A History of Manufacturing in 5 Objects

10.13.16

Both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have talked about loss of manufacturing jobs, and the importance of having things “Made In America.” From 18th century colonists struggling to produce that most coveted of items — porcelain — to the invention of nylon stockings and the TV picture tube in the 20th century, Peter, Ed, and Brian explore the surprising history behind five inventions and innovations.

This episode and related resources are funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this {article, book, exhibition, film, program, database, report, Web resource}, do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

invention; manufacturing; material history; technological innovation

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Child Labor Lesson Set

Note to Teachers:

The materials that follow comprise a lesson in questioning and a lesson on writing. First, the lesson asks students to answer, then create questions at each level of Bloom’s Taxonomy. The objective here is to teach students to develop sophisticated inquiry skills and to foster a curiosity about people and issues. Information needed for writing and answering these questions is provided through both primary and secondary sources. Students will be practicing the Habit of Mind: interrogating text and posing questions about the past that foster informed discussion, reasoned debate, and evidence-based interpretation. The suggestion in this lesson is for students to use the questions they create as part of a role-play of a “Meet the Press” episode on the regulation of child labor. However, this work could be used for a Socratic Seminar or a number of other discussion strategies that capitalize on questioning to develop higher order thinking skills.

The second part of this lesson is structured to entice students to gain information from both primary and secondary sources in order to make an evidence-based argument about a historical topic. They will need to distinguish between fact and opinion or, as History’s Habits of Mind term it, discern differences between evidence and assertion. The summative assessment for this lesson involves students in a structured reading and writing assignment to instruct them in critical reading and writing with evidence to support a position.

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Segments

War Dog

In 1798, Eli Whitney – who perfected, not invented the cotton gin – was awarded a contract to manufacture muskets for an “undeclared war” with France. Whitney had zero experience in making firearms, but he did manage to make an impact. Historian Merritt Roe Smith tells the hosts how Whitney revolutionized manufacturing with interchangeable parts.

Eli Whitney; arms manufacturing; firearms; manufacturing

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PETER: Welcome to the show. I’m Peter Onuf, here with Ed Ayers.

ED: Hey, Peter.

PETER: And Brian Balogh.

BRIAN: Hey there, Peter.

PETER: Today we’re doing something a little different on BackStory. As always, we’ll be exploring the history of one topic– in this case, manufacturing– but we’re going to take a look at that history by examining five objects. And in looking at those five objects, we’ll illuminate key moments in the history of American industry.

ED: First up, the precursor to the modern rifle– the musket.

BRIAN: What’s so special about a musket, Ed?

ED: Oh, Brian, that wasn’t exciting enough to you?

[LAUGHTER]

PETER: You can have a ball with muskets.

ED: Oh, god. And we’re going to begin by talking about someone you might recognize, a Mr. Eli Whitney.

BRIAN: I know him. He invented the cotton gin.

ED: Well, kind of.

PETER: He did not invent the cotton gin. This is historian Merritt Roe Smith.

MERRITT ROE SMITH: He invented a very effective cotton gin. There had been many cotton gins before Whitney came along. But they could not gin green seed cotton, which was the main type of cotton grown in the southeastern part of the United States.

ED: In other words, Eli Whitney perfected the cotton gin. He filed for a patent in 1793, hoping to get rich off his design. But instead of getting rich, he spent all his time suing people.

MERRITT ROE SMITH: Primarily concerned about pirating his invention– people building it and then not paying him royalties for it. And that got to the point that by 1798, he was nearing bankruptcy.

ED: Whitney was in a tough spot. Enter the musket.

MERRITT ROE SMITH: Whitney learned that the Secretary of the Treasury, a guy named Oliver Wolcott, was putting out calls for firearms contracts.

ED: The fledgling United States government needed to stockpile weapons to protect itself against a growing threat from France. The two countries were involved in an undeclared war over French attacks on US shipping. Where government officials saw a threat, Whitney sensed a business opportunity.

MERRITT ROE SMITH: Whitney saw a firearms contract as a way of rescuing his cotton gin business, basically, because he was going to get an advance on the contract. I think the advance was something like $10,000. Lot of money in 1798.

ED: The feds gave Whitney two years, until 1800, to complete the contract. There was just one problem. Well, actually, make that several problems.

MERRITT ROE SMITH: He didn’t own a factory. He had no workforce. He had no experience making firearms. And so it was a very gutsy move on his part to do something like that.

ED: Was it a stupid move on the part of the government to give it to him?

MERRITT ROE SMITH: Well, yeah. In my opinion, it was. Because they were desperate, I suppose, for firearms, but still, to contract with somebody who had no experience is pretty remarkable.

ED: Given these circumstances, it’s no surprise that Whitney blew his deadline. So the inventor headed to DC to ask for an extension. And this is when the musket really made an impact.

MERRITT ROE SMITH: He went to Washington with a box of muskets that he had made up in New Haven to demonstrate to John Adams, who was the outgoing president, and the incoming president, Thomas Jefferson, and other dignitaries, that he could pull out the firing mechanism from his muskets and exchange them with one another. And from this, Jefferson concluded that all the parts were basically interchangeable.

ED: “Interchangeable parts.” Now, those words might not mean much to us today, but in 1800, they represented a revolution.

MERRITT ROE SMITH: Before that, each gun was made unto its own. Each one had its own parts, but they would not interchange with other guns– mainly because they were made in a craft style, which meant that every part was hand-filed and fitted and shaped to the point that it was going to– all the parts would come together. Whitney was claiming that he could make a gun that didn’t require filing or fitting, that it was all the parts would be able to fit one another, whether you’re making 10 guns or a thousand guns, or whatever.

ED: Think of it this way. Before interchangeable parts, if a gun broke, there was nothing a soldier could do to fix it. But with Whitney’s musket, a damaged part could be replaced on the spot, and the implications were huge.

MERRITT ROE SMITH: You know, Jefferson and Adams really blew their minds when he had this demonstration, and they walked away thinking, this guy’s doing something new and different. We need to support him.

