Sublime

The practical methodologies evolved over many years, and were largely the work of John Hall, a gunsmith from Portland, Maine, and inventor of the “Hall carbine” that became notorious when muckrakers dug into the youthful Pierpont Morgan’s dealings with Civil War procurement authorities.

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

The Valley’s venture investors were typically Boston merchant princes, men such as Israel Thorndike, S. A. Eliot, Samuel Cabot, Francis Stanton, and Harrison Gray Otis. Edmund Dwight, a Morgan cousin on his mother’s side, wasn’t in the same financial stratum as a Cabot, but gained access through his work at the law firm of Fisher Ames, the old Mass

All of these businesses operated below the radar screen of megacapitalists like the Morgans. Their primary capital expenses were for real estate and inventory, which could be financed by traditional mortgages and bank working capital lines. But that was true only because they could “externalize” the cost of all the shipping infrastructure that Morg

The mills drew from a swelling stream of farm girls and boys as New England agriculture withered under the onslaught of high-productivity New York farmers. Mill profits created an ample supply of venture capital, with activist investors prospecting for opportunities. The most talented young men perceived that a flair for machinery could be a fast t