Work & Industry

Thomas Edison called his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, an invention factory, and he meant it literally. He set up the place in 1876 with a staff of machinists and experimenters and the stated aim of turning out new inventions on a schedule. The phonograph came out of it in 1877 and a practical electric light bulb in 1879.

Edison is the largest single figure in this collection, and he fits the subject well. His real invention was the organized research lab, and it was part of a much bigger change. Between the Civil War and World War II the United States went from a mostly rural country to the largest industrial economy in the world.

The pictures follow that change into every corner. Textile mills line the rivers of New England and the South. Coal miners come up from the shafts with lamps on their caps. Oil derricks crowd the fields of Pennsylvania, where the first commercial well was drilled near Titusville in 1859, and later of Texas and California. Telephone and telegraph crews string wire across open country. Waterworks, dams and power plants appear as the cities grew. Banks, offices, stores and markets fill out the business side.

The workers themselves are here too, and some of the most important photographs of them were made to change things. Lewis Hine photographed children at work in mills, mines and canneries in the early 1900s for the National Child Labor Committee, and his pictures helped build the case for child labor laws. Later, during World War II, government photographers documented the war production effort, including the women who took factory jobs in large numbers.

Worth noticing is the scale. In industrial photographs, people are often posed beside the machines to show how big they are, and the effect can be startling. Look also at the clothing and the lack of safety gear. Men work high on steel frames with no harness, and children stand barefoot at spinning frames. The pictures are a record of how the country was built, and of what it cost.