USA > Massachusetts > Commonwealth history of Massachusetts, colony, province and state, volume 5 > Part 35
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20TH CENTURY MANUFACTURES
1892 there entered the port of Boston well over a million foreign hides and seven hundred thousand domestic; but the market totals are apt to fluctuate from year to year.
One cannot conceive a time when Massachusetts shoes will not be in sustained demand throughout America. Geographi- cal competition can hardly undermine the hold of the Bay State upon the market, assuming an adequate intelligence in management and esprit de corps in procedure. And yet the twentieth-century American has acquired one particular habit which is giving farsighted shoe manufacturers some concern. He is prone to ride in automobiles ; and he rides so incessantly that he does not wear out his shoes as fast as he once did. This is declared actually to have a bearing on the demand and to be darkening the industrial outlook at the present time.
Whatever the saving to the consumer, it may also mean hard sledding for the shoe factories. And the Massachusetts shoe worker can scarcely feel consoled by the realization that the yearning for automobiles is keeping busy large numbers of his fellow citizens of the Commonwealth who work in the plants making automobile parts, however it may be acting as an imperceptible drag upon his own prosperity.
TOOLS (1867-1920)
The skilled craftsmen of Massachusetts have raised the manufacture of metal products, machine tools, and mechanics' tools to the level of a splendid New England accomplishment. Some of these lines of metal goods are specialties, famous everywhere that mechanics are to be found, and cannot be dispensed with whenever work of great precision is to be undertaken.
Shortly after the Civil War, a young Boston mechanic, Daniel Stillson, invented a new and peculiarly useful style of wrench. The manufacturing company in whose shops he was employed purchased his patents, and he received thousands of dollars in royalties before his death. For the Stillson wrench immediately came into great demand. It has been ever since a classic in its field; it is in use today the world around, and has been produced in Massachusetts, its birthplace, in greater volume with every decade.
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MACHINE TOOLS
Contemporary with the appearance of the Stillson wrench in Boston was that of the Morse twist drill at New Bedford. This basic product of a great metal-working plant was origi- nally manufactured during the 'sixties. It prospered rationally, adding modern methods and materials as fast as they were developed. Marvelous precision was attained, until at pres- ent steel drills are accurately produced as small as a sewing needle. Numerous other types of tools come from this plant -twenty thousand different sizes and styles, all told.
MACHINE TOOLS (1890-1910)
Another remarkable tool factory was developed from a humble beginning at Athol by L. S. Starrett. Some twelve hundred types of mechanics' fine tools are made there, most of these being of Starrett's invention. They, too, are wonderful examples of accuracy in shop work, known far and wide and recognized as splendid specimens of what Massachusetts's skilled workmen can do.
In Boston the Sturtevant establishment produces an amaz- ing variety of fans, blowers, economizers, ventilating machin- ery, and similar apparatus. In Cambridge and Holyoke are the teeming plants of a corporation devoted to the making of a famous steam-driven direct-acting pump, designed in 1897 by George P. Aborn, an engineer of the company, and growing out of the pioneer steam-pump inventions of Lucius J. Knowles and George F. Blake.
Within the last quarter-century other remarkable examples of Yankee invention, or improvements in the inventions of others, have grown up; such as the notable textile machinery plants of Worcester, Whitinsville, Lowell, Hopedale, and Hyde Park. Such names as Draper, Crompton, Knowles, and Whitin have stood out in this development. A notable suc- cess is the automatic loom, an achievement coming soon after 1890, especially in the weaving of fancy goods. This has been one of the conditions permitting manufacturers to reduce costs and yet pay good wages. So extraordinary is this device that it can detect the breakage of a single filament among the thou- sands of threads that enter into the warp of the loom.
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WORCESTER MACHINERY PRODUCTS
No locality in all Massachusetts can compare with Worces- ter as a center of the metal manufactures. The diversity of wares produced there is fairly amazing, particularly for a city that is located inland and not on a water-power site. Metal goods seem to predominate.
Worcester is notable, among other industrial characteristics, for the multitude of relatively small concerns, or concerns which began on very modest lines. Numerous mechanics have lived there from generation to generation, and they have al- most always been able to set up their own small shops in rented premises, without going to the expense of erecting a building.
