Oliver Heaviside (1850-1925) was one of the great pioneers of electrical science. His ideas led to huge advances in communications and now form much of the bedrock of electrical engineering - every textbook and every college course bears his stamp. Despite having little formal education he created the mathematical tools that were to prove essential to the proper understanding and use of electricity. At first his ideas were thought to be outrageous and he had to battle long and hard against ignorance, prejudice and vested interests to get them accepted. Yet they are now so much a part of everyday electrical science that they are simply taken for granted and our great debt to him is rarely acknowledged. Caring nothing for social or mathematical conventions, he lived a fiercely independent life, much of the time close to poverty. His writings reveal a personality like no other and are laced with wickedly irreverent humour; he is by far the funniest author of scientific papers. Basil Mahon combines a compelling account of Heaviside's life with a powerful insight into his scientific thinking and the reasons for its enduring influence.

In this corporate history of the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, Nannie M. Tilley recounts the story of Richard Joshua Reynolds and the vast R. J. Reynolds tobacco complex with precision and drama.
Reynolds's rise in the tobacco industry began in 1891 when he introduced saccharin as an ingredient in chewing tobacco. Forced into James B. Duke's American Tobacco Company in 1899, the Reynolds company became the agency for consolidating the flat plug industry. In 1907, as the government began its antitrust suit against Duke, Reynolds himself bucked the trust and introduced another bestseller: Prince Albert smoking tobacco. The government won its suit in 1911; Duke's Tobacco Combination was dissolved, and Reynolds, left with a free and independent company, a much larger plant, and improved machinery, immediately began an expansion program.
In 1913 Reynolds introduced Camels, a blend of Burley and flue-cured tobacco with some Turkish leaf. Perhaps the best-known cigarette ever produced, Camels swept the market and generally led the way until the development of filter-tipped cigarettes in the 1950s.
Other important Reynolds advances include the systematic purchase and storage of leaf tobacco, the development of a stemming machine, the adoption of cellophane for wrapping cigarettes, and the production of cigarette paper. For its employees, the company established a medical department, introduced lunch rooms and day nurseries, and installed group life insurance. Perhaps more important than any of these items was the development of reconstituted leaf, a method of combining scrap tobacco and stems into a fine elastic leaf entirely suitable for use in any tobacco product. This achievement represented a savings of 25 percent in the cost of leaf and was followed by the development of the filter-tipped Winstons and Salems.
"The R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company" includes absorbing accounts of the company's steady technological progress, its labor problems and advances, and its influential role in North Carolina and in the industry through 1962.

Corporations often move factories to areas where production costs, notably labor, taxes, and regulations, are sharply lower than in the original company hometowns. Not every company, however, followed this trend. One of America's most iconic firms, the Campbell Soup Company, was one such exception: it found ways to achieve low-cost production while staying in its original location, Camden, New Jersey, until 1990.

The first in-depth history of the Campbell Soup Company and its workers, Condensed Capitalism is also a broader exploration of strategies that companies have used to keep costs down besides relocating to cheap labor havens: lean production, flexible labor sourcing, and uncompromising antiunionism. Daniel Sidorick's study of a classic firm that used these methods for over a century has, therefore, special relevance in current debates about capital mobility and the shifting powers of capital and labor. Sidorick focuses on the engine of the Campbell empire: the soup plants in Camden where millions of cans of food products rolled off the production line daily. It was here that management undertook massive efforts to drive down costs so that the marketing and distribution functions of the company could rely on a limitless supply of products to sell at rock-bottom prices. It was also here that thousands of soup makers struggled to gain some control over their working lives and livelihoods, countering company power with their own strong union local.

Campbell's low-cost strategies and the remarkable responses these elicited from its workers tell a story vital to understanding today's global economy. Condensed Capitalism reveals these strategies and their consequences through a narrative that shows the mark of great economic and social forces on the very human stories of the people who spent their lives filling those familiar red-and-white cans.

