CORPORATE AND URBAN CONTEXTS OF TEXTILE TECHNOLOGY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LOWELL, MASSACHUSETTS: A STUDY OF THE SOCIAL NATURE OF TECHNOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE

Modern technology is characteristically corporate and urban, controlled by business organizations and located in cities. In the United States, technology first came under the control of the corporation in the textile industry of northern New England. Lowell was the first American city founded to take advantage of new technological and corporate strategies. This dissertation is about the corporate and urban contexts of the technology invented, built, and used in nineteenth-century Lowell.; The first part of this study is focused on the large corporations of Lowell. Here the management of the mills, the backgrounds of the mill owners and managers and the nature of their work are examined to shed light on the balance of power between managers and owners. The second chapter is a study of Lowell overseers, the level of management most closely involved with technology and labor. In the third chapter, accounting at the mills is discussed. Accounting theory and practice had a direct influence on decision-making at the textile mills, and thus a large effect on their technology.; Part Two extends the dissertation beyond the large mills to the city of Lowell. Chapter four examines invention and innovation in the city, a study of the training and employment of the 131 Lowell inventors of textile machinery and the uses to which they put their 266 patents. Both invention and innovation reflected the demands for technology in the city. The study of innovation is expanded in the fifth chapter, which examines entrepreneurship at Lowell, the reasons for the founding, location and the success of the many small textile machinery companies there.; The conclusion generalizes from the foregoing chapters, using the insights gained there to speak more generally about the nature of technology. Each of the earlier chapters was about a social or cultural context of the technology used at Lowell; this final chapter defines technology so that it can be examined as part of these social and cultural contexts. Technology, this synthesis declares, is a type of social knowledge, of knowledge embedded in its surroundings.