Many of them began with simply one machine and grew little by little, adding to their plants only as their business pros- pects warranted expansion. No growth could be more sound or more permanent. Old Stephen Salisbury and his son after him, both of them large property owners, were always willing to lease space for factory uses. Again and again the leased property was eventually purchased by the occupants.
It was Salisbury who built the factory on Grove street in which Ichabod Washburn essayed to manufacture drawn wire in the first half of the nineteenth century. His partner after a while was Philip L. Moen, and the firm of Washburn & Moen prospered greatly.
In the late 'seventies the plant, in addition to drawn wire, began to make barbed wire fencing, and in 1888 this product was being marketed at the rate of 18,000 tons a year. From 1884 copper wire for use in electrical systems was manufac- tured, and in five years the yearly output had swelled to 50,000 tons.
In 1889 this plant and several others, notably that of the Worcester Wire Company, William E. Rice, proprietor, were consolidated as a modern corporation; and in 1901 it was absorbed bodily into a still larger national combination, Judge Elbert H. Gary's United States Steel Corporation. The three Worcester plants now produce great quantities of high-grade wire specialties : wire rope, galvanized steel wire cable, wire rope for hoisting, tiller rope, switch rope, picture cord, sash-
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THE PAPER TRADE
cord wire, wire nails, piano wire. The company still has in its industrial museum the old ledger in which appears, in neat legible writing, a record of the first modest shipment of piano wire to Jonas Chickering, founder of the great Chicker- ing piano house in Boston.
In 1900, wire manufactured in Massachusetts had a market value of $1,120,000; in 1909 it had increased to $9,500,000, and in 1919 to $24,500,000-concrete evidence of the effect of modern usages. In Worcester are established also pros- perous plants that produce rolling mills, employed to roll iron and copper rods into wire, steel wire springs, machine crank shafts, foundry castings, forgings, and gears.
THE PAPER TRADE (1889-1930)
America has long obtained the great bulk of her finished paper, especially her fine writing paper, from Massachusetts. Currency paper, which the United States Bureau of Printing and Engraving makes into legal tender, is manufactured in Dalton. The Connecticut River Valley has been practically always the seat of papermaking in this State. The head of water power in the river at Springfield and Holyoke was fa- vorable for operating the ponderous Fourdrinier paper ma- chines. From 1860 to 1897, four fifths of the loft-dried paper manufactured in the United States was produced within fifteen miles of Springfield.
The paper mills of the State produced goods having a total value of $40,000,000 in 1909, and $87,000,000 in 1919. The manufacture of fine paper led all other classes-91,000 tons in 1919, valued at $34,000,000. Book and coated paper was second as to value, $21,300,000 in 1919, and first as to quan- tity, 130,000 tons.
Twenty-five years ago a modest concern for manufacturing paper novelties opened its doors in Framingham. Once every week a horde of small boys with toy express wagons assembled in front of the plant and received loads of paper tags and twine to be carted home for the family workers to string. That is all changed: three huge Dennison factories in Framingham, Worcester, and Marlboro are equipped with busy machines,
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any one of which can string more tags in one day than all the family workbenches could turn out in a week.
Early in the 'nineties there occurred a succession of consoli- dations among envelope manufacturers in Massachusetts. In these developments was reflected the absorption of many small plants and the gradual evolution of the present large factories in Springfield, Worcester, Holyoke, Fitchburg, Boston, and Cambridge-most of them under efficient corporation manage- ment. Twenty-five such plants now exist, with a total factory product running over twenty million dollars in yearly value.
ELECTRICAL MACHINERY (1883-1930)
It was in 1883, a few years before the strictly modern era opened, that Massachusetts acquired its first electrical manu- facturing plant. The inventions of Professor Elihu Thom- son, who had devised a practical direct-current dynamo ma- chine of peculiar efficiency and a well-regulated arc lamp, interested a group of farsighted capitalists in Lynn.