ED: By the time Jefferson became president in 1801, the war with France was over. And that was a good thing, because Whitney still hadn’t delivered his muskets. On the other hand, Whitney had something more powerful than a government contract. He had an idea that he could promote. Whitney spent the rest of his life spreading the gospel of interchangeable parts, and this idea would propel manufacturing and industry in ways that neither Whitney, nor John Adams or Thomas Jefferson, could even begin to imagine.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Fake It Until You Make It

Remember those interchangeable parts that Whitney invented? Historian Merritt Roe Smith says he pretty much faked it.

arms manufacturing; firearms; invention; manufacturing

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PETER: If you’ve been following this presidential election, both campaigns have been responding to concerns about the country’s declining manufacturing industries. Here at BackStory, we faced a challenge in responding to all that election chatter. How do you tell the history of dozens of industries? Well, every industry produces things, objects, that have become parts of our lives. What about looking at how the objects themselves have changed American history?

BRIAN: Today on the show, we’re looking at a history of US manufacturing through five objects. We’ll find out how porcelain caused a trade war in a teacup. And we’ll look at how the birth certificate radically changed who could work in American factories in the early 20th century. We’ll also discuss why nylon stockings caused a run on American department stores in 1946.

ED: Brian, I can’t wait to hear about those nylon stockings. But first, let’s return to the musket.

BRIAN: Oh, not the musket!

[LAUGHTER]

ED: Brian’s on fire today. Now, do you remember Eli Whitney’s demonstration of interchangeable parts in front of Jefferson and Adams?

PETER: Yep.

ED: Well, historian Merritt Roe Smith says that Whitney pretty much faked it.

MERRITT ROE SMITH: The reality is– is that Whitney did not invent interchangeable parts. That’s a process that worked itself out in the United States primarily over a 40-year period. He never achieved it in his lifetime. But that said, his legend cannot be completely destroyed, because he was a promoter of the idea. He wanted to see this new technology developed. He just didn’t do it himself. There were others that achieved that idea.

ED: He kind of planted the seed, right, by claiming that he could to it–

MERRITT ROE SMITH: He planted the seed– absolutely. He pushed the idea, planted the seed, and for that, he deserves a lot of credit.

ED: You know, today, when we’re used to everything being interchangeable, it seems like we should have discovered this a long time ago. Why was it such a hard thing for people to imagine, much less accomplish?

MERRITT ROE SMITH: The main reason is if we project ourselves back to, say, 1800, think of the lack of machines and the lack of measuring devices that just were not in the United States at that time. A whole new set of ways of making things had to be developed.

ED: I see. All right.

MERRITT ROE SMITH: And these are primarily not just self-acting machines, like a milling machine, for example, but also more precise gauges that were used to test the parts as they were coming off the line. And that was a whole different mindset than what had existed under the craft system in the United States.

ED: I see.

MERRITT ROE SMITH: Or in Europe, for that matter.

ED: Right. But why guns? I mean, of all the other things that we could have made with interchangeable parts– does it say anything about the United States that weapons were our main contribution to 19th century manufacturing?

MERRITT ROE SMITH: Why guns? It’s a great question. I think it has to do with the military implications. First of all, governments often sponsored the development of this new technology, both in the United States and in Europe. And it’s an expensive venture. No private individual in the early 1900s could have afforded to invest–

ED: I see.

MERRITT ROE SMITH: –the amount of money that was needed in order to develop this over the course– think. If you’re a company in, say, New Haven– or wherever– having to invest in the development of a new technology over a 30- or 40-year period, you’d be bankrupt.

ED: Right

MERRITT ROE SMITH: Long before that happened.

ED: And nobody else has that much of an incentive for their parts to be interchangeable. It’s only if you have lots of men with lots of guns does that become a big deal, right?

MERRITT ROE SMITH: Absolutely. You know, it wasn’t the US Army that actually did the work. There were private individuals– and public institutions, like the two National Armories at Springfield and Harper’s Ferry. But it was the constant prodding and congressional funding of these ventures that made them– you know, in effect, made it possible for these procedures and these new techniques to be worked out.

ED: I think people might be surprised. We think about this as being a clear example of just private enterprise, but the federal government’s been a critical ingredient from the very beginning, then.

MERRITT ROE SMITH: I think one of the most interesting things about American history is what I tell my students about. I call it government in, government out. And what I mean by that is that when an idea often comes about in the private sector– a particular inventor has a great idea but doesn’t have the money to develop it– they turn to the government support. And basically, that government support helps them get through that risky time when the new invention– there’s no guarantee it will work out or not. But once it becomes economically viable, government gets out and it becomes privatized, basically.

ED: So it really was kind of a national accomplishment. And it must have been a surprise to the world that the Americans could do this. So how did this invention identified with the United States become known around the world?

MERRITT ROE SMITH: Well, basically, it happened at the London Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851, which was organized by Queen Victoria’s husband. The thing that’s interesting about it is that the United States tended to send very utilitarian stuff. You know, countries like Russia were exhibiting very fine ware– Faberge, for example, and French tapestries, very fine stuff. And here are the Americans, exhibiting guns and rifles and apple peelers and plug tobacco and stuff like that. Then the British were sort of making fun of these American notions, as they called them.

But you had people like this firm from Windsor, Vermont, named Robbins & Lawrence– they exhibit six interchangeable rifles. It was so novel to European eyes that it got the name “The American system of manufacturers” to encapsulate, basically, the whole process of interchangeable manufacturing, especially in firearms.

ED: So did the invention of interchangeable parts and the American arms industry sort of spread through other industries in the United States?

MERRITT ROE SMITH: Surely did, and it moved fairly quickly. Once the arms industry had developed the capacity to make guns with interchangeable parts, you see them– that information, those techniques– moving to other technically rated industries. And as a result of that, gunmakers, interestingly, became the first manufacturers of the first commercial product made with gun-making technology. Take a guess what it is.

ED: Um, it’s not a cotton gin.

MERRITT ROE SMITH: Not a cotton gin.