With the closure of the coalmines around East Lancashire went a comradeship that few other industries could ever boast. Today the dry and dusty coal seams with death and danger ever present are but a memory for those whose unique recollections contribute to this proud collection. In this book, former coal miners recall their time spent labouring in the local mines: Josh Greenwood recalls at age fourteen pushing tubs of coal for the colliers in his bare feet along the dark and wet underground galleries at the old Whinney Hill Colliery near Clayton-le-Moors, whilst on his very first day at the Little Naab Colliery, a drift mine on the high and bleak moors above Water village in the Rossendale Valley, Stephen Spencer, also aged fourteen, was given just four candles to light his way along the dark, dank tunnels. This book is a fitting tribute to all those who worked underground in the coal mines of East Lancashire, and an acknowledgement of a bygone industry to which we owe so much. It is also a mark of respect to the camaraderie of the miners, and their trust in their colleagues while working in extreme conditions, for they knew that should the need arrive, others would be there to help.

Many studies have concluded that the effects of early industrialization on traditional craftsworkers were largely negative. Robert B. Kristofferson demonstrates, however, that in at least one area this was not the case. Craft Capitalism focuses on Hamilton, Ontario, demonstrating how the preservation of traditional work arrangements, craft mobility networks, and other aspects of craft culture ensured that craftworkers in that city enjoyed an essentially positive introduction to industrial capitalism.

Kristofferson argues that as former craftsworkers themselves, the majority of the city's industrial proprietors helped younger craftsworkers achieve independence. Conflict rooted in capitalist class experience, while present, was not yet dominant. Furthermore, he argues, while craftsworkers' experience of the change was more informed by the residual cultures of craft than by the emergent logic of capitalism, craft culture in Hamilton was not retrogressive. Rather, this situation served as a center of social creation in ways that built on the positive aspects of both systems.

Based on extensive archival research, this controversial and engaging study makes an important contribution to the study of industrialization and class formation in Canada.

Symbolic Caxton is the first study to explore the introduction of printing in symbolic terms. It presents a powerful literary history in which the fifteenth century is crucial to the overall story of English literature. William Kuskin argues that the development of print production is part of a larger social network involving the political, economic, and literary systems that produce the intangible constellations of identity and authority. For Kuskin, William Caxton (1422-1491), the first English printer, becomes a unique lens through which to view these issues. Kuskin contends that recognizing the fundamental complexity inherent in the transformation from manuscript to print-the power of literature to formulate its audience, the intimacy of capital and communication, the closeness of commodities and identity-makes possible a clear understanding of the way cultural, bibliographical, financial, and technological instruments intersect in a process of symbolic production. While this book is the first to connect the contents of late medieval literature to its technological form, it also speaks to contemporary culture, wrestling with our own paradigm shift in the relationship between literature and technology.

This book presents a look at one of the first major railway disasters in Britain, the fall of the Dee bridge in May 1847, which occurred just outside Chester with the loss of five lives. The main line from Holyhead to Chester had only been opened six months before, and the chief engineer Robert Stephenson was slated nationally (almost being accused of manslaughter) as his cast-iron bridge had failed so catastrophically. Luckily, only a local train was passing and so few lives were lost. Full of detailed technical insight and illustrated with a wealth of contemporary material, this informative book will be of great use for engineering students and historians, as the Dee bridge is an often cited case study of bridge failure along with the Tay and Tacoma Narrows bridges. It will also appeal to interested locals, and railway enthusiasts.

Trained as a printer when still a boy, and thrilled throughout his life by the automation of printing and the headlong expansion of American publishing, Mark Twain wrote about the consequences of this revolution for culture and for personal identity. "Printer's Devil" is the first book to explore these themes in some of Mark Twain's best-known literary works, and in his most daring speculations - on American society, the modern condition, and the nature of the self. Playfully and anxiously, Mark Twain often thought about typeset words and published images as powerful forces - for political and moral change, personal riches and ruin, and epistemological turmoil. In his later years, Mark Twain wrote about the printing press as a center of metaphysical power, a force that could alter the fabric of reality. Studying these themes in Mark Twain's writings, Bruce Michelson also provides a fascinating overview of technological changes that transformed the American printing and publishing industries during Twain's lifetime, changes that opened new possibilities for content, for speed of production, for the size and diversity of a potential audience, and for international fame. The story of Mark Twain's life and art, amid this media revolution, is a story with powerful implications for our own time, as we ride another wave of radical change: for printed texts, authors, truth, and consciousness.

Bolton was built on the cotton industry with, at its peak, over 200 mills in the town - the last closed in 2002 after a gradual decline throughout the 20th century. This illustrated book includes information on the transport infrastructure that made all this industrial activity practicable, as well as the essential public utilities.

