Sublime

Pratt hired Gould to survey a tanning site, but was sufficiently impressed that he made him a partner and manager of the projected new tannery. So the pint-sized Gould, barely out of his teens, led fifty workmen into the woods and built virtually a full-scale town, including living and food service quarters, a mule-powered bark crushing plant and c

Tarbell especially romanticized—men whose lives ran “swift and ruddy and joyous . . . until a big hand reached out from nobody knew where, to steal their conquest and throttle their future.” But the hard fact was that with two or three exceptions, the region’s refiners were among the least efficient of all. As production technology shifted to favor

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

This vast realm of geographical ignorance reduced European activity in the Outer World to an archipelago of settlements, mines and trading depots connected by a skein of pathways kept open only by constant effort.

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.