Chapter 59: Steel and Rubber
It is simply impossible to imagine life today without the mass-production of steel and rubber, made possible during the Technological Revolution. In this episode, we’ll discuss the inventions of the Bessemer converter and the Siemens-Martin process for steel making, the expanding steel empire of Alfred Krupp in Germany, and the efforts of Alexander Holley and Andrew Carnegie to make the U.S. the global leader in steel production. We’ll also talk about how steel was adopted for bridges, skyscrapers, and more. Finally, we’ll turn to the expanding uses of rubber, how rubber companies cultivated the market, and how they exploited the Global South to get it.
Sources for this episode include:
Allitt, Patrick N. “The Industrial Revolution.” The Great Courses. 2014.
Carnegie, Andrew. Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie. Constable & CO. Limited. 1920.
Harp, Stephen L. A World History of Rubber: Empire, Industry, and the Everyday. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2016.
Misa, Thomas J. A Nation of Steel: The Making of Modern America 1865-1925. The John Hopkins University Press. 1995.
Morris, Charles R. The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J.P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy. Henry Holt and Co. 2005.
“Pierre-Émile Martin: French engineer.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. Last updated: 14 Aug 2021. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Pierre-Emile-Martin
Weightman, Gavin. The Industrial Revolutionaries: The Making of the Modern World, 1776-1914. Grove Press. 2007.
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Full Transcript
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In 1854, an ambitious inventor left England, bound for France. As he put it, “At the time when the Crimean War broke out, the attention of many persons was directed to the state of our armaments.” But the British War Office had rejected his proposal for a new kind of smooth-bore, heavy artillery rifle that could spin its projectiles. So, he made the trip south to see if the French would be interested.
After demonstrating his prototype there, he met our old friend, Claude-Étienne Minié, a French artillery commander and the inventor of the Minié pattern rifle. Minié expressed his doubts about the prototype, due to the “heavy strains” such field guns would have to withstand from repeated firing. As the English inventor explained, he then returned to England to “study the whole question of metals suitable to the construction of guns.”
His name was Henry Bessemer, and the results of his subsequent studies would do much more than make new guns possible – they made a whole new world possible.
Born in a tiny village in Hertfordshire, north of the London area, in 1813, Bessemer was the son of a small-scale industrialist who had fled the French Revolution as a young man. The elder Bessemer went into engraving metal types for printing, setting up a foundry in the village, and became something of an expert on anti-counterfeiting. In 1830, they moved to London where Henry followed in his father’s line of work. The 17-year-old Bessemer then made his first important invention – a dated stamp to protect the Inland Revenue Office from the pervasive problem of people fraudulently reusing revenue stamps (i.e. not paying the tax). It helped the Treasury raise an extra £100,000 per year and, with it, Bessemer found his calling as an inventor.
Over the next few years, he patented dozens of new inventions, including a steam-driven press for extracting juice from sugar cane, new means of ventilating coal mines, new railway carriages, and new ways of manufacturing paints, oils, sheet glass, and more. Perhaps most significant was a new way of creating bronze particles for false gold powder, for which he set up a factory.
But it was the Crimean War – and his meeting with Minié – that was the real turning-point of Bessemer’s career. As he put it in his autobiography, “I well remember how, on my lonely journey back to Paris that cold December night, I inwardly resolved, if possible, to complete the work so satisfactorily begun, by producing a superior description of cast-iron that would stand the heavy strains which the increased weight of projectiles rendered necessary.”
Back in London, Bessemer set up a laboratory with his brother-in-law at Baxter House and began experiments. Working with various mixtures of iron in the furnaces he built, he stumbled upon a breakthrough.
“Some pieces of pig iron on one side of the bath attracted my attention by remaining unmelted in the great heat of the furnace, and I turned on a little more air through the fire-bridge with the intention of increasing the combustion… I then took an iron bar, with the intention of pushing them into the bath, when I discovered that they were merely thin shells of decarburised iron… showing that atmospheric air alone was capable of wholly decarburising grey pig iron, and converting it into malleable iron without puddling or any other manipulation. Thus a new direction was given to my thoughts…”
Bessemer adjusted his experiments around this critical point: That air alone could refine iron. He then built a new crucible with a blowpipe in its center. And then he took it a step further, scrapping the furnace, and building an open-mouth cylinder through which air could be blown in through the bottom. After ten minutes of blowing air into this device, violent, white flames shot up through the mouth, followed by “a succession of mild explosions, throwing molten slags and splashes of metal high into the air, the apparatus becoming a veritable volcano in a state of active eruption.”
The experiment had produced the decarburized malleable iron he desired, but the process was far too dangerous. So, he then created a new cone-shaped upper chamber to control it. What he had built was a new blast-furnace system – his two-chamber converter. And what he was converting was crude iron into steel.
This invention would change the course of history, as humankind would soon build a world our ancestors would have thought impossible.
