USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Metropolitan Boston; a modern history; Volume II > Part 34
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Placing one of the country's foremost authorities on vitamins in charge of the problem the discovery was made that while cod liver oil had been generally employed for its medicinal value for two and a half centuries, not until modern research in the company's laboratories revealed the commodity as being the richest known source of vitamin A and the anti-rachitic vitamin was its thereapeutic value understood- another indication of the advance of Massachusetts industry joining with science in evolving the pioneer product and in proving to the med- ical world that American cod liver oil manufactured under modern scientific conditions is superior to that made in any other country of the globe.
Before any product was offered on the market more than a year was spent in the company's research department in testing various methods of handling and cooking the cod livers and in storing the oil. As a result, radical improvements in the whole process of manufacturing cod liver oil were made. It was found that an adequate supply of fresh livers was the first essential in producing medicinal cod liver oil of high vitamin potency and agreeable taste. It became necessary for the Patch Com- pany to set up many plants along the shores of New England and of Nova Scotia where the oil is extracted at once from strictly fresh livers. The company next developed a method whereby the oil can be made on the large trawlers while the boats are fishing far out to sea. Only a few minutes after the fish are hauled aboard they are dressed and the livers go immediately into the cookers where the oil is extracted.
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After the manufacturing process was perfected, it was still necessary to carry on work in the research department as every consignment of oil is biologically assayed on animals at the company's plants in order that the vitamin potency may be guaranteed.
The product soon won a quick professional recognition and today it not only enjoys national distribution, but is marketed in Mexico and all South American countries.
A Massachusetts pharmaceutical house has thus brought New Eng- land into her rightful position as a producer of high grade medicinal cod liver oil to fill the great need of the medical profession.
The program for the future development of the Patch Company includes several new products which, when commercially marketable, will take their place along with the other Patch specialties.
The company is typically New England in all its aspects, as its founder, Prof. Edgar L. Patch, was a product of old Worcester County, having been born in Spencer, spending his boyhood in Worcester and Clinton, the turning point of his career coming to him while serving as a drug clerk in the latter town; later becoming the real genius of the faculty of the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy, in Boston, and finally locating in Stoneham, where he built up the vast business which bears his name, and where he passed on to his reward in 1924, in his seventy- third year. Dr. Arthur D. Holmes, the head of the company's laboratory, is a native of New Hampshire, and a product of Dartmouth College.
How Chase's Lozenges Grew Into Necco Products-In 1847, when Oliver Chase opened a modest candy shop in the city of Boston he little realized the vast importance of this event upon the industrial life of the community and its influence upon the future of the confectionery indus- try of the United States.
Today, the manufacture of confections is the fifth greatest industry in Boston proper, being exceeded only by sugar refining, with which it is allied to a certain extent, and by clothing, printing and publishing, and boots and shoes.
This candy shop, however, proved an important event for Oliver Chase, even though he could not visualize the existence of a billion dollar candy industry in the United States three-quarters of a century later.
Like many great industries, the confectionery industry was born under very modest circumstances. In those days candy making was confined to the home kitchen and was considered a luxury and a treat in which people indulged themselves only occasionally.
A cold sugar paste rolled out on a smooth slab was cut out with a double ended cone shaped metal tube sharpened on one end. The labor-
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ious process of cutting lozenges one at a time was aided only by the conical shape of this lozenge cutter which permitted lozenges to be cut as rapidly as the arm could operate. Each lozenge forced others up through the tube until they could be pushed out from the wide end of the tube onto a board to be dried. There was undoubtedly a demand for these pure sugar sweets and the limitations of hand operations and the need for mechanical equipment gained for Oliver Chase his great renown. The law of supply and demand was becoming very active in the case of this maker of pure sugar lozenges, and he soon discovered that mechan- ical aid would be necessary if his business was to continue to grow. Of an inventive turn, he developed a machine which automatically cut out Chase lozenges in quantities, and as a result of this invention is credited in the "Encyclopedia Britannica" as being the inventor of the first candy making machine in the United States. This was the beginning of the confectionery industry in the United States, and his little candy shop was the genesis of the business which is now operated under the popular trade name of Necco and the corporate name New England Confection- ery Company.
