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Joseph Brown, founder of Brown & Sharpe, was a skilled clockmaker who invented new machines, and new ways to make things. Samuel Darling, an eccentric inventor from Maine, joined up and brought with him his engine for marking precise graduations on measuring instruments. Lucian Sharpe, with his son Henry and grandson Henry, Jr., guided the company for more than a century--and along with it the global machine tools industry.
The men and women of Brown & Sharpe produced and marketed a dazzling array of measuring devices, machine tools and precision machinery. They truly helped shape Rhode Island, the nation and the modern world. The history of Brown & Sharpe covers more than 150 years of technological development, labor history and public policy, culminating in history's longest strike.
List of contents
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Foreword by Steven Lubar
Preface
Part One-Age of Invention
¿1.¿A Burning Curiosity
¿2.¿A Curiosity Shop
¿3.¿"The Genius of Its Maker"
¿4.¿"An Eye to Business"
¿5.¿Prosperity
¿6.¿Panic
¿7.¿The Age of Steel
¿8.¿Providence, Paris, Chicago
¿9.¿Spoke Wheels, Turning
10.¿Death and Succession
Part Two-Centralization
11.¿"Clean the Damned Place Out!"
12.¿When Peppermint Creams Meet Steel
13.¿"If I Had Known This Was Coming"
14.¿"Don't We Ever Play a Waltz?": The 1930s
15.¿World War II: Defense Workers Wanted
16.¿One War Ends, Another Begins
Part Three-A People's Capitalism
17.¿Flying into the Jet Age
18.¿Retooling
19.¿An Industrial Eden
Part Four-Managerial Capitalism and the Global Corporation
20.¿Fenced In
21.¿The Longest Strike
22.¿Locked Out
Chapter Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Gerald M. Carbone completed a John S. Knight Fellowship at Stanford University, and earned a master's degree in public humanities at Brown University. This is his third book. He lives in Warwick, Rhode Island.
Summary
The history of Brown & Sharpe turns out to be not only an important technological and economic story, but also a fascinating human story. Gerald Carbone's history of Brown & Sharpe tells the story of the company, bringing people to life, putting them into the context of Rhode Island's and the nation's history, and the history of technology and the political economy of the United States.