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This is the Industrial Revolutions
Chapter 59: Steel and Rubber
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Strictly speaking, steel is an alloy defined by some particular chemical properties. But for our purposes today, I’m going to simplify it a bit and say that steel is a specific form of iron. If you think of iron alloys as a spectrum, you have on the one end wrought iron, which has a very low carbon content – less than 0.1%. Wrought iron is great in terms of tensile strength, but it is not very malleable – in other words, it’s difficult to form. (And today it’s seldom used.)
On the other end of the spectrum you have cast iron, which has a high carbon content of at least 2.1%. Cast iron is very malleable but is also very brittle and easily cracks when too much weight or other pressure is applied to it.
In the sweet spot between them is steel. Typically, with a carbon content of between 0.1% and 2.1%, it has the benefits of being both malleable and strong. Technically, there is more to it than that – including how the metallic compounds fuse together – but I will remind you that science is not my strong suit, so let’s just leave it at that.
The point is, for nearly as long as human beings have been making iron products, they have also been able to make steel products. But because of the specific parameters that make steel what it is, it was not as widely used as iron. For the most part, it was used in creating blades like knives and – most importantly for most of history – swords.
Sword production was the most important application of steelmaking in Medieval England. And, by the High Middle Ages, the epicenter of England’s steel industry was the town of Sheffield in Yorkshire. Geoffrey Chaucer even noted the town for its knives in The Canterbury Tales.
It was on the outskirts of Sheffield where our old, old friend, Benjamin Huntsman, set up his foundry for crucible steel in 1740. If you remember to way back in Chapter 6, it was Huntsman who had made the first really big innovation in steel production. Using coke to get the desired temperature, he could cast molten steel in reusable crucibles, thus scaling the production of steel goods. It was a major disruptor in Sheffield’s steel industry at the time, and it made Britain the world’s leading steelmaking nation.
And it was in Sheffield where Henry Bessemer set up his steelworks and started licensing the technology to others in 1858. Helped along by the work of scientists like Henry Clifton Sorby (who made pioneering research into steel’s microscopical structure) and innovative manufacturers like Robert Forester Mushet (who discovered ways to improve Bessemer’s process), Bessemer’s breakthrough reduced the need for fuel sevenfold, and it was getting attention from all over the world.
Except, it turned out there was a major problem with the Bessemer process. During his experiments at Baxter House, he had been using some grey pig iron that was unusually low in phosphorus. But most British iron ore had high a phosphorus content, which made for an unacceptable quality of steel. Bessemer converters had been set up across the country and they were failing spectacularly. He had to start importing more expensive ore from Sweden and ended up refunding about £32,500 in licensing fees. (That’s about $5.5 million today.)
But a couple solutions soon emerged for the world’s budding steelmakers.
The first was a totally different process that came out of France. There, one Pierre-Émile Martin figured out how to make steel using an open-hearth furnace – a device just recently invented by our old friend, the German-English industrialist Carl William Siemens. (Shout out Chapter 55!) This more controllable Siemens-Martin process, as it was soon known, allowed manufactures to produce large quantities of high-quality steel from lower-quality ore, and with minimal waste. The only problem was it was a significantly slower process.
Martin patented this alternative process in 1865, but lost the lawsuits that followed when copycats adopted the invention in their steel mills. Martin would die in poverty, but his method became the preferred method of steelmaking in Continental Europe.
In 1869, it was adopted by the Continent’s leading steel producer, our old friend, Alfred Krupp in Germany.
At first, Krupp had adopted the Bessemer process and – despite its drawbacks – was initially reluctant to switch to the Siemens-Martin process. An Anglophile who had actually changed his name from “Alfried” to the more English “Alfred”, he had been travelling to the U.K. since the 1830s to study industrial metallurgy. It was he who first mastered Huntsman’s crucible steel system outside England, and then had invested heavily in Bessemer converters, which he used to quickly churn out mediocre steel to supply both the growing American railways and the growing Prussian artillery needs of the late 1860s. But as Krupp continued to expand his massive business – which employed tens of thousands of workers by this point – he couldn’t ignore the benefits of the French method of steel production.
The other solution that made modern steelmaking possible was a fix to the Bessemer process, developed by a pair of British cousins. One – a London-born schoolmaster-turned-police clerk named Sidney Gilchrist Thomas – decided to go back to school to study chemistry. When one of his professors told his class about the phosphorus problem with the Bessemer process, Thomas reached out to his Welsh cousin, Percy Carlyle Gilchrist – a metallurgical scientist working in a rural foundry. In 1877, they patented a way to absorb the phosphorus from the ore used in the Bessemer process by adding crushed dolomite in the initial blast of air that converted the pig iron into steel.
The so-called Thomas-Gilchrist adaptation of the Bessemer converter was also adopted by the Krupp company, and – between this innovation and the Siemens-Martin furnace – the mass production of high-quality steel was now possible. Thanks mostly to the Krupps, this was a major sector of Germany’s industrialization in the late 19th Century. The only other country that could match its steel output was the United States – and that was thanks mostly to one largely forgotten, but massively influential engineer.