ED: A washing machine?

MERRITT ROE SMITH: Well, you’re in the right area.

ED: OK.

MERRITT ROE SMITH: It’s a sewing machine.

ED: Whoa, didn’t see that coming.

MERRITT ROE SMITH: Sewing machines, to locomotive equipment, to pocket watches. And you can go right on down the line, from watches and bicycles to automobiles, refrigerators– you name it.

ED: Are all of those technologies built on interchangeable parts?

MERRITT ROE SMITH: Yeah, absolutely.

ED: So that’s the commonality.

MERRITT ROE SMITH: That’s the commonality, is the use of machine tools and gauges, and basically precision-measurement devices to manufacture parts interchangeably and to products that could be used in the consumer market. And I think the thing that’s interesting about this story of interchangeable parts is how it strings itself over a long period of time and touches so many different areas of manufacturing.

ED: Great.

MERRITT ROE SMITH: We’ve only talked about a few. But you know, it has profited from what originated from Eli Whitney and his contemporaries in the early 19th century.

ED: Merritt Roe Smith is a historian at MIT and co-author of Inventing America: A History of the United States.

Praying For The Porcelain God

Alexandra Kirtley, a curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, explains why porcelain was so coveted by American colonists and how the ability to manufacture it helped pave the way for independence.

Colonial Era; consumer goods; luxury; manufacturing

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BRIAN: Well before interchangeable parts were a twinkle in Eli Whitney’s eye, another item inspired visions of a brighter future.

ED: Here’s the situation. In British North America, colonists enjoyed luxury goods courtesy of the sprawling British empire– tea and spices from India, sugar from the Caribbean, and finished goods like glass, paper, and fine furniture made in London. There was just one catch. Colonists could only buy these goods from British merchants, often at a substantial markup. This forced dependence on England was a source of mounting tension. Frustrated colonists took to smuggling overpriced goods like tea. They also began to manufacture their own versions of imported luxuries, and this simple act helped pave the way for American independence. In some ways, it set the table.

PETER: Which brings us to our next manufactured object– porcelain. Most of us probably have a porcelain cup or two in our kitchen. For American colonists, porcelain was as coveted and valuable as sterling silver.

ALEXANDRA KIRTLEY: It’s about refinement and the Americans were eager to live a refined lifestyle.

PETER: This is Alexandra Kirtley, a curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She says to understand why early Americans were so enamored of imported porcelain, you’d have to compare to the earthenware pottery manufactured in the colonies. Earthenware was the opposite of refinement. It was rough, thick, heavy, and easily broken.

ALEXANDRA KIRTLEY: Porcelain is different from earthenware. It’s harder. It’s also translucent, so when you put it up to light, light shines through it. So how– how wonderful that you have this material that is, at once, stronger, yet light transmits through it.

PETER: Right, so all the senses were engaged. This is the Enlightenment sensorium, as historians call it– the Enlightenment in a teacup, you might say.

[LAUGHTER]

ALEXANDRA KIRTLEY: Yes, that’s a nice way of putting it. And in America, there was not only the desire to have this porcelain and to use this porcelain, but to make it. So if the Americans or the colonists could produce their own porcelain, why, the world was their oyster. Because that was the ultimate in luxuryware production.

PETER: Kirtley says that by the mid-18th century, colonists could produce their own porcelain. They had discover rich deposits of kaolin– that’s the clay used to make porcelain– in the American South. And they had a seemingly limitless supply of wood to keep fires burning in porcelain kilns. They even had craftsmen who could build the kilns and keep them going. By 1770, there were two known American manufactories of fine porcelain, in Philadelphia and Charleston, South Carolina.

The goal was, in the words of one potter, to make every kind of earthenware that is usually imported from England. These factories produced everything, from finely decorated plates and pitchers to pickle stands, to the delight of the colonists who could afford them. You could say this local porcelain inspired the colonies’ first “buy local” movement.

ALEXANDRA KIRTLEY: There was a lot of support at the top. Ben Franklin himself, when he was in London, his wife sent him some porcelain made at the porcelain works here in Philadelphia, and he replied back to her and said, go on in encouraging the manufacturers at the china works.

PETER: But not everyone was happy that the colonists had cracked the porcelain ceiling.

ALEXANDRA KIRTLEY: The Brits would have been quite nervous that the Americans were able to do this, that the Americans were actually able to produce luxury manufactures. You know, the American colonies were established by the British with the goal of providing raw materials to the mother country.

PETER: The whole point of the colonies was not to manufacture but to provide raw materials for manufacturing on the other side of the ocean.

ALEXANDRA KIRTLEY: That’s correct. That’s correct. Americans continued to be not only a source of the raw materials, but also a market for those manufactured goods. However, the American colonists, as they were able to become more proficient in local manufactures, became more of a threat to that mercantile system that the British created and were thriving on. If colonial Americans were producing, were manufacturing their own products, then the whole system would break down.

PETER: All of which helps explain what happened next.

ALEXANDRA KIRTLEY: Back in jolly old England, the manufacturers there heard about this, and they cut their prices.

PETER: Ow.

ALEXANDRA KIRTLEY: Yes.

PETER: Yeah. So this is a kind of commercial warfare that anticipates the Revolution itself, you might say, like dumping porcelain in America to eliminate potential competition?

ALEXANDRA KIRTLEY: That’s correct.

PETER: Those British price cuts crushed the tiny American porcelain industry. But Kirtley says experience making porcelain fired Americans’ imaginations about their future.

ALEXANDRA KIRTLEY: It was sort of wind in the sails that we were able to boast of making porcelain in America. It really was a great badge of honor for us. And part of that was sort of the alchemy that was reflected in the production of porcelain– using the earth, using materials that were naturally occurring, combining them, adding heat to them, and coming up with a completely new substance.

PETER: You might say, Alexandra, that if you could transform the earth, as you do with porcelain, you could transform the country and make the land into a new country.

