Industrial History

Focusing on the day-to-day operations of the U.S. armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, from 1798 to 1861, this book shows what the "new technology" of mechanized production meant in terms of organization, management, and worker morale. A local study of much more than local significance, it highlights the major problems of technical innovation and social adaptation in antebellum America.

Merritt Roe Smith describes how positions of authority at the armory were tied to a larger network of political and economic influence in the community; how these relationships, in turn, affected managerial behavior; and how local social conditions reinforced the reactions of decision makers. He also demonstrates how craft traditions and variant attitudes toward work vis-à-vis New England created an atmosphere in which the machine was held suspect and inventive activity was hampered.

Of central importance is the author's analysis of the drastic differences between Harpers Ferry and its counterpart, the national armory at Springfield, Massachusetts, which played a pivotal role in the emergence of the new technology. The flow of technical information between the two armories, he shows, moved in one direction only― north to south. "In the end," Smith concludes, "the stamina of local culture is paramount in explaining why the Harpers Ferry armory never really flourished as a center of technological innovation."

Pointing up the complexities of industrial change, this account of the Harpers Ferry experience challenges the commonly held view that Americans have always been eagerly receptive to new technological advances.

The definitive work on the creation of the United States Balloon Corps during the Civil War

More than half a century after its initial publication, F. Stansbury Haydon's well-researched book remains the definitive work on the creation of the United States Balloon Corps during the Civil War. Haydon explores his topic down to the last detail, from the amount of fabric used to manufacture every balloon that saw federal service, to the formula for varnish used to seal the envelopes. He explains the technical operation of mobile gas generators that T. S. C. Lowe designed to inflate balloons in the field and provides the precise cost of each rubber hose used in their construction.

Military Ballooning during the Early Civil War raises large and important questions about technological change within a military bureaucracy. The book begins with an introduction to the history of military ballooning since the wars of the French Revolution, with special attention to discussions of military aeronautics in the United States since the time of the Seminole Wars. Haydon also demonstrates the complicated maneuvering among American balloonists who sought to aid the army before the Battle of Bull Run and shows how the attitudes of various officers toward the balloons changed during the ensuing months of 1861-62.

First published in 1941 as Aeronautics in the Union and Confederate Armies, this volume received compliments in the London Times Literary Supplement for its exploration of "the attitude of soldiers toward innovations." A reviewer in the Military Engineer praised the book both for its extensive scholarship and "as a lesson to all military men of the difficulties and misunderstandings which arise whenever a new means of conducting war is introduced into army circles." This edition includes a new foreword by Tom D. Crouch, senior curator of the Aeronautics Division at the National Air and Space Museum.