Alexander Lyman Holley was born in Lakeville, Connecticut, in 1832. The son of a prosperous cutlery manufacturer – who was actually serving as the state’s Lieutenant-Governor at the time – Holley was educated at Brown University before getting a job as a locomotive designer for the industrialist George H. Corliss. (Long time listeners will remember this name. He was the inventor of the Corliss engine – a more fuel-efficient steam engine – and he built some of the nation’s best locomotives, as well as the monstrous engine that powered all the machines in the massive Machinery Hall at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, among other accomplishments.) Holley would then go on to work for the Stonington and Providence Railroad and the New York Locomotive Works as a draftsman engineer.
And from the mid-1850s through the mid-1860s, Holley became a prolific writer on engineering topics, for technical publications, layman newspapers like the New York Times, and even two books about European railways. In addition to this work, he consulted for the U.S. military on new armament technologies leading up to the Civil War.
What was great about all this knowledge-based work he was doing was it gave him an excuse to travel and learn about new mechanical engineering developments across North America and Europe. And it was during one of these trips in 1862 he visited Bessemer’s steelworks in Sheffield.
Given access to observe the Bessemer process up close as a prospective American licensee, Holley quickly realized the great potential this system offered. As he later put it, the process promised to “ameliorate the whole subject of ordnance and engineering construction in general, both as to quality and cost.”
Upon returning to the United States, Holley contacted our old friend, the Swedish-born screw-propeller inventor and U.S. Navy contractor John Ericsson. Ericsson then connected Holley to the businessmen who bankrolled the construction of Ericsson’s ironclad warship, the USS Monitor. (Shout out Chapter 52!) Together, Holley and the two businessmen came up with a plan to convert an iron foundry in Troy, New York, into America’s first Bessemer steel plant.
Over the next two decades, Holley would build and/or help design another ten American mills employing Bessemer converters. In this way, he almost singlehandedly got the nation’s mass production of steel off the ground. And with his investors, he licensed these mills through a new American patent pool: The Trustees of the Pneumatic or Bessemer Process of Making Iron and Steel – or, as it was more simply known, the Bessemer Association. For the rest of the Technological Revolution, the Bessemer Association played the role of a cartel, largely determining the price of steel in the United States.
Holley’s mills would transform the Great Lakes region, especially in Chicago and across Pennsylvania. Among the new plants were the Cambria Iron Works and the Bethlehem Iron Works – which later merged into one of the nation’s leading steel producers of the 20th Century: Bethlehem Steel.
But almost all the plants Holley designed were existing iron works that he retrofitted for steel production. What he really wanted to do was design a new steel works from scratch – one that could achieve ultimate scalability; one built with a seamless flow system from the start; one that incorporated transportation in and out of the plant for optimum efficiencies. And in 1872, he was given the chance to build such a steel plant outside Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, thanks to a rising capitalist who would soon dominate the steel industry – an immigrant whose rags-to-riches story embodied the burgeoning American Dream. (And I’m guessing more than a few of you already know who I’m talking about.)
Andrew Carnegie was born in a one-room cottage in Dunfermline, Scotland – just north of Edinburgh – in 1835. His biography reads like a mad-lib full of the topics we’ve covered throughout the course of this podcast. His father was a handloom weaver who struggled to make ends meet due to the invention of the power-loom. His mother made the family some money selling baked goods to their neighbors. The Carnegies were political Radicals and joined the Chartist movement. Though poor, Andrew had an uncle on his mother’s side who was a prosperous snuff manufacturer and Radical politician. This uncle, George Lauder Sr., is often credited with having shaped the boy’s worldview.
In 1848, with the economy in tatters across Europe, the Carnegies decided to emigrate to America. Borrowing from Lauder, they took a steamer from Edinburgh to Glasgow and then set sail for New York City. As Carnegie described it in his autobiography, “New York was the first great hive of human industry among the inhabitants of which I had mingled, and the bustle and excitement of it overwhelmed me.” From there, the family made a three-week journey up the Erie Canal – watching the construction of the new Erie Railway as they traveled – and then sailed across Lake Erie to Cleveland, before finally heading south to Pittsburg.
But in Pittsburg, his father continued to struggle as a handloom weaver. He eventually got a job in a cotton mill, but it didn’t much suit him. And so, the 13-year-old Andrew had to find work to help the family make ends meet.
He started as a bobbin boy in the cotton mill before getting a job for a bobbin manufacturer, operating a dangerous steam-engine boiler of which he was terrified, as one could expect minors to do in the days before those pesky child labor laws.
Fortunately for young Carnegie, another uncle of his in Pittsburg helped him get a job as a messenger boy for a new telegraph company, delivering telegrams from the company’s office to various businessmen and whatnot around town, making him acquainted with some of the “leading men of the city.” A hard worker who showed a keen interest in learning, Carnegie watched the telegraphers closely and picked up the skill. He convinced the telegraph office’s manager to give him a trial. Before long, he had become a “one-man wire service” for the Pittsburg newspapers. All the while, Carnegie was committing his spare time to his self-education, reading vociferously and organizing mutual improvement societies with his fellow working children, including a debate club in which they hotly contested topics of politics, philosophy, and law.
