My Neighbor, General Solomon Lowe

 

General Solomon Lowe (-1861)

Every so often on one of my morning runs I feel energetic enough to pass by the Harmony Cemetery in our little town of Boxford.  I've known for many years that there's a certain General Solomon Lowe (1782-1861) buried there, and that he had either three wives (and a mistress, one story goes) or four wives--each of whom presumably he loved with all of his heart in life--but whom he used as kind of decorative ornamentation around his grave in death.

Today, looking for a reason not to finish my Christmas shopping, I finally stopped by to check out the General.  It turns out, back in 1901, a travel reporter for The New York Times had a similar idea.

I leave the story, 113 years old if a day, to him.

At a place known as Boxford, about ten miles from Andover, Mass. far, far from the madding crowd, there is as curious a burying ground as can be found in all New England.  As a matter of fact, Boxford is just a section of country, beautiful country at that, but there is no village or gathering of habitations which could be dignified with the name of town.  The quiet farmspeople go their peaceful ways utterly oblivious to the odd humor to be found in their old burying ground.

I might point out that there's a little city-slickerism going on here, and throughout the article.  Boxford is still today no booming metropolis, but the town had a "center" in 1645 (the same year Manhattan was just being deeded to the Dutch), a railroad stop in 1854, and by 1901 both an East and West Boxford Village.  It also had in 1901 a rather substantial match factory.  It's fair to say, however, that if Route 95 hadn't altered the town's quaint ambiance in the late 1950s we might still have only 600 residents, about the number the Times reporter found in 1901.  

He continued:

Not many weeks ago a traveler took two sturdy horses and started to find the old Boxford burying ground.  He had driven about five miles when he inquired of some farm hands by the wayside where the cemetery was.  They elucidated the situation as follows:

"Which one do you want?  There are two Boxford burying grounds.  There is an old one and a new one.  To reach either one, just drive on the way you are going now for about a mile and half more."

Having traveled for more than two miles further along a road to which there were no forks, the traveler came to an old farmhouse, and called out for some one to hear what he had to say.  In a few minutes an aged woman came to the door, bearing every appearance of having spent many years amid rustic surroundings.

"Where is Boxford?" asked the traveler, fearing that the mention of "Boxford burying ground" might suggest unpleasant anticipations.  The good lady look puzzled, stepped indoors for a moment, and then returned to the door with the reply:

. . ."This is Boxford."

There was not another house within two miles.  It was all trees and fields.  But the traveler went ahead, feeling that such good roads as he had encountered must lead somewhere.  Around three miles further on an old cemetery was met with, with the traditional New England stone wall surrounding it.  This, it was concluded, was the Boxford burying ground. . .

I've stepped inside the stone wall to take this picture.  If it looks bleak and cold, it was.  Anything not to Christmas shop, though.

And above all these gravestones and burial places the lot in which repose the remains of "General" Solomon and his three wives stands out most conspicuously.

You'll note use of quotation marks around the title "General."  There's some skepticism from our intrepid 1901 Times reporter on this historical point, as you'll see.  Above, though, is a good shot of the Solomon lot with the dashing General featured in the middle and bas-reliefs of his four wives, two on each side.

"General" Lowe was a member of the State Militia, in which he had some sort of rank, although he had never heard the sound of battle.  It was the delight of his life, the villagers who remember him say, to dress up in his regimentals and exhibit himself.  He was one of the characters of this quiet rural community.

Without a pilgrimage to the New England Historic Genealogical Society, I'm going to have to leave this controversy to a Lowe family genealogist.  We can only be sure--if you look in front of his wives' gravestones--that the General (or "General") is credited with service in the War of 1812 (the "War of 1812" perhaps?) and the Mexican American War ("ditto").

"General" Lowe died on April 4, 1861.  He left a curious will, the most curious provision of it being the creation of a trust fund which was to furnish free beer to every one who should come to his tomb on the anniversary of his death to celebrate the momentous event.  For many years this bequest made April 4 the day of a veritable orgy for the farm people for miles around.  The abuse became so great that the Sheriff of the county had to intervene, and instruct the itinerant constable of the district to violate the "General's" will.  

