Machines and Technology

The Industrial Revolution that had begun in England in the late eighteenth century by no means guaranteed the immediate establishment of the factory system in America. In fact, the English sought to prevent dissemination abroad of the details of the new inventions. Parliament passed laws in 1774 and 1781 prohibiting the export of new industrial machinery, not unlike later laws that prohibited high-tech exports to Soviet bloc countries during the Cold War. In 1782, a law was passed to prevent labor pirating, the luring abroad of highly skilled British mechanics. Although these efforts possibly slowed the introduction of new machines and technologies in the United States, technology transfers occurred anyway. For example, on the eve of the Napoleonic wars, the Scofield brothers

Arrived in New England from Yorkshire and built water-powered wool-carding machinery. They were preceded by Samuel Slater, who came to the United States in 1789 and, in cooperation with Moses Brown and William Almy of Providence, Rhode Island, built the first American spinning mill powered by water. More than a dozen small prototypes of their mill were built during the next decade in New England.

Largely because of the relatively high cost of labor in the United States, American managers tended to use the most nearly automatic machines available for a particular application. More important, they successfully innovated ways of organizing production that saved labor expense per unit of output. Their chief contributions—the two basic ideas that led to American preeminence in nineteenth-century manufacturing—were interchangeable parts and continuous-process manufacture. Both advances were allied with the development of machine tools and with changes in techniques of applying power.