USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Metropolitan Boston; a modern history; Volume II > Part 33
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Among other important products are rubber heels and soles, mats and matting, belting, fruit-jar rings, gaskets, friction tape and rubber tape.
Another Progressive Rubber Unit Founded in 1908-Another pro- gressive rubber unit, founded and maintained on the tradition that New England manufactures quality merchandise, and one that has achieved its great success in the section of the United States which demands the best in its products, came into corporate being in 1908, when a group of New England industrialists, possessing an intimate knowledge of the trade, headed by M. M. Converse, incorporated under the laws of Massa- chusetts the Converse Rubber Shoe Company, of Malden.
When the concern started operations the rubber footwear production was largely controlled by a single company, and the advent of the Con- verse corporation was welcomed by retail dealers who felt that whole- some competition would be advantageous. The corporation has manu- factured a premium grade of rubber footwear which it has marketed direct to the retail trade and has maintained strict independence both as to policy and fact.
The year following incorporation a modern plant, containing 27,000 square feet, employing 400 operators, and capable of 3,000 pairs of rubber footwear daily, was erected under the personal direction of Hugh Bul- lock, who has had charge of the production of the corporation since its inception.
Enjoying steady growth the Malden plant has been extended during the intervening seventeen years until today it covers five acres, employs 2,000 men and women and has a daily output of 18,000 pairs of rubber footwear. From sales of $400,000 the first year the products of 1925 were marketed for $4,750,000. Capitalization has increased from $250,000 in 1909 to $4,000,000 at the present time.
While the Converse Rubber Shoe Company is distinctly a New Eng- land concern guided by New England men and with the backbone of its business located in New England, nevertheless, the high quality of its
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merchandise has earned for it a reputation that has spread throughout the United States and to Europe and Asia. Branch offices are now main- tained in Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Chicago, with distributing houses in the principal foreign countries.
The impress of the forceful character of M. M. Converse, the presi- dent of the corporation, is indelibly stamped upon its products, and while it continues to be guided by him the rubber trade may rest assured that a fair, progressive and up-to-date policy will prevail in all. its operations.
The Massachusetts Plants of the United States Rubber Company- The United States Rubber Shoe Company operates three plants in Mas- sachusetts, of which the Boston Rubber Shoe Company, with its factory in Malden, and its Boston office at 101 Milk Street, is the largest, nor- mally employing 2,700 hands, with the Revere Rubber Company, hous- ing 1,000 hands at its Chelsea location, the two concerns representing a capital investment of $10,000,000, while at Millville, Massachusetts, the Woonsocket Rubber Company with a capital of $1,500,000 more, employs 2,000 hands.
The Boston and Millville factories manufacture rubber boots and shoes while at the Revere plant mechanical rubber goods are produced.
The Boston Rubber Shoe Company is the oldest of the three, and while the dark days of 1857, which involved so many manufacturing concerns of repute in insolvency, obscured, for a brief time, the rise of the corporation, E. S. Converse who was made its treasurer and pur- chasing and selling agent, and with his great ability carried the concern safely through the crisis, with its credit unimpaired and its manufactur- ing reputation second to none. During the Civil War it produced thou- sands of rubber blankets for the United States Government and at the conclusion of that struggle, when its legitimate business was resumed the plant was greatly enlarged, and many improvements were introduced in the processes of manufacturing rubber boots and shoes.
Modern inventions, increased facilities and methods, and progressive management have conspired to successful operation during the more recent years of the existence of this unit.
The Giant of the Woolen and Worsted Industries-On the 28th day of February, in the closing year of the nineteenth century, the American Woolen Company, an amalgamation originally of seven New England plants, and one in New York State, having an appraised value at the time of $12,000,000, was formed with $29,501,000 common and $20,000,000 preferred stock.