Hold on.  I think I've just come up with another annual fundraiser for the Boxford Historical Society.  Or maybe a codicil to my own will.  Stay tuned.

Another curious proviso of this will was the stipulation that on this same April 4 of every year the regimentals of the "General" should be taken from their resting place, and be displayed at the tomb for the inspiration of the rising generations.

A rather dashing character, no, with quite a shock of hair?  Both Custer and Pickett undoubtedly stole a page from General Solomon's playbook.  (Incidentally, it was eight days after Solomon's death that the first shot of the Civil War was fired at Fort Sumter.)

"General" Lowe took unto himself four wives as he journeyed upon this earth.  He arranged that two of them were to be buried on one side of his vault and two on the other.  When he died the fourth of the spouses had not died.  In fact, she still lives somewhere among the wildernesses of Boxford."

The "General" arranged that one tombstone should serve for two wives, and another slab of marble for the other two.  Each wife was to get half of a tombstone.  The "General" wrote no flattering epitaphs for his wives, but he arranged to tell posterity of their qualities by bas-relief carving on the gravestones.

Note the General's deft use of commas after each name--perhaps the single item that says more about his personality than any other.

These carvings are about 6 inches in diameter and round in shape. . .The first of the wives to die was Huldah [Kimball], who departed this earth of Sept. 24, 1808, at the age of twenty-eight.  Over Huldah's name is the carving of a woman sitting beside a small working table.  In her lap two babies sit, and on the table are various domestic paraphernalia.  Huldah had two children, and her life was distinctly in the home.

Note that Huldah was the mother of Major William Lowe, a surviving twin, born in 1807 and buried here with his parents.  Without more digging, however, I cannot tell you if we are here discussing Major William Lowe or "Major" William Lowe.

Wife Dolly [Wood] likewise bore two children [also twins], and they, too, are remembered upon the carving which helps to perpetuate her memory.  Dolly, like Huldah, was domestic, and the table beside her commemorates her virtues.  She died, says the gravestone, on May 10, 1817, nine years after wife Huldah.

The next wife was Martha [Eastman].  She died on July 24, 1855 at the age of fifty.  Martha apparently was fond of books.  She bore no children, so, instead of the babes, the carving in her honor represents her in the act of reading.  On the little work table beside her there is another book instead of the sewing basket of the other wives.

The fourth wife was Caroline H. [Chase], according to the gravestone.  She still lives, but her name was placed on the slab, and a space left for the date of her death.  Caroline bore no children and she was not literary, so she is engraved simply sitting in her chair, with no babes upon her knee and no book in her hand.  The work table beside her, too, is empty.

This puzzles me a little, since Caroline died in 1877 and the New York Times article was published July 28, 1901.  (If the article was a Times reprint, then our reporter's visit would date between 1855 and 1877.)

From there our Times reporter poked around at a few other epitaphs and then headed to Farmington, Connecticut, and ultimately to the marble quarries of Vermont where he found another sarcophagus of a man with four wives.  The tomb held only three, it seems, because the fourth wife refused to be buried with the others.

It wouldn't have surprised me had Catherine H. felt the same way.  At least, like the General, she got a definitive period after her name and not a one-in-a-series, next-in-line, step-right-up comma like the other wives.  Maybe that's what convinced her to lie down peacefully with the General and his other beloved.

In any event, I'm going to Boxford Town Hall tomorrow to find the General's trust money.  Mark down April 4 in your calendar.  We'll have the keg by the big rusty door.  Be there or be square--but start now.

Sources

The NYT's article is behind a paywall but can be found here and at their "TimesMachine" site.  A bit more on General Lowe is in The History of Essex County and Sidney Perley's History of Boxford, in which the maiden names of the wives are revealed.  Poignantly, Perley refers to Lowe as "Mr.", does not mention any service in battle, and notes that Caroline H. remarried after Lowe's death and moved to West Newbury.  Perley is also silent on Major William's military service, though we find in Dwellings of Boxford that William died in an attack in his cowyard by a bull.  The 2005 Boxford Reconnaissance Report is here for some quick history.  If you have an interest in being interred near the General and his entourage, there's still plenty of room (see here)--not bad for a cemetery established almost sixty years before the American Revolution.

