Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [10]
“Looking down, as I now do, upon these huge brick workshops, I have thought of poor Etzler, and wondered whether he would admit, were he with me, that his mechanical forces have here found their proper employment of millennium making,” Whittier wrote. “Grinding on, each in his iron harness, invisible, yet shaking, by his regulated and repressed power, his huge prison-house from basement to capstone, is it true that the genii of mechanism are really at work here, raising us, by wheel and pulley, steam and waterpower, slowly up that inclined plane from whose top stretches the broad table-land of promise?
A hundred years into that millennium, Americans still haven’t answered the question of whether—or perhaps which—technologies are raising us or lowering us. Are we closer to the promised land or farther away? How would we know it if we got there?
The brilliant fusion of the Scottish planned village, British industrial city, and the American utopian settlement6—the vision of a mechanized, profit-making near-utopia (where the girls were always young) was clearly a popular model for how America should industrialize. Perhaps the historian Caroline Farrar Ware overstated her case when she wrote back in 1931 that “the story of the New England cotton industry is the story of industrialization of America.” Although there were other key events and places, other industries and forms of power, there was no single place that could be said to have had a greater impact in determining what industrialization could be to young America than Lowell.
Consider the alternatives. Small-scale manufacturing in the United States relied almost exclusively on water power through most of the nineteenth century.7 The entrepreneurs and capitalists who would make themselves rich through mass production learned their skills by finding water power and exploiting it. What was new about Lowell was the unprecedented size and scale of its factories.8
The only other place where one might find such grand manufacturing was Pittsburgh, the iron city. Surrounded by rich coal veins, Pittsburgh is the yang to Lowell’s yin. Because it was powered by coal, the city had to run its gas lights during the daytime, as the cloud of smoke and soot that hung over the city blotted out the sun. We don’t have detailed measurements, but the atmospheric pollution around Pittsburgh during that time sounds as bad as any Shanghai horror story today. In fact, Peregrine Prolix, a wry, pseudonymous traveler from the South observed that “If a sheet of white paper lie upon your desk for half an hour you may write on it with your finger’s end through the thin stratum of coal dust that has settled upon it during that interval.”9
Pittsburgh was practically defined by its smokiness and sootiness. “Every body [sic] who has heard of Pittsburg, knows that it is the city of perpetual smoke, and looks as if it were built above the descent to ‘the bottomless pit,’” a female traveler related.10 The black clouds that hung over the city became a trope, a natural character to portray the city’s Faustian bargain with its geology. In the Pittsburgh version of industrialization, dirtiness—not cleanliness—represented virtue, or at least money. “Its manufacturing powers and propensities have been so often described and lauded that we shall say nothing about them except that they fill the people’s pockets with cash and their toiling town with noise and dust and smoke,” Prolix pronounced.11 Another traveler put it even better: “He whose hands are the most sooty, handles the most money, and it is reasonable to infer is the richer man.”12
Conversely, Lowell factory girls went for walks in nature right outside the town, poking around the “rocky nooks along Pawtucket Falls, shaded with hemlocks