The Tinkerers Read online

  George Washington had a completely different reputation than Franklin, and a different way of viewing himself. Washington was a leader and a war hero—a tall, imposing man with great physical strength—a classic type-A personality seemingly unencumbered by self-reflection or a need for extraneous hobbies.

  However, there’s another way to look at the first president that casts him as a tinkerer every bit as passionate and creative as Franklin. Washington, both prior to being elected president and after having served, viewed himself primarily as a farmer. But Washington was no ordinary farmer; he was a farmer of the highest intellectual order and innovation. “[Washington] was one of America’s first experimental agriculturists,” wrote author and educator Paul Leland Haworth, “always alert for better methods, willing to take any amount of pains to find the best fertilizer, the best way to avoid plant disease, the best methods of cultivation, and once declared he had little patience with those content to tread the ruts their fathers trod.”

  But how would the resourceful general find the better methods? Since there was no agricultural society or agricultural newspaper in the whole country in the late 1700s, he was forced to write to specialists in England for advice, but they were unfamiliar with America’s climate and soil conditions. By default, Washington was forced to rely on his own scientific experimentation to improve his farming methods. And so in 1760, he planted a variety of crops including clover, rye, spelt, trefoil, and timothy at Mount Vernon that were heretofore unknown in Virginia agriculture. At the same time he experimented with various fertilizers, including cow dung, sheep dung, marl, and black mold. Meticulously tinkering with different combinations and tracking the results, he decided that sheep dung and black mold were the two most effective. Dissatisfied with the operability of the plows of the era, Washington, in 1760, devised one of his own invention “and found She answerd very well.”

  That Washington was a man of many public accomplishments is well known, but it is less familiarly acknowledged that innovative farming was a pursuit he maintained through his adult life.

  Washington’s interests also extended to engineering, though in its early years, America had virtually no one trained to design and build large infrastructure projects. But he did have a vision for extending the country’s infrastructure and, after his presidency, pressed Virginia governor Benjamin Harrison to develop a company to help connect Virginia’s east coast with the Ohio Country.

  Thanks to his status and clout, Washington, who ended his second term as the first United States president in 1797, became president of the newly formed Patowmack Company in 1785, which was founded to improve the Potomac River as a route for commerce. Within the company’s charter was a requirement to maintain a navigable channel through the Potomac River of at least one foot deep year round. For nearly forty years, the Potomac had been talked about as valuable transportation route to the West, both from a military standpoint and as economic stimulus.

  Washington already had a personal passion for the Potomac River as a conduit into the country’s interior, both because he owned western land and because he believed it was a key chance for the young nation to survive and prosper. However, he simply did not have the formal education to make his passion a reality.

  Washington tried to hire American civil engineers to undertake the planning, design, and construction of the Potomac Canal. But there were none to be hired. No one in America knew how to build canals. England and France had engineers, but the cost of bringing them to America was prohibitive.

  The Patowmack Company occasionally used English engineers already in America as consultants, but the Potomac River was physically very different from most waterways in Europe, limiting the value of their knowledge. Most canals in Europe essentially consisted of man-made underwater steps, or level ditches, that led through a series of locks, or walled pits that raised and lowered the water level. Paths alongside the canals were used to tow boats safely and efficiently through the water passage. The distances were relatively short and the terrain was not too hilly. By contrast, the Potomac was a mountain river, and the distance that needed to be traversed was nearly two hundred miles. The banks were craggy and the vertical drops quite significant. The river was also prone to serious flooding.

  Washington and his board of directors ultimately made the engineering decisions for the canal, though Washington took the visionary leap to get the project started by hiring James Rumsey, a quirky tavern owner and builder who knew nothing about building canals, as the company’s first technical advisor. Washington previously had hired Rumsey to erect a barn and stable on a property he owned in Bath, Virginia, while staying at Rumsey’s nearby inn, called the Sign of the Liberty Pole and Flag. At that time, Rumsey showed Washington a model of a mechanical boat he had invented, which could climb upstream due to a series of poles controlled by a paddlewheel. Washington thought it would be perfect for the canal he was planning.

  Washington’s approach to creating the canal was pure improvisation. Few people in America had ever seen a canal lock before. He knew he would have to create locks at Great Falls, where the river builds up speed before heading over a series of steep, jagged rocks, and expected he would eventually have to import an engineer from Europe to design them. Meanwhile, he decided he’d just open the channel as best he could. He put Rumsey in charge of clearing rocks from the river bottom. Rumsey, however, soon discovered that the actual-size versions of his mechanical boats didn’t work as well as the model. He tried to add a steam propulsion element to his design, but that raised the cost of production dramatically, making it ultimately unfeasible.