His big break came at age 17, when he was offered a job with the Pennsylvania Railroad. The new superintendent of the railroad’s Western Division, Tom Scott, was a frequent visitor to the telegraph office where Carnegie worked, and he quickly took a liking to the boy. Scott was also born into poverty and had been working since age 10, and he saw in this teenager not only his own strong work ethic, but also a strong mind and a knack for problem solving. He convinced the railroad he would need an in-house telegrapher to manage his share of the line effectively, and upon their approval, hired the young Carnegie.
In this role, Carnegie had the opportunity to learn the railroad business. And, when Scott was promoted a few years later, he chose the now 22-year-old Carnegie to replace him. Carnegie proved an adept railroad manager who kept the traffic moving smoothly – even keeping a telegraph in his home and visiting tracks regularly for inspections. Meanwhile, Scott helped him learn how to invest his earnings, and Carnegie began buying stock in various companies that did business with the railroad. And, when the Civil War came, Scott was appointed Assistant Secretary of War for transportation. Sure enough, he brought Carnegie with him, making the young man superintendent of the Union’s railroads and eastern telegraph lines.
By the end of the war, Carnegie was a rich man – having earned handsome dividends from his investments, thanks to the industrial build-up the war had spurred in the North. At this point, he became a full-time venture capitalist, buying shares in industrial corporations and helping direct their operations. The most significant example was with the Keystone Bridge Company, which supplied and oversaw construction of the Eads Bridge in St. Louis – the first bridge to span the Mississippi River. Made of iron and steel, and spanning 520 feet, it was a nightmare to build. It took about seven years to complete, requiring Carnegie to keep going back to their banker – Junius Morgan – for financing. They finished it within hours of their final deadline, and they had to convince locals it was safe to cross by having an elephant walk across it first. Afterward, Carnegie wisely sold his shares, as the bridge also turned out to not be all that profitable.
But the experience had demonstrated to Carnegie the value of steel. The weight it could hold would be indispensable for the construction projects of the future. And while he was selling bonds for the bridge in the UK, he happened to get a chance to visit the new steel plants going up in Sheffield and Birmingham. He returned home knowing exactly where his future energies would be focused, and he approached Alexander Holley to build him the world’s best steel mill.
Construction of the Edgar Thomson Steel Works began in April 1873. Named after the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad – where Carnegie had started and which still did business with many of the companies Carnegie had shares in – it was by far the most productive steel mill of its day. In plans that only took him six weeks (since he’d been imagining this ideal mill for so long) Holley designed it so the pig iron would be melted in large cupolas, ladled by “tipping cupolas” into twin 6-ton Bessemer converters, and heated with independent blowing engines. From there, the molten steel would flow directly into ingot molds on moving rollers. Unlike other steel mills that required constant cooling and reheating as the product moved, steel here could stay hot throughout the process until it was ready for one cooling. Hydraulic fingers pressed the steel so it would cool into straightened rails, and then shipped out via the tracks built for the site.
The layout of the works was designed specially for these rail tracks. As Holley explained…
“…these works were laid out, not with a view of making the buildings artistically parallel with the existing roads or with each other, but of laying down convenient railroads with easy curves… Coal is dumped from the mine-cars, standing upon the elevated track… directly upon the floors of the producer and boiler houses. Coke and pig iron are delivered to the stock-yard with equal facility. The finishing end of the rail-mill is accommodated on both sides by low-level gauge railways… There is also a complete system of 30-inch railways for internal transportation.”
The entire undertaking was extremely expensive, but Carnegie was willing to pay whatever it took to get the best possible economies of scale. He invested a quarter million dollars of his own personal fortune (today that would be about $5.9 million) and raised an additional $450,000 from other investors. And to manage the facility, he hired the experienced steelmaker and Civil War veteran, Captain Bill Jones, who was beloved by the employees and found additional innovative ways to increase production.
Carnegie once said, “I am neither a mechanic nor engineer, nor am I scientific. The fact is I don’t amount to anything in any industrial department. I seem to have had a knack of utilizing those that do know better than myself.” A great example of this was in the case where Jones asked for a raise. Carnegie liked to incentivize managers with stock options, but Jones said he’d prefer to have the highest salary of any steel mill superintendent – asking for $20,000, but willing to settle at $15,000, per year. In a stroke of genius, Carnegie decided to pay him $25,000 per year – the same salary as the President of the United States – and in the process, he earned the longtime loyalty of this skilled manager.
Carnegie, for his part, played the unofficial role of salesman for his steel. And with the economies of scale achieved, he was able to sell that steel at 30% less than his competitors / fellow Bessemer Association members. The result was instant profitability – though, much to the chagrin of his shareholders, Carnegie refused to pay any meaningful dividends, instead reinvesting said profits in continued expansion. More steel mills were constructed, as well as coke works to fuel the steel mills.
