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And the Mechanic Arts: the Franklin Institute and Science in Industrial America, 1824-1976

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And the Mechanic Arts: the Franklin Institute and Science in Industrial America, 1824-1976 A. Michal McMahon THE FRANKLIN INSTITUTE "BRIGHT SCIENCE" AND THE MECHANIC ARTS: THE FRANKLIN INSTITUTE AND SCIENCE IN INDUSTRIAL AMERICA, 1824-1976 "Bright science too, beneath our sacred dome, Shall find a last retreat, a fav'rite home, And, freed from schoolmen's trammels, shall impart Her cheering influence to each useful art." Mathew Carey's American Museum, 17891 Philadelphia's technological and scientific community founded the Franklin Institute of the State of Pennsylvania during the 1820s in response to the emergence of industrialization and to the rise of experimental physical science. These momentous events re- leased energies carrying the organization through crucial phases in the development of the nation. Because the Institute's one-hundred- and-fifty-plus-years parallel the making of the industrial order in America, its work exposes the shifting contours of technological and scientific activity in the culture. In the nineteenth century, the Institute's scientific work reflected first the experimental tradition and then the rise of university-trained engineers and engineering knowledge refined by mathematics and industrial necessity. In our own century, the Franklin Institute has created both a basic science research institution in the tradition of England's Cavendish Labora- tory and an applied science research laboratory serving military, governmental, and industrial needs. The society began its work in 1824 with men like Samuel Vaughan Merrick, a manufacturer; William H. Keating, a professor of min- eralogical chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania; and Mathew 1. Quoted in Silvio A. Bidini, Thinkers and Tinkers (New York 1975), vii. 351 352 PENNSYLVANIA HISTORY Carey, a national leader in the movement to promote American manufacturers. The Institute's founders established formal classes, popular lectures on science and technology, a long-running series of industrial exhibitions, a library, and a committee to oversee tech- nological innovation in America. In 1826, the Journal of the Franklin Institute began publication. From this industrial community, leading members of the first generation of organized physical scientists found their initial sup- port. University of Pennsylvania physicist Alexander Dallas Bache, a great-grandson of Benjamin Franklin and at mid-century the nation's leading scientific administrator, contributed greatly to the Institute's initial research efforts. Sharing the manufacturers' desires to promote machine production and the useful arts, physical scientists like Bache lent their knowledge and skills to the needs of the young manufacturers' organization. The Institute's successful introduction of experimental science to Philadelphia technologists rested on a tradition already a half- century old. Since the eighteenth century, the industrial movement had included constant attempts to join science with the useful, or mechanic arts. This American movement actually grew alongside England's industrial revolution. Yet the colonial version was only a shadow of the English experience. Attempts to create the reality of English industrialism in the colonies invariably failed; accordingly, early American promoters of industrial growth tended more to praise industrial activity and progress than to institute it. Colonial litera- ture frequently mixed scientific opinions and information with discussions of the practical concerns of the people and land. Whether in Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, in Benjamin Franklin's Essay on the New Invented Pennsylvania Stove, or in the Trans- actions of the American Philosophical Society, colonial savants wrote passionately on agricultural experiments or the need for increased manufactures. Such writings reinforced the progressive colonial's desire to establish manufactories in the New World. In 1769, the American Philosophical Society founded a short-lived linen manufactory; by 1790, several similar, equally unsuccessful attempts had been made to implant England's industrial revolution in America. 