(Page 19 of 20) - Machinists in Networks: Building America�s Earliest High Technology Industries authored by Meyer, David.

existed, technological change could advance on various fronts, and this explains why so
many antebellum machine sectors achieved such success. Besides the networks which
linked these multiple communities-of-practice of machinists and their firms, these
individuals and companies exchanged information and knowledge with any industry
which mechanized, because machinists and their firms possessed the critical skills
required to build the machines these industries needed. The machinists’ communities-of-
practice learned about new machine problems which needed resolution, and this impelled
these communities to enhance their existing network ties or build new ones.

The Antebellum Transformation

Over the years from 1790 to 1860, machinists in the eastern United States built

sophisticated networked communities-of-practitioners across a range of metalworking
industries. These networked communities operated at local, such as a city and its
immediate environs (e.g., Providence, Rhode Island, and adjacent towns), and at
subregional scales, such as a metropolis and its inner hinterland (e.g., New York City and
the lower Hudson Valley and northern New Jersey). These communities also extended to
wider territories such as a metropolis and its regional hinterland (e.g., Philadelphia and
much of Pennsylvania). Territory neither determined all, nor necessarily the most
important, features of these networks; manufacturing sectors also played important roles,
because communities spanned across a sector, such as locomotives, or across several
sectors, such as steam engines and locomotives. The mobility of machinists precluded
strict territorial bases of these communities. The governing feature of these machinist
communities was their integral base in the metropolises, their satellite towns, and small
cities, towns, and villages in areas of rising agricultural prosperity in the East.

Within the first several decades after 1790, some of the communities-of-

practitioners encompassed the East Coast and even extended into the distant areas of
agricultural prosperity in central New York state. Although one could not strictly term
these national networks, the early extensiveness of networked communities of machinists
suggests that from the start of the new republic the United States possessed some
technology communities which spanned much of the areas with prominent workers. This
is, perhaps, two or three decades earlier than has been suggested as the first appearance of
national communities of technologists, such as those in geology and mining which started
in the 1840s. And, virtually from the start, an international dimension, especially with
Britain, was a feature of American machinist communities. Therefore, the early

John S. Brown and Paul Duguid, “Organizational Learning and Communities-of-Practice:

Toward a Unified View of Working, Learning, and Innovation,” Organization Science, vol. 2
(February 1991), pp. 40-57; Edward W. Constant, III, “The Social Locus of Technological
Practice: Community, System, or Organization,” The Social Construction of Technological
Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, edited by Wiebe E. Bijker,
Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor J. Pinch (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), pp. 223-42; Ross
Thomson, “Crossover Inventors and Technological Linkages: American Shoemaking and the
Broader Economy, 1848-1901,” Technology and Culture, vol. 32 (October 1991), pp. 1018-46;
Steven W. Usselman, “Patents, Engineering Professionals, and the Pipelines of Innovation: The
Internalization of Technical Discovery by Nineteenth-Century American Railroads,” Learning by
Doing in Markets, Firms, and Countries, edited by Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Daniel M. G. Raff, and
Peter Temin (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 61-91; Vincenti, What
Engineers Know and How They Know It; Von Hippel, The Sources of Innovation.

Meyer, The Roots of American Industrialization.