Chase and Company, as the firm later became known, was made up of Oliver Chase and his brother. The business spread in later years from coast to coast, and Oliver Chase developed many of the popular lozenge confections which so delighted the hearts of children because of their numerous interesting shapes and sizes. Among these were the famous Conversational Lozenges, Coin Lozenges, and what are now popularly known as Necco Wafers, but prominent at all times was the famous block Chase Lozenges with the name Chase stamped in it, which today con- stitute the standard for pure sugar lozenges throughout the country.
Bird, Wright & Company, later known as Wright & Moody, another energetic group of confectionery manufacturers was established in 1856. This concern is remembered particularly for its novelty packages of children's candies. Its trade mark, "O. K.," is still to be found on the most popular brands of penny confections. Abner J. Moody was the creative genius in molding and modeling the many attractive shapes. These novelties have made lasting impressions upon children for many generations, and delight the youngsters of today just as they did over half a century ago.
Fobes, Hayward & Company, another Boston confectionery firm, noted particularly for their fine grades of sweets that appealed more to the adult than to children, was established in 1848. This firm founded by Daniel Fobes later became the leading distributors of fancy sweets, and ultimately enlarged their manufacturing business in high grade choco- lates, bonbons and fancy packaged confections.
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It would take many pages to tell the interesting story of these three important Boston confectioners, but suffice it to say that their expand- ing business became of nation-wide importance, and it was but the natural sequence of events that at the dawn of the present century these three diversified lines should consider the consolidation of their interests. In 1901 they came together under the name of the New England Confec- tionery Company. Under the trade mark name of Necco the new com- pany has grown to a position of leadership in the confectionery world of Boston, especially in the field of popularly priced sweets.
In the Necco line there are over five hundred different kinds of con- fections, and the enormous business which has developed in this very broad line is directly responsible for the building of the world's largest candy factory, bounded by Massachusetts Avenue, Lansdowne, Cross, and Albany streets in Cambridge. While there may be larger plants throughout the country making bakery products, and confectionery as a side line, the new Necco factory, devoting its entire space to the manu- facture of candy, is the largest.
The buildings, six stories in height, are of reinforced concrete with brick and limestone facing on the Massachusetts Avenue front and when completed this year will house the 1,300 hands now employed by the company.
The Man Who Put the Air to Work-High among the founders of the present industrial supremacy of New England stands the name of Benjamin Franklin Sturtevant, who advanced from most humble sur- roundings to a place where his name became synonymous with industrial success, and who, fortunately, was permitted to live and serve until he saw the products of his own brain, genius and handiwork become the servants of world-wide civilization.
Less than three-quarters of a century ago there lived a shoemaker in a little Maine village, pegging shoes as shoes had always been pegged by hand. As he worked on, he saw in the prosaic, hum-drum work upon which he was engaged, the possibility of a machine that would shave a continuous ribbon of wood from the log, and, feeding this strip to a cutter, form each peg from the wood, and drive it into the shoe at the same blow. That was his vision, and today shoes are still pegged in the Sturtevant way.
But the operation of some of his machines raised a dust which both- ered the workman. Promptly, he designed a simple blower to fan away the dust. He decided to concentrate his inventive genius on the fan, and with seventy-five cents in his pocket came to Boston, where he promptly spent his tangible assets for cab-fare in carrying the models of his fan to a lodging house.
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For a little time he carried on in a small way in a little shop on Sud- bury Street, and in the Centennial year he built a new factory, then considered large, in Jamaica Plain, which, within a decade thereafter, was more than doubled in capacity.
