Читать книгу The Inventive Life of Charles Hill Morgan: The Power of Improvement In Industry, Education and Civic Life - Allison Chisolm - Страница 16

Charles Morgan’s life found expanded opportunities, as did the new town. The year 1852 was a banner year for him, beginning with his 21st birthday on January 8. Now that he was of legal age, he could not wait another day to declare his love for a Shrewsbury girl, Harriet T. Plympton. So on January 8th, no doubt with a grin across his thin, oval face, he and Harriet registered as the first marriage of the year in Shrewsbury’s town hall and then travelled to the First Congregational Church in West Boylston for their wedding, with Rev. Joseph W. Cross presiding.

The ceremony was attended by Harriet’s parents, Harriet and Alexander Plympton, a Shrewsbury carpenter, machinist and farmer, as well as Hiram and Lucina Morgan. The newlyweds probably followed common practice of the time and moved in with Charles’ parents and paid them rent.

On the marriage registry, Charles listed his occupation as “labour.” Since his drafting lessons four years earlier, he had continued to work for the Bigelows in the machine shop, learning his craft, and gaining skill as a draftsman.

Erastus Bigelow kept an eye on his eager pupil, and within a few months, named him superintendent of the dye-house for the carpet company. Carpet dyes, their color, brilliance and variety, their durability and resistance to fading were essential selling points for the emerging American carpet industry. Creating dyes and understanding how different wools absorbed them required much knowledge and training.

Morgan’s knowledge of chemistry had been limited to the books he could find, so he tackled the new subject with his typical close observations and scientific approach. Titling his diary “Chas Morgan’s Note Book for Coloring M July 1852,” Morgan documented in his initial entries his first days on the job, including shorthand recipes to achieve specific dye colors that yarn will hold.

The experiments were conducted on an industrial scale, as he tested gallons of various mixtures on more than 100 pounds of “yarn waste” at a time. He preserved among his diary’s pages sample strands, one green, one blue. After five days on the job, on July 6, 1852 he summarized this procedure for making and fixing the color of green yarn:

200 lbs Colored Cotton green

100 lbs Fustic (wood from a mulberry tree that produces a yellow color)

35 lbs. Logwood (the heart of a woody type of legume plant)

2 lbs. Sal. Soda (also known as washing soda, a transparent crystalline hydrated sodium carbonate)

Give 12 turns, add

5 ¼ lbs. Blue Vitriol (hydrated copper sulfate)

Give 10 turns, rinse, dry

Once he learned the basics of the dye process, however, he changed jobs. Whether it was the nuances of chemistry or the supervision of others that did not suit him at age 21, he returned to working with machinery with great eagerness. Fewer than a dozen pages into his diary, his entries shift focus to other aspects of the textile business, particularly the construction and timing of loom operations.