Reverse Engineering Big Data

Want to dabble in Big Data, right from the comfort of your own keypad?  Want to know what the rest of the world is thinking using one of the world’s great algorithms?

I don’t pretend to understand Google’s Autocomplete, but I do know that it wants to try to answer my question before I even know what I want to ask.  In other words, it takes what billions of people are doing and tells us, Big Data-style, exactly what the rest of the world is thinking about.  

It’s very cool, sometimes distracting, and often very scary.

How to Spot a Digital Immigrant

Your neighbors in Palo Alto

How do you spot a spy? 

During WWII, Britain’s M-5 suggested that if an enemy spy was living next door, he would be young, fit, have a slightly odd cut to his clothing and eat strange chocolates.  Watch, too, for a scar or limp, M-5 said, since parachuting from airplanes was treacherous business in the 1940s.

How about today?  WikiHow (To Do Anything) suggests that you might have a spy next door if the person is educated, physically strong and highly intelligent (unless you live in Palo Alto, in which case that’s just your neighbor).   Also, look for an intermittent work history (unless you live in Silicon Valley, in which case that may be your next boss).

It seems spies, despite their best efforts, almost always give themselves away.

Once upon a time, digital immigrants were easy as pie to spot, like knowing that the guy with shorts and black socks, complaining that he didn't get enough ice in his drink in the Paris bistro was, well, an American.

You might recall not many years ago the person who didn't own a computer, "and I don’t see any need for one, either.  I can keep my recipes in a box, thank you.”  Today, that person is perfecting his or her shuffleboard.

There was, you might remember, the CEO who had his secretary print all of his email so he could answer each message by hand, or perhaps by dictation.  (For you Gen Xer’s, write me and I’ll explain “dictation.”  Gen Yer’s, write me and I’ll explain the concept of a “secretary.”  Those younger, write and I'll explain "email.")  This was the same person with a wall of Rolodex across his desk, the prequel to the LinkedIn LION with 10,000 close, personal associates.

The Organization Man, 2012 Style

I had reason recently to skim William H. Whyte's The Organization Man, published in the autumn of 1956 and now considered one of the most important American sociological texts of the 20th century.

An assistant managing editor for Fortune magazine, Whyte concluded that the American corporation was purposefully and systematically eliminating individuality--and individuals were happily giving it up.  Conformity had become a central virtue in Eisenhower's America.  It was the coming of the Stepford Executives--and of particular consequence to Whyte, the Stepford Scientists who would no longer have the flexibility to free-wheel their way into true innovation.

Whyte was particularly down on the emergence of the group.  "People very rarely think in groups; they talk together, they exchange information, they adjudicate, they make compromises.  But they do not think," he concluded: "They do not create."

What they do,Whyte knew, was avoid risk, or any misstep that might cost a job or a career.  It was, if we take a trip to the dystopian side of the 1950s, the sale of one's soul for lifetime employment and a tidy lawn in the suburbs.

Foundation of Genius

I had the opportunity to speak before some of the senior leaders of UTC Climate Controls & Security (CCS) last night at the Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts in Hartford.  UTC CCS is today a family of leading, billion dollar+ companies that just happened to be founded by some of the more impressive and successful entrepreneurs of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The starting point for the presentation was my 2011 research on the life and impact of Willis Carrier and modern air conditioning for Weathermakers to the World.  (Shameless promotion: Time to buy a copy?  It's on Amazon!)  Over the last few months, thanks to UTC CCS, I was able to extend this research to include Charles and Jeremiah Chubb, Robert Edwards and Walter Kidde.

My One "New Yorker" Cartoon Possibility

I was planning to send this to The New Yorker until I read how hard it is to actually have something accepted--30 gags a month, years of submissions--so decided, what the heck, put it on the blog.

We don't have all five of us home at night much anymore, but when we did, this scene was not a complete impossibility.  A nod to Lord of the Rings, and a special thanks to artist, inventor, toy designer, model helicopter pilot, and friend Ben Bowman for the artwork.

