Fathers of the Industrial Revolution

Fathers of the Industrial Revolution.

"I knew that my propensity for tools and ingenuity was great. Erskine was the Skribe and a good mechanic and excellent councellor." , , Josiah White, 1832

, Josiah White was a devout Quaker with an inventive mind, sharp business sense and indomitable persistence. As a youth, White set a goal of making enough money by the age of 30 to devote the rest of his life to the betterment of humanity. He reached his goal and then focused on promoting American industry and commerce, specifically through using water power and improving rivers. In 1810, he and Erskine Hazard went into partnership in a wire and nail mill on the Falls of the Schuylkill, where they discovered how to use anthracite coal in manufacturing. Realizing anthracite's potential, White and Hazard turned their attention to the coal mines of the upper Lehigh Valley, and the challenges of transporting anthracite from mine to market., Erskine Hazard came from one of Pennsylvania's most prominent families; his father Ebenezer was the first United STates Postmaster General and a founder of the first American insurance company. Hazard was educated at Princeton, where he published a paper on electricity while still in his teens. He invested his own wealth in the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company and used family connections to secure investors. Hazard's keen, mechanically-inclined intellect, combined with White's inventive mind, helped the men overcome challenges they faced creating an industrial and transportation system unprecedented in the United States. They became America's greatest entrepreneurial team of their time.,

"The state of Engineering was barely known in Pennsylvania when I began my career in 1810, at the Falls of Schuylkill … I seemed indeed to have got into a field of business apparently untryed in the Country." , , Josiah White, 1832

, [Caption:] , The Spider Bridge at the Falls of Schuylkill in Philadelphia, constructed by Erskine Hazard and Josiah White in 1816. The 407-foot-long Spider Bridge was an iron-wire footbridge erected over the Schuylkill River. Though a modest and temporary structure, it is thought to have been the first wire-cable suspension bridge in world history.