New Hampshire backcountry, determined to control the watershed that made Lowell possible. With that control, Francis used the entire region to bank water and regulate its flow through Lowell. By telegraph, he ordered releases from dammed lakes tributary to the Merrimack.

All that civil engineering had one goal: to assure steady operations in the Lowell mills. It all cost a lot of money, and Francis had to ensure that all the textile manufacturers paid their fair share. To that end, he devised an extensive testing program to determine accurately the flow of water into each mill. Chapter 4 details Francis's pioneering and rigorous experimental methods to measure flow, hallmarks of the new professionalism in engineering. Measurement also provided important guidance to his efforts to devise a new prime mover. His water turbine proved far more efficient than the breast wheels inherited from the medieval millwrights.

Chapter 5 describes Francis's work to protect Lowell from flood and fire. Flood had threatened every humble gristmill ever built beside a stream. At Lowell the stakes grew considerably, with millions in property and thousands of lives at risk. Francis showed great foresight in building a "great gate" for diverting floodwaters, a measure that has repeatedly...