Surviving Little Entrepreneurism

In the October 2012 issue of Vanity Fair, Randall Stross writes about Silicon Valley’s Y Combinator, describing events in the spring and summer of 2011 when 2,000 teams competed to become one of 64 “companies” receiving between $11,000 and $20,000 to launch their “business.”

One team highlighted by Stross was made up of three 24-year-olds, recent college grads who pitched an idea for a business that would send “past memories to your in-box.”  Encouraged to “pivot the idea”--the latest phrase for “that stinks, try again”—they then hit upon an idea to create a business that would “organize and rank your Facebook content, allowing you to easily create a printed photo book.”  Yep.  These three would-be entrepreneurs told the Y.C. partners that they “believe in the power of memory, nostalgia,” without, one presumes, having had time to accumulate much of either.  When asked how this idea will “expand” they said they’ll begin building memory books around personal calendars, Foursquare check-ins and tweets.

Now--hold onto your hats--this was one of the teams the Y.C. Partners really liked, so much so that they were willing to fund their “business” (however it came to rest on its pivot) by investing $20,000 in return for 7% of their newly formed “company.”

Welcome to the world of Little Entrepreneurism.

Criminal Entrepreneurs

In 1817 a serious robbery using false keys was carried out at the busy Portsmouth dockyard, home to the Royal Navy.  In response, the government offered a reward to anyone who could design a lock that could not be picked.  The next year a local ironmonger by the name of Jeremiah Chubb patented a mechanism that rendered a lock useless if it detected anything other than its own keys.  This encouraged Jeremiah and his brother, Charles, to found what would become one of the world’s great security companies.  It also led them to diversify into a number of other lines, including designing the world’s first burglar and fire-resistant safe, advertised in 1838 as being able to “repel the force and ingenuity of the most skillful burglar.”

This was a serious claim, because like all good entrepreneurs, crooks and criminals are quick to adopt the newest technology and the latest form of organization in pursuit of their ignoble visions.  This makes criminal entrepreneurs a moving target, just like any worthy competitor.  

When Time Predicts the Future

One of the most reliable predictors of the future is the changing way in which we relate to time.

We know, for example, that before the Industrial Revolution, the consensus in agrarian America was that time belonged to God.  The good Lord had created light and dark and that was about all the time-keeping most people required.  Clocks could be helpful on cloudy days when noontime was obscured--Boston had a town clock in 1638, for example—but few Americans owned clocks (perhaps one in 50 in 1700).  And, everyone knew that clocks were not time per se, but crude mechanical proxies for what was really going on in the Heavens.

By 1820 things began to change, however, and it’s no surprise it reflected the rise of the steam engine, factories and the steady move from farm to city.

Haverhill's Cool Mural

Living near Boston means living side-by-side with the new information economy and the old industrial revolution.  The first is situated in places like Cambridge, Boston, Waltham and Burlington, churning away at pharma and Big Data and start-ups of all shapes and sizes.  The second, or at least its ghost, is found in the old industrial centers of Lowell, Lawrence, and Fall River--places that were booming in the years before the Great Depression with textiles, shoes and tool-making, but struggling now with varied success in attracting the new economy.

(Cities like Waltham, in fact, have bunches of both, home to companies like Zoom, Lycos, and Liquid Machines not so far from the very start of the American Industrial Revolution.  See Steampunk in Pictures at the old Waltham Watch factory.  For other historical junkets, see Gettysburg Redux and Edison in Winter.)

So it was we found ourselves the other day in one of those old booming industrial centers, Haverhill, once home to ship-building, tanneries, millinery and enough shoe-making (especially women's) to earn for it the title "Queen Slipper City."   We don't have reason to visit often, so it was a pleasant surprise to find this stunning mural, a visual history of Haverhill, beautifully rendered on the side of an old brick building.

      

Robots Tame the Frontier, Edison Invades Mars - Sci Fi of the 19th Century

Fans of science fiction recognize that many futuristic stories say far more about our current aspirations, limits and phobias than they do about the future.