Most of the men who joined the financial syndicate then formed were shoe or leather manufacturers: H. A. Pevear, B. F. Spinney, J. N. Smith, Patrick Lennox, Charles A. Cof- fin. One of the originators of the movement was Silas A. Bar- ton, printer and stationer. These men purchased outright a struggling little enterprise, the American Electric Company, at New Britain, Connecticut, which was then seeking to market Professor Thomson's inventions. They moved it to Lynn, where they housed it in a new factory building, reorganized it under the name of Thomson-Houston Electric Company, and infused it with fresh, vigorous energy. The name of Houston was incorporated into the name of the company at the in- stance of Professor Thomson who desired thus to honor his early associate in Philadelphia, Professor Edwin J. Houston.
Within ten years this was a flourishing, expanding industry, producing hundreds of dynamos and thousands of arc lamps annually. It had become an integral part of the General Elec- tric Company, one of the largest electrical manufacturing or- ganizations in the world, comprising a great modern corpora- tion.
That ten-year interval also brought into the State the activi-
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THE RUBBER INDUSTRY
ties of another electrical pioneer, William Stanley, who had established in 1891, at Pittsfield, a small electrical manufac- turing plant, which quickly underwent a similar experience of rapid growth. In time this company, like that at Lynn, be- came part of the modern electrical corporation previously alluded to, which assumed a position of acknowledged leader- ship in this branch of industry. Within a few years both these plants were shipping their products nation-wide, and had made electrical manufacturing prominent among the half-dozen premier industries of the Commonwealth, reporting an annual product valued at $10,400,000 in 1900 and nearly $126,000,- 000 in 1920, a high year. At present the total yearly value of electrical manufactures of the State ranges from $110,000,- 000 to $120,000,000.
THE RUBBER INDUSTRY (1896-1930)
A development even more definitely modern is the wonder- fully aggressive rubber industry of Massachusetts. It was no longer ago than 1896 that young Frederick C. Hood, acting for the six stockholders of vision who stood behind him, per- sonally superintended the erection of that first modest plant at Watertown, from which came one of the tremendous in- dustrial growths of the twentieth century. In November of that year this new unit began to produce. On the first day the little force of workers completed a dozen pair of rubber shoes. On the following day, gaining experience and confidence al- most in a moment, they made 216 pairs; and within a month they were turning out three thousand pairs a day.
That was merely a beginning. Every year saw remark- able expansion, until at the present time the products of this immense establishment embrace rubber footwear, vulcanized canvas footwear, automobile tires, automobile tubes, rubber heels, hard-rubber products, and rubber mechanical goods.
Back of such merely material success is an economic and sociological triumph which is heartening to contemplate. It is a story of how the Hood ideals, splendidly sustained and adhered to, have developed intrinsic quality in the product and continuing contentment in the producer. The industrial relations practiced have been farsighted and altruistic; the
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commercial policies adopted have emphasized the value of the factory-trained sales executive, and have sought to prepare young men for such positions, utilizing the experience of the older men to stabilize the personnel. The result has been a producing unit holding high mark among the nation's in- dustries.
Almost parallel with this venture, arose in 1898 another rubber industrial center in Massachusetts at Chicopee Falls, under the leadership of Colonel Harry G. Fisk. This plant specialized in bicycle tires, for the bicycle was just then at its zenith of popularity in America; and the automobile, then in its beginning, soon offered an additional field. Eventually a second plant was established at New Bedford, and others else- where in New England. This concern alone produced $75,- 000,000 worth of goods in 1925.
In Cambridge, Malden, Melrose, Chelsea, and Millville are other major rubber-manufacturing centers and additional ones of smaller size in other places. In several instances these plants survived the crisis that occurred with the decline of the bicycle, and by courageous readjustment won a new prosperity. In one of these plants bicycle tires were superseded by rubber hose of every description; in another the automobile tire saved the day. Not many years ago, about ninety-five per cent of America's annual production of automobile tires was made in Ohio. At present fully thirty per cent of the output in this commodity is produced in Massachusetts.
MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS (1890-1930)
A multitude of human interests, numerous aspects of human life, are intimately touched and influenced by Massachusetts industries as a whole. Those mentioned thus far are the most notable for the sheer magnitude of their activities.
But what a contribution to American life and American standards has sprung from other Massachusetts manufactur- ing achievements! The bright fame of Jonas Chickering, the master piano maker, still endures in the great Boston plant where craftsmen skillfully produce the instruments bearing that illustrious name; and nearly a dozen other pianos of wide
Courtesy of Hood Rubber Company
HOOD RUBBER COMPANY PLANT, WATERTOWN
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SHIPBUILDING
repute throughout the country have their production centers in different cities of the Commonwealth.
