The Making of...
As the "Setting a Pattern" page makes clear, I was interested in stove making and, beyond that, in the American foundry industry, from the early to mid-1980s, in the beginning mostly because of its distinctive system of labor relations. But that led me naturally to wanting to understand the labor process that underpinned it -- i.e. why did this sector of metal working remain so skill-dependent? I was in any case fascinated by production technology, as a complete mechanical klutz, and when I saw so many of my colleagues beginning to take the "cultural" or "linguistic" turn, I responded by becoming increasingly empirical and even materialist in my own historical outlook. So I started reading about how metal castings were made, alongside my main research interests. I was already doing this by the mid to late 1980s.
It did not lead to any obvious result -- I was not, after all, a historian of technology. But when I had a year's research fellowship in 1990-1991, I devoted a piece of it (that I should have used for writing Bloodless Victories, which was what I said I was going to do) to some more serious reading, including quite a bit on the histories of metallurgy and materials testing, which turned out to explain quite a lot of the industry's difficulties with the standardization and mechanization of production processes. The outcome was a long but inconclusive paper that I enjoyed writing, but that never got into any fit state to publish -- "Little Drops of Water, Little Grains of Sand, Make the Molders' Calling the Finest in the Land."
Having written it and circulated it privately to a few colleagues who knew something about the topic, I just put the paper away in a desk drawer, which has been the fate of some of my other work too (for example "Between Convergence and Exceptionalism," which languished even longer). I didn't forget it -- I carried on reading more stuff about the foundry industry whenever I came across it while looking for other material, and I even did some deliberate research (looking, for example, at whole runs of journals with an interest in the subject, notably the Transactions of the American Institute of Mining Engineers and Society of Mechanical Engineers). But I did focus on bringing Bloodless Victories to a close.
When that was done (the first draft was submitted to Cambridge University Press in 1995; drastic revisions and cuts took another couple of years after I got it back from them with a conditional Yes), then of course the question arose -- what next? My initial plan was to do a proper, thorough study of the foundry industry, and to that end I applied to the Hagley Museum and Library, and went there for three research trips in the Septembers of 1995, 1996, and 1998. Some of the time was spent on wrapping up loose ends of Bloodless Victories research, and the rest on the new project. I read quite exhaustively in the Hagley's holdings -- trade catalogues, trade journals (notably The Metal Worker, Iron Age, and Iron Trade Review), technical manuals, and a lot of stove stuff too. Lots of activity, not much outcome -- a paper to the historians of technology at Lehigh University in 1996, an informal talk and then in 1996 a proper seminar at the Hagley, where I first used "Rocky Road" as a title, but I still couldn't see the shape of a book-sized project. (Why "Rocky Road"? First, because it conveys the difficulty of progress; second, more obscurely and even privately -- I don't know if any reader ever got the hint -- because of the argument that the inability to standardize and control sand quality -- sand is just ground-up rocks, after all -- was one of the late 19th century/early 20th century foundry's major problems.)
However, I had a stroke of luck. Phil Scranton had liked my Hagley paper -- it chimed with his work on those areas of U.S. manufacturing industry that mass production couldn't touch, notably "Diversity in Diversity" (1991) and Endless Novelty (2000), not accidentally because we had helped and influenced one another -- and in 1999 he took over as editor of the Business History Conference's journal, rebranded and relaunched as Enterprise and Society. Like all new editors of effectively new journals, he was short of good material to publish at the outset of his tenure, so there was an opportunity for me to place a much improved version of "Rocky Road" with him [link to preprint]. The editorial review process was quick and easy, I got some very helpful input from friendly economic historians (notably Gavin Wright), the Hagley Library cooperated by producing some really nice illustrations, and the piece appeared. I am still quite happy with it, but it has the unusual distinction among my proper journal articles of appearing not to have picked up a single citation, though according to E&S it was downloaded a lot in its first few years.
Stoves take their place in (or on?) "The Rocky Road" as a key example of the kinds of sub-sectors within the U.S. foundry industry where, for a variety of reasons, mechanization was particularly difficult and inappropriate. But by the time I finished the piece, in 1999-2000, they bulked even larger in my interests than the attention I gave them in the article might indicate, mostly because of all of the reading I had done in 1995-1998 that never managed to make its way into the text.
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