Ingenious machinists : two inventive lives from the American industrial revolution / Anthony J. Connors.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Connors, Anthony J., author.

Series:

Excelsior editions

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Wilkinson, David, 1771-1852.

Wilkinson, David.

Moody, Paul.

Machinists--United States--Biography.

Machinists.

Inventors--United States--Biography.

Inventors.

United States.

Industrial revolution--United States.

Industrial revolution.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

xii, 282 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Albany : Excelsior Editions, 2014.

Summary:

Ingenious Machinists recounts the early development of industrialization in New England and New York through the lives of two prominent innovators whose work advanced the transformation to factor)'work and corporations, the rise of the middle class, and other momentous changes in nineteenth-century America. Paul Moody chose a secure path as a corporate engineer in the Waltham-Lowell system that both rewarded and constrained his career. David Wilkinson was a risk-taking entrepreneur from Rhode Island who went bankrupt and relocated to Cohoes, New York, where he was instrumental in that city's early industrial development. Anthony J. Connors writes not just a history of Technological innovation and business development, but also two interwoven stories about these inventors. He shows the textile industry not in its decline, but in its days of great social and economic promise. It is a story of the social consequences of new technology and the risks and rewards of the exhilarating, but unsettling, early years of industrial capitalism. Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction: machinists in the early republic

Industrial glimmerings : Massachusetts before 1790

Revolutionary technology : Rhode Island, 1775-1790

The progress of a textile machinist : Paul Moody, 1794-1814

Oziel's son : David Wilkinson, 1790-1815

Company man : Paul Moody at Waltham, 1813-1823

Toward Wilkinsonville : David Wilkinson, 1815-1828

Respectable company man about town : Paul Moody at Lowell, 1823-1831

"We all broke down" : David Wilkinson, 1829-1852

Epilogue: ingenious machinists

Notes

Glossary

Essay on sources

Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781438454016

1438454015

9781438454023

1438454023

OCLC:

871186897