The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy

The collection of manufacturing technologies developed by Hall, Blanchard, and, later, men like Thomas Warner and Cyrus Buckland at the Springfield Armory has been dubbed “Armory practice” by the historian David Hounshell, and was a key element in the American technologic gene pool. Merritt Roe Smith has traced the numerous skilled machinists who p

Pierpont Morgan famously wired his house for electricity in 1882—it required a basement generator—but residential electricity would not become standard until the 1920s.

As early as 1883, Captain Jones reported that he had reduced the labor cost of rails by a quarter, from 20 percent to 15 percent. New machinery in 1885 eliminated fifty-seven of sixty-nine men on the heating furnaces and fifty-one of sixty-three hands in the rail mill. In the 1892 Homestead negotiation, the company hoped to eliminate 325 of about 8

American factories were mostly water-powered, but the wave of the future was clearly steam, and American railroad and steamboat lines bought British engines. On the eve of the Civil War, America’s biggest manufacturing industry was still cotton textiles, and the British could take sour comfort in the fact that American mills ran mostly on stolen Br

Trustbusters thought they were slaying a dangerous monster when the Standard was broken up in 1911; instead, they were doing the shareholders, and especially John Rockefeller, a large favor. Once the stock of the individual companies were listed in their own names, and they could compete freely, their market values multiplied many times over, and R

The Empire had begun life as a fast-freight forwarder, just one of the many companies that Scott and Thomson had created to pick the meatier bones left on the Pennsylvania’s table. Its superb chief executive, Col. Joseph Potts, had built it into a major transportation business in its own right, with a particularly strong position in petroleum. Besi

Being middle class was suddenly a life strategy, not just an economic category, and one that was mostly managed by women. Tactics included smaller families, greater concentration on child-rearing and child education, careful budgetary management to maintain the required status signals without extravagance, and inculcating children with habits of pr

Best-practice steam engine technology could have saved the equivalent of a quarter of labor costs at most plants. Inefficient furnaces were oxidizing away huge amounts of metal. The Germans were pulling ahead in the use of overhead belt conveyors. It was absurdly wasteful to support 119 rail-shape standards. Better management of furnace linings, mo

Earlier in the century, most people lived on family farms that looked and smelled like rural factories. Survival was a matter of brutally hard labor and lots of kids. Houses were painted once when they were built, if at all; yards were full of garbage and foraging animals; soap was for clothes, not for people. Accelerating growth in the 1840s and 1