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In the interim it has grown to over fifty mills, operating more than 11,000 looms, and employs an army of 43,000 hands. In 1917 the cor- poration segregated its export business from its domestic production, and established branch offices in the Argentine, Brazil, Canada, Cuba, Chile, Columbia, Peru, Mexico, and the Far East, which handled, up to its liquidation in 1921, due to world conditions, some $5,000,000 worth of business annually.
While the plants making up the corporation are located in Maine, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Vermont, New York, and Kentucky, the number of woolen spindles in three of the Massachusetts units exceed in total those in all the twenty-seven plants located outside this State, while in Lawrence alone approximately 350,000 worsted spindles out of the total of 500,000 operated by the American Woolen Company are installed in the Washington, Wood, Ayer, and Prospect Mills in the Essex County city.
The most significant development in the history of the corporation began at North Andover, in 1918, when the Shawsheen Village project was launched. It is unrivaled by any textile unit in all the world, and typifies the record of perseverance, energy, and principle of its founder, the late William M. Wood, as can no other monument.
The Homestead Association, which followed in 1919, formed for the purpose of affording employees an opportunity to own their own homes through the medium of monthly payments of an amount approximately equal to the rental; the offer of shares of common stock in the company to employees, with the result that 13,000 at once became part owners of the enterprise; together with the establishing of a labor department which has brought about harmonious relations between employer and employee, all emphasize the vision held by the founders of the American Woolen Company in their desire to create, foster and maintain an eco- nomical agency for the production and distribution of woolen and worsted goods.
Its capital stock has reached $90,000,000, almost double the original investment of a quarter of a century ago, and the net profits have varied from $2,000,000 to almost $16,000,000 a year, according to the fluctuations of the general movements of the market.
Manufacturing the Power Resources of Greater Boston-No single agency has contributed more to the industrial development of Greater Boston than the Edison Electric Illuminating Company, of Boston. Its officers have always anticipated long in advance the manufacturing growth and needs of the municipality, and it is this fact which has influ- enced scores of prospective investors in locating their plants within the
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territory served by this progressive and wide-visioned dispenser of electric power and light.
It is interesting in reflecting upon the mutations of time to note that in its beginnings the Edison Company was compelled to fight for its very existence, even as many other public and private enterprises which in later years have established enviable reputations in industrial and commercial fields found strenuous opposition facing them in their efforts to add to the productive capacity of a given locality.
But it is obvious that in the minds of the promoters of the Edison Company there was the will to win-that Yankee stick-to-itiveness which has triumphed on so many battlefields in the past, and which today is one of the greatest factors in New England progress.
The Edison Company was by no means the first to enter the electric lighting field in Boston, for as early as June, 1881, the first arc light company was organized, followed by three others during the succeeding four years, so that in 1885 these four companies had built up an extensive arc light business in the city of Boston.
On October 21, 1879, Thomas A. Edison perfected the incandescent lamp as a commercial product. He also designed a direct current gener- ator and worked out a three-wire system of distribution, all of which were patented. The Edison Electric Light Company was organized to control these patents and promote companies for the use of the system. In 1885, representatives of this company started the organization of an Edison Company in Boston, secured from Boston capitalists the promise of subscriptions to stock and applied for a franchise to do business in the city.
The promoters were opposed by the arc lighting companies already operating, causing delay and a lagging interest among the investors, but paid up subscriptions to the stock were finally secured, a franchise obtained and The Edison Electric Illuminating Company of Boston was organized under the Massachusetts laws on December 26, 1885, with a capital of $100,000.
At the time of the organization the Bijou Theatre, in Boston, which had been discontinued a few years before, was planning on reopening, and applied to the company for service. This request hastened the start- ing of the station of the newly organized company, which leased prop- erty on Bumstead Court, near its present office building on Boylston Street, where it removed a small plant which had previously been used for isolated lighting, and started operations on February 20, 1886, with this theatre as its first customer. The records show that the price charged for current was one and one-fourth cents per lamp hour, equal to twenty-five and one-fourth cents per kilowatt hour.
