USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Metropolitan Boston; a modern history; Volume II > Part 30
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The Wiggin Terminals, Inc., is providing ultra-modern dock facilities
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METROPOLITAN BOSTON
for unloading and reshipping in the Charlestown district, the head struc- ture of steel and corrugated asbestos, sixty feet in height, embodying many new features of construction and furnishes another concrete example of investors who have faith in Boston's future industrial growth.
The reclaiming of approximately 750 acres of East Boston marsh land from the ravages of the sea is going steadily on in the area skirting Breed's Hill, along the shores of Chelsea Creek and Belle Isle Inlet, where, a little more than a decade ago, the onlooker viewed a panorama of slimy mud, eel grass and stagnant water, which furnished a way station for migrating duck. More than 175 acres have already been filled in and reclaimed to an average depth of twelve feet, by the East Boston Company during the past thirteen years, and with the increased facilities, include a receiving depot, a traveling crane and a steam railway to dis- tribute the loads of filling, it is but a question of time before there will rise on this great morass, once the location of clam beds and tidal flows, an industrial city which eventually will occupy the full 1500 available acres. Its climatic advantages for the production of fine textile goods is only rivaled by New Bedford, as the moist atmospheric element is one of its great assets.
The entrance into New England of the powerful and resourceful Insull power interests of Chicago; the enlargements of plants by the Edison, New England Company and other agencies now in the power field; the ingenious and almost romantic Passamaquoddy Bay power harnessing, which the State of Maine has politically endorsed, and the growth of the super-power program into "an unlimited field of expan- sion," all spell the development and pooling of these attributes of nature which constitute the cheapest source of energy feeding from the common reservoirs of waterfall, steam-produced power at tidewater and perhaps tidal energies. They answer the clarion call of Boston and its environs, as well as all of New England for that most important "raw material" of all-power for the industries.
Power use always has been the great unfailing economic index and wage curves have followed power curves as a sequence. It has long been asserted that each worker in the United States virtually com- mands thirty-three mechanical slaves-in terms of horsepower. In the olden times each free Athenian possessed but four slaves. It is a truism that the more power the electrical art places behind the American worker, the greater the human advance.
If the Passamaquoddy project becomes an actuality an initial devel- opment of from 500,000 to 700,000 horsepower is predicted, which means three billion kilowatt hours yearly, or seventy-five per cent. of the entire utility output of New England in 1922-a premise, which coupled with the vast human, financial and geographical assets possessed by the six
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THE INDUSTRIES OF METROPOLITAN BOSTON
New England States, spells emancipation from the coal tyranny under which this section has suffered in recent years.
But discounting entirely all of the immense hydro-electric develop- ments contemplated in New England which are designed to serve indus- trial Boston, and all other manufacturing municipalities, the future growth of the industries of Greater Boston is not for a moment jeopard- ized. Today, there is just about as much power being developed by steam as by water in this section. With 84,000 horsepower already installed at the Edgar plant, at Weymouth, serving the Greater Boston district, and with 80,000 additional horsepower now building at the same plant, the present and potential power facilities will meet all require- ments. Eventually, the Edgar plant alone will have a capacity of 400,000 horsepower flowing from steam-produced electric energy, and as the company is consuming somewhat less than a pound of coal for each kilowatt hour of electricity, against an average for the country of I.995 pounds, in 1925, and three pounds in 1920, it is obvious that this plant is adequately developing efficiency in deriving electrical power from tidewater coal.
. Many critics of Boston's industrial prowess fail to realize that the municipality is not only the chief city of New England, but that it is one of the four leading cities of the United States. It ranks with New York, Chicago and Philadelphia as a center of population and of wealth. Great in itself, with a metropolitan district embracing over 1,750,000 people it is also the center of the second most densely populated area in the United States.
The trading area within a fifty-mile radius of New York, Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia, according to the 1920 census, is as follows: New York, 8,034,349; Boston, 3,934,011; Chicago, 3,615,101, and Phila- delphia, 3,611,626.