2 Even so, 2. Samuel Rezneck, "The Rise and Early Development of Industrial Consciousness in the United States, 1760-1830, "Journal of Economic and Business History, 4 (1932):784 passim. FRANKLIN INSTITUTE 353 these first fumbling attempts were crucial events in the making of the industrial order. The formation in 1787 of the Pennsylvania Society for the En- couragement of Manufactures and Useful Arts was one such event. Established in Philadelphia, the Society brought together a number of energetic Americans. The eighty-three-year-old Benjamin Franklin accepted a patron's role, as he had done at the Constitutional Con- vention. Tench Cox served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Alexander Hamilton; from 1790 to 1815, he wrote a series of important reports on the growth of American manufactures. Among the most active members was publisher Mathew Carey, a Scottish immigrant and editor of the American Museum. Others in the group operated chemical manufactories, or already had at- tempted to found textile factories. The society's own effort to establish a manufactory ended in a fire in 1790.8 Though Carey was the youngest of the main group forming the Pennsylvania Society, his perceptions of the industrial revolution compared closely with the venerable Franklin's. Franklin perceived the centrality of invention and scientific work to the future of Amer- ican civilization, believing inventions would be "prolific."4 Similarly, the poem in Mathew Carey's American Museum yearned passionately for a future where "Bright Science. freed from schoolmen's tram- mels, shall impart her cheering influence to each useful art." Already that was happening in the application of astronomical knowledge to navigation. Industrial application came as physical scientists began to examine the properties of steam and the steam engine, and to look at technology generally.5 This awareness of the importance of scientific experimentation to industrialization grew with the young nation. The Franklins and Careys knew instinctively what modern historians forcefully assert: a primary feature of modern industrial revolutions is the accelerated application of science to pro- duction.6 3. Ibid. 795. 4. Franklin to Rev. John Lathrop, 31 May 1788, John Bigelow, ed., The Works of Benjamin Franklin, 9 (1904):429. 5. Brooke Hindle, The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1956), 166-169, 174 ff, 352. On the interest in industrial application of scientific research see "Address before the Albany Institute, October 30, 1824, "The Papers of Joseph Henry, I (Smithsonian Institution Press: Washington, D.C. 1972):78- 92, 241-242. 6. Stuart Bruchey, The Roots of American Economic Growth, 1607-1861 (New York 1968), pp. 14-15; David S. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 1969), pp. 2-7. 354 PENNSYLVANIA HISTORY The Pennsylvania Society lasted only a few years, yet Carey's pro- motional activities extended well into the nineteenth century, liter- ally joining the chiefly ideological eighteenth-century movement with the more concrete period of actual industrialization. Besides writing and publishing a steady stream of pamphlets on American manufactures, Carey encouraged organizational efforts to win greater influence with the national government. In the 1820s alone, he campaigned for a strong, protective tariff, helped form an internal improvements society, and, for the Franklin Institute's first two years, chaired the Board of Managers. 7 The Institute's connections to the eighteenth-century industrial movement went beyond Carey, however. The society's intellectual and social roots led to the energetic mechanics of the revolutionary era and to the vibrant spirit of Franklin as experimental scientist, tradesman, and inventor. Later, during the 1 820s, the manufacturing movement came together with experimental science as mechanics' institutes organized throughout the country. In Philadelphia, Samuel Vaughan Merrick, the recent inheritor of an iron foundry, initiated both the Franklin Institute and its scientific activity. He needed the Institute in the beginning to learn the new industrial technology so he could succeed as an iron founder. Within five years, however, Merrick began to push the fledgling organization beyond the bounds of a mechanics' society. He first wrested con- trol of the journal from its editor, who aimed solely at the common mechanic. Though not against mechanics' education, Merrick wanted "original matter" in the Journal. He invited the newly-ap- pointed professor of natural philosophy, Alexander Dallas Bache, to join the Institute and contribute reports on his researches. Merrick also translated articles from French scientific periodicals for the Journal. That same year, in 1829, Merrick initiated the Institute's first large-scale experimental project on water wheels and water- power.' The Institute's waterpower investigations consisted of "a series of experiments" seeking the "value of water as a moving power, and the relative effect produced by it upon wheels of different construc- tions." The result of tests upon the various water wheels-overshot, pitchback, breast, and undershot-would be, one of the experimenters 7. Mathew Carey, "Diary, 15 December 1822-16 June 1826," Special Collections,' Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania. 8. Bache to Merrick, 11 March 1829, Franklin Institute Archives (hereafter Fl); Minutes, Board of Managers, Franklin Institute, 12 March 1829, Fl. FRANKLIN
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