By the end of the Century, Carnegie Steel was the nation’s leading steel producer – a consolidated corporation responsible for over 40% of American steel output. In fact, it churned out more steel per year than all of Great Britain. He was ready to expand further, putting competitors out of business in a new steel war. As he put it, “A struggle is inevitable, it is a question of survival of the fittest.”
But by that point, Carnegie had hired one Charles Schwab to run the company. (Note: This is not the Charles Schwab associated with the financial services company that exists today, of the “Talk to Chuck” commercials – that Charles Schwab is actually still alive, but not at all related to ours.)
Our Charles Schwab had a vision for the future of American steel, which he articulated in a speech to the University Club in New York in December 1900. He said he envisioned a top-down “rationalization” of the industry in a “scientific manner” of distributing production among plants most efficiently, and eliminating “ruinous competition” in the process. It was a technocratic vision that could appeal to a monopolistic businessman or even a certain type of socialist (albeit, for different reasons). Among those in the audience was Carnegie and, more importantly, the banker John Pierpont Morgan.
The son of Carnegie’s old banker, Junius, J.P. Morgan did not much care for the back-slapping Scottish immigrant. However, he was drawn to this Schwab fellow and approached him after the speech. Together, they courted Carnegie and worked with a couple other steel firms that Morgan had stakes in. The next year, they bought out Carnegie and incorporated a new trust at the whopping, unprecedented price of $1.4 billion – U.S. Steel. It would be the country’s biggest merger for over eighty years to come, and the new corporation – with Schwab serving as its first president – controlled about 60% of the American steel market.
With his payout, Carnegie was now extremely rich, and for the remainder of his life, he would focus his energies on giving the vast fortune away. (But we’ll save that and other Carnegie topics for another time.)
Steel was big business. It was among the heavy industries that overshadowed so many other examples of industrialization during this period. As a result, Wall Street insiders thought little of those companies like P&G or Heinz or Gillette or Coca-Cola – those were small potatoes by comparison. And when you consider what steel helped America build, it’s easy to understand why.
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According to legend, it was all the fault of an Irish immigrant woman and her cow. On the night of October 8th, 1871, Mrs. Cate O’Leary was milking her cow in the family barn at 137 DeKoven Street in Chicago. While being milked, the cow kicked over a lantern. The hay on the ground caught fire, and the fire rapidly spread – first engulfing the barn, and (before long) the entire city.
Today we know it probably wasn’t Mrs. O’Leary’s fault, but it is true that – as a result of the fire – roughly a third of Chicago was destroyed, mostly in the downtown core of the city.
But as damaging and traumatic as this Great Chicago Fire was, the rebuilding of Chicago was a remarkable undertaking. And in this task, an entire generation of Chicago architects were given an opportunity to design creative, inspired, and massive new buildings.
Among them was one Louis Sullivan. A Boston-born architect in Philadelphia, hit hard by the Panic of 1873, he decided to move to Chicago to join the building boom there. Following his arrival, he noticed a problem.
“It became evident that the very tall masonry office building was in its nature economically unfit as ground values steadily rose. Not only did its thick walls entail a loss of space and therefore revenue, but it’s unavoidably small window openings could not furnish the proper and desirable ratio of glass area to rentable floor area.
“Thus arose a crisis, a seeming impasse. What was to do?...
“…in this instance, the Chicago activity in erecting high buildings finally attracted the attention of the local sales managers of Eastern rolling mills; and their engineers were set at work. The mills for some time past had been rolling those structural shapes that had long been in use in bridge work… Thus the idea of a steel frame which should carry all the load was tentatively presented to Chicago architects.”
Sullivan would later be known as the “father of skyscrapers.” (Or one of the fathers, anyway.) Among his structures is Chicago’s Auditorium Building and Union Trust Building, St. Louis’s Wainwright Building, Buffalo’s Guaranty Building, and New York’s Bayard-Condict Building.
Before this point, it was quite rare for a building to exceed five or six stories. But now steel was making the impossible possible.
Also, before this point, the advancements made in steel production had mostly been used to supply the expanding railroads. Thanks to Bessemer, steel was now more affordable than labor-intensive wrought iron. And because many of the Bessemer plants were producing these steel rails before the Thomas-Gilchrist adaptation, a lot of those steel rails cracked and needed to be replaced within a matter of years. (Although, thanks to lower-phosphorus ore found in the mines of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and northern Minnesota, it wasn’t quite as big of a problem as it was in Britain.)
As steel was adapted for structure building, though, it became ever more important to understand the quality of the stuff. Steel firms began employing scientists to study the chemistry of their work, ensuring that the beams they produced could withstand tremendous load-bearing weight. In fact, for the first time, scientists and industrialists began debating what exactly defined the word “steel.” (Was it a matter of the carbon content? Was it a matter of the amount of heat needed to fuse the metallic compounds? How much did the mix of the metals in the alloy matter? What was the appropriate mix? Etc.) Usually, their preferred definitions conveniently aligned with the kinds of steel their mills were already equipped to make.
