Connors Anthony J. Ingenious Machinists: Two Inventive Lives from the American Industrial Revolution

Excelsior Editions. — State University of New York, 2014. — 296 p. — ISBN 13 9781438454016.Ingenious Machinitis recounts the early development of industrialization in New England and New York through the lives of two prominent innovators whose work advanced the transformation to factory work and corporations, the rise of the middle class, and other momentous changes in nineteenth-century America. Paul Moody chose a secure path as a corporate engineer in the Waltham-Lowell system that both rewarded and constrained his career. David Wilkinson was a risk-taking entrepreneur from Rhode Island who went bankrupt and relocated to Cohoes, New York, where he was instrumental in that city's early industrial development. Anthony J. Connors write not just a history of technological innovation and business development, but also two interwoven stories about these inventors. He shows the textile industry not in its decline, but in its days of great social and economic promise. It is a story of new technology and the risks and rewards of the exhilarating, but unsettling, early years of industrial capitalism.Introduction: Machinists in the Early Republic
Industrial Glimmerings: Massachusetts before 1790
Revolutionary Technology: Rhode Island, 1775–1790
The Progress of a Textile Machinist: Paul Moody, 1794–1814
Oziel’s Son: David Wilkinson, 1790–1815
Company Man: Paul Moody at Waltham, 1813–1823
Toward Wilkinsonville: David Wilkinson, 1815–1828
Respectable Company Man About Town: Paul Moody at Lowell, 1823–1831
“We All Broke Down”: David Wilkinson, 1829–1852
Epilogue Ingenious Machinists
Notes
Glossary of Textile and Machine Tool Terms
Essay on Sources