Metropolitan Boston, as defined by legislative enactment, and long continued acceptation includes the geographical areas of the cities of Boston, Cambridge, Chelsea, Everett, Lynn, Malden, Medford, Melrose, Newton, Quincy, Revere, Somerville, Waltham, and Woburn, and the towns of Arlington, Belmont, Braintree, Brookline, Canton, Cohasset, Dedham, Dover, Hingham, Hull, Lexington, Milton, Nahant, Needham, Reading, Saugus, Stoneham, Swampscott, Wakefield, Watertown, Wel- lesley, Weston, Westwood, Weymouth, Winchester, and Winthrop.
The accompanying table vividly portrays the industrial importance of the Metropolitan Boston district. The figures are for the calendar year of 1924, as the statistics for 1925, while in the possession of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics, are not as yet segregated, and will not be for some time to come.
Met. Bos .- 38
594
DATA FOR PRINCIPAL MANUFACTURING INDUSTRIES-1924
1924 Industries and Municipalities
Number of Estab-
lish-
Capital Invested
Value of Stock and Materials Used
Amount of Wages Paid During the year $711,812,104 230,727,844 105,119,54I
Average Number of Wage Earners
Value of Products
State
10,174
$2,853,590,206
Metropolitan Boston
4,56I
849,235,200
Percentage of Entire State in
Metropolitan District
44.8%
29.7%
35.9%
32.6%
30.3%
36.7%
RANK IN IMPORTANCE BY VALUE OF PRODUCT
METROPOLITAN BOSTON
I. Boots and Shoes (not rubber), including cut stock and findings ..
$115,090,824
2. Sugar Refining .
*
3. Printing and Publishing
67,348,308
4. Electrical Machinery, Apparatus and Sup- plies
64,668,77I
5.
Clothing (Men's and Women's)
55,489,521
6. Slaughtering and Meat Packing
45,095,903
7. Foundry and Machine Shop Products
44,706,563
8. Confectionery
42,654,812
9. Bread and Other Bakery Products
41,613,053
IO. Rubber Boots and Shoes
30,403,73I
II. Cutlery and Edge Tools
24,620,446
12. Rubber Goods, Tires, Etc.
23,798,053
13. Leather Tanned, curried and finished
21,032,433
14. Coffee and Spice roasting and grinding
20,556,35I
15. All other Industries, including Sugar Refin- ing
352,156,43I
Total.
$849,235,200
* Principal data for these industries cannot be presented separately without disclosing the operations of the two individual sugar refining establishments located in the Metropolitan District.
METROPOLITAN BOSTON
79,027
$3,126,137,145 1,148,260,013 554,404,798
Boston Proper
2,632
387,366,775
$1,629,342,134 584,512,038 289,481,380
589,364 178,487
ments
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THE INDUSTRIES OF METROPOLITAN BOSTON
To attempt to adequately portray, within the limitations of a single chapter, the origin, rise and growth of 4500 industrial establishments in Boston is an impossible task. Merely to enumerate their names would exceed the allotted space, and such an exposition would not even serve to furnish meagre directory information concerning them. Hence it has been necessary for the writer to make as judicious a selection as circum- stances permitted from the outstanding industrial units and to trace some of the developments of these well-known concerns whose individual progress borders in many instances upon the marvelous and the romantic. It is realized that many important corporations, whose careers have done much to establish the reputation of Boston as a bee-hive of industry, must be omitted in this resume, but nevertheless their contributions to the manufacturing life of the community have been no less conspicuous in the affairs of the municipality than those made by other industrial units mentioned in this chapter.
The writer expresses the hope that the day is not far distant when proper recognition may be given to all who have exerted an influence upon the industrial structure of the city, but an all-inclusive portrayal of the history of these thousands of establishments would require vol- umes, rather than a few pages, and the product would of necessity be of a. monumental nature.
The Romance of the United Shoe Machinery Corporation-No great advance in shoe pegging machines was brought about until Benjamin Franklin Sturtevant, whose fame as a pioneer in harnessing the air is treated in this chapter, turned to the work of perfecting the "peg strip" under the patronage of Elmer Townsend, a Boston auctioneer.
In the latter part of 1848 young Sturtevant found his way to North- bridge, Massachusetts, and thence back to Skowhegan, Maine; in both of which towns he worked, until 1856, at shoe-making; and became, without having served an apprenticeship, a skillful artisan. He had injured his health by the confining work of the bench and casting about to better his condition, the idea of pegging boots and shoes by the use of power came to him. With no knowledge of mechanics or experience in building machinery, he knew what went to make up good footwear, how many pegs he must be able to drive, and how rapidly, to make a machine that would find a market. After a month's labor he succeeded in producing a model which, though rude and imperfect, embodied all the main principles of the modern pegger. In 1856, at the age of twenty- three, he left Skowhegan with his model and went to Boston.
