Men, Machines, and Modern Times by Elting E. Morison

Author:Elting E. Morison [Morison, Elting E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2016-07-21T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

* This essay was delivered as one of three lectures at the California Institute of Technology in 1963.

7

“Almost the Greatest Invention”

Part I

A Long Course of Expensive Experiment

In the spring of the year 1862, a rail of Bessemer steel was laid down between two abutting iron rails in the Camden yard of the London and Northwestern Railway.* Four thousand goods cars—about one every twenty seconds—passed over it in the next twenty-four hours. By estimate in the following two years about 20,000,000 wheels ran on the rail. At the end of that time it was still in place and “hardly worn at all.” Seven times in the same period the abutting iron rails had been replaced.

Three years later, in May 1865, the first rail manufactured from Bessemer steel in this country was produced at the North Chicago Rolling Mill. In the next two days five more were made. Present on the second day were men in the iron trade from six cities, a United States senator, three women, and four strangers. To a man in Wyandotte, Michigan, who had, after three years of labor, produced the steel from which the rails were made, the news fell like “the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.” Those in Chicago who attended the actual event believed it of such significance that they arranged to have the first rail “lying in state” for a time in the lobby of the Tremont House.

Those involved had not miscalculated the point of their achievement. In the year 1860 there were in this country five companies that produced between them about 4000 tons of steel. Forty years later, in 1900, this country alone by all known methods produced about 10,000,000 tons. Not all, not even most, of this grand total came from the Bessemer converters, but from this remove it is now possible to see that the single rail in the Camden goods yard and the six rails made by the North Chicago Rolling Mill were the small causes from which flowed such great results.

The nature of those results, imperfectly described by production figures, is perhaps better explained in the words of a man closer to the first events who, in one way or another, observed most of them, was a part of some of them, and appears to have understood almost all of them. In 1892, Abram Hewitt said,

I look upon the invention of Mr. Bessemer as almost the greatest invention of the ages. I do not mean measured by its chemical or mechanical attributes. I mean by virtue of its great results upon the structure of society and government. It is the great enemy of privilege. It is the great destroyer of monopoly. It will be the great equalizer of wealth. … Those who have studied its effects on transportation, the cheapening of food, the lowering of rents, the obliteration of aristocratic privilege … will readily comprehend what I mean by calling attention to this view of the subject.

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