ALEXANDRA KIRTLEY: That’s actually a wonderful analogy. I mean, you could. There was something that was inspirational about being able to create something magical, exotic, and perhaps also that regular people could throw off the powers of the mother country.

PETER: This is why visions of the future are so important to Americans at this time.

ALEXANDRA KIRTLEY: That’s correct.

PETER: Of course, they’re proving something to the Brits. But more important than that, they’re proving something to themselves. Because provincial Americans would have doubts about their capacities, about their civility, about their refinement, and this was a definitive answer. Because they look at the growing wealth of the colonies and say, yeah, one day, we could be England.

ALEXANDRA KIRTLEY: That’s correct, too. It provided– it was a source of pride that they were going to be able to do this. The Great Experiment was going to be able to take hold. If they could produce that, if they could manufacture that, then we really didn’t need to be connected to Britain. They saw themselves playing on a world field. They saw themselves being able to participate like England, France, Germany, Italy.

PETER: Alexandra Kirtley is a curator of American decorative arts at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. And if you want to see some of that fine American porcelain for yourself, head to our website, backstoryradio.org.

How Old Are You?

By the late 19th century, manufacturing was exploding and so were manufacturing jobs. In a search for cheap labor, many companies employed children and though reformers wanted to put a stop to it, it was difficult because the government couldn’t prove the ages of the workers. Historian Susan Pearson explains how the birth certificate changed all of that.

birth certificates; child labor laws; children; factory workers; manufacturing

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ED: So far today, we’ve looked at how a couple of manufactured objects– muskets and porcelain– changed the course of American life. Now let’s reverse the process. Let’s see how another object– actually just a slip of paper– actually changed American manufacturing, by changing who could work.

BRIAN: By the late 19th century, manufacturing in the United States was exploding. Machines were stitching together shirts, cutting leather, rolling cigars, and forging steel. To keep up with all that production, factories needed workers– and lots of them. Company managers met that demand with children. Many even preferred children. Kids were docile, less likely to strike, and best of all, cheap.

SUSAN PEARSON: About 20% of children in 1900 are working outside the home for wages.

BRIAN: This is historian Susan Pearson.

SUSAN PEARSON: One thing that industrialization does is it deskills labor. And the great advantage of unskilled labor for employers is that they can pay children so much less than they have to pay an adult male to perform the equivalent task.

BRIAN: It was one thing for kids to help out on the family farm, but industrial jobs were something else altogether. Working in factories and mines was dangerous and hard, with the workday often stretching beyond 12 hours. You know those photos you’ve seen of forlorn-looking children standing next to machines three times their size? Those pictures were part of reformers’ efforts to outlaw child labor in factories. But progress was slow, in part because the government couldn’t prove how old anybody was.

SUSAN PEARSON: Even in states that are able to pass laws that regulate children’s labor– so, say New York State passes a law in the 1880s that says you’ve got to be 14 years old to work in a factory. OK, well, how do you prove that? How do you know what children are 14 and which are 13, and which are 12?

PETER: The answer? The birth certificate. Today every American citizen has one. But in the 19th century, parents recorded the birth of their children in the family Bible, if at all. Pearson says in the 19th century, age was a fuzzy concept.

SUSAN PEARSON: A lot of people didn’t keep careful track of when their children were born or when they themselves were born. If you think about it, in the 19th century, there weren’t a lot of reasons you needed to know your exact birthdate. So when census takers would come around and ask people how old they were, they would give very round numbers. They would say, I’m about 25, or I’m close to 30.

BRIAN: So if so many children were working, why were some other people so concerned about those children working, especially in factories?

SUSAN PEARSON: They would have told you that child labor is wrong because it stunts the physical and mental growth of children who work in industrial settings. However, historians have different explanations for why child labor becomes a problem, and that really has to do with changing ideas about childhood itself and what it is that childhood is for, right? That children should be kept away from the adult world, in their own kinds of activities that are developmentally appropriate. So they should be in school, not working. They should be playing, not working. They should be shielded from premature contact with adult activities, like going into saloons or coming in contact with vice, or any of the kinds of mixing that children and adults routinely used to do.

BRIAN: Once the states actually started requiring registration of births and then requiring birth certificates in order to work, how did the families react?

SUSAN PEARSON: A lot of families were not happy. Clearly the child labor reformers, they are at war with working-class conceptions of childhood, of the fuzziness of chronological age, and of working-class household economy. And those parents, we might look at them and think they were greedy or selfish, or didn’t understand what children really need. Chances are they were operating from a world view in which all family members contribute to the financial well-being of the household. As soon as they’re big enough to work, everybody’s put to work. That’s how it had always been. What changed was that the kind of work children could do became industrial.

PETER: We haven’t talked about how the kids felt about this. Did they like working?

SUSAN PEARSON: Most of them did. There’s a lot of testimony, even among the reformers, who think that they’re protecting these children– they find all the time when they go into factories that the children want to be there, and they are even proud of the work that they do and the money that they bring into their families. A National Child Labor Committee employee, a guy named Owen Lovejoy, went and visited kids in the coal mines in Pennsylvania, and he wrote, the typical breaker boy– who’s a boy who works in the coal mine– is proud of his breaker and boasts of its daily output. And he goes on to say they’re proud about how fast they can work, how accurately they can work, but also, and I quote, “They’re proud of the independence which personal economic value gives him in the home.”

BRIAN: Hm. So what impact does this have when it’s fully in place– let’s say by 1940? How does this change manufacturing?

SUSAN PEARSON: It makes it much harder to work before the age of 16, which is the standard that the Fair Labor Standards Act creates. It also works in conjunction with compulsory schooling laws to change the nature of the workforce as a whole. So in 1900, only 10% of youth age 14 to 17 are attending high school. By 1940, when the Fair Labor Standards Act is in place, that has jumped to 73%. So that’s a seven-fold increase in the number of young people that are staying in the workforce past the age of 14.

BRIAN: When you started doing your research, did you expect a piece of paper to have such a dramatic impact on the labor force, the workforce, in manufacturing?