This history of three powerful family firms located in different European countries takes place over a period of more than two hundred years. The interplay and the changing social and legal arrangements of the families shaped the development of a European capitalism quite different from the Anglo-American variety.

Qualifying claims by Alfred Chandler and David Landes that family firms tend to be dysfunctional, Harold James shows how and why these steel and engineering firms were successful over long periods of time. Indeed, he sees the family enterprise as particularly conducive to managing risk during periods of upheaval and uncertainty when both states and markets are disturbed. He also identifies the key roles played by women executives during such times.

In "Family Capitalism," James tells how "iron masters" of a classical industrial cast were succeeded by new generations who wanted to shift to information-age systems technologies, and how families and firms wrestled with social and economic changes that occasionally tore them apart. Finally, the author shows how the trajectories of the firms were influenced by political, military, economic, and social events and how these firms illuminate a European model of "relationship capitalism."

Written after the lumber industry shifted westward out of the necessity of supply, Rafting Days in Pennsylvania presents numerous recollections of the days when Pennsylvania's lumber traveled by mighty river raft, across the state and beyond. This elite but dangerous trade had all but disappeared by the time the volume was published in 1922, but the industry loomed large in the memories of Pennsylvanians and the idea of "the last raft" became almost legendary.

This collection, edited by J. Herbert Walker, not only preserves the recollections and commemorations of the lumber industry and the men who risked their lives in its name, but also echoes the regret over an industry that had become unsustainable due to the exhaustion of its main resource. As a whole, the volume reads as a treatise on reforestation and honors the living memory of Gifford Pinchot, a Pennsylvania governor and the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service.

Rafting Days in Pennsylvania provides glimpses into the memories of aging raftsmen. It details the process of raft building, the types of rafts used for various purposes, the rafting trade and lumber industry and their workers, forest lore, famous rivers, and notable floods. It also includes a glossary of rafting terms.

Many Latino and Chinese women who immigrated to New York City over the past two decades found work in the garment industry-an industry well known for both hiring immigrants and its harsh working conditions. Today the garment industry is one of the largest immigrant employers in New York City and workers in Chinese- and Korean-owned factories produce 70 percent of all manufactured clothing in New York City. Based on extensive interviews with workers and employers, Margaret M. Chin, offers a detailed and complex portrait of the work lives of Chinese and Latino garment workers. Chin, whose mother and aunts worked in Chinatown's garment industry, also explores how immigration status, family circumstances, ethnic relations, and gender affect the garment industry workplace. In turn, she analyzes how these factors affect whom employers hire and what wages and benefits are given to the employees.

Chin's study contrasts the working conditions and hiring practices of Korean- and Chinese-owned factories. Her comparison of the two practices illuminates how ethnic ties both improve and hinder opportunities for immigrants. While both sectors take advantage of workers and are characterized by low wages and lax enforcement of safety regulations-there are crucial differences. In the Chinese sector, owners encourage employees, almost entirely female, to recruit new workers, especially friends and family. Though Chinese workers tend to be documented and unionized, this work arrangement allows owners to maintain a more paternalistic relationship with their employees. Gender also plays a major role in channeling women into the garment industry, as Chinese immigrants, particularly those with children, tend to maintain traditional gender roles in the workplace. Korean-owned shops, however, hire mostly undocumented Mexican and Ecuadorian workers, both male and female. These workers tend not to have children and are thus less tied to traditional gender roles. Unlike their Chinese counterparts, Korean employers hire workers on their own terms and would rather not allow current employees to influence their decisions.

Chin's work also provides an overview of the history of the garment industry, examines immigration strategies, and concludes with a discussion of changes in the industry in the aftermath of 9/11.

The story of mining in South Wales has been one of the people who extracted the black gold from the hillsides and valleys of the area. Their hard work has often been accompanied by danger and countless thousands have lost their lives in the valleys of Wales as a result of man's urge and need to extract coal. From the children squashed by coal trucks as they opened doors underground for ventilation to the huge disasters at Aberfan and Senghenydd, David Owen takes us 'down the mine' and into a tale of human misery, of families destroyed, livelihoods lost, all in the hunt for coal.

