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Industry,Technology,and Labor
Museums of Industry,Technology, and Labor (continued)
MuseumLocation Theme/Highlights
Woodworking and Gardner Heritage State Park Gardner, Mass. Furniture making and silversmithing Lumbering Patten Lumbermen’s Museum Patten, Maine Work and technology of logging, logging camp and blacksmith shop Old Schwamb Mill Arlington, Mass. 19th-century millwork and woodworking machinery, operating firm making picture frames Frye’s Measure Mill Wilton, N.H. 1858 waterpowered mill with associated machines for box making, operating company Diverse Industries Charles River Museum of Waltham, Mass. Textiles, watches, automobiles, machine tool, Industry first fully integrated textile mill in United States Maine State MuseumAugusta, Maine Permanent exhibition on textile, and lumbering, fishing industries Worcester Historical MuseumWorcester, Mass. Permanent exhibition on diverse industries, including steel and wire, diverse social experience
General Electric’s research complex at Plas- Pratt and Whitney A unit of United buzzing noise in flight, was a radical departure tics Avenue, Pittsfield, developed Lexan poly- Technologies, Pratt and Whitney is one of from the heavier, more cumbersome engines carbonate and other advanced engineering Connecticut’s most famous manufacturers of its day. It powered record-setting flights by plastics. and a significant contributor to the state’s Amelia Earhart, Charles Lindbergh, and New England’s most famous postwar plas- economy. Headquartered in East Hartford, Jimmy Doolittle. In the Wasp’s perfor- tic product was Tupperware, developed by the company, whose motto is “Dependable mance prompted the U.S. Navy to order Earl Tupper of Berlin, N.H., while he was ex- Engines,” produces and services space- of the impressive engines, thus cementing the perimenting with injection molding of poly- propulsion systems and jet engines for the company’s reputation as an innovator in the ethylene for Du Pont in the late s. Popu- military, commercial, and general-aviation nascent aviation industry. lar attention focused on Tupperware home markets. Plants are located in North Haven, In a merger between Pratt and Whit- parties administered from Orlando, Fla., but Middletown, and Cheshire, Conn.; North ney, Boeing Air Transport, Chance Vought the patented food containers were manufac- Berwick, Maine; Columbus, Ga.; West Palm Aircraft Corporation, and Hamilton Aircraft tured in Massachusetts and Rhode Island for Beach, Fla.; San Antonio, Tex.; San Jose, (later Hamilton Standard) resulted in the cre- several decades. At the opposite end of the Calif.; and Montreal, Halifax, and Toronto, ation of United Aircraft and Transport Com- spectrum was the Monsanto House of the Canada. pany (UATC). UATC’s aim was to produce Future, a fiberglass-reinforced polyester shell In Frederick Rentschler, a former pres- under one corporate roof all the parts needed engineered by Albert Dietz at MIT’s Plastics ident of Wright Aeronautical and an aviation to build planes and a new airline, United, to fly Research Laboratory in Cambridge, Mass. pioneer, traveled to Hartford to seek funding them. Antitrust legislation in forced the Intended as a mass-production prototype, the for the production of a revolutionary new air- breakup of UATC into three separate compa- futuristic Monsanto House was installed at plane engine. Rentschler chose Connecticut nies, with United Aircraft retaining Pratt and Disneyland in and visited by million because it was home to many small tool com- Whitney, Chance Vought, Sikorsky (brought people. New England’s plastics industry panies and a skilled labor force, crucial ele- on board after the initial merger), and Hamil- suffered during the s and s as manu- ments of his business plan. ton Standard. facturing moved outside the United States. Rentschler bought both the name and the Following quickly on the heels of the The region’s historical importance was recog- physical plant of Pratt and Whitney, a ma- Wasp’s remarkable success, the company pro- nized in when the industry-funded Na- chine-tool and gun manufacturer founded in duced the Hornet, the Wasp Junior, and the tional Plastics Center and Museum opened at by Francis Pratt and Amos Whitney, Twin Wasp, which was used in many World Leominster. cousin of the famous Connecticut inventor War II–era military planes. Pratt and Whit- and entrepreneur Eli Whitney. Rentschler ney and its sister companies contributed more Alison J. Clarke, Tupperware:The Promise of Plastic in ff s America (); J. Harry DuBois, Plastics His- quickly assembled a team of aviation visionar- than , engines to the war e ort. Over tory U.S.A. (); Robert Friedel, Pioneer Plastic:The ies, and in only six months Pratt and Whitney million horsepower, fully half the total Making and Selling of Celluloid (); Jeffrey L. unveiled the Wasp, a revolutionary -horse- U.S. aerial horsepower during World War II, Meikle, American Plastic: A Cultural History (). power engine weighing less than pounds. was produced by Pratt and Whitney engines. Jeffrey L.Meikle The radial air-cooled Wasp, which made a Having put all its resources into developing