SUSAN PEARSON: I did not. I didn’t know how central it was to child labor reform. I thought that it would be on the periphery, one of many things that the birth certificate did. But the more I did the research, the more I discovered that it was really this campaign against child labor that was the first time that birth certificates were used as identification documents in this way.

BRIAN: Is the birth certificate just a symbol of government’s increased role in kind of mediating between workers and employers?

SUSAN PEARSON: In some sense, yeah, it is. It’s certainly not the only example from this period, from the late 19th and early 20th century, where you see everything from the Pure Food and Drug Act, which was passed in 1906, to efforts in the states to regulate the number of hours per day and per week that employees can work, to regulating the kinds of work that women can do. There’s a large national movement to try to control the terms of industrial production in the United States.

BRIAN: Right, and you can add workers’ compensation and worker safety laws to that.

SUSAN PEARSON: Absolutely

[MUSIC PLAYING]

BRIAN: Susan Pearson is a historian at Northwestern University and the author of The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Children and Animals in the Gilded Age. She’s currently working on a book about the history of– you guessed it– the birth certificate.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

BRIAN: BackStory listeners, listen up. This is a listener challenge, and it’s a challenge for our upcoming show on the history of horror. And to help us challenge you, we have our producer, Nina Earnest.

NINA EARNEST: Hi.

PETER: Hey, Nina.

ED: Hi, Nina.

NINA EARNEST: Hey, guys. So before I tell you the challenge, I’m going to tell you a story. So I am from rural Iowa, small town, and there’s a local legend we have about a girl named Lucinda.

The story goes that Lucinda, in the late 19th century, was supposed to get married. She was supposed to run off with a man. But when she went to go meet him, he didn’t show up. And he either didn’t show up because he abandoned her, or because his wagon wheel got stuck– the details are a little murky.

ED: Oh, not that!

PETER: Oh, stick in the mud!

NINA EARNEST: I know.

[LAUGHTER]

Either way, she threw herself off the bluffs down on Stony Hollow Road. So the local myth is that if you go to Stony Hollow Road and you call her name three times, she will appear. And if she appears and drops a rose, then you will die the next day.

ED: Oh my goodness.

NINA EARNEST: So a lot of people in my high school– this was a big thing, that people would go check it out. I just called a friend and she said that she was going to do it, but she chickened out.

ED: So are other big blank places in your high school annual where people died from hitting on the wrong side of this story?

NINA EARNEST: Well, maybe there were just no roses dropped. They saw her, but there were no roses.

ED: My goodness.

PETER: Ow!

BRIAN: It’s pretty intense.

ED: Well, Nina– Nina, I– I’m mesmerized, but where do our listeners come in?

NINA EARNEST: OK–

PETER: Yeah, what’s the challenge?

NINA EARNEST: So this is a phenomenon that folklorists and anthropologists are now calling “legend tripping.” And the idea is that it’s oral storytelling and local mythology that sets up these repeatable experiences that are seen as a rite of passage for young people, which is why it was all these people at my high school who were like, we’re gonna go see Lucinda tonight.

We want to know your local legend tripping stories. We want to know what those things are that were your rites of passage, that you said, well, we’re going to go call this person’s name three times, and whatever supernatural experience was supposed to happen to you. We want to hear them. We want to know your name, we want to know where the legend is, and what the legend says. So you should leave a comment on our website, backstoryradio.org, or record a voice memo on your smartphone and send it to us at backstory@virginia.edu.

ED: Or just call Lucinda and she’ll deliver the message. [LAUGHS]

PETER: Yeah. But make it quick. We only got a minute for you.

NINA EARNEST: That’s right, Peter. We want these to be a minute or less.

BRIAN: Thanks a lot, Nina.

ED: I’ll look forward to these scary stories.

Nylon Mob

In the 1920s, the Dupont Chemical Corporation, already established as a manufacturer of gunpowder and other explosives, made an unexpected discovery. Nylon. The hosts talk to textile researcher Susannah Handley about how nylon became one of the most coveted consumer products and what happened when it vanished from department stores during WWII.

chemistry; clothing; consumer goods; manufacturing; textiles

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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BRIAN: Our next object comes to us compliments of the DuPont Chemical Corporation. DuPont made its fortune in the 19th century manufacturing gunpowder and other explosives. But in the 1920s, with its bottom line secure, the company decided to branch out. Executives decided to invest in scientific research that they hoped would yield prestige, if not necessarily profit. The new division was jokingly nicknamed Purity Hall. The company recruited some of the country’s most promising young chemists. One of them was a Harvard man named Wallace Carothers.

SUSANNAH HANDLEY: They set him up with very expensive laboratory with no request that he makes anything that will make them a profit.

BRIAN: This is Susannah Handley, a textile researcher based in Paris. She says Carothers’ experiments made DuPont even richer, and something of a household name. Those experiments also sparked a revolution that fundamentally altered American manufacturing, which leads us to our next object– nylon stockings.

MAN: Here’s a piece of a cloth we make from coal and other things. It’s called nylon.

BOY: But how can a soft thing like this come from a hard thing like a piece of coal?

SUSANNAH HANDLEY: It’s basically a– a polymer? It’s very difficult to explain.

MAN: This is adipic acid, and this is hexamethylenediamine.

SUSANNAH HANDLEY: Tiny, tiny, tiny molecules joined together in limitless length.

BOY: Hexa– hexa– say, Mr. Norton, how can you remember a name like that?

SUSANNAH HANDLEY: It became like a petrochemical necklace, and it could make really, really long, and really, really strong, and really durable, to some extent– and elastic.

MAN: And here’s a full bobbin of bright, silky nylon yarn.

SUSANNAH HANDLEY: This sort of whole masculine molecular world began a collision between the most feminine of items, stockings.

ANNOUNCER: Better things for better living– through chemistry.

BRIAN: DuPont saw a market for its unexpected discovery. At that time, women’s stockings were made from fragile, imported raw silk, far too expensive for the average woman. But DuPont was willing to bet millions of women would spring for pricey stockings if they were strong enough to last. And so the company began courting women with a national advertising campaign two years before nylons were ready for the market.