  Washington and his board of directors’ most crucial engineering decision was to opt for sluice navigation, a primitive gate system that diverted water into channels alongside the river, instead of a more advanced lock technology. It would take more than a decade to implement the approach at Great Falls, due to work delays and funding problems. After hiring a series of advisors, including William Weston, an English engineer employed by the Schuylkill and Susquehanna Canal Company of Pennsylvania, the Great Falls section of the canal was finished in 1802, a couple of years after Washington’s death, followed by Little Falls, Payne’s Falls, and Stubbeville Falls, among others.

  Transportation along the river and canals soon became busy during the seasonable high-water periods. Unfortunately, that only amounted to about ten days in the fall and thirty-five days in the spring. Two early American-born engineers, Thomas Moore and Isaac Briggs, later showed that the decision to employ the sluice navigation approach was not only wrong but counterproductive. Sluice navigation made the river more dangerous and difficult to maneuver, due to the unmanageable water levels. Clearing mud and rocks was a constant and arduous chore.

  Even worse, the sluice gates required frequent and heavy repairs and wasted excessive amounts of water, a serious issue during the dry season. The lower wooden gates at the Great Falls were particularly susceptible to natural decay; during the summer of 1818, two of the gates gave way and had to be replaced with stone ones. By 1825, many of the gates had deteriorated beyond repair. The Potomac Canal was closed down in 1828 and the Patowmack Company’s remaining assets and liabilities were turned over to the newly formed Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company. The C&O Canal, also known as the “Grand Old Ditch,” would run parallel to the Potomac River, connecting the Chesapeake and Ohio Rivers and running from Cumberland, Maryland, to Washington, DC. It operated from 1831 to 1924, though it was made obsolete by 1850, when the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad reached Cumberland.

  Benjamin Wright, known as the father of American civil engineering, led the planning and design of the C&O Canal. It was during the execution of his previous project, the Erie Canal, that Wright had stumbled upon entirely different methods of canal construction than those used on the Patowmack Canal. From its use of detailed plans and precise instruments, to the way in which it divided up key projects into individual contracts monitored by a large corps of engineers, the company’s app
roach was unlike any previous one undertaken in the United States. Somehow, between the beginning of the Patowmack Canal and its demise, American civil engineering was born.

  The reasons that George Washington is not remembered as a great tinkerer are multitudinous but the biggest of all may be that, unlike Benjamin Franklin, Washington was a failed tinkerer. Despite his best efforts to pursue his wildest visions to their logical conclusion, the product of his creativity was not completed during his lifetime. And when it was, it withered and died an ignominious death.

  He also had some other accomplishments to fall back on.

  My point here is that innovators aren’t always the individuals who present themselves as such. This is in part because tinkering is an extremely personal and oftentimes solitary endeavor, not conducive to the broad gesture. Furthermore, the fruits of serious tinkering don’t always reveal themselves in the short term. It can take years, even decades, for the societal impact of tinkering to be fully realized. Lastly, Americans instinctively favor physical tinkering, the act of creating objects, over virtual tinkering, the act of creating something new that does not result in an immediate material object. On one level, that makes sense—we Americans are a practical, pragmatic people—but it sometimes results in an inability to recognize pure brilliance if isn’t right in front of our noses.

  This is a situation we can change.

  Even those who embody the American tinkerer legend sometimes have had a bigger impact away from the discoveries or inventions most frequently associated with them. Ben Franklin’s grand accomplishment as a tinkerer may not have been any of the ones most readily associated with his inveterate puttering, but rather his establishment of the US Post Office in 1775. As publisher of the Pennsylvania Gazette in the 1730s, he had publicly clashed with a rival publisher, Andrew Bradford, who printed the American Weekly Mercury. Unfortunately for Franklin, Bradford simultaneously served as the postmaster of Philadelphia and exerted the power of his position to prohibit Franklin’s Gazette from being distributed officially. Franklin was forced to bribe postal carriers to get his newspaper delivered, even after reporting Bradford to the postmaster of the colonies, Colonel Alexander Spotswood.

  In 1737, he was able wrest the Philadelphia postmaster gig from Bradford after the latter was called out for his poor bookkeeping practices. Unlike Bradford, Franklin prided himself on delivering competing newspapers; as postmaster for Philadelphia, he delivered Bradford’s Mercury, as well as the Gazette (at least until Bradford failed to pay debts he had accrued while postmaster).

  By 1753, he had been named deputy postmaster of the colonies, sharing the job with William Hunter of Virginia. While Franklin took the opportunity to enhance his publishing portfolio and hand out plum jobs to his relatives, he also used the powerful position to make the postal system more efficient. Among his innovations were the first home delivery of mail, a dead letter office, and post office inspection tours focused on improving service. In a year’s time, he whittled the time it took to mail a letter from Philadelphia to New York down to only one day.

  I hope to underline here that true tinkering is a state of mind, not a set of interests or skills that together somehow form an arrow pointing to the future. Franklin’s establishment of the post office had a bureaucratic element to it that may have obscured some of its brilliance. It also was not something that happened overnight. It did, however, require rethinking preexisting elements of American society and reordering them to create something entirely new.