But more and more steelmakers did realize, around this time, that they needed to adopt the Siemens-Martin process as well. Though slower and, thus, more expensive to operate, it was necessary to get the quality of steel necessary for the burgeoning market. They could still operate their Bessemer converters for some products, but skyscrapers would need steel made in an open-hearth furnace. Guys like Carnegie diversified their holdings, building additional plants for the Siemens-Martin system. The blueprints they drew up for these facilities made the Watt steam engine look like a cute high school science project by comparison.
Steelmakers also innovated with the engineering of their beams, creating a more secure I-beam and later and even more secure H-beam. With these advancements, they could market their beams to architects. The steel industry would continue to develop other innovative products with newer applications in mind. Bethlehem Iron, for example, built a gigantic, 125-ton hammer to press huge slabs of acid-soaked steel into armor plates for new naval war ships. Others found new ways of forging steel machines for metal-cutting factories.
But it was how steel transformed urban landscapes that was most noticeable. Bridges like the Brooklyn Bridge were made possible. So were elevated transit lines like Chicago’s L. But certainly, most significant was skyscrapers.
To build a skyscraper required more than just breakthroughs in steel production, though.
For starters, precision-made interchangeable parts allowed engineers to construct massive skeleton frames, around which brick or masonry or glass could be added. Perhaps the best examples of these skeleton frames were those designed by French industrialist Gustave Eiffel, who used them in the interior of the Statue of Liberty (gifted to the United States for its 1876 Centennial) and, of course, for the Eiffel Tower in Paris (constructed for the city’s 1889 World’s Fair). While these two structures were made of wrought iron, rather than steel, they showed the world just how high architects could safely build. Though originally meant to be a temporary landmark, the Eiffel Tower was left standing and would remain the world’s tallest structure until the 1930s.
For another thing, the economics of building skyscrapers had to make sense. As industrialization expanded, it allowed a professional services sector to grow. Banks, insurance companies, publishers, and other such businesses needed office space in urban commercial districts. What’s more, renting such space in a high-rise became a status symbol for the owners of these enterprises. And thanks to the new railroads and mass transit systems, office employees could easily commute into the expensive downtown cores each morning from the surrounding residential neighborhoods where they lived.
Following the Great Chicago Fire, architects also began incorporating fireproofing strategies into their designs – a critical step to attracting investment to build skyscrapers. Plus, by using skeleton frames, it took construction firms shockingly little time to build them – something much appreciated by the capitalists building these offices, so they could start collecting rents all the sooner.
But maybe the most important requirement for skyscrapers to work was the development of the elevator. While examples of elevators can be found going back centuries, it was really in the 19th Century when they first started becoming practical. Several British architects were designing steam-powered elevators by the 1830s. American Elisha Graves Otis invented a safety break in 1852 that made elevators considerably safer to ride – a critical step for the public to trust them. And, in 1880, our old friend Werner von Siemens invented the first electric elevator.
Before safe, powered elevators, it would not have been practical to build high. Not too many business owners or managers would want to rent space in a building where they’d need to climb 10 floors of stairs to get to their office. Now they wouldn’t just want to rent in a high-rise – they’d want to rent at the top of that high-rise, looking down on the city below them.
In the wake of Chicago’s building boom, skyscrapers slowly spread across the country as cities gradually reviewed their building codes to allow for them.
When New York City decided to sanction “skeleton construction” in 1892, it saw its own building boom – culminating in 1901 with the completion of an unthinkably high triangular building. Originally named after its architect, George Fuller, it was better known by its nickname: The Flatiron Building. At 22 stories high and remarkably thin, many locals were convinced it would eventually fall – either cracking under its own weight or by blowing over with a strong gust of wind. But thankfully, the steel structure has kept intact, and the building still stands today.
Now, as you can guess by the title of this episode, steel was by no means the only important industrial product of this age. There was another that would be just as critical to machines, consumer goods, and other breakthroughs of the future – rubber.
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Last time, I told you about the invention of the safety bicycle in Britain followed by John Boyd Dunlop’s invention of the pneumatic rubber tire, and how these inventions kickstarted a worldwide bicycle craze in the 1890s. Well, already set up to take advantage of this craze was an American manufacturer named Albert Augustus Pope.
Born in Boston in 1843, Albert Pope’s family went way back in New England history. They had succeeded in the lumber trade, and Pope’s father tried using it to buy up land west of Boston on the verge of suburban sprawl there – but he was too early and ended up losing a fortune. Albert subsequently dropped out of school and began working as a shop clerk. But he succeeded in military service during the Civil War – leaving at the rank of captain – and used his savings to begin investing in various business ventures.
It was at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia that Pope saw a display of Penny Farthing bicycles – those are the old-timey bicycles you’ve probably seen in pictures where the rider has to sit up really high above the bike’s giant front wheel. He decided to start importing some of these bikes from the U.K. and, by 1878, began building his own out of a new factory. Taking advantage of the advancements in metal casting and interchangeability, he was able to easily assemble and sell these bikes over the coming decade. And when safety bicycles and pneumatic rubber tires became possible, things really started taking off for him. At the height of the craze, Pope was churning out some quarter million bicycles per year. And of all a bicycle’s components, rubber was the most important.