ANNOUNCER: And DuPont chemists are working to develop fibers that will be even finer, softer, tougher, and less expensive than those we have now– stronger than steel wire of the same cross-section.

BRIAN: As strong as steel.

SUSANNAH HANDLEY: Steel.

BRIAN: As strong as steel!

SUSANNAH HANDLEY: That’s what they said. And they had great big promotional shows. They had the Nylon Bride. It was in all sorts of magazines, as well, where everything the bride was wearing and everything in her boudoir was constructed from nylon materials.

[LAUGHTER]

And they had very expensive exhibits created at World Fairs. They hired the most attractive models available at the time, put them in nylon stockings, paraded them around the World Fair. They were very proud of this potential to sell their fiber.

BRIAN: And even though nylons cost a lot more than silk stockings initially, they had a major advantage over silk.

SUSANNAH HANDLEY: You know, it was advanced. It was futuristic. All synthetics in the 20th century presented a new thrill– new materials, new ships, new forms, all these new products that were made from plastics. And ball gowns made from synthetic fibers were the herald of a new future, you know? It was very contemporary, very modern.

ED: But then practically overnight, nylon stockings vanished from department stores.

ANNOUNCER: America goes to war. Men of the Army, Navy, and Marines–

ED: When the US entered World War II, DuPont began producing nylon for the troops in parachutes, ropes, and hammocks. And suddenly, one of the most coveted consumer products in America became virtually unattainable. Women who couldn’t get their hands on actual stockings found creative ways to attain the coveted nylon look.

SUSANNAH HANDLEY: By staining their legs and drawing a line down the back with a crayon, which indicated the seam of the stocking.

BRIAN: But it wasn’t until the war ended in 1945 that Americans understood the full impact of the synthetics revolution. Just months after Japan’s surrender, small shipments of nylon stockings went on sale again in a limited number of stores. Women were eager to get their hands on evidence of America’s return to normalcy– really eager.

SUSANNAH HANDLEY: In New York, there were 30,000 women. They were called the Nylon Mob. And perhaps husbands included, I’m not sure. And in Pittsburgh, 40,000. And the newspapers made great heyday from all these women.

BRIAN: Yeah, I’m looking at one of these headlines right now from Pittsburgh. “Nylon Mob, 40,000 Strong, Shrieks and Sways For Miles.”

WOMAN: Pittsburgh Press, June 13, 1946. “A good old-fashioned hair-pulling, face-scratching fight broke out in the line shortly before midnight. Police had to swarm in and restore order. A few who tried to slip into the line were shouted out with screams that could be heard for blocks. Some of the language used would have shocked a Boston fish peddler. As the last of the crowd melted away, a patrolman summed it up. ‘I hope,’ he said, ‘I hope I never see another woman.'”

SUSANNAH HANDLEY: I don’t think the world had witnessed anything quite like that– perhaps in the 1960s with Beatlemania, where it was complete obsession and hysteria– that greeted a strange material. That’s what was unusual. It wasn’t linked to a person, a personality, or anything. It was linked to having something flattering and sheer and fitting on your legs, which gave you a kind of social status of desirability.

BRIAN: Handley says this hunger for nylon stockings reflected the desire among Americans to embrace a new era of prosperity, a desire that industry was more than happy to satisfy.

SUSANNAH HANDLEY: You need a convergence of situations to make a new invention really work. The chemical industries, the textile manufacturing industries, the fashion industries, and not least of all– perhaps most of all– the marketing industries. It has to be the right moment. I mean, the rest of Europe was pretty devastated, but there was America, the symbol of the Coca-Cola. Everybody could have this symbol of plenty. And nylon just hit the right moment.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

BRIAN: Susannah Handley is a textile researcher and the author of Nylon: The Story of a Fashion Revolution. Special thanks to historian Jeff Meikle, author of American Plastic: A Cultural History.

The Boob Tube

When the cathode ray tube – also known as the picture tube – was invented, Chicago-based Zenith became one of the country’s biggest television manufacturers. When the plant closed in 1998, the lives of approximately 2,000 workers were upended. Learn more in this WBEZ piece produced in 2008 by Ben Calhoun.

factory workers; manufacturing; television

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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ED: Today we’re exploring the history of manufacturing in five objects. So far we’ve heard about porcelain, the musket, the birth certificate, and nylon stockings.

PETER: Our final object today is the cathode ray tube, also known as the picture tube. This innovation projected the image on a television screen. These tubes look like clear oversized Christmas lights, about the length of a hand.

BRIAN: Zenith, based in Chicago, became one of the country’s biggest manufacturers of televisions. There, in a Chicago suburb called Melrose Park, workers streamed into the Zenith plant every day, and they produced millions of those tubes there. Their livelihoods were built on them. But the lives of those workers were up-ended when Zenith’s plant shut its doors. In 2008, Ben Calhoun was a radio producer for WBEZ in Chicago. Though the Zenith plant had already been closed for nearly a decade, Calhoun tracked down its former employees and he recorded their memories of factory life.

PETER: We offer his documentary as a reminder of the lives behind not only Zenith’s picture tubes but all manufactured objects throughout American history.

WALLY KIRBY: My name’s Wally Kirby. I started in 1984. And when Zenith closed its doors in 2001, I was finally laid off after about 17 years.

NANCY KATOWSKI: My name is Nancy Katowski. I was there about three and a half years.

JOHN CUMMINS: My name is John Cummins. I worked there from ’79 till about ’98. The first time I went, I was 14 years old. My father worked there, also.

NANCY KATOWSKI: I was so scared.

JOHN CUMMINS: It was cavernous.

NANCY KATOWSKI: So big and so confusing– yeah, I would get lost.

JOHN CUMMINS: Easily a city block long.

WALLY KIRBY: An amazingly stuffed building.

NANCY KATOWSKI: Place was huge.