Two of the biggest movies of 1998, Armageddon and Deep Impact (which together grossed almost a billion dollars worldwide), had Bruce Willis and Robert Duvall facing-off against giant asteroids headed directly for earth.  These movies about “extinction level events” sent people running for NASA, which was bombarded with panicked questions.  

Spotting the Big Dog

Every organization has a Big Dog.  Every division.  Every department. 

How do you spot a Big Dog?  He's the one whose assistant breaks into a meeting to deliver an important, whispered message--a message that just can’t wait.  He's usually late to that same meeting, and the first to get bored, stand up during the discussion and wander around.  If it's a technology Big Dog, he's often the worst dressed, or at least without socks.  He's inevitably the one to send the first text while you're talking, the one to flip noisily through the slide deck when you're focused on slide 2.  Big Dogs have a LinkedIn account but no contacts, and they don't carry business cards. Big Dogs park near the front door in an inviolate spot and fly First Class, even when nobody else is allowed.  

At home, the Big Dog is the one who falls asleep after Thanksgiving dinner, snoring on the couch while everyone else helps the hosts clean up.  

I can’t wait.

America: Fat and Greedy--But Always Speedy

From time to time I bump into an International traveler visiting America for the first time, and I love to ask what about our country has surprised them most. Inevitably they comment on the giant portions at restaurants, probably a kind way of saying how fat we all are.  One young man last summer said, “You’re all shorter than I expected” (nothing like feeding a complex).  New York, I’m sometimes told by first-time visitors, is dirty but a blur of sound and motion.  California is sunny (even if they haven’t been there yet, and certainly not if they have been to San Francisco).  And all of them want to visit Disney World, though whether that lives up to their expectations, I’m not sure.

While not always pleasant, these critiques are certainly illuminating. Sometimes, too, they take a more serious tone.

From 1946 to 2004, Englishman Alistair Cooke delivered his Letter from America every week on BBC4.  Cooke’s first letter, written when he departed aboard the Queen Mary from a bleak London starved for heat and electricity, is here.  He found eggs and bacon and sausage and pancakes for breakfast five mornings in a row, but stomachs too shrunk from the war’s deprivations for anyone to enjoy the feast more than two consecutive days.  He arrived in a New York City that had been unable to build new hotels during the war and was now unable to accommodate its flood of visitors, taxis hobbling along with doors secured by string, and women (with their complicit husbands standing awkwardly in a second line) hoping to purchase nylons.

Arguably the most famous "international visit" to America ever was that of Frenchman Marquis de Lafayette, second only to Washington as a “rock star” in the early Republic.  Arriving in New York Harbor 122 years before Cooke, he went on a 13-month “Farewell Tour” through 24 states where he received an outpouring of affection, honors and gifts almost daily. In June 1825, before departing, he helped lay the cornerstone of the Bunker Hill Monument.  He also kept a journal, or more accurately, his private secretary, Auguste Lavasseur, did.  It said a lot of things Americans wanted to hear--Lavasseur’s major goal was in publicizing to French Liberals the success of the great American experiment--so it gets re-published regularly.

Lafayette, Dickens and Kipling: Speed

One of the defining characteristics of America, Lavasseur found in 1824, was the speed of the country.  Traveling an average of 11 miles per hour, Lavasseur wrote, “Often we passed through so many villages and so many towns on the same day that my memory could not retain all the names faithfully.” And in Lockport, New York, alongside the building of the Erie Canal, he was struck “with astonishment and admiration.  In no other place have I seen the activity and industry of man grappling with nature as in this burgeoning Town.   Short on necessities to “satisfy the prime needs of life,” he still found “a school in which the children come to be taught while their fathers build the dwelling which is to shelter them,” and “a printing press which each morning gives birth to a newspaper.”

Now skip ahead just 18 years to 1842 when the American railroad had begun to put an end to the canal age, almost before it began. Just 30 years old, renowned British author Charles Dickens visited the country for the first time, writing home to a friend about American railroads.  “You walk down the main street of a large town: and, slap-dash, headlong, pell-mell, down the middle of the street; with pigs burrowing, and boys flying kites and playing marbles, and men smoking, and women talking, and children crawling, close to the very rails; there comes tearing along a mad locomotive with its train of cars, scattering a red-hot shower of sparks (from its wood fire) in all directions; screeching, hissing, yelling, and painting; and nobody one atom more concerned than if it were a hundred miles away.” 