Soon afterwards he passed from earthly scenes of triumph, but his power and personality were transmitted to good hands and within five years after the previous enlargement the Sturtevant works were again doubled, and in the early years of the present century a new site was chosen at Hyde Park and soon covered with great factories and foundries, containing acres of floor space, until today, in its own special field of service, the B. F. Sturtevant Company is the largest manufacturing establishment of its kind in the entire world, as well as one of the leading industrial enterprises of New England in the size of its plant, the number of its workmen, and the amount and value of its output.
There is no denying the fact that it owes this position to the unwav- ering faith of its principal owner, former Governor Eugene N. Foss, and his associates, to the skill of New England workmen and to the industrial soundness and vigor of New England itself as the logical center of high- grade, skilled mechanical engineering.
For many years Governor Foss has been a militant and outstanding force in the maintenance and development of the industrial progress of the section. A firm believer in the fact that this ancient stronghold of the skilled artisan is impregnable from successful attack, he has so managed the affairs of the B. F. Sturtevant Company as to carefully maintain the high standard of the products of his concern by insisting upon the fair and equitable utilization of labor by the use of the best raw materials in fabricating the most efficient types of machinery; and by the accumulation and dissemination of useful engineering data acquired after the most painstaking and thorough research activities, thus prov- ing by precept and example the right of his company to the confidence of engineers, users of power, and the consuming public.
In laying down the policy of his company each step has been predi- cated upon the recognition of a definite industrial need, and production has been gauged on the highest attainable means to that end.
To facilitate this policy in practice the Sturtevant Company has main- tained a highly efficient business organization, with branch offices and agencies throughout the world. It is a truism that through the growth of the mechanical draft and fuel economizing apparatus the Sturtevant Company has been a direct agency in enabling the industrial world to save uncounted millions of dollars at an insignificant cost of installation and operation.
The Sturtevant products are employed all over the world in the
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making of paper and cloth, in the drying of lumber, chemicals and innumerable manufactured products, in forcing the fires of the steel mills, in cooling the air of homes and public buildings-or warming it when it is too cold; in drying and moistening it as required; in separating and conveying grains, pulverized materials, flour and food stuffs, and in innumerable other ways until it may be said they constitute the pulse of trade.
The phenomenal growth of the company is perhaps the best proof that well-designed, well-made and well-distributed New England machin- ery retains increasingly the confidence and approval of the entire indus- trial world. The products of the concern make weather and climate to order ; they employ air to save fuel and power and to aid health; they convey loads at the rate of a mile a minute; they lift grain a distance of forty or fifty feet; they feed fuel dust to the boilers in coal breakers ; they throw off the noxious gases that endanger the lives of workers in chemical industries; they banish the fine metal chips that formerly cut the delicate membranes of the lungs of metal workers; they even pull sparks out of smoke; they separate the wheat from the chaff, and they go so far as to distinguish between popped and unpopped corn in a fritter factory.
Trail Blazers of the Coffee and Tea Industry-Nations have been made and unmade over a brewing of tea and momentous problems of world-wide import have been decided over coffee cups.
A full century before the American revolution, Charles II of Eng- land attempted to enforce a proclamation by which he sought to effectu- ally close 3,000 British coffee-houses as hotbeds of sedition, but he soon found that he was compelled to reckon with King Coffee.
A hundred years later, because of the conviction that taxation without representation was tyranny, a handful of determined men, clad in the garb of American Indians, consigned a certain historic cargo of three hundred and forty chests of tea to the then turbulent waters of Boston Harbor. The Boston Tea Party, which bordered on the very edge of treason to the King, was but the forerunner of other revolutionary acts which were to culminate in the new republic across the sea.
