The Society for Useful Knowledge (29 page)

Thirteen years later, Hamilton chose these same flowing waters to drive his monumental experiment in the early mechanization of America. This new city was to be named Paterson, after New Jersey governor William Paterson, in return for crucial support for the project, including tax abatements, an exemption for military service for SUM employees, and the legal authority to create an incorporated company town essentially outside state jurisdiction.

A carefully calibrated public relations campaign accompanied the unveiling of the SUM. Hamilton provided the first public hints of the forthcoming project in his 1791 Report on Manufactures. “It may be announced that a Society is forming, … in behalf of which measures are already in train for the prosecution on a large scale of making and printing of Cotton Goods,” he informed the Congress.
⁶⁹
Meanwhile, Hamilton and Coxe circulated among potential investors a formal three-page prospectus—drafted by Hamilton personally—that touted the advantages that the Society for the Establishing Useful Manufactures would realize from federal backing and an effective monopoly on large-scale cotton textile production.
⁷⁰

Finally, the pair used their extensive contacts in the American press to secure favorable coverage of their plans in leading newspapers. The
National Gazette
, for example, ignored early criticism of the SUM and instead trumpeted the project's financial prospects, citing the abundance of nearby raw materials and easy access to the power of the Great Falls: “These advantages, together with its contingency to, and easy communication with one of the first cities of the United States, makes it unquestionably one of the most eligible and desirable situations in the world for the permanent establishment of manufactures.”
⁷¹

Spurred by glowing newspaper accounts, public excitement about the project ran high and the demand among the well heeled and the well connected for
shares in the new corporation proved robust. However, the enterprise faced enormous challenges from the outset, many of which were exacerbated by poor judgment on the part of Hamilton in doling out key managerial positions to loyal but unscrupulous business associates. Facing ruin after provoking America's first financial scare, the panic of 1792, SUM chairman and former Hamilton aide William Duer absconded with Society funds in a failed attempt to stave off personal bankruptcy and a stint in debtors' prison. Other board members were also implicated in Duer's financial wrongdoings, which caused a run on the fragile American banking system and forced the intervention of the federal government.

Meanwhile, the SUM's planned investment of fifty thousand dollars in textile machinery apparently vanished into the hands of a perfidious corporate agent. Even honest investors found it difficult in the immediate aftermath of the panic to make good their pledges of funds for the Society's shares, further slowing the construction of the planned canals, the reservoir, and the raceway needed to capture the power of the falls for industrial use. The lack of real manufacturing experience on the part of the directors, almost all of whom were well-connected professional speculators, and the high cost of importing skilled European labor only added to the Society's start-up woes.

By 1794, the SUM nonetheless succeeded in setting up limited operations. The new construction manager Peter Colt, who replaced the ill-disciplined, free-spending L'Enfant, managed to complete a four-story, water-powered spinning mill, driving 768 spindles—then the largest such complex in America.
⁷²
An initial scheme that relied on oxen to drive the spinning of cotton, at the so-called Bull Mill, gave way in the summer to the full use of water-power—a technological breakthrough marked by a grand parade and a renewed, if short-lived, rush of enthusiasm for the entire project. Some months earlier, a hotel and tavern had opened on the site, further sweetening the public mood.

An advertisement for goods for sale at the complex in December 1795 included such items as “Candlewick, both common and Superfine”; “All kinds of white or printed cotton goods”; and “All kinds of Stocking-Yarns, for needle or frame, either grey or bleached.” According to one estimate, the new industrial town of Paterson featured around five hundred residents, of whom one quarter were directly affiliated with the Society.
⁷³

However, the whiff of financial scandal that surrounded the early years of the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures clung to Hamilton,
his associates at the treasury, and his private circle of financial and political backers. The treasury secretary himself had played an extraordinary, hands-on role in what was essentially a private business project, supervising the construction of machinery for the SUM, dictating its exact site, tussling with the board over every detail, and even issuing questionable guarantees for a last-minute bank loan needed to launch the venture and backing tariffs that would protect the Society's nascent cotton industry from foreign competition.
⁷⁴

The early difficulties faced by the scheme delighted Hamilton's domestic critics and seemed to justify widespread skepticism among British commentators and politicians toward the notion of a technologically advanced America. Many at home were alarmed from the outset at governmental support for industry, in particular the use of special legal powers and tax holidays and the granting of monopolies that threatened smaller, more traditional enterprises. Public anger also broke out over the use of state lotteries to help finance the SUM to the benefit of its shareholders, rather than the public at large.

Jefferson and his allies were outraged at this government-backed assault on their ideal of a yeoman republic, and the SUM came in for repeated political attack as a powerful symbol of the secretary's broader ambitions. “If it has been imputed to others as criminal to incorporate a company of merchants, engaged in a particular trade, or a company of manufacturers engaged in the fabrication of particular goods, or a company of gamblers to fleece the people by lotteries,” asked “An Observer” in the
Philadelphia Advertiser
as early as January 1792, “what must we think of this institution who have united all these political crimes in one act?”
⁷⁵
The financial panic only exacerbated the nation's anxieties over Hamilton's aggressive fiscal and banking policies, in particular the heavy reliance on debt.

After just two years, the persistent cost overruns and general mismanagement of the initial construction forced a radical change in the direction of the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures. Plans spelled out for the production of hats; the spinning of flax, wool, and hemp; the making of shoes; and the cultivation of silkworms, all promised in the prospectus, had come to naught, while the Society's printing operations had essentially collapsed. A revamped board of directors quietly voted to cease direct manufacturing in 1796, and the SUM steadily transformed itself into an industrial developer, selling or leasing factory space and providing power to entrepreneurs, inventors, and engineers of various stripes.