Now, jump ahead another 57 years to a second renowned British author. Rudyard Kipling toured Chicago in 1899 and was profoundly unimpressed.   “Having seen it,” he wrote, “I urgently desire never to see it again.  It is inhabited by savages.  Its water is the water of the Hugli, and its air is dirt. . .They told me to go to the Palmer House, which is a gilded and mirrored rabbit-warren, and there I found a huge hall. . .crammed with people talking about money and spitting about everywhere. Other barbarians charged in and out of this inferno with letters and telegrams in their hands. . . there was no colour in the street and no beauty—only a maze of wire ropes overhead and dirty stone flagging underfoot.

Chicago, about 1899

When Kipling hired a cab driver “to show me the glory of the town,” the driver “conceived. . .that it was good to huddle men together in fifteen layers, one atop of the other, and to dig holes in the ground for offices.  He said that Chicago was a live town, and that all the creatures hurrying by me were engaged in business. That is to say, they were trying to make some money.  Then, he concluded, “the papers tell their readers in language fitted to their comprehension that the snarling together of telegraph wires, the heaving up of houses, and the making of money is progress.”


Kipling, of course, gave us a glimpse of America in its Gilded Age--and it wasn’t pretty.  But with “barbarians charging in and out,” and “creatures hurrying by me” engaged in making money, it certainly was speedy.

There are other visitors throughout the years, some more charitable than others.  A countryman of Lafayette and another accomplished statesman, Georges Benjamin Clemenceau, worked in New York City from 1865 to 1869 and summed up his impressions succinctly with, “America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.”

Emil Ludwig and the Future of Speed

The most fascinating visit, however, at least as it anticipated modern times, was from German author and biographer Emil Ludwig, who toured the United States in 1928 and wrote about it for The New York Times.

First, like Lafayette and Kipling, he found everything, everywhere on the move.  “Speed has become the goddess of the new era,” he wrote.  In fact, Ludwig described a scene that can only be termed an early form of "surfing": “When a young man in New York lured me into his motor car and showed me with tokens of much satisfaction how he could listen by radio, while motoring, to the latest jazz hits, and, at the same time, enjoy the details of the latest crimes supplied him in gigantic headlines by the newspapers handed to him as he drove, he seemed to me merely the most scatterbrained youth imaginable—able to appreciate in reality neither the road ahead of him, nor the music, nor the newspapers; capable merely of gliding quite blasé along a warm stream of piled—up sensations.”

Does that not sound a little bit like 2012?

Then Ludwig warned--and this will hit home with my Luddite friends (not to mention Nicholas Carr and maybe Jaron Lanier): “This is man’s memory being weakened. . .for such a person the echo of a talk, of a walk, of a glance at a starry sky, or a letter or a book is lost in the blur of a thousand fleeting images.”

Then, for those of us moderns with a “password problem,” Ludwig addressed the bane of early 20th-century America: numbers.  “For how many numbers does this modern technical age of ours imprint upon the brain of a modern human being, even as it drives out worldly wisdom and the finer feelings!  Numbers, numbers—how many numbers must he retain concerning his motor car, hat, shoes, collar—concerning streets, houses, floors—telephones, street railways, sport scores, exchange quotations. . .Small wonder that, with every brain cell packed to overflowing, he can find no place for poetry, none for aphorisms, none for the precious thoughts of philosophers—none even for God!”

Through it all, Ludwig noted, Americans appeared better adapted to such a world.  More charitably than Kipling in Chicago a generation before, he wrote, “I marveled at the calmness of people in the turmoil of the streets, the riot of numbers, the confusion of mechanized melodies and noises—everything.”  Europeans had experienced quiet for centuries, he said, whereas “Americans trained from early youth in the hard school of impressionability and strife.”