No less renowned is a Massachusetts builder of organs, Ernest M. Skinner, whose genius and industrial organization came to the front very early in the new century; organs of that and other makes are delighting audiences from coast to coast, insuring prosperity to the organ builders of Massachu- setts, whose plants are scattered among a round half-dozen localities in the eastern and central areas.
SHIPBUILDING (1898-1930)
The greatest shipbuilding plant in northeastern United States is the Fore River Shipbuilding Corporation, founded in 1898, and owned since 1913 by the Bethlehem Steel Corpo- ration. The plant is located on the Fore River at Quincy, near deep water. There the skill of Bay State craftsmen has carried onward, and still carries onward through this modern era, the finest traditions of Massachusetts shipbuilding. The great steel shapes in which present-day maritime adventure constantly flowers are recruited as frequently from launchings in this great shipyard as were the clippers of old.
Naval vessels for the United States and subsequently for other nations were built here from the time of the Spanish War; previously such craft were built entirely at the Charles- town Navy Yard. In the fifteen years from 1913 to 1928, the Fore River yard launched the torpedo boat destroyers Lawe- rence and Macdonough, the cruiser Des Moines, the battle- ships Rhode Island, New Jersey, Vermont and North Dakota, the scout cruisers Salem and Birmingham, as well as five sub- marines for the imperial Japanese navy and the battleship Rivadavia for the Argentine Republic.
Within a year after the Bethlehem corporation took control, the European war began; and almost immediately the Fore River yard contracted for ten submarines for England, to be delivered within ten months. The corporation carried out the contract, notwithstanding that the vessels were built on Can- adian soil at the request of the state department of the United States government. During the year before the United States entered the war, nineteen contracts were handled at
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Fore River, and 15,000 men were employed there. Torpedo boat destroyers, submarines, and battleships were built at top speed, as well as freighters and tankers, which the Emergency Fleet Corporation immediately commandeered when they were completed.
In October, 1917, thirty-five additional destroyers were ordered, and at the same time authority was extended for building the great new shipyard at Squantum. Scarcely more than a year from the time that this swampy site was surveyed for shipyard construction, the first vessels built there were actually delivered. The Fore River plant was the only ship- yard in the country to deliver destroyers to the Navy Depart- ment during the actual war period. Since the close of the war this shipyard, having already a record equaled by none other in America, has been busy with both naval vessels and merchantmen.
At the Fore River and Squantum plants only the heavier craft are built and launched. But at several other shipyards around Boston, employing as many as five hundred men apiece, pleasure boats, particularly yachts, are regularly under construction. Massachusetts has thousands of ardent yachts- men, many of whom sail craft built in their own State and competing with distinction in the regattas annually held in Massachusetts waters.
Yacht building is carried on in greater or less degree by practically every seaport town in Massachusetts. Nearly a score possess plants of appreciable size. The largest in the state, and probably the largest in the United States, is that of George Lawley & Sons, Inc., at Neponset, a part of Boston, where the annual volume of business in normal years exceeds $5,000,000. Both wooden and steel construction is carried on.
Other yards regularly building yachts are located at Dor- chester, Quincy, Kingston, Onset, Wareham, Fairhaven, Monument Beach, Osterville, Winthrop, West Lynn, Swamp- scott, Marblehead, Manchester, Essex and Medford. Many other yards are devoted to storage and repair work. The Bethlehem plant at Fore River (Quincy), has built yachts in the past, but has not handled this class of work for the last twenty years.
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VARIOUS MANUFACTURES
CONFECTIONERY (1893-1930)
One seventh of the confectionery purchased yearly by the American public comes from Massachusetts plants. This is an industry with three quarters of a century of growth within the Commonwealth. Yet its modern aspects have all become apparent since 1893, in which year a well-known Boston maker of chocolate bonbons displayed at the World's Fair in Chicago a collection of fancy and quality confections which represented a distinctly new appeal to the sophisticated American palate.
