Winner of the Hilton Book Award from the Railway and Locomotive Historical Society The largest maker of heavy machinery in Gilded Age America and an important global exporter, the Baldwin Locomotive Works of Philadelphia achieved renown as one of the nation's most successful and important firms. Relying on gifted designers and skilled craftsmen, Baldwin built thousands of standard and custom steam locomotives, ranging from narrow gauge 0-4-0 industrial engines to huge mallet compounds. John K. Brown analyzes the structure of railroad demand; the forces driving continual innovation in locomotive design; Baldwin's management systems, shop-floor skills, and career paths; and the evolution of production methods.

Philadelphia-based Baldwin began designing and building steam locomotives in the 1830s and gave the U.S. many of its most significant and famous types of steam, and diesel-electric motive power. This history of Baldwin is illustrated with a large selection of rare, superb builder's photos and other publicity images from the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania, with the book's large page size showcasing the detail and crisp quality of the images in this outstanding collection. Author Brian Solomon provides technical histories of each locomotive along with builder's specifications and explanations of how the locomotives were used by the railroads that bought them. These carefully researched histories are keys to understanding the significance of the locomotives and how they worked, and are presented in a manner that makes the book accessible to everyone, while retaining sufficient technical detail to appeal to the most ardent railroad enthusiast.

Originally written in the late 1900¿s and then periodically revised, A History of the Baldwin Locomotive Works chronicles the origins and growth of one of America¿s greatest industrial-era corporations. Founded in the early 1830¿s by Philadelphia jeweler Matthais Baldwin, the company built a huge number of steam locomotives before ceasing production in 1949. These included the 4-4-0 American type, 2-8-2 Mikado and 2-8-0 Consolidation. Hit hard by the loss of the steam engine market, Baldwin soldiered on for a brief while, producing electric and diesel engines. General Electric¿s dominance of the market proved too much, and Baldwin finally closed its doors in 1956. By that time over 70,500 Baldwin locomotives had been produced. This high quality reprint of the official company history dates from 1920. The book has been slightly reformatted, but care has been taken to preserve the integrity of the text.

Uncle Sam's Locomotives looks at these magnificent locomotives and discusses how and why the designs were chosen, how they related to existing designs, what standardization entailed, and how each performed.".

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The American Reaper adopts a network approach to account for the international diffusion of harvesting technology from North America, from the invention of the reaper through to the formation of a dominant transnational corporation, International Harvester. Much previous historical research into industrial networks focuses on industrial districts within metropolitan centres, but by focusing on harvesting - a typically rural technology - this book is able to analyse the spread of technological knowledge through a series of local networks and across national boundaries. In doing so it argues that the industry developed through a relatively stable stage from the 1850s into the 1890s, during which time many firms shared knowledge within and outside the US through patent licensing, to spread the diffusion of the American style of machines to establishments located around the industrial world. This positive cooperation was further enhanced through sales networks that appear to be early expressions of managerial firms. The book also reinterprets the rise of giant corporations, especially International Harvester Corporation (IHC), arguing that mass production was achieved in Chicago in the 1880s, where unprecedented urban growth made possible a break with the constraints felt elsewhere in the dispersed production system. It unleashed an unchecked competitive market economy with destructive tendencies throughout the transnational 'American reaper' networks; a previously stable and expanding production system. This is significant because the rise of corporate capital in this industry is usually explained as an outworking of national natural advantage, as an ingenious harnessing of science and technology to solve production problems, and as a rational solution to the problems associated with the worst forms of unregulated competition that emerged as independent firms developed from small-scale, artisanal production to large-scale manufacturers, on their own and within the separate and isolated US economy. The first study dedicated to the development and diffusion of American harvesting machine technology, this book will appeal to scholars from a diverse range of fields, including economic history, business history, the history of knowledge transfer, historical geography and economic geography.

A century and a half before the modern information technology revolution, machinists in the eastern United States created the nation's first high technology industries. In iron foundries and steam-engine works, locomotive works, machine and tool shops, textile-machinery firms, and firearms manufacturers, these resourceful workers pioneered the practice of dispersing technological expertise through communities of practice. In the first book to study this phenomenon since the 1916 classic, English and American Tool Builders, David R. Meyer examines the development of skilled-labor exchange systems, showing how individual metalworking sectors grew and moved outward. He argues that the networked behavior of machinists within and across industries helps explain the rapid transformation of metalworking industries during the antebellum period, building a foundation for the sophisticated, mass production/consumer industries that figured so prominently in the later U.S. economy.