To induce a capitalist to guarantee him a small sum each week, while developing his pegger, he assigned to him one-half of the patent abso-
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METROPOLITAN BOSTON
lutely, and the entire control of the remaining half, an arrangement which resulted in the inventor's never receiving any return from his device. During 1857 and 1858 he was engaged in building five experi- mental machines, the first type of the pegger, upon which three patents were taken out, and the ensuing two years, 1858-1859, were occupied in perfecting his first attempts. In 1859 the owner of a worthless patent, granted in 1854 for a pegger, having examined the Sturtevant machine, claimed an infringement, and artfully convinced the capitalist who had aided Mr. Sturtevant of the validity of his claim, with the result that the latter, in 1860, stopped Sturtevant's weekly stipend, just on the eve of success, and left the inventor penniless, but not without resource.
Up to 1860, at which time the Sturtevant pegger and its co-worker, the sole sewing machine, were introduced, not more than half a dozen power shoe factories were in existence. These two inventions gave birth to the New England shoe factory system, now grown to be one of the largest industries in the country and exerted an influence upon two hundred other patented shoe machines for the equipment of a complete establishment. From 1860 to 1880 an average of thirty million pair of boots and shoes were each year pegged upon the Sturtevant pegger, with an annual saving to the public of over $1,000,000.
Sturtevant soon saw that the success of his pegger depended upon its having a suitable supply of material and that an exhaustless series of pegs contained in a narrow strip of wood veneer could alone meet this want. No machine for cutting such veneers with a knife was in existence, and to do this successfully, without shattering the wood, was considered impossible. He next invented the wood veneer lathe, by which not only the peg strip is cut and turned, but also veneers of a thousand shapes and forms, from the bulky barrel stave down to the delicate slices of ornamental woods, which, when pasted upon paper, are employed in the external finish of all fine wood-work, and for interior decoration. To gain the required length of peg strip, Sturtevant conceived the plan, in 1859, of cutting a spiral ribbon from around a log across the grain and after a week's labor with a common lathe and a rude spring, to control the log, he succeeded in obtaining a fair specimen. It was not until some time after, however, that he was successful in building a lathe that would turn out, unvaryingly, a perfect peg-veneer, and then only by having developed the rude spring of his first attempt into the well-known presser-bar. He was granted patents for both the veneer-cutter and for its product, the veneer. The peg-wood lathe takes a peeled log of white birch, eighteen inches long, and with great rapidity turns out a spiral veneer, which is at the same instant divided into ribbons as wide as the length of a peg, and from fifty to one hundred feet long. These ribbons
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THE INDUSTRIES OF METROPOLITAN BOSTON
are then dried, beveled on one edge, uniformly compressed and tough- ened by machines also invented by Sturtevant, and are fed from rolls, into which they are wound into the pegger like thread into the sewing- machine.
Sturtevant and associated inventors ultimately demonstrated the workability of a machine-pegger, which retired all other similar devices from the market. By his method the pegging was done upon the shoe- last, and years later John F. Davey perfected a horn-pegging device.
Sidney W. Winslow and his associates adopted the fundamental advantages of the Sturtevant and Davey machines, and refined them into the products of the United Shoe Machinery Corporation so that pegs can now be split and driven at the rate of 350 per minute.
The machine-made shoe had its beginning when Elias Howe's eye- pointed curved needle, operating with an under shuttle, was perfected, and it was his invention that inspired a whole generation of inventors to devote their attention to leather stitching. Here again a Massachusetts inventor played a prominent part in the products which today distinguish the United Shoe Machinery Corporation.
The application by the boot and shoe trade of Howe's basic patents to the machine sewing of leather had so advanced when King Edward VII of England came to the throne that he regularly ordered Lynn-made shoes for himself and the Royal family.