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In June, 1887, the first district station was started, equipped with Edison bi-polar dynamos, driven by simple horizontal engines by means of belts, which although the best available at the time, was a very crude method of producing electricity, in the light of later developments.
On December 21, 1887, the second district station with similar equip- ment was started on Hawkins Street, and a number of customers located near these stations were supplied with service by means of overhead lines.
Soon additional facilities were needed to meet the increasing demand, and on August 27, 1892, the third district station started operation on Atlantic Avenue. The boiler room of this station is located over the spot where occurred the famous Boston Tea Party of December 16, 1773, and some of the beams and rocks of the Tea Party wharf were removed while excavating for the station foundations.
This unit located at tidewater, with modern facilities for handling and storing coal, and equipped with triple-expansion condensing engines, the first to be installed for this purpose, to which were direct-connected multipolar generators, comprised a plant designed to meet the require- ments of at least a quarter of a century, and was hailed at the time as the most wonderful undertaking that had been built in the engineering world. The fact that it has been for some years obsolete and is retained only as a reserve, proves the remarkable progress of the electrical industry.
The Boston Electric Light Company was organized in Massachusetts in June, 1888, to take over the pioneer arc light companies previously referred to, and for twelve years between 1890 and 1902, the Boston Com- pany on the one hand and the Edison Company on the other, faced each other in active and sometimes strenuous competition, their lines often paralleling one another and each seeking to secure the same business.
On February 5, 1902, the property of the Boston Company was con- veyed to the Edison Company, at which time the latter organization acquired the generating station of the Boston Company on L Street, South Boston, now called the fourth station, equipped with alternating current generators and Brush arc machines, which supplied the street lighting system of Boston.
This acquisition of an alternating current system of distribution marked the beginning of the territorial expansion of the company. While at the beginning of 1903 it was serving but one municipality, it is now supplying forty-three cities and towns, covering an area of approxi- mately 700 square miles. In order to care for this additional business a turbine station adjoining the existing station was erected and started operation on October 15, 1904. This station contains eleven turbines having a total capacity of 186,000 kilowatts, and has storage area for 100,000 tons of coal.
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For over twenty years this station has been capable of supplying the demands on the company, but in order to provide for future business it was necessary to arrange for additional equipment, and a location was sought which would offer the best facilities for receiving and storing fuel, provide an adequate supply of water for condensing and still be situated near the centre of distribution and in the line of possible terri- torial expansion.
Such a property was found, and purchased, in Weymouth, just across the river from the Fore River Shipbuilding Yard. This station, named the Edgar Station, commenced operations on January 17, 1925, initially equipped with two 30,000 kilowatt horizontal turbines to which has been added one 3,500 kilowatt turbine operating on 1,250 pounds steam pres- sure. There is provided also an area for the storing of 300,000 tons of coal. Provisions have been made for additional station equipment as it may be needed. This equipment shows the best economy in the com- pany's history, a kilowatt hour being produced from one pound of coal.
During this time distribution and transmission lines have been built, 150 substations erected and constant improvements in many lines have taken place, so that today the system is second to none in design, equip- ment, and operation in the United States. The investment in company property has increased from the original $100,000 to $115,000,000; its customers now number 250,000; it sold 500,000,000 kilowatt hours in 1925, and its gross income for that year was $21,260,000; it has about 3,300 employees and its maximum rate has decreased from twenty-five and one-fourth cents per kilowatt hour in 1886 to eight and one-half cents in 1925.
The company takes rank as one of the leading industries of Greater Boston.
Boston's Newest Industrial Center-Pittsburgh-on-the-Mystic-On a peninsula, which up to a few years ago was regarded as a marsh, there has been constructed in 1925 and 1926, on the Everett waterfront, and adjoining the shores of the Mystic River, the first units of the Mystic Iron Works, with its $5,000,000 blast furnace turning out every working day 500 tons of pig iron, which is about 20 per cent. of the quantity of this type of raw material used daily by the industries of the six New England states. The furnace is the largest in the East, and unsurpassed by any similar equipment east of Pittsburgh.