  From a time shortly before the formation of the United States through the bulk of the twentieth century, American’s character was redefined over and over again by these kinds of disruptive bursts. The country’s slow but inexorable progression from an agrarian society to an industrial behemoth was not a simple result of inertia, but rather the result of a series of free-associated ideas that took shape and acquired purpose in the hands and minds of tinkerers, men and sometimes women who saw potential in thinking differently and solving problems the country often didn’t even know it had. This is how the country progressed and grew.

  In the wake of the second industrial revolution, which spanned from the 1860s to the 1920s, the big problems to be solved no doubt grew more complex. The emergence of electrification, gasoline engines, chemistry, and thermodynamics pretty much insured that most tinkerers from this era onward would need more than a passing interest in these new technologies to make names for themselves in what already had become one of America’s best-known exports: the business of solving other people’s problems.

  Notions of American exceptionalism had hovered around the cocky, young nation from days of manifest destiny. And the ongoing influx of immigrants throughout the original technological age nearly guaranteed the United States’ role as ground zero for citizens eager to fix what they didn’t like about where they originally came from, especially if there was money to be made.

  But by the late 1800s, most major innovations had become science based rather than mechanically based—think cotton gin (1793) versus photographic film (1885). This changed the equation immeasurably. It wasn’t as if the average person could have come up with the idea for the telephone or the motor car; this took deep knowledge of physics and chemistry. Over time, this most democratic of countries had, through no fault of its own, erected barriers that deterred the casual handyman from reaching the highest of echelons of fame and fortune. It was one of the ironic by-products of unfettered civilization. Here you were in a land without social classes or inherited power, as close to a meritocracy as the world had ever seen, but it seemed as if everyone you’d ever heard of was smarter and more capable than you.

  You would have expected this hard fact to have a chilling effect on a nation brimming with nosy but know-nothing amateurs. After all, why keep trying to come up with something new when you know that in all likelihood someone else has beaten you to the punch? Not because they have some preordained advantage but simply because the free market of ideas is far more thickety and primal than you ever could have imagined.

  But, in fact, these unusual circumstances had the exact opposite effect. The final twenty-five years of the 1800s represent the most rapid period of economic growth the world has ever known. It was a time of increased mechanization, furious factory building, the establishment of speedy transportation grids, and enhanced communication networks. Productivity growth during this period went through the roof. And individual prosperity, particularly in America, reached previously unknown heights.

  The effect was colossal, igniting what became known as the “American century.” Most of the innovations produced by the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century comprise what we know of today as modern life. Suffused by this remarkable change in lifestyle within the course of one or two generations, Americans embraced their new-found primacy and the United States became the dominant economic force in the world,

  But at the same time America began to flex its now formidable financial muscle, the enormous impact of its technological innovations seemed to dwindle. Between 1876 and 1900 came the telephone, the refrigerator, the lightbulb, AC electric power, the automobile, aspirin, and the assembly line. After Thomas Edison, however, the output of American scientific tinkerers seemed somewhat diminished. From 1900 to 1925 came air conditioners, toasters, ice cream cones, and traffic lights. With the exception of the airplane, the early twentieth century hatched relatively few gadgets of import.

  So what happened?

  My personal theory is that the tinkerers went underground. That is, they reacted to the industrial world that had grown up around them by channeling their energies away from the mainstream toward less outwardly identifiable projects. Tinkering became a way of creating systems and organizations as much as a way to create a specific device or machine.

  After all, as the world got more technologically complex, so did the problems that needed solving. While the invention of the automobile was an earth-shattering innovation, by the 1920s cars had
created a host of new problems: mainly increased traffic and inefficient cross-country transportation. So it’s not surprising that one of the main innovators of the era, a man whose tinkering with the way the nation’s highways were built, reshaped the way America thought about commerce. And chances are, you’ve never heard his name.

  Born in Leadville, Colorado, in 1891, and raised in Montezuma, Iowa, fifty miles east of Des Moines, Thomas Harris MacDonald witnessed firsthand the frustration of a vibrant farming community limited by the lack of asphalt roads. The same rich soil that made for an abundant harvest also covered the town of Montezuma in mud for nearly four months of the year. “It had the consistency of thick and sticky horse glue,” MacDonald’s daughter later recalled. “When it rained, you were stuck, your wagons, your feet, you just stayed in your house until it dried. That could be two, three weeks, a month.”

  As a boy, MacDonald worked at his father’s lumber and grain store and watched as business halted as soon as the rain arrived. He later attended the Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts in Ames, one of the many land-grant schools of engineering established in the United States in the late nineteenth century under the Morrill Act. Intrigued by the prospect of finding practical solutions to some of the problems posed by nature, Macdonald was determined to become a civil engineer.