Читать книгу The Inventive Life of Charles Hill Morgan: The Power of Improvement In Industry, Education and Civic Life - Allison Chisolm - Страница 3

SHORTLY AFTER BECOMING President of Morgan Construction Company in November 1965, I had the opportunity to read Charles Hill Morgan’s 1900 Presidential address to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. It was a lengthy review of his accomplishments at Morgan Construction Company, which he had founded in 1888. I was hugely impressed! Growing up and until reading his speech, I had heard almost nothing from my father or my grandfather about this remarkable, self-taught engineer. I needed to know more, and so do you.

It has taken too long, but before we sold Morgan Construction Company to Siemens I persuaded my son, Philip, and the directors to hire Allison Chisolm, the writer of our Square and Crescent and MCCo publicity, to write Charles’ biography. Having never researched and written a biography before, especially going back over 100 years, Allison estimated what it would take, Philip and the directors agreed, and the project was launched.

This biography is truly a remarkable achievement. Charles had kept diaries throughout his life and these had been turned over to WPI Archives in the 1980s. Allison has read every word. In MCCo vaults were “letterbook” copies of outgoing correspondence and some originals of incoming letters going back to the beginnings. The copies are extremely difficult to read because time has made them very faint, but Allison has persisted as you will see.

She now knows more about Clinton, Massachusetts, paper-bag making machines, cams and American steel plants of long ago than any other living person. We are the fortunate beneficiaries of her deep and thorough research.

It is also our good fortune that she is an excellent writer and story-teller. It takes a lot of imagination and talent to take an historical sentence and turn it into a paragraph. And do that hundreds of times.

One fantastic outcome to all this research and narrative is the knowledge that in 1864 Erastus Bigelow (of Clinton and worldwide carpet fame) was the person responsible for recommending Charles to Ichabod Washburn of the Washburn and Moen wire mill in Worcester. Mr. Washburn was looking for a General Superintendent. Charles moved to Worcester, and the rest, as you can read, is a history of hard work, integrity and entrepreneurial success.

Paul S. Morgan

Duxbury, Massachusetts

June, 2012