(Page 17 of 20) - Machinists in Networks: Building America�s Earliest High Technology Industries authored by Meyer, David.

Britain is included. The institutional environment which these elite created framed
machinists’ networks. These elite often knew each other directly through personal and
family connections, or their contacts were only one-level removed as friends-of-friends or
friends-of-relatives. They communicated with each other about their work, thus providing
on-going exchanges of technical information. This elite network embraced the entire east
coast of the United States, and tendrils extended to Britain through family members.
These contacts were also constituted through transatlantic visits of machinists, especially
Americans traveling to Britain to observe machine shops and discuss machine
technology. Likewise, British immigrant machinists built the transatlantic networks, and
later in the antebellum the visits of leading British machinists buttressed them. Anthony
Wallace has termed these elite, the “international fraternity of mechanicians.”

The emergence of a technical literacy, which became a shared language of

communication, acculturated the elite into a community of machinists, reinforcing their
self-conscious identity. And, the aspiring young, upwardly mobile residents of farms,
villages, and small towns who demonstrated technical skills were drawn into this
community. Using a rough estimate of about twenty journeymen and apprentices for each
elite machinist suggests that this larger community in the East numbered perhaps two to
three thousand machinists from 1820 to 1840, and if Britain is included the numbers may
have reached about six thousand. While avoiding an over-identified interpretation of
antebellum machine shops, it is useful to conceive of them as possessing a “shop
culture,” as Monte Calvert terms it. This culture consisted of: an orientation to technical
work and problem-solving, an institutional framework of a community of machinists
which bonded those within the shop to machinists in other shops and which bonded them
all with their customers, and emergent traditions. It constituted one of the key
foundations, along with railroad shops (which actually were big machine shops) and
naval engineering, of the profession of mechanical engineering in the second half of the
nineteenth century.

It would be an exaggeration to claim that social class distinctions were left at the

entrance to the machine shop. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of the machine shop
required close working relations between the top machinists (often members of the social
elite) and the ranks of the machinist workforce. Machinists from the elite of society, as
well as those from lower in the social hierarchy who became the most skilled, highly
sought after machinists, typically commenced their skill acquisition working with the
regular machinist workforce, often as apprentices. At minimum, the top machinists
learned how to work with the regular workforce of the shop. Once established in the top
positions, the elite machinists often led the efforts to improve machines and solve
technical problems, yet, in order to implement their ideas, they also required close
working relations with the machinists on the shop floor—a consequence of the tightness
of the artifact-activity couple. This produced an extensive sharing of information and
know-how within the machine shop, and this sharing extended to the firm’s customers
who raised technical problems which required solutions, because much of the machine

Wallace, Rockdale, pp. 211-19.

Calvert, The Mechanical Engineer in America, 1830-1910, pp. 3-27; Stevens, The Grammar of

the Machine; Wallace, Rockdale, pp. 211-19.