Just as in old England, coffee-houses were centers of political agita- tion, so, too, in Colonial times, they were the rendezvous of dauntless souls whose names have come down to us as tireless workers for American independence. Massachusetts presented the very head and front of opposition to England's Colonial policy and it was in the old time coffee- houses of Boston that dark plots were hatched which were ultimately to shape the destiny of the nation. It seems a far cry from the primitive
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decoction of the Colonial coffee-house of Boston, to the delectable demi- tasse or cafe au lait that regales the palates of epicures in our day and generation, but to care in cultivation, to improved methods in manu- facture and to the unflagging zeal of great Boston coffee merchants in scientific blending and roasting is attributable the widespread popularity of coffee today.
The founders of the business, Caleb Chase and James S. Sanborn, rounded out a singularly successful mercantile career. With others they formed the nucleus of a firm conspicuous for business integrity and abil- ity. The methods employed, while forceful and vigorous, were always honest and broadly progressive, and the firm's position in the trade today, the character and scope of its activities, may fairly be said to constitute the lengthened shadow of their dominant personalities.
In many respects the history of the house is unique. No outside interests have ever advanced a dollar of its capital, formulated its plans or shaped its policies. Present partners comprising the firm are John Moir, William T. Rich, Frederick A. Flood, Harry L. Jones, F. Warren Kimball, and Charles R. Butler, with Carleton Moseley and Henry T. Brown, resident partners in Chicago and John Anderson, resident partner in Montreal.
In 1878 they startled the trade by being the first concern to pack and ship roasted coffee in sealed cans. Tradition was thrown to the winds in this amazing departure from the hitherto accepted practice of marketing coffee. A score of years had hardly elapsed following the disappearance of the last white-topped wagon of the intrepid "forty-niner" in the dust of the Western prairie when representatives of this New England firm appeared on the business horizon of Chicago and Montreal, and pushing further westward connections were established, in what at the time were little more than trading centers, but prospering with the marvelous growth of the western country and cemented by the years these earlier business relationships have proved the very bulwarks of present day success.
In 1894, the firm of Chase & Sanborn installed at their Boston plant the first automatic weighing machine known to the coffee trade of the United States, and a year later they introduced the now well-known parchment-lined paper bags used in the trade. In the more than sixty years of existence of the firm it has always led in the evolution from bulk to package goods, by which the qualities of tea and coffee are preserved for the user.
Coffees and teas bearing the signature and trade mark of this New England firm are as readily procurable today in Texas, California and even in Alaska, as in adjacent States along the Atlantic seaboard. Its
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widely known brands of teas and coffee have consistently represented merchandise so dependable and distinctive in character as to suggest how faithfully have been perpetuated those traditions which are asso- ciated with the older and long established business institutions of New England. To the initiative and aggressiveness of these merchants, New England and Boston in particular owes the distinction that it enjoys today of being the fine coffee center of the country.
In its long mercantile life the firm has been singularly in position to observe the changing conditions incident to the growth and development of the industry. It has witnessed the consumption of coffee jump from about 200,000,000 pounds in the early sixties to a present consumption of something more than 1,000,000,000 pound. Or, to put it differently, from a consumption of about five pounds per capita in 1866 to something more than twelve pounds per capita today.
Two and a Half Centuries of Brick Making-From 1667, when the Great and General Court of Massachusetts appointed a committee to frame a law regulating the size and manufacture of brick to the present hour, the history of the brick industry of Metropolitan Boston and of New England has constituted one of the most interesting bits of romance connected with any industry.
Some of the first real building and homes in and around Salem and Boston were constructed of brick. As early as October 26, 1636, the General Court granted permission to Thomas Mount to manufacture brick from the marshes, which is now the south side of Summer Street, Boston, and from that date forward brick yards sprung up throughout New England, their location depending upon the clay deposits, until, in 1667 regulation was found desirable.
But it remained for the twentieth century to finish the work, as it was not until 1900 that the genius appeared by which thirty-seven differ- ent brick-yards located in Belmont, Cambridge, and Medford, all within the Metropolitan District, and others in Maine, New Hampshire, and New York, were consolidated into the New England Brick Company.