The Black Country was the industrial heartland of England, a harsh environment of coal and iron mines, of nail and chain making. Its people worked hard, and drank hard. This is the story of brewing in the region. It was often on a small scale, like the industry itself. The Black Country is known for its home-brew houses, and the characters associated with them - Ma Pardoe, Old Sal, Batham's, Holden's and Sarah Hughes - are part of our brewing heritage. The rise of the big brewers came late to the region, but made a major impression. Mitchells & Butlers at Cape Hill and Banks at Wolverhampton have strode through the pages of the brewing history of this country for over 125 years. This book, complete with over 100 illustrations, provides a fascinating insight into the history of brewing in the Black Country.

Coal mining and iron working prospered in the West Midlands in the nineteenth century, after the development of local industry, in particular metalworking and the use of coal, iron and limestone. Metalworking also stimulated the growth of a local chemical industry where acids and alkali was produced, which in turn led to the making of pure chemicals, assisting the local paint and varnish industry. Industries sprang up at the canal side. Other needs led to building of brickyards, flourmills, glassworks and timber yards beside the water's edge. This illustrated volume examines the canalside industries of Birmingham and the Black Country, looking at iron, coal, gas, electricity, bricks and firebricks, and railway interchange, plus some of the more modern trades. This is Ray Shill's second book with Tempus Publishing; his first was Birmingham Canal Navigations. He has written two other books with Sutton Publishing

A celebrated triumph of historiography, "Rockdale" tells the story of the Industrial Revolution as it was experienced by the men, women, and children of the cotton-manufacturing town of Rockdale, Pennsylvania. The lives of workers, managers, inventors, owners, and entrepreneurs are brilliantly illuminated by Anthony F. C. Wallace, who also describes the complex technology that governed all of Rockdale's townspeople. Wallace examines the new relationships between employer and employee as work and workers moved out of the fields into the closed-in world of the spinning mule, the power loom, and the mill office. He brings to light the impassioned battle for the soul of the mill worker, a struggle between the exponents of the Enlightenment and Utopian Socialism, on the one hand, and, on the other, the ultimately triumphant champions of evangelical Christianity.

Continuing the 'Mining in Cornwall' series, L.J. Bullen depicts three mines from the Central Mining District. Most of the scenes date from around 1900 to the early twenty-first century. This was the period that saw the decline of the industry, but renews hope was generated in the 1960s with the much improved world price for tin. Some of the leading mining corporations of the world became involved. A great deal of exploratory work, including diamond drilling, took place and a number of mines were reopened. One entirely new mine was commenced. The sudden and dramatic collapse of the tin price on the London Metal exchange in October 1985 hit the world's tin industry severely and was a particular blow to the deep underground mines of Cornwall. Since that time the price has been depressed and never in its long history has the price for that metal remained at such a low level for so many years. South Crofty Mine finally succumbed in 1998 and was the last tin mine to operate in the Duchy. In this, his seventh volume, the author provides a remarkable portrayal of an ancient industry which is now consigned to history. However, the mineral resources of Cornwall are still considerable and perhaps at some time in the future a combination of different economic and political circumstances will bring about a renaissance.

In his popular book The Germans (1982), Stanford historian Gordon Craig remarked: "When German intellectuals at the end of the eighteenth century talked of living in a Frederican age, they were sometimes referring not to the monarch in Sans Souci, but to his namesake, the Berlin bookseller Friedrich Nicolai." Such was the importance attributed to Nicolai's role in the intellectual life of his age by his own contemporaries.

While long neglected by students of the period, who tended to accept the caricature of him as a philistine who failed to recognize Goethe's genius, Nicolai has experienced a resurgence of interest among scholars reexploring the German Enlightenment and the literary marketplace of the eighteenth century.

This book, drawing upon Nicolai's large unpublished correspondence, rounds out the picture we have of Nicolai already as author and critic by focusing on his roles as bookseller and publisher and as an Aufkarer in the book trade.

Charlotte-based NationsBank, formerly named NCNB, became one of the nation's leading financial powers following its acquisition in 1988 of First Republic Bank of Texas and its merger in 1991 with Atlanta-based C&S/Sovran. The authors provide a corporate history of this maverick financial institution.