In 1858 Gordon Mckay, formerly the manager of a Lowell machine- shop, stood before a cobbler's window on Tremont Row, in Boston, and intently watched the operation of a machine for sewing soles to uppers, which had recently been invented by Lyman R. Blake. The latter had optioned it for $50,000 to a group of Lynn shoe manufacturers, but Mckay stepped in and offered $70,000, $8,000 to be paid in cash and $62,000 out of the earnings of the machine, if the Lynn men should fail to take up the option. With characteristic Scotch thrift, Mckay was on hand with the $8,000 when the date fixed for the expiration of the option arrived, and when the Lynn men reached their decision they were forced to begin a seven years' lawsuit before they became convinced that Mckay had prior rights to theirs.
The Blake leather-stitcher, perfected under Mckay's direction, and refined later by the experts of the United Shoe Machinery Corporation, is still a primary factor in the production of shoes.
As Blake's stationary horn could sew only the sides, leaving the toe and heel to be nailed, his brother-in-law, Robert H. Mathies, devised, during Blake's absence in the South, in the interest of his health, a rotary horn which proved successful.
The Civil War gave Gordon Mckay his chance and Blake soon
598
METROPOLITAN BOSTON
adapted his machine to army-shoe sewing, while to meet government specifications Mathies channelled a track for the seam on the sole, and the Mckay stitcher gained in favor and soon outran the pegged shoes. Later improved by experts the machine was speeded up to 600 pairs a day, though part of the finishing had to be done by hand. The inventors of the United Shoe Machinery Corporation simplified the mechanism until today it produces 1260 pairs a day.
In 1872, when Blake pleaded for an extension of his patent he esti- mated that 200,000,000 pairs of shoes had been sewn on his machines, at a saving of eighteen cents a pair over the cobbled type, and when he won his case the McKay Company renewed its contract with him. He died at Newton, Massachusetts, in 1883, at the age of forty-eight, and in his passing the shoe business lost a genius.
After the Civil War, McKay went to work on the problem of nailing shoe-soles and his name is identified with the introduction of the first pair, either stitched or nailed by machine, that came into general use.
From 1876 to 1880 Charles Goodyear, Jr., and his welt and turn shoe and Gordon Mckay with his Blake patents, and metallic fastenings for bottoming shoes, continually overlapped each other, and they spent much of their time in the courts attempting to establish their respective rights, but in the latter year there came an amalgamation under the name of the Goodyear and McKay Association, and fifteen years later, the Mckay interests were sold to the Goodyear shareholders, a consummation which had been devoutly hoped for by the shoe trade, and which proved to be the salvation of the industry.
At that time, a McKay machine possessed the ability to stitch a pair of women's shoes in thirteen minutes, using forty-two machines carry- ing fifty-seven different operations. After the experts of the United Shoe Machinery Corporation had added the refining touches it became possible in building a shoe of extreme fashion such as a Polish Goodyear welt, with perforated vamps, foxings, outside panel, eyelet and stays, to perform as many as two hundred and ten operations. Of this total one hundred and seventy-four were cared for by one hundred and fifty-five different machines, and the remaining thirty-six by hand. The average Goodyear welt of business is the product of a string of from about twenty-five to forty machines.
But the industry awaited in these earlier days the inventive genius which would substitute metal digits for human fingers in pulling over the upper on a last and in bottoming a shoe.
In the solution of this problem, resort was again had to a Massachu- setts genius. In 1878 there was employed in the shoe factory of Harney Brothers, at Lynn, an alien mechanic, whose father, a native Hollander,
599
THE INDUSTRIES OF METROPOLITAN BOSTON
had been sent to Dutch Guiana, South America, to superintend some government work, and there had married a native woman.
Their son, Jan Ernst Matzeliger, had been carefully trained as a machinist by his father, and had come to the United States to seek his fortune. When he entered the Lynn shoe establishment he had not acquired the hatred for machines that then obsessed union labor, and which, in the city of his adoption, had resulted in a series of pitched battles that drove many Lynn manufacturers out of that municipality or out of business.
It was not until the lasters' union had been so crippled by its enor- mous expenditures in carrying on the fight against the introduction of machinery methods, and had alienated so many thousands of its members who longer refused to pay dues to a group of obstructionists, that it finally gave way to the modern method of making shoes.