WALLY KIRBY: That’s when I finally got the idea of how immense the plant was, and I was actually awestricken.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JOHN CUMMINS: When you went to work, it was like a city all on its own.

NANCY KATOWSKI: They ran it 24 hours a day, so it was neverending– packing tubes, packing tubes, packing tubes.

JOHN CUMMINS: The rhythm of the building seemed to be constant. And the people– you know, sometimes people would get a little bit behind. You’d see them speed up–

NANCY KATOWSKI: Go, go, go, go, go.

JOHN CUMMINS: –and have to work faster until they got caught up.

NANCY KATOWSKI: Constant motion.

JOHN CUMMINS: I was talking with another gentleman and he turned to me and he said, you know, look at the trucks that pull in and bring the glass in, and the trucks that pull out with picture tubes, and just think how many picture tubes they have to sell to keep all these people employed.

WALLY KIRBY: Maximum 3 to 3.5 million picture tubes a year. And that was running three shifts.

NANCY KATOWSKI: 24 hours a day.

WALLY KIRBY: 24 hours a day.

NANCY KATOWSKI: 24 hours a day.

WALLY KIRBY: Seven days a week, for all but maybe four weeks out of the year. That would be Christmas and New Year’s and the Fourth of July.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

NANCY KATOWSKI: Very loud.

WALLY KIRBY: Very, very–

JOHN CUMMINS: Very noisy.

NANCY KATOWSKI: Very loud. There so much excitement.

WALLY KIRBY: For the most part, the noise level was probably real close to any EPA limit. You had to become accustomed to the noises.

NANCY KATOWSKI: Tubes busting, bells ringing.

JOHN CUMMINS: It’s like when you’re at home. Certain noises just become secondary.

NANCY KATOWSKI: Just used to it.

WALLY KIRBY: Every piece of equipment in there had its own personality. They all looked the same. They all looked like as if they should be the same. But they weren’t.

NANCY KATOWSKI: Different. Like, you know, when they put the glass on top of the–

JOHN CUMMINS: Hundreds of machines.

NANCY KATOWSKI: It was momentum, though. It was constant sounds.

WALLY KIRBY: And you’d know where you were, even if you had your eyes closed, because you would hear those particular noises. It was more or less the heartbeat of the building.

NANCY KATOWSKI: Like if there was, like, doors opening and closing, like– tch, tch, tch, tch.

JOHN CUMMINS: Ssssst.

NANCY KATOWSKI: Boom. Tch, tch, tch, tch. Robotic-like. Tch, tch, tch, tch.

WALLY KIRBY: You’d know when something was blowing up.

NANCY KATOWSKI: Ba-boom! It would be so loud! You would– half the building would shut down.

[ALL MAKING MACHINERY NOISES]

NANCY KATOWSKI: That would be the sound.

JOHN CUMMINS: But when they shut down, it was like walking through a ghost town. You could almost hear a pin drop. And it was hard to believe you could go from one extreme to the other.

WALLY KIRBY: The conveyor system there was pretty much the lifeline of the process.

JOHN CUMMINS: 13 to 15 miles of conveyors.

NANCY KATOWSKI: Throughout the whole building.

JOHN CUMMINS: I guess you could basically get on one conveyor and take a ride all the way to the other end of the plant.

WALLY KIRBY: The conveyors went up and down different levels.

NANCY KATOWSKI: They would turn the corner.

JOHN CUMMINS: The carts turned and–

NANCY KATOWSKI: Up and down and around in a U shape, and come back, and–

WALLY KIRBY: Safety baskets had to be put underneath all of the conveyors, because–

NANCY KATOWSKI: I guess picture those baskets.

WALLY KIRBY: Glass being like glasses, glass breaks.

NANCY KATOWSKI: Oh, constantly. Tubes are breaking all different areas of the building.

WALLY KIRBY: By the time they were ready to be put into a TV set, they were in the 80- to 85-pound range.

JOHN CUMMINS: They called it an implosion. Since it’s a vacuum inside, it explodes in.

WALLY KIRBY: Heat was a vital process to producing a picture tube. Many times the glass level was well over 400 degrees.

JOHN CUMMINS: And if the ceiling leaked–

WALLY KIRBY: There was leaks in the roof.

JOHN CUMMINS: And just–

WALLY KIRBY: If a raindrop–

JOHN CUMMINS: One drop of water hit that tube–

WALLY KIRBY: These tubes would shatter, just like glass would normally shatter if it’s hot and cold. We’ve all done it with Pyrex type ware.

JOHN CUMMINS: Sometimes you’d get a cascading effect. One would explode, and it would set the one off next to it, and the one down from it. So you’d hear one explosion knowing that moments later, you’d hear two or three more.

WALLY KIRBY: And because of that, it would rain glass– very nice big pieces of glass that can cut you pretty good.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JOHN CUMMINS: The hazards that I personally faced–

NANCY KATOWSKI: Right, like the asbestos? They told everybody that there was no asbestos in the building.

JOHN CUMMINS: You know, there were some chemicals that we were using to clean certain things. And then after using them for a year and a half, you were told, well, we can’t use that anymore because it’s a suspected carcinogen. Well, what about the year and a half that I used it?

WALLY KIRBY: It’ll kill bacteria and [? life. ?]

NANCY KATOWSKI: Hydrochloric acid.

JOHN CUMMINS: And you’d see people get cut.

NANCY KATOWSKI: You know what I mean? You knew that there was acid in there.

JOHN CUMMINS: And I remember getting some on my finger one time and then watching as the skin literally turned white.

NANCY KATOWSKI: Containers, and they’d say, “Danger.”

JOHN CUMMINS: Your skin would be bleached for one or two days.

WALLY KIRBY: There’s a couple horror stories I have.

I could’ve killed that guy.

And there was four days that I ended up spending at home with eye patches on.

I seen a guy take off his index finger.

Creams and salve.

He wasn’t the only guy that lost a finger.

Bob’s head was caught in the machine.

Screaming.

A steel plate in his head, reconstructing that side of his head.

Six, seven times a week, the ambulance would be there from Melrose Park, to do something for somebody.