Some of these plants became obsolete ; some ran out of clay, and for various economic reasons yards were sold for other development, until 1920 seven yards were being utilized.
Although only seven out of the original thirty-seven are now being operated, the output is approximately the same as when the thirty-seven yards were all in use. This is due to the fact that all the yards were known as open yards, and only operated during the summer months, while the company, since 1912, has been equipping plants that had large clay deposits with dryers, which permit brick to be made during the
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twelve months of the year. In this way, one plant is equal to approxi- mately three or four open yard plants.
Not only is the company operating dryer yards, but they have installed up-to-date machinery, which has increased the output consid- erably, as eight brick are made where only six were before.
The efforts of the management has been to improve the quality and output, as well as cutting down the cost of manufacture, and experiments are continually being made in the drying and burning, so that the New England Brick Company can produce at a low cost the finest product manufactured in the East.
The Cambridge, Massachusetts, plant is one of the most modern in New England, being constructed of brick and steel, and employing the latest automatic machinery and dryers. In fact all the local plants about Boston are equipped with improved machinery of modern efficiency.
The daily capacity of the five plants that make sand-struck brick, is approximately 400,000 brick, made up as follows: Belmont, 50,000; Cambridge, 135,000; Medford, 63,000; Epping, New Hampshire, 50,000 ; Mechanicsville, New York, 100,000.
Two plants at Gonic, New Hampshire, operated from May to Sep- tember, manufacture the justly famed hand-made wood-burned water- struck brick. This process of manufacture, which is as old as civiliza- tion, is nearly extinct, but as no machine can duplicate the work of the human hand, the company has maintained this method of manufacture because of the individuality of the brick thus produced. The product is used for the finest residences, apartment houses, college and manufac- turing buildings, and is shipped throughout the United States.
A Medford Brick Yard Furnishes the Germ From Which the Steam Pump Grew-The second largest pump manufactory in the United States-the Blake & Knowles Works, of the Worthington Pump and Machinery Corporation-occupies a ground area of nine and a half acres, containing more than 600,000 square feet of floor space, and nor- mally employing 1,500 workmen, and is located on Third Street, between Munroe and Bent streets, and extending back to Sixth Street, in East Cambridge, just across the Charles River, from Boston proper, under the management of George P. Aborn.'
Like many of the large industries of Greater Boston the Blake & Knowles Works had a modest beginning, and the present plant is the result of an amalgamation of two industries which began about the period of the Civil War.
George Fordyce Blake, who was superintendent of one of the Med- ford brick yards in 1862 invented the pump which bears his name, the
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device being the outcome of his particular needs in handling clay-pit water. He promptly abandoned brick-making and established a small shop on Province Street, Boston, in 1864, where he manufactured pumps, water meters, brick presses, and other machines of his invention.
In 1869, on account of increasing business, the shop was moved to Chardon Street, and in 1872, the entire building at the corner of Cause- way and Friend streets was taken, and here the business, under the name of the George F. Blake Manufacturing Company, continued until 1890, at which time the industry was transferred to East Cambridge to the large shops built for it on the present site.
In 1858, a few years before Mr. Blake started in business, Lucius J. Knowles, who was operating a warp mill in Warren, Massachusetts, invented the Knowles direct acting steam pump. The small shop estab- lished in Warren prospered and a large business rapidly developed, con- ducted under the name of Knowles Steam Pump Works.
In 1879 the Blake Company bought the Knowles works, but during the next eighteen years the plants continued to run as separate units under their original corporate names, although controlled by the same financial management, until in 1897 the Knowles shop was moved to the Blake works at Cambridge, the buildings being enlarged for the pur- pose, and the combination became known as the Blake & Knowles Steam Pump Works.
About 1912 a new type of direct acting steam driven pump called the Simplex Style A Pump was designed by Mr. Aborn to supplant the single pump of both Blake and Knowles design which had been the regular types built. It was a simpler and more efficient pump than either of these older types and henceforth became the standard product of the works.
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