Using a series of case studies from five industries, Dicke analyzes franchising, a marketing system that combines large and small firms into a single administrative unit, strengthening both in the process. He studies the franchise industry from the 1840s to the 1980s, closely examining the rights and obligations of both the parent company and the franchise owner.
Originally published in 1992.
A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

In the first few decades of the nineteenth century, America went from being a largely rural economy, with little internal transportation infrastructure, to a fledgling industrial powerhouse--setting the stage for the vast fortunes that would be made in the golden age of American capitalism. In The Dawn of Innovation, Charles R. Morris vividly brings to life a time when three stupendous American innovations--universal male suffrage, the shift of political power from elites to the middle classes, and a broad commitment to mechanized mass-production--gave rise to the world's first democratic, middle-class, mass-consumption society, a shining beacon to nations and peoples ever since. Behind that ideal were the machines, the men, and the trading and transportation networks that created a new, world-class economic power.

Globalisation has created a whole new working class - and they are reliving stories that were first played out a century ago. In Live Working or Die Fighting, Paul Mason tells the story of this new working class alongside the epic history of the global labour movement, from its formation in the factories of the 1800s through its near destruction by fascism in the 1930s and up to today's anti-globalisation movement. Blending exhilarating historical narrative with reportage from today's front line, he links the lives of 19th-century factory girls with the lives of teenagers in a giant Chinese mobile phone factory; he tells the story of how mass trade unions were born in London's Docklands - and how they're being reinvented by the migrant cleaners in skyscrapers that stand on the very same spot. It is a story of urban slums, self-help co-operatives, choirs and brass bands, free love and self-education by candlelight. And, as the author shows, in the developing industrial economies of the world it is still with us. Live Working or Die Fighting celebrates a common history of defiance, idealism and self-sacrifice, one as alive and active today as it was two hundred years ago. It is a unique and inspirational book.

The oil price collapse of 1985-6 had momentous global consequences: non-fossil energy sources quickly became uncompetitive, the previous talk of an OPEC 'imperium' was turned upside-down, the Soviet Union lost a large portion of its external revenues, and many Third World producers saw their foreign debts peak. Compared to the much-debated 1973 `oil shock', the `countershock' has not received the same degree of attention, even though its legacy has shaped the present-day energy scenario. This volume is the first to put the oil `counter-shock' of the mid-1980s into historical perspective. Featuring some of the most knowledgeable experts in the field, Counter-Shock offers a balanced approach between the global picture and local study cases. In particular, it highlights the crucial interaction between the oil counter-shock and the political `counterrevolution' against state intervention in economic management, put forward by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the same period.

In an era dominated by huge railroad corporations, Indianapolis Union and Belt Railroads reveals the important role two small railroad companies had on development and progress in the Hoosier State. After Indianapolis was founded in 1821, early settlers struggled to move people and goods to and from the city, with no water transport nearby and inadequate road systems around the state. But in 1847, the Madison & Indianapolis Railroad connected the new capital city to the Ohio River and kicked off a railroad and transportation boom. Over the next seven decades, the Indiana railroad map expanded in all directions, and Indianapolis became a rail transport hub, dubbing itself the "Railroad City." Though the Pennsylvania and the New York Central Railroads traditionally dominated the Midwest and Northeast and operated the majority of rail routes radiating from Indianapolis, these companies could not have succeeded without the two small railroads that connected them. In the downtown area, the Indianapolis Union Railway was less than 2 miles long, and out at the edge of town the Belt Railroad was only a little over 14 miles. Though small in size, the Union and the Belt had an outsized impact, both on the city's rail network and on the city itself. It played an important role both in maximizing the efficiency and value of the city's railroad freight and passenger services and in helping to shape the urban form of Indianapolis in ways that remain visible today.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, Barrow-in-Furness became a pioneer in iron and steel production. It went on to grow astronomically - owning collieries in three counties and ore mines in two - and became the largest integrated steelworks in north Lancashire and Cumberland and, at one time, the largest steelworks in the world. Its success was due, in part, to having the prestige of three dukes as directors, as well as to being only 2 miles away from one of the largest and richest iron ore mines in the country. Written by two former employees of the works, Barrow Steelworks chronicles the company's past from the early empire through the inter-war and post-war years, the development of continuous casting in the 1950s, which revolutionised steelmaking, and, finally, the struggles and ultimate demise from the 1960s onwards of this once prominent industry.