A Gothic Novelty

A Gothic Novelty John Bowditch (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. The Novelty Works engine in the Henry Ford Museum. (Photo courtesy of Henry Ford Museum & Greenfield Village.) The great Novelty Works steam engine in the Henry Ford Museum is arguably the finest surviving example of mid-nineteenth-century ornamented American machinery. Built around 1855, the thirty-foot-tall, fifty-ton, Gothic-style engine is a visual emblem of the collision between traditional society and the modern industrial world that took place in the United States just prior to the Civil War. Victorian engineers often covered their creations with ornament in a vain effort to harmonize these alien objects with the world about them. In the process, they unconsciously left a record of their own inner struggle to adapt to a new and alien world. This engine was built to supply industrial power deep inside a factory, far from public view. Installed in 1857 at the Tatham Brothers Lead Works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the engine drove machinery used to make such products as pipe and sheet flashing. It stayed in service at the Tatham facility until 1929, when it was donated to the museum by John T. Lewis and Company, owners of the Tatham plant. At the time this engine was built, most people—though by no means all—saw the coming of the steam age as a wonderful opportunity to make the world a better place; it seemed that there was no problem that enough steam power and Yankee ingenuity could not solve. So the size of the engines and of the factories they powered continued to increase, especially in the boom years after the Civil War. Ironically, through all of this the steam engine itself remained a profound mystery to many. Powerful and at times frighteningly dangerous as well as useful, it operated on scientific principles that were not widely understood in 1850. Steam engines and their builders fascinated the public. In an article in the May 1851 issue of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Jacob Abbott waxed poetic about an engine, similar to the one pictured here, that powered the machine shops of the Novelty Works. “This central engine,” wrote Abbot, “since it carries all the machinery of the works, by means of which everything [End Page 99] is formed and fashioned, is the mother, in fact, of all the monsters which issue from it; and it is impossible to look upon her, as she toils on industriously in her daily duty, and think of her Titanic progeny, scattered now over every ocean of the globe, without a certain feeling of respect and even admiration.” (Novelty also manufactured the great side-lever engines that powered the ships of the Collins Line, then locked in mortal combat with Cunard for dominance in the Atlantic steamship trade.) Abbott was well aware of the significance of steam power for the country’s future. His Harper’s article opens with a description of the impact of successful systems of marine steam power: “Perhaps no one of those vast movements which are now going forward among mankind, and which mark so strikingly the industrial power and genius of the present age, is watched with more earnest interest by thinking men, than the successive steps of progress by which the mechanical power of steam and machinery is gradually advancing in its contest for the dominion of the seas. There is a double interest in this conflict. In fact, the conflict is a double one. There is first a struggle between the mechanical power and ingenuity of man, on the one hand, and the uncontrollable and remorseless violence of ocean storms on the other; and secondly, there is the rivalry, not unfriendly, though extremely ardent and keen, between the two most powerful commercial nations on the globe, each eager to be the first to conquer the common foe.” He could just as well have been writing about any of the new uses of steam in mills, on ships, and in the railroad industry. The builders of the engine at the Henry Ford Museum were probably not consciously thinking of all of this, yet their creation symbolizes it in grand fashion

Art · Art history · Emblem · Management · Power (physics) · Steam engine · Style (visual arts) · Visual arts · Workmanship · American Literature and Humor Studies · Engineering · Mechanical Engineering · Science Education and Perceptions

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