Читать книгу The Inventive Life of Charles Hill Morgan: The Power of Improvement In Industry, Education and Civic Life - Allison Chisolm - Страница 6

1831 was an auspicious year for the birth of someone who was to become an inventor, entrepreneur and fervent Christian. Fiery evangelical preachers crisscrossed the western New York of his childhood preaching a gospel of self-denial, self-discipline and self-improvement. Each man, they taught, should take responsibility for his own morality and salvation. It was, Ralph Waldo Emerson proclaimed that year, “the age of the first-person singular.”

The emergence of such self-directed spiritual philosophies echoed the country’s developing democratic ideology. That very American ideal of self-reliance, where a man could advance on the strength of his education, ideas, and initiative, was reiterated in November 1831 by Massachusetts Senator Edward Everett. In the inaugural lecture of a series honoring Benjamin Franklin, Senator Everett said, “We are all equal” in our ability “to compare, contrive, invent, improve and perfect,” addressing an audience of Boston laborers and mechanics whose backgrounds resembled Franklin’s early years.

Improving and perfecting the ideas of others is the real accomplishment of most innovators. History often pays tribute to inventors with breakthrough ideas, but “improvers” rarely gain the spotlight. Inventions may offer new or different ways to solve problems, but by commercializing those ideas, improvers, or innovators in today’s parlance, build businesses and create jobs. In 19th-century New England, many mechanics tinkered with better ways to do something. Their incremental improvements fulfilled a desire to solve problems and effect change. A new journal, Scientific American, recognized this impulse in describing its mission in its first issue in August 1845: “the Advocate of Industry and Enterprise, and Journal of Mechanical and Other Improvements.” Written particularly for mechanics and manufacturers, the magazine had for its first cover illustration an “improved rail-road car” and articles describing improvements in a variety of fields as well as a list of new patents. Charles Morgan was an avid reader of Scientific American as early as 1852, even before he invested in his high-quality drafting tools.

The virtues of improvement had been “a watchword of society” in early 19th-century America, according to Robert Friedel in his comprehensive work, A Culture of Improvement. Novelty was not welcomed. Inventions that were too new were suspected of quackery or worse, the source of labor savings that were unwanted in challenging economic times. Craftsmen who made incremental improvements in their tools, methods and materials were clearly interested in raising the quality of a product. Improvements, however, were not always patentable. The distinction between invention and improvement, as Friedel details, “mattered to those seeking sources of national wealth and prosperity.”

In the United States, establishing a patent system was a priority for George Washington’s administration in 1790. Together with Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and Attorney General Edmund Randolph, the president signed the new nation’s first patent in 1790, for an improvement on the making of “pot ash and pearl ash.” The patent system soon needed its own improvements, but not until 1836 did Congress create the Patent Office. No longer a responsibility of the Secretary of State, the country’s patents were administered through a Commissioner of Patents.

As inventions and improvements on them received patent protection, the volume of patents grew. While it took close to 20 years to grant the first 12,000 patents after 1836, that quickly became an annual figure by the 1870s. Charles Morgan offers a prime illustration of this escalating trend: his first patent, issued in 1857, was number 17,184, and his last, in 1909, was number 931,750.

Charles was fortunate to live in an inventive location. Many observers considered the spirit of improvement and innovation of the time to be rooted in the genius of particular individuals or places. “The New Englander invents normally; his brain has a bias that way,” reported the London Times in reviewing the American exhibits at the Paris Exposition of 1878, where the typewriter, telephone and Remington rifle jockeyed for attention. George Frisbie Hoar, a lawyer and politician from Worcester, relished every opportunity to celebrate the prolific inventors of central Massachusetts while he served in the U.S. Senate from 1877 to 1904. Speaking to that chamber on January 6, 1903, in support of a bill to regulate the power of large corporate trusts, Hoar argued that Worcester’s businesses were founded not on water power, seaports, mines or fertile prairies, but local control and public-spirited citizens: Worcester “was a marvelous example of American genius, growing and expanding in the air of American liberty. It was the very center and home of invention,” he declared.

Hoar boasted that within a 12-mile radius of his Worcester home were the birthplaces of the inventors Eli Whitney of the cotton gin, Erastus Bigelow of the carpet machine, Amos Whittemore of the carding machine, and Elias Howe of the sewing machine. The city itself was home to inventors of modern plows, wire drawing and industrial looms. Worcester’s workshops produced practical inventions like the monkey wrench, typewriter and a machine that not only folded envelopes, but also attached glue to the flaps. From the mind of Ichabod Washburn sprang the Worcester wire industry, which began in a blacksmith’s shop but grew to such an extent that his company became the largest and most profitable wire manufacturer in the world.

Referring to his Worcester neighbors, which included Charles Morgan, Senator Hoar continued: “All around me are homesteads, some bordering my own, who are inventors, foremen, and skilled workmen, who have acquired fortunes in this honorable service, so beneficent to mankind and so honorable to their country.” And what made this concentration of invention and industry possible? “It was not water power or steam power or electricity. It was man power, it was brain power, that wrought this miracle.”

These powers of invention required not just celebration, but thoughtful reflection. A widely circulated 1890 sermon by Reverend C.S. Nickerson, a Wisconsin minister, questioned the value of invention for invention’s sake. “It is sometime said the progress of the present age is the result of invention,” he began. “It is a great deal nearer the truth to say that invention comes from the spirit and need of the age. Can the mere invention of a machine make a people great and prosperous unless they have and recognize a need of it?”

Map of Worcester, Massachusetts, c. 1880

Over the course of his lifetime, Charles Morgan made a substantial and lasting contribution to the development of paper bag production, steel manufacturing, patent case law, his own company, his wider family and the civic life of his community. Morgan’s drafting tools helped him begin this personal and professional journey. His formidable manpower and brainpower, as Senator Hoar so forcefully put it, did not develop in a vacuum, however. Charles Hill Morgan’s success was further propelled by the power of capital, the wire industry, the system of education, and the people of Worcester, Massachusetts.