Matzeliger particularly resented the boast of the lasters that no inventor could substitute iron for human fingers in lasting a shoe, and when he finally evolved the lasting machine, the disgruntled operatives denominated it a "niggerhead" product in derogation of the half-breed Matzeliger, who had crinkly hair and a dark brown complexion. "Niggerhead" the machine is called today in every shoe factory where it operates, but it proved to be the pioneer invention of still another phase of shoe-making machinery.
Cut off from companionship by his hostile factory mates, delicate in health, young Matzeliger worked in solitude every night in his little room over the West Lynn Mission, and in September, 1880, gazed with pride upon the first model of the lasting machine, fashioned out of cigar boxes and other odds and ends. His first real machine pleated the leather around the toe of the shoe. For this invention he refused a $1500 offer. The plan of his third machine was sent to Washington for patent purposes, but it was so crude that it was not until an expert was sent on to explain the model machine that the department found it pos- sible to protect the invention by patent.
In the little Cape Cod town of Brewster, there was born in 1854, five years before Gordon McKay bought Blake's patent-which event was the real beginning of the shoe-machinery era-Sidney W. Winslow, the son of a South Shore shoemaker and inventor. The elder Winslow had abandoned the work bench for machine-sewing, and it was young Sid- ney's good fortune to live long enough to witness the passing of the old hand methods and the glories of the new day in the shoe industry. At the age of thirty-five years he invested in the stock of the company formed to market Matzeliger's lasting machine, and employing experts to complete the inventor's device, it was perfected to greater efficiency,
600
METROPOLITAN BOSTON
but the youthful Lynn genius did not live to witness the zenith of his success, for it was not until 1904 that the "pull-over" was developed, and for seven or eight years afterwards constant changes and refine- ments were added.
No less than 2600 changes were made by the old Consolidated Hand- Method Lasting-Machine Company, and by the United Shoe Machinery Corporation, at a cost of nearly $1,500,000 before the machine was declared 100 per cent. efficient. Its importance to the industry is attested by the fact that the daily output of the shoemaker of the olden days rarely exceeded sixty pairs a day, while the perfected machine, running as one unit in a chain of machines, "pulls over" from 700 to 1000 pairs per day, according to the type of footwear upon which it is engaged.
This invention stands out as perhaps the most brilliant shoe-machin- ery lore. Observing five iron fingers carefully, firmly and without hesi- tancy adjusting the upper to the leather while at the appointed instant another device tacks it ready for welting and soling, the looker-on is obsessed with the belief that the operator, gently caressing the machine now and then with his fingers, has unconsciously imparted to the dynamo which operates it the magic power of life and even human thought.
The completion of Matzeliger's invention, however, but added to the anomalous situation that harassed the shoe manufacturers of the period, for now there were three distinct agencies, each making some machines that the others produced; each with its own sales representatives; each providing its own corps of machine repairers, the trio of which often gathered at the same hour in a given plant with entirely separate, if not distinctly hostile, ideas and purposes.
The hand of a genius was needed to do away with confusion, dupli- cation and waste of energy, and to bring order out of chaos. Charles Goodyear had died; Gordon Mckay was approaching his eighties; Ben- jamin Franklin Sturtevant had passed from earthly scenes nearly a quarter of a century before; Elias Howe's contribution had become an accepted commonplace, due to its long use and he, too, was dead; Jan Matzeliger, Lyman R. Blake and Robert H. Mathies had gone to their rewards, and thus the group of great inventors and forecasters of new methods of manufacture had departed, and the situation required a man possessing the patience to ferret out machine experts, the art of winning capital, the executive ability to coordinate the warring units, and the vision to market the machines produced.
Few men in the history of world industry have faced a more difficult task than that which confronted Sidney W. Winslow, the sole remaining outstanding member of the group, but he adroitly approached the situa- tion, firm in his conviction that the four decades of wandering in the
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THE INDUSTRIES OF METROPOLITAN BOSTON
wilderness of shoe-machinery invention must end with the dying nine- teenth century and that with the dawn of the twentieth the divergent groups should march on in serried ranks to the heights of greater accomplishments.
In February, 1899, representatives of the three groups gathered with their feet under the same table, and there emerged from that momentous conference one of the giant industrial powers of New England, destined to become the great leader of the boot and shoe world-now known as the United Shoe Machinery Corporation-with authorized capital of $75,000,000, and Sidney W. Winslow as its president, and with all the cooperating interests represented upon the board of directors.
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