Significantly, the SUM's many shortcomings did not stem from any failure of technical innovation, creative energies, or industrial vigor on the part of the Americans, and the complex steadily took on a life of its own, animated by the same impulses of “mechanism” that began to drive economic development and industrialization elsewhere in the country. With the basic infrastructure in place, Paterson emerged in the nineteenth century as a manufacturing powerhouse and became, for a time, one of the largest and fastest-growing cities in America.

Along the way, the SUM went through cycles of boom and bust in the face of rapid technological change. The working of cotton textiles gave way, first to small-scale manufacturing, then to the casting of iron and the fabrication of heavy machinery, and subsequently to the production of fine silk. Paterson's signature industry, representing more than 125 firms in 1891, earned it the nickname Silk City.
⁷⁶
The advent of the airplane industry provided one final burst of activity. The Society itself held on, more or less intact, until 1945 when it was absorbed by the city it had created.

While volatile economic conditions played their part, each distinct phase in Paterson's industrial history was primarily driven by innovation, the transference of skills and ideas from old industries to new ones, and the subsequent development of novel techniques, applications, and systems. At the forefront stood some of America's leading inventors—mechanics, artisans, and other heirs to the traditions of useful knowledge and practical experimentation dating back to Franklin's original Leather Apron Club—rather than scientists or other academically trained experts.

These included textile worker Samuel Colt, who developed some of his first revolvers, the Colt Paterson, at the SUM, beginning in 1835; Thomas Rogers, a journeyman carpenter who directed his early experience with Paterson's cotton machines into a successful venture building steam locomotives; Thomas Edison, the telegraph-operator-turned-inventor who oversaw the replacement of the SUM's hundred-year-old system of waterpower with a hydroelectric plant in 1914; and the Wright brothers, former bicycle mechanics whose Wright Aeronautical Corporation took over a former SUM textile mill to build the engine that powered Charles Lindbergh's solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927 and later to outfit U.S. aircraft during World War II.

Had Hamilton not been killed in his infamous duel with Vice President Aaron Burr in the summer of 1804, the former treasury secretary might well
have looked back at the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures and reminded critics of his prediction at its birth: “The establishment of manufactures in the United States when maturely considered will be found to be of the highest importance to their prosperity.… Communities which can most completely supply their own wants are in a stage of the highest political perfection.”
⁷⁷

a
John Bartram was already in declining health when the war broke out. He died at the age of seventy-eight, on September 22, 1777, four days before British troops began their occupation of Philadelphia.

b
Unbeknownst to Franklin, and to the rest of the scientific world, Cook had been killed one month earlier in a dispute with Hawaiian islanders.

c
The others were Roger Sherman, a New England shoemaker, and George Walton, trained as a carpenter in Georgia. Both later went on to successful careers in law and politics.

d
Given Coxe's personal ambitions and his natural inclination to hedge his bets, it is not surprising that he shared the secret with Hamilton's archrival Jefferson, for whom Coxe later drafted a number of economic reports and policy papers.

Say it! No ideas but in things—
nothing but the blank faces of the houses
and cylindrical trees
bent, forked by preconception and accident
split, furrowed, creased, mottled, stained
secret—into the body of the light—
These are the ideas, savage and tender
somewhat of the music, et cetera
of Paterson, that great philosopher—
     —William Carlos Williams,
Paterson
(1927)

Benjamin Franklin died quietly in his bed on April 17, 1790, at the age of eighty-four. His public funeral four days later was one of the most extraordinary processions of humanity in American history, with a crowd of mourners, marchers, and onlookers estimated at roughly twenty thousand—or two thirds of Philadelphia's total population. A phalanx of local printers, practitioners of Franklin's beloved craft, walked behind the coffin to the Christ Church cemetery, followed by members of the American Philosophical Society, physicians from the medical college, the clergy, and delegates from the various artisans' associations. The House of Representatives and its French counterpart, the National Assembly, each observed one month of official mourning.

Provost William Smith, Franklin's one-time nemesis in educational and political affairs, delivered a gracious eulogy before the American Philosophical Society and both houses of Congress. “His original and universal genius was capable of the
greatest
things, but disdained not the
smallest
, provided they were useful,” intoned Smith, who then elevated Franklin above the world's great philosophers and lawgivers “by uniting the talents of both, in the Practical philosophy of doing good.”
¹
Franklin, it is fair to say, had fulfilled the supreme
ambition he expressed to his mother, Abiah Folger, forty years earlier: “The last will come, when I would rather have it said,
He lived usefully
, than,
He died rich
.”
²

Franklin bequeathed his personal telescope to Rittenhouse, the lone mechanic among his six pallbearers. In effect, he also handed over to Rittenhouse stewardship of the movement for useful knowledge and its flagship institution, the American Philosophical Society. With Rittenhouse installed as its leader, America's preeminent knowledge society retained its focus on the useful and the practical. The new president himself addressed large-scale engineering projects, chiefly the construction of roads, canals, and other improvements to river transportation, all designed to serve the commercial needs of a young and growing nation.

Among the many practical challenges facing the country were the creation of a trusted system of coinage and the establishment of reliable standards of weights and measures. As they had done with many of the most trying problems during the war, the leaders of the republic turned to the day's foremost scientific practitioners for help. Soon Rittenhouse found himself drafted to head up the new U.S. Mint, where his reputation for learning, experimental skills, and intellectual integrity would be a great help with the development, production, and safeguarding of a new American currency.