Charles Goodyear and Thomas Hancock had each figured out how to vulcanize rubber in the 1840s (shout out Chapter 39), and following their deaths in the 1860s, the uses of vulcanized rubber had only expanded. It was now being used to insulate telegraph lines and, eventually, telephone and electric lines too. It was used in the hoses for the increasingly industrial breweries of the United States and Europe. Rubber was being used to make safer steam engines and safer machinery for the production of electricity, armaments, and more. It was needed for washers, gaskets, springs, pistons, plug valves, motor mounts, and more. It would soon be adopted in diesel engines and assembly line conveyor belts.
Not only were there new industrial applications, but new consumer applications for rubber too. In addition to his pneumatic tires, Dunlop used rubber to make better tennis balls and golf balls. Tennis shoes, with rubber soles, also started to hit the market – as did rubber ducks, balloons, and other rubber toys for children. Foam rubber was developed for pillows, mattresses, and upholstered furniture.
Rubber was even starting to be used for new forms of birth control. As late as the 1850s, people still relied on sheep intestines for their contraceptives. But in the late 1800s, the manufacture of rubber diaphragms, cervical caps, and condoms began – with condoms being by far the most popular. Now, these were not the disposable rubber condoms of today – those wouldn’t be possible until the advent of concentrated liquid latex in the early 20th Century. Instead, workers would piece strips of rubber around penis-shaped molds of various sizes and then cure them with heat. It resulted in a thick, rubber condom that could be reused for up to three months.
These would be important public health tools come the First World War, as the British, French, and German armies began supplying rubber condoms to their troops. (The U.S. army, though, was hamstrung by a federal morality law and couldn’t provide its soldiers with condoms, which is how Americans came to spread so much venereal disease in Europe come 1917 and ’18.) In fact, rubber condoms were so popular in France that they might have been a key reason for the “depopulation” fears the French faced in the first half of the 20th Century.
But nothing created as much demand for rubber as the inventions of the bicycle and automobile, for which rubber tires were needed. (Now, don’t worry, we’ll talk more about the introduction of the automobile in the future.)
To supply bicycle manufacturers and automakers, several major rubber companies sprang into existence. In 1871, Continental-Caoutchouc und Gutta-Percha Compangnie (better known today as Conti) formed in Hannover. Dunlop set up his own rubber company in Dublin in 1889, and expanded with plants in Belfast and Coventry before relocating to Birmingham. Also in 1889, the brothers Édouard and André Michelin started a company to make pneumatic tires in rural France.
U.S. Rubber was established in Naugatuck, Connecticut, in 1892, with hopes of dominating the American market much like U.S. Steel later would. But the trust was overshadowed by a number of rubber companies set up in Akron, Ohio – the rubber capital of America – including Goodrich, Goodyear, and Firestone.
It was at a time when automobiles were really only affordable if you were wealthy, and the tires were a big reason why. In 1898, a set of rubber tires cost $400 – adjusted for inflation, that’s over $13,000 today. So, to attract business, tire companies went out of their way to make the investment seem worthwhile. They sponsored car races to appeal to playboy thrill seekers – a tradition that endures to this day. Michelin began printing the first road maps for drivers in Continental Europe and Goodrich followed suit in the U.S. And, in the days before governments saw the need for doing it, these two companies even installed some of the first road signs big enough to be seen by passing motorists.
Michelin went so far as to establish a tourist office in Paris and began publishing a guidebook of hotels, garages, and restaurants for travelers exploring the Continent by car. (If you’ve ever wondered about those Michelin stars that fancy restaurants get, well, this is their origin story.) Conti, Dunlop, and Goodrich all proceeded to make their own such guidebooks too.
These efforts helped make automobile ownership more and more popular and, as a result, helped sell rubber tires. By the turn of the century, rubber companies were hiring tens of thousands of workers for their factories in the industrialized world. And to supply the rubber for processing in these factories, the rubber companies turned to the still unindustrialized tropics.
As you’ll remember from Chapter 39, rubber trees originally came from the Amazon rain forest. And, throughout the 19th Century, that remained the source for most of the world’s rubber supply. Brazil was the leading exporter of latex well into the 1890s.
During the 1890s, though, the African rubber trade grew significantly. Lesser-known rubber trees like Funtumia elstica and vines like Landolphia were native to the rain forests of central Africa, from modern-day Nigeria to modern-day Angola. And as European powers colonized the African continent during these years, one of the primary objectives was to extract latex to send to rubber factories.
The most infamous example of this was in a territory known to us today as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. At the time, it was called the Congo Free State and it was the personal domain of Belgian King Leopold II. (We’ll talk about how the Berlin Conference allowed that to happen some other time.) Though a constitutional monarch back in Belgium, the Congo Free State was not in a union with Belgium, and so the constitution didn’t apply there.