No plant in the world is more strategically located, and in the opinion of experts who have studied the situation, its erection is believed to be but the first step in the making of a modern steel plant that ultimately will rival the most efficient possessed by the Pittsburgh, Youngstown, or Birmingham district.
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It is in its alliance with the great coke plant, established in 1898, with its 455 ovens, in serried ranks meeting the demands of the blast furnace, that its great potentialities lie.
Included in the group going to make up the corporation known as the Mystic Iron Works are the Massachusetts Gas Companies, the Bos- ton Consolidated Gas Company, the New England Fuel & Transportation Company, the New England Coal & Coke Company, the Mystic Steam- ship Company, the Castner, Current & Bullitt Company, large interna- tional coal distributors and mine owners, and several lesser subsidiaries.
With such major industries brought into one gigantic corporation it is easy to see the challenge that is thrown down to Pittsburgh and the western and southern pig iron producers, for at this Mystic plant coal from company-owned mines, brought to company-owned docks, located at tidewater in company-owned ships, and converted into coke in a company owning the coking plant, is to supply the blast furnace with its fuel. Other company-owned vessels bring the limestone, used in the pig iron process, from seaboard quarries at Rockland, Maine, and discharge it almost on the hearth of the blast furnace. Finally, and perhaps the most important factor, iron ore is today being brought by ships to Everett from Africa, Sweden, Newfoundland, and Spain, for less than half what it costs, ton for ton, to haul iron by rail from Pittsburgh to New York City.
Provision has been made by the promoters for the addition of other units but as the plant stands today it has thirty-four miles of railroad in operation within the area of production, a fleet of seven locomotives, existing facilities for the unloading of 1,500 tons of coal per hour, a thirty-car train being filled in thirty minutes, overhead coal pockets of 20,000 ton capacity, a magnificent power house, an electric railway that carries the 85-ton ladle of molten iron to the casting house, and an end- less chain of molds, cooled by a water spray, which takes on the liquid mass at one end and dumps solid pigs of iron directly into freight cars at the other end, 150 feet away. These are whirled to the rail junction of the New York Central and Boston & Maine irons, less than half a mile away.
It is an interesting coincidence that the first iron made in North America was produced at Lynn, in 1645, from bog ore dug out of the Saugus River marshes, which was described by Governor John Win- throp, the first Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony to be "as good as Spanish iron." Up to fifty years ago iron was produced in Massachusetts, but the development of the rich western ore fields, with unlimited supplies of coal at hand, rendered profitable production impos-
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sible, and until the opening of the Mystic Iron Works in 1926, the nearest large blast-furnace that has operated during the past five decades is located at Buffalo, New York, where short rail and low cost lake trans- portation conspired to produce ore at a profit.
It is believed that the Mystic Iron Works will solve for all time the needs of Boston's and New England's industrial plants whose operations have heretofore depended solely upon supplies of pig iron shipped to this and other North Atlantic ports from the great iron producing centers of the United States.
Building America's Greatest Organs-The career of Boston's most noted organ builder began when, as a boy, Ernest M. Skinner was employed pumping a church organ. As soon as he was old enough to secure a job he elected an organ factory, and has never divorced himself from that line of activity since.
In 1905, through the assistance of friends who appreciated his genius, he started the Ernest M. Skinner Company, and although the books showed no profit for fifteen years, the equity in the Skinner name was being slowly and substantially established.
The policy laid down by the founder at the beginning has been rigidly adhered to, and each succeeding product has been built of the best material, in the most workmanlike manner, and has taken its place alongside the others as a distinctly beautiful instrument which would command the admiration of organists.