The production of high-grade sweets not only in Boston but in other Massachusetts localities-particularly in Cambridge, where the largest single confectionery plant in the world is to be found-progressed rapidly from that period. The inven- tion of ingenious machines modernized this industry, as it has done with many another. The first of any importance to ap- pear was brought out in 1891-the "enrober," which automat- ically applies a coating to molded fondant. Various other machines have been devised in more recent years, until at present all the nationally known brands of candy are thus pro- duced, and the manufacture of the machines is itself a sub- stantial industry, of which Massachusetts has its share.
In 1899 the sales value of confectionery made in this State was $5,700,000; in 1925 it was practically $50,000,000. That tells the tale in mere monetary prosperity. It does not indicate the remarkable progress in quality of product and especially in the skill lavished upon the appearance of the product, in- cluding the colorful and artistic design of the present-day candy box.
VARIOUS MANUFACTURES (1860-1930)
Growing with the years, keeping well abreast of the times, -particularly these later times-are several industrial ven- tures in Massachusetts which have become unique in one way or another. One of America's greatest manufacturing drug and pharmacy houses flourishes in Boston, but it dates back only as far as 1903. In Southbridge is a marvelous plant for producing optical goods, manned by four thousand workers; yet it grew from a little spectacle shop started in 1890, in which everything was made by hand. In Cambridge there
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20TH CENTURY MANUFACTURES
stands the largest plant in America for manufacturing ink, mucilage and paste.
Carpets of the finest texture and most luxurious feel come from immense establishments in Clinton and Worcester, to be shipped literally to the four quarters of the globe. The world's largest jute and hemp mill, keeping three thousand hands busy, thrives at Ludlow.
More than twenty-six million dollars is represented in the jewelry manufactured every year in Attleboro and North Attleboro, where a hundred factories and noted silversmiths are engaged in this industry. It is one of the two great jewelry-producing centers of the United States and as a well- defined industrial activity it goes back to the period of 1860. Attleboro has also developed the largest dyeing and bleaching plant in the world.
There are other silversmiths at Taunton, as well as a variety of general interests, especially stove-making plants. The town has seven such foundries, including the largest of this charac- ter in the country, in which a complete stove, having 150 parts, is said to be cast, set up, and shipped every two minutes.
No better known nor more wisely managed watch factory exists anywhere than the astonishing modern plant at Wal- tham; yet it is only one of fifteen establishments in Massa- chusetts that preserve the craft of the watchmaker.
Millions of safety razors and blades are manufactured an- nually in Boston. The world's largest establishments in some lines are located at Worcester, a city which excels in produc- ing such commodities as leather belting, vacuum cleaners, corsets, wall paper, railway cars, skates, and valentines.
The most costly automobile on the market is produced in Springfield; and the Ford company, for its popular low- priced motor vehicles, has an assembling plant at Somerville where 2500 men are normally employed. Motor trucks are built at Fitchburg and Woburn; and taxicabs, at Framingham and Chicopee Falls.
TRANSFORMED INDUSTRIES (1895-1930)
That unceasing interplay of change, that inexorable onward march of progress, has transformed the industrial scene in every direction that one is minded to turn the eye. The
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TRANSFORMED INDUSTRIES
native talent for adaptation has met the crisis of the new cen- tury in Massachusetts, and new products have replaced old ones as the new dispensation has crowded out the old.
Twenty years ago or more there were great plants in Ames- bury and Merrimack that manufactured buggies and hacks, the familiar equipages of the heyday of the horse. Smart broughams for the stylish driveways and boulevards of city parks and avenues were shipped to all quarters. Today those plants are still busy, but their product now is automobile bodies, a specialty in the making of which they have become highly skilled.
Within a quarter-century, industrial fame has touched the town of Leominster through its success in supplying the market for celluloid and horn products. But the source of its raw material is not what it used to be. Time was when cows' horns, imparting an aromatic odor to the air, came into Leo- minster by the freight-car load, shipped as a byproduct from the great slaughterhouses of the West. These horns, after going through the Leominster mills, reappeared as neat and ornamental novelties of every sort. Nowadays, the compara- tively new patented substance, viscoloid, dominates in this field; and a recent inflow of New York and Delaware capital has reorganized this whole enterprise upon the most orthodox basis of big business.
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