In the early fall of 1785, Oliver Evans of New Castle County, Delaware, traveled his region seeking financial support for what everybody frankly told him was a harebrained scheme: Evans intended to convert a conventional flour mill into a fully automatic one. “Ah! Oliver,” one miller chided the inventor as he turned him away, “you cannot make water run uphill, you cannot make wooden millers!” It was without any backing, then, that Evans began redesigning the mill he owned with his brothers on Red Clay Creek. For his persistence, he became regarded as a man “who would never be worth anything,” a neighbor later recalled, “because he was always spending his time on some contrivance or another.”
Evans’s contrivances proved revolutionary. He devised a bucket elevator that hoisted grain, and a hopper boy that spread it and then funneled it elsewhere. Marvelous as these machines were, it was the functioning of the entire mill that represented a radical conceptual leap. In it, man’s presence was necessary only to start, stop, and adjust the machinery. Evans’s flour mill was, in fact, the first fully integrated automatic factory and the genesis for all modern mass-production industries.
Of course, Evans’s contemporaries remained resistant to the idea of “wooden millers.” Even after the Red Clay Creek mill was converted and working smoothly for all to see, it was years before most millers were willing to automatize their own establishments. When they finally did, they were typically dumbfounded by the results. At one newly converted site, Evans wrote, “all the millers assembled about the hopper boy, where they remained in silent astonishment, until one of them exclaimed, ‘It will not do! it cannot do!! it is impossible it should do!!!’—it doing perfectly well at the same time.”
Evans, who lived from 1755 to 1819, went on to build America’s first highpressure steam engine and drew up plans for eighty more inventions, he claimed, from a machine gun to a refrigeration machine. But he was never the quiet linkerer sort. He spent much of his life either hawking his mill design or, once it was patented and in common use, suing millers to pay him for having adopted it. Endowed at the outset with an abrasive personality, the inventor ended his life a virtual misanthrope. He took to riding about the country like some greedy Chaucerian figure, seeking out unlicensed millers to whom he could direct his lawyers.
•September 10: The United States enters a treaty of commerce with Prussia that outlaws privateering.
•September 14: After a nine-year stay in France, Benjamin Franklin returns to Philadelphia.
1885 One Hundred Years Ago
On September 2, the men and women of Rock Springs, Wyoming, a bleak coalmining town south of the Tetons, loaded their guns and descended on the local Chinese community. A number of Chinese had recently been hired to work in the mines there, and whites felt that their jobs were endangered. In the chaos that ensued, twenty-eight Chinese were killed. Over five hundred others fled into the hills, and their homes were burned behind them.
The Rock Springs massacre was by no means an isolated incident. Since the early 187Os, Chinese had endured bitter oppression in the West. Labor leaders and politicians declared that they accepted substandard wages and were thus to blame for white unemployment. Chinese were lynched and their employers persecuted. In state after state, local ordinances were passed, forbidding the Chinese everything from owning property to using sidewalks. In 1879 the California constitution was rewritten to say that Chinese were “dangerous to the well-being of the State,” decreeing further that “the Legislature shall delegate all necessary power” to towns “for removal of Chinese.” In 1882 Congress passed the Exclusion Act, prohibiting Chinese who “engaged in mining” from coming to America. That year, thirtynine thousand Chinese entered the country. Four years later, only forty were accepted.
In this atmosphere, the residents of Rock Springs undoubtedly felt their actions were justified. Others must have thought so, too, for in many Western towns through the turn of the century, mobs drove Chinese from their homes. In the face of such virulent hatred, thousands sailed back across the Pacific. In the late 1880s there were reportedly 110,000 Chinese living in the West. Thirty years later, about 60,000 remained.
•August 10: The first commercially operated electric streetcars begin running, in Baltimore, Maryland.
•September 17: Women are barred from Western Reserve Medical school.
1935 Fifty Years Ago
On the evening of August 15 a small private plane carrying two men crashed in a shallow lagoon just south of Point Barrow, Alaska. The pilot, Wiley Post, a record-setting aviator, was killed. So too was Post’s passenger, a fifty-six-year-old man upon whose humor and clearsightedness the country had come to depend—the Cherokee Indian, cowboy, comedian, actor, columnist, and radio commpntatnr Will Rogers.
It could be said that Rogers was on intimate terms with more Americans than any other man of his day. They saw him in films; they listened to his radio broadcasts; and when they opened their newspapers, many turned first to Rogers’s brief “Daily Telegram” or his weekly column.
But the regard Americans had for Rogers resulted from more than just his familiarity. The comedian had a forthright manner and a down-home way that reminded people of a simpler, more rural America. When he told jokes about the day’s events, he slyly exposed the bumblings of Congress or the inanities of our foreign policy. Part rustic philosopher, part court jester, Rogers helped the nation through some of its most painful years. His death that August stunned the country.
•August 14: Social Security is approved.
September 8: Sen. Huey P. Long is assassinated.
1960 Twenty-five Years Ago
When the Red Sox played the Orioles on September 26 in Boston’s Fenway Park, 10,454 fans gathered to witness not only the last home game of the season but also the last game played in Fenway Park by Ted Williams, the Red Sox’s forty-two-year-old hitter who for half his life had been the pride and torment of Boston.
Esteemed as the greatest batter of his age, Williams might have ranked with Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth if he hadn’t lost numerous seasons to military service and injuries. But lost seasons weren’t the only impediment to his career: Williams spat at inopportune moments, rebuked sportswriters, and rarely acknowledged his fans with so much as a tip of the hat. In return, Williams was subjected throughout his career to open hostility from the sports pages and grandstands alike.
One of Williams’s apologists, John Updike, claims the hitter sought “a perfectionist’s vacuum” and “desired to sever the game from the ground of paid spectatorship and publicity that supports it.” Others have argued that Williams’s show of indifference belied an inordinate concern for such attention. However indecipherable the workings of the inner man may have been, the performance of Williams the athlete was indisputable.
He made that clear on September 26. In the eighth inning, he came up to bat for what everyone knew would be the last time in his long career at Fenway Park. Somehow, although the odds were against it, he finished that career the way any hitter would want: with a home run.
After the game, Williams announced he would not be traveling on with the team to finish up the season. That final glorious homer in Fenway Park was to be his last time at bat.
September 26: Vice-Président Richard M. Nixon and Sen. John F. Kennedy debate on television.