Mr. Skinner's genius for developing beautiful organ tones of distinct color and especially the reproduction of the tones of the orchestral reeds soon attracted the attention and admiration of the leading organists of the country and today experts are in agreement that no other builder is able to compete with the Skinner quality of tone.
Under this policy, each organ as completed became an active sales- man for the company, and every year the name of the builder became more widely and more favorably known through these monuments to the skill and craftsmanship of Skinner workmen.
Among the best known of the early instruments are the organs in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York; the College of the City of New York, Columbia University, St. Thomas Church, Grace Church, Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, all of New York; and the Old South Church, Boston.
In 1919, a fortunate connection established by Mr. Skinner resulted in a reorganization of the company, whereby Arthur Hudson Marks, formerly vice-president and general manager of the B. F. Goodrich Company, and recognized as one of the leading executives in the rubber
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industry, assumed the presidency of the Skinner Organ Company, and William M. Zeuch, one of the leading organists of the United States, became vice-president. This arrangement relieved Mr. Skinner of the financial and production factors, and enabled him to devote all of his time to the technical work. In 1921 the Steere Organ Company, of Westfield, was absorbed by the parent company, and was so re-equipped and organized as to be able to produce the smaller organs made by the Skinner concern. The same year great developments were made by Mr. Skinner in residential player organs. The following year George L. Catlin, at that time assistant treasurer of the Locomobile Company, was brought into the organization by President Marks, and a studio and sales office were opened in New York City.
While the success of the present management of the Skinner Organ Company is well known throughout the industry it is not, as one might surmise, due simply to increased sales effort and greater volume of busi- ness. These are factors, it is true, but the improvement in the work- manship and tonal quality of the Skinner organ are considered the pri- mary reasons for the growth of the concern. The management, antici- pating that competitors would only be too glad to find the slightest deviation from the well known Skinner quality of workmanship and beautiful tones, has paid more attention than ever before to the building and finishing of each organ and has continually added better craftsmen to the organization. This policy has resulted in building the house name still higher in reputation and has enabled the company to command higher prices than any of its competitors. In fact many large and import- ant contracts are awarded to the concern without any other builder being considered.
The city of Cleveland, a few years ago, installed a $100,000 Skinner organ in the Auditorium where the 1924 Republican convention was held. In that instance, the choice was made simply by taking a poll of one hundred and eighteen of the best known organists of the country, eighty-seven of whom voted for Skinner as Number I. The city of St. Paul, Minnesota, purchased a $75,000 organ as a result of a similar vote. Among other conspicuous examples of Skinner organs installed under the present management are: Old Trinity Church and the Town Hall, both in New York; the Carnegie Library and the Church of Ascension, of Pittsburgh; the Fourth Presbyterian Church and the Methodist Tem- ple, of Chicago; the Palace of the Legion of Honor and Trinity Church, of San Francisco; St. John's Church, of Los Angeles; Grove Park Inn, at Asheville, North Carolina; Trinity Church, West Palm Beach, Florida ; and the Boston City Club.
In the radio field, the Skinner concern was a pioneer, beginning more
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than a year ago to broadcast weekly recitals through WEAF, and is now conducting similar programs through the American Telephone & Telegraph system in half a dozen eastern cities, and from Boston through WNAC, with occasional air recitals from Cleveland and Pittsburgh.
The general office and main factory are at Dorchester, and with the Westfield plant, and the New York studio and sales office a force of upwards of two hundred and fifty men are employed.
Getting the Best Out of the Codfish-There are those who delight in publicly asserting that the citizens of the Bay State have not had a new idea since the early colonists pulled from the waters of Massachusetts Bay the first codfish and translated it into an article of commerce, but the statement is wide of the mark as is evidenced by the stellar contri- bution given to science and industry by the E. L. Patch Company, of Stoneham, which in 1922, after thirty-five years' work as pharmaceutical manufacturers, turned its attention to the study of vitamins as a part of the specialization program which has played such an important factor in the development of the concern.
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