Today, let's visit embryonic Pittsburgh. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
A historical snapshot of
Pittsburgh in the year 1816 offers an unexpected
window into early American history. The War of 1812
had just ended. We'd survived our first forty years
of independence, and we'd just begun seeing
ourselves as a strong, solvent country. Pittsburgh
was a singular town. It lay across the great
natural barrier of the Allegheny Mountains, far
from population centers on the Atlantic coast.
This settlement was so important because it lay
right in the western Pennsylvania coal fields. It
was cheaper to bring iron to coal for smelting than
to bring coal to iron. So, soon after the first
Western Pennsylvania blast furnace was set up in
1790, Pittsburgh emerged as our major source of
iron. It became our major source of glass as well,
because glassmaking also requires a lot of heat.
Between 1810 and 1820 Pittsburgh's population
mushroomed from forty-seven-hundred to more than
seven thousand.
What was odd about all that was Pittsburgh's
inaccessibility. It sits at the confluence of the
Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers. They connect it
to the ocean at New Orleans, over a thousand miles
away. With the Erie Canal a decade in the future,
it took over two weeks for a loaded wagon to make
the three-hundred-mile trip over the mountains to
Philadelphia.
Despite that, Pittsburgh had acquired three
newspapers, nine churches, three theaters, a piano
maker, five glass factories, three textile mills, a
steam engine factory, four thousand tons of iron
processing per year, two rolling mills, most of our
nail production, and (no surprise) a notorious
air-pollution problem.
Robert Fulton's steamboat patent was only seven
years old in 1816. Nevertheless, this inland
city launched three of those gigantic boats that
year to link itself to the ocean. And they weren't
its first. Another boat, made two years earlier in
Pittsburgh and bearing the unfortunate name of
Vesuvius, burned up in New Orleans in 1816.
These words from an article in the September 3rd
issue of the Pittsburgh Gazette say much
about the mood of the place:
Those who first cross the Atlantic in a steam
boat will be entitled to a great portion of
applause. In a few years we expect such trips will
be common ... and bold will they be who first make
a passage to Europe in a steam boat.
In fact, the first transatlantic steamboat crossing
was made, with the help of sail, just three years
later.
The article ends with a quotation from Homer:
Bold was the man, the first who dared to
brave,
... in fragile bark, the wild perfidious wave.
There it is. The imprint of a developing
civilization -- healthy, adventurous technologies
driven by awe, excitement, and (maybe most
important) a perfectly implausible self-confidence.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