To raise revenues for his new state, Leopold claimed all uncultivated land and targeted it for rubber harvests. His men oversaw an armed African contingent known as the Force Publique to “recruit” local Congolese men for this purpose. Poorly paid and often abused by their white leaders, the Force Publique used similar brutality with the Congolese. Men who did not meet their quotas were whipped, even though the whole operation was over-harvesting rubber vine, forcing them to go further and further into the forests to find some. Women and children were taken hostage until the rubber quotas were achieved. Villages were burned to the ground. Those who resisted had their hands cut off. It is believed as many as 10 million Congolese died in the pursuit of rubber. Similar atrocities were seen in the French Congo too.
Africans weren’t the only indigenous people victimized by the rubber trade. In the rain forest of northern Peru, a British outfit known as the Peruvian Amazon Company used debt peonage to enslave Amerindian workers in the area around the Putumayo River. By the time the atrocities were discovered in 1909, as many as a quarter million had been killed by disease or mistreatment. Entire tribes were wiped out.
It became known as the Putumayo Scandal, and the American whistleblower who uncovered it described it in stark terms:
“The agents of the Company force the pacific Indians of the Putumayo to work day and night… They are flogged inhumanly until their bones are laid bare… Their children are grasped by the feet and their heads are dashed against trees and walls until their brains fly out… Men, women and children are shot to provide amusement… they are burned with kerosene so that the employees may enjoy their desperate agony.”
When the stories of these atrocities – both in the Congo and Peru – hit the papers, readers were outraged. The Belgian Parliament ended up stripping their king of his control over the Congo, while a British judge forced the PAC into dissolution. Reformers, meanwhile, pursued a new way to cultivate rubber – one that would not only clean up the horrific abuses of the “wild rubber” trade, but also the inefficiencies of sending people out into the jungle to cultivate the stuff.
In 1895, an English botanist in Singapore named Henry Nicholas Ridley figured out a way to extract latex from Haeva brasiliensis trees without seriously damaging them – not unlike how we tap syrup from maple trees. He also experimented with how closely the trees could be planted alongside each other (they only needed about 16 feet of distance, it turned out), how soon a tree could be tapped for latex, and how long it could continue producing latex before it was tapped out.
By 1899, Ridley had planted over a million rubber tree seeds on the Malay peninsula, where fungi were not as threatening as in South America or Africa. For his love of rubber trees, he earned nicknames including “rubber Ridley” and “mad Ridley”. And his work had demonstrated the viability of rubber plantations in southeast Asia.
Over the next several decades, rubber companies set up such plantations across modern-day Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia. In 1900, virtually no rubber was produced on a plantation. 20 years later, more than 90% of the world’s rubber supply was harvested on plantations in southeast Asia. And as a result, the annual supply of latex for rubber processing had increased nearly eightfold.
Workers migrated from all over Asia to work on these plantations – some from as far as China and India, though most from rural communities closer by. Referred to as “coolies” by the white managers, they endured rough working and living conditions, flagrant racism, and a rigid socio-economic hierarchy on the plantations. Discipline was strict and they were worked from sunrise to sunset, tapping the trees, gathering liquid latex, heating it, and using machine presses to form it into blocks for shipment to the U.S. and Europe.
Confined to small huts or barracks, disease would spread rapidly among the Asian workers. While especially bad in the early years of a plantation – when mortality rates were frequently over 20% – there was never a point in which their life expectancy exceeded that of their friends and family members who remained in the nearby rural communities. But upon entering work on a plantation, it was made difficult to leave. Gambling was a big part of the culture in many of these societies, which was even more so the case with the disproportionately unattached male workforces. Knowing this, the companies would extend lines of credit to the workers on their days off, indebting them to the estate so they’d have little choice but to renew their labor contracts when the time came.
Even names reflected the problematic labor practices on these plantations. While white managers enjoyed being addressed by their full names and honorifics, overseers would only be called by their first names. The laborers they oversaw, meanwhile, were simply called “Coolie” or “boy” or a dehumanizing number. For example, a report taken on a French plantation in 1936 read that “folio 14,436 of village 6” was struck to the point of bleeding by “overseer Thanh”. This led to a protest for which four workers – all named by their own folio numbers – were put in a prison for five days.
Similar to how textile mills had become dependent on a steady supply of cotton from plantations across the world, now rubber factories had become dependent on plantations. This agricultural commodity, so critical for industrial production, was now a cornerstone of the global supply chain. The two world wars disrupted that global supply much like the invasion of Ukraine is now disrupting the global supply of oil and gas – and consumers a century ago talked about the prices of rubber much the way we walk about the price of filling up the tank today. Only with the development of synthetic rubber in the mid-1900s did such anxieties die down.
Today, it is simply impossible to imagine the world without mass-produced steel and rubber. These products were critical to bringing about the kind of lives we enjoy today. Also critical to modern life were numerous new inventions of the late 19th Century – especially those made possible with the power of electricity – and we’re going to discuss them and their legendary inventors next time on the Industrial Revolutions.
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