Again, reflecting a fear many of us feel now, Ludwig wrote that there would be no more legends created.   “Now that every happening becomes known. . .to the whole world within a few hours, the mystic veils behind which men in earlier days sought to make themselves better or their foes worse are rent asunder, and reality is revealed beyond fear of distortion. Gutenberg was reproached with having overcome priests and kings and made himself the first democrat in a new world; similarly, the inventors of the rapid tempo of modernity, of the wireless telephone, of the reproduction of word, tone and image, may be credited with having speeded up this development one thousandfold.”

Finally, in what can only be called a “pre-Twitter moment,” Ludwig remarked on the incredible ability of two lovers to communicate across the sea: ”Let us imagine him, during those embarrassed moments which always occur in love talks, whispering to her: ‘Speak—just speak—no matter what you say!’”

So, my fellow American: we are fat, we crave money, we multitask to the detriment of God and our neighbors, we speak without having anything to say, and we do it all at chaotic, breakneck speeds.

I think it must be true. 200 years of international visits can’t be completely wrong.

Though, maybe someday we should clue them in about doggie bags.

Weathermakers to the World 2.0 (Behind the scenes, again, sort of)

The former site of Sackett & Wilhelms, today's ISPC.
Picture the second floor circa 1902 with 60 multi-color
presses and a weekly deadline to churn out Judge magazine.

On July 16 I had the opportunity--thanks to UTC Climate, Controls and Security/Carrier, CBS This Morning, ISPC Brooklyn (and here) and CooperKatz, to tour the former Sackett & Wilhelms printing facility (circa 1900 till sometime in the 1920s) in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn.  After researching the history of air conditioning for a year and launching Weathermakers to the World at the Library of Congress (and here), this really was a special treat--to visit "ground zero" where Willis Carrier's invention of modern air conditioning was first installed and operated.

To steal a phrase from Lexington and Concord, it was at Sackett & Wilhelms that "the cool, dry blast felt round the world" originated.  (By the way, if you want to see some of the things S&W printed, see here.  They were a well-known, high end NYC printer that did, among other products, Judge magazine--see here for images.  Spoiler alert: It was Judge that was giving S&W fits.)  

I was never so excited to stand next to rusty old
pipes in my entire life.  This is where the cool water from
a local well entered the building and was pumped into the
first a/c apparatus.

In other words, air conditioning started in a factory, and it was first and foremost about humidity control and only later about temperature.  In fact, it would take about 30 years for a residential market to evolve, and another 20 (thanks to Depression and War) for a/c to really escape its industrial orbit and migrate to the urban apartment and suburbs.  When it did, though, it did so with a vengeance.  The Huffington Post article here has a good summary of Weathermakers, and of this migration.  The New York Times also did a great city blog feature here.

Anyway, for a visit to the Sackett & Wilhelms site, see the CBS This Morning video segment here. 

And, of course, if you want to put Willis Carrier on Mt. Rushmore--on this, a 96F in Boston--click here.   

The original blueprints return to the building 110 years
later, with our CBS The Morning cameraman watching me
pretend that I know how to read them.

Weathermakers to the World - Behind the Scenes

The Mechanical Weather Man, a fixture
of Carrier advertising in the 1920s.
copyright © 2012 Carrier Corporation · a UTC company

Throughout much of 2011 I labored away on a history of Carrier Corporation at the kind invitation of the good folks at Carrier, now part of UTC Climate, Controls and Security.  The mission, which involved a small team of talented people at the company (see here for the official website) and equally talented folks at the Pinckney-Hugo Group in Syracuse (who designed the book), was to deliver a coffee-table history of the company focused on its founder, Willis Carrier, and its century-plus record of leadership, innovation, and sustainability.

Our book team wanted to avoid the typical corporate history tome, full of mind-numbing 6-point font and a 450-page throw-weight.  In fact, we were kind of thinking “cool museum,” where you might see an artifact that you like and decide it’s worth reading about.  Whenever I forgot this point I would hear the gentle reminder from my teammates, “less text, more pictures, Eric.”

Launching at the Library of Congress
Earlier this month we launched the final product of our labors, Weathermakers to the World, at the Library of Congress on a suitably tropic 99F day in Washington, D.C.