Carrying the mill

The role of the steam engine in the American Industrial Revolution has captivated scholars for more than a century. This "colossus of modern machinery," long assumed to have been a necessary precursor to industrialization, was revealed in empirical studies conducted in the 1960s and 1970s to have been adopted slowly and haltingly throughout much of the 19 th century. Most American manufacturers, it turns out, preferred waterpower until some time after 1850. Previous studies of steam engine diffusion describe when and where the nation took its first steps toward a fossil fuel economy. This dissertation focuses on the adoption decision process in New England textile mills. It asks how decision makers chose between waterpower and the steam engine and explores how decision-making processes changed over a sixty-year period, from the 1820s to the 1880s. It finds the once-innovative steam engine became increasingly affordable, reliable, well understood, and widely available due to the efforts of steam advocates and engine manufacturers, and that the Civil War laid the groundwork for increased adoption by catalyzing education for mechanical engineers. Steam adopters, at first technical experts with a high tolerance for risk, were by 1860 the operators of smaller, less capitalized mills. In the 1870s and 1880s, steam adoption was propelled by the demand for expansion and the technically sophisticated practice of "cogeneration," the use of steam for multiple purposes. Although the dissertation is a study in the history of a particular technology it takes as its subject, not the machine itself, but the people who bought and used it. The attention paid to reconstructing their opinions, perceptions and reasoning, and locating them in a finely textured cultural context, brings a wide variety of source material into play and allows for a multi-disciplinary perspective. Sources include the correspondence and business records of textile mills operators, steam engine and waterwheel manufacturers; biographies, autobiographies and personal papers of key individuals; town and corporate histories; popular and trade publications; published and newly tabulated U.S. Census data; images of steam and waterpower technologies, and in-person examination of the few remaining steam engines and waterwheels.