BRIAN: You know, you hear the reports that other countries are being industrialized and they’re– their standards of protection aren’t as high as ours are or were, and what are those people dealing with today?

By the time I left, they were trying to fully automate the plant.

NANCY KATOWSKI: They brought in 10 new robots. Big yellow robots.

JOHN CUMMINS: And that was their way of making the company profitable. Didn’t work out that way, though.

NANCY KATOWSKI: Person was way more accurate. And several times we’d watch, and it would just bust tube after tube after tube after tube. And we’d go, oh! What a waste.

JOHN CUMMINS: I was out of there before they actually said, well, this place is going to close down as a production plant.

WALLY KIRBY: So that was a pretty gruesome day. The people, some were crying. Didn’t want to leave. I certainly didn’t want to leave there.

JOHN CUMMINS: It was just strange to see someplace that you had spent 20 years just kind of get up and move.

WALLY KIRBY: It was easier just to let everybody go.

JOHN CUMMINS: We’re going to take our business elsewhere.

WALLY KIRBY: It was pretty overwhelming, all the families.

NANCY KATOWSKI: Grandfathers, sons.

WALLY KIRBY: Brothers, sisters.

NANCY KATOWSKI: Grandsons.

JOHN CUMMINS: Not only my dad, I had an uncle. I had a couple of cousins.

WALLY KIRBY: That was a big-time hurt for these people. It was a big-time hurt for me.

JOHN CUMMINS: That our manufacturing base, which is what helped bring everybody’s standard of living up, was slowly declining.

WALLY KIRBY: Little bit of resentment and a little animosity towards– I– I don’t know who to blame here. I don’t think it’s society, per se, or just the growth of technology. I don’t know. I– I have some mixed emotions on that.

JOHN CUMMINS: Where do we help the next generation come up?

WALLY KIRBY: We have grown past being an industrial nation.

JOHN CUMMINS: Is it going to be strictly just a service industry?

WALLY KIRBY: It’s hard for me to see that the three-piece suit is doing the same thing. It’s not doing the same thing. It isn’t the same thing. So our opinions and our values can’t be the same thing. They have got to have changed.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

NANCY KATOWSKI: We go to the store, we buy it off the shelf, we put it in our living room, and we watch it. But there was so much more involved. There were so many lives that went through to make that tube.

JOHN CUMMINS: I look back at some of those days and think, where would I be today if I were still working there?

WALLY KIRBY: Probably the best teamwork type situation that I’ve ever had to be in. You knew who you could depend on, and you didn’t question them.

JOHN CUMMINS: I guess what I’d want to say is that a lot of people put a lot of their lives into that building. I mean, the picture that’s being drawn in my mind right now is like there’s ghosts there. Even though we go and we work someplace, and we come home and we live our lives, maybe we leave just a little bit of ourselves everywhere we go, you know? And each job that you go to, it changes you in some way, or molds you in some way. I think it’s because we do leave a little bit of ourselves in those places.

PETER: Those were the voices of Zenith factory workers Wally Kirby, Nancy Katowski, and John Cummins. That piece was produced by Ben Calhoun in 2008 for WBEZ in Chicago. He’s now the station’s vice president of content and programming.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

ED: You know, hearing that story of Zenith and connecting it back to the story of Eli Whitney and interchangeable parts kind of makes you wonder how much the story of manufacturing is the story of interchangeability of places and of processes, and even of people. Is that too dark a view of things?

PETER: I don’t think so, Ed. There’s another way to frame it, though. Interchangeability can be seen as mobility. That is, everybody has an equal chance to get that factory job that may be opening up someplace. And I think the big fact of American industrial history, until fairly recently, was that there were plenty of jobs. And compared to Europe and Britain particularly, factory laborers made a good living.

BRIAN: So Ed, I think it’s important to remember the reason that people are interchangeable today is for 100 years, we’ve been distributing all this stuff all over the world. The rise of international trade is an important part of this interchangeability story.

I want to make just a simple point about interchangeability in the 20th century. That’s the interchangeability of roles– that people who make stuff are also seen as the people who buy that stuff. Workers are considered to be consumers as well. Their roles are very interchangeable.

ED: So Peter, you’re our specialist in taking the really big picture of things. How far have we moved from the days of porcelain and 18th century America?

PETER: Well, I think we’re still there, in some ways, Ed. On the one hand, interchangeability is associated with mobility, dynamism. It’s what has made America great. On the other hand, we’re not making much anymore, in that sense that you make a country great. It really refers back to the idea of being able to make the very best things– the best porcelain. Because we have made a great country, what will we be making in the future? And that sense that the whole world can do what Americans once did best– well, that, I think, is very upsetting for many people. What is the future of the producer in the modern post-industrial world?

[MUSIC PLAYING]

BOBBY DARIN: (SINGING) The world is full of beautiful things, butterfly wings, fairy tale kings, and each new day undoubtedly brings still more beautiful things.

ED: That’s going to do it for today. But head to our website and let us know what you thought of the show. While you’re there, share your stories of local legends for our Halloween special about the history of horror. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org. Or send an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter, @BackStoryRadio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

PETER: This episode of BackStory was produced by Andrew Parsons, Brigid McCarthy, Nina Earnest, Emily Gadek, and and Ramona Martinez. Jamal Millner is our technical director. Diana Williams is our digital editor, and Melissa Gismondi is our researcher. We have help from Sequoia Carrillo, Emma Gregg, Aidan Lee, Liz Macaulay, and Peyton Wall.

BRIAN: BackStory is produced at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Major support is provided by the Shiacon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment, and by History Channel– history made every day.

ANNOUNCER: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia and the Dorothy Compton Professor at the Miller Center of Public Affairs. Peter Onuf is Professor of History Emeritus at UVA and Senior Research Fellow at Monticello. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

ANNOUNCER: BackStory is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.

Child Labor Lesson Set

Child Labor Main

Child Labor Handouts

Child Labor Sources

Child Labor Standards/Citations