Diversified Industrialization and Economic Success: Understanding Cincinnati’s Manufacturing Development, 1850–1925

Diversified Industrialization and Economic Success: Understanding Cincinnatis Manufacturing Development,18501925 PHILIP SCRANTON half-centuryago,FrederickV.Geier,boardchairmanoftheCincin nati Milling Machine Company,gave the commencement address at the Ohio Mechanics Institute. Geier' s firm, then and later,shone as one of the brightest stars in the city's industrial firmament. CMM, or " the Mill" as it was known locally,made top quality machine tools and innovative metalcutting fluids. It was then,in 1952,beginning an extended collaboration with the Air Force,1 designing and building experimental tools for fabricating experimental planes,as well as starting to venture into designing machinery for a rapidly expanding plastics industry. In his address to the graduates, Geier looked both back and forward: Some of us here tonight grew up in the days when barbed wire fencing and wire nails were n ew. Booming new industries... were the railroad, the air brake, the automatic coupler, and the automatic switch and signal,not to mention the low wheel bicycle and the bicycle built for two. The marvels of the times were the electric incandescent light bulb and the electric motor,the typewriter and the telephone . . . . And yet this was the very time [ at the turn of the twentieth century]when the U.S. Commissioner of Labor took this gloomy view in his official report: " There is no further room in the United States for marked extension of industry,such as occurred during the preceding fifty years.', 2 f,1,31, fs, m .: Unl New plant for tbe Cincinnati Milling Machine Co.opened in Oakley in 1911. Cincinnati Museum Center, Cincinnati Historical Society Library SPRING 2005 5 3'... S '4*i ' t . f - ..... 342«»..% :. 8% F DIVERSIFIED INDUSTRIALIZATION AND ECONOMIC SUCCESS Frederick V.Geier 1893-1981), president of Cincinnati Milling Macbine Co.front 1934 to 1958.Cincinnati Muselim Center,Cincinnati Historical Society Library Of course, Geier then reviewed the remarkable array of technological innovations that crowded the period from 1900 to 1950, twodozen items ranging from air transport to nylon, from frozen foods to tungsten carbide tools. Looking ahead,he voiced a faith in progress without penalties that few today might venture: When was the door of the future ever so wide open to those who seek progress? Were you and I so bold as to attempt to list the new developments and industries of the future, we would start with nuclear fission. We would note the results of intensive wartime research in developing radar... jet propulsion, and the new synthetic rubber industry. We might add textiles of glass... titanium and light metal alloys,helicopters, radio telephony,new synthetics and new plastics, television, instrumentation and remote controls, prefabricated housing, localized weather controls, guided missiles, giant air lit»ers, blind flying Iby instruments], synthetic lubricants which his firm patented], gas turbines and jet engines . And in the production field,we see striking progress in machining and in metallurgy.... Indeed,he concluded confidently, " there is every indication that the pace of progress is accelerating." a r'today ,as Americans stepcarefully throughthe first decade of the twentyfirst century, we are surrounded by the achievements,consequences, and aftermaths of the industrialization Geier celebrated in his 1952 address. From the glass and brass lamps sitting on our desks, the electricity that lights them, and the networks of power lying behind every sixty watt bulb,to the extended,complex transportation,communication,and information systems that undergird everyday life, we daily visit and quietly relish the material results of a two hundred year process of transforming nature in order to sustain and shape human societies. Like Geier,most persons involved in animating that process believed it was progressive, truly a good thing. Yet in industrialization's second century,which we have at last exited, virtues vied with vices as economic and technological innovations first made mass slaughter conceivable,then made it efficient. Similarly,valued innovations delivered collateral and damaging blows to our lands,seas,and air,which we struggle to remedy today.4 Overall, if industrialization' s consequences might be fairly regarded as mixed,amid our hopes that the overall balance might eventually be judged as positive,its aftermaths have proved hard all round. The United States may not yet be a postindustrial society,but...