The Society for Useful Knowledge Read Free Page A

for the Improvement of Inland Navigation, in Philadelphia, and the Boston Mechanic Association, one of the first societies to address the interests of artisans and engineers alike. 9
    Among the most important were the manufacturing associations, which united the aspirations of the mechanics with broader notions of economic development, political independence, and patriotism. New organizations such as Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute of the State of Pennsylvania for the Promotion of the Mechanic Arts and New York’s Society for the Promotion of the Useful Arts drew on the older, general-knowledge societies for members. Like their predecessors, they attracted a diverse range of skills, occupations, and social groups: craftsmen, merchants and financiers, accountants, lawyers, instrument makers, and the slowly growing pool of academic scientists. 10
    So powerful was the promise of the movement for useful knowledge that there was little real chance of slowing or deflecting America’s coming technological and industrial revolution, despite deep divisions among the Founding Fathers—and in society at large—over the future place of manufactures. Just as colonial notions of practical utility anticipated the final break with Great Britain, so, too, did these ideas operate largely outside the control of the postwar political factions.
    Alexander Hamilton’s blueprint for a manufacturing utopia collapsed under the weight of unsavory dealings, managerial malfeasance, and technicalincompetence. Nonetheless, his Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures ultimately produced the industrial colossus that once was Paterson, New Jersey. Jefferson, meanwhile, found that imagining a republican idyll was one thing but realizing such a state in a world of international trade, diplomacy, and war was quite another. To protect itself, the young republic would have to turn away, at least in part, from its agricultural vocation. “Our enemy has indeed the consolation of Satan on removing our first parents from Paradise,” Jefferson conceded to a friend during the War of 1812 against the British. “From a peaceable and agricultural nation, he makes us a military and manufacturing one.” 11
    Having escaped the dangerous terrain of his youthful “metaphysical Reasonings,” Benjamin Franklin never looked back. His faith in the pursuit of useful knowledge—and in the social networks that made that pursuit possible—survived the setbacks, professional rivalries, and political upheavals that punctuated his long and eventful life. Not even rebellion against the British could shake the intellectual ties that Franklin had carefully cultivated ever since his early days in the coffeehouses, taverns, and salons of London.
    With the end of the war, he sought where possible to resume his scientific correspondence with former friends and associates in the Royal Society. While he could not resist chiding the British for not “spending those Millions in doing Good which in the last War have been spent in doing Mischief,” Franklin nonetheless struck clear notes of optimism and even wonder as he looked toward a world of scientific advances and technological change that he could never hope to see.
    â€œThe rapid Progress
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Science now makes, occasions my Regretting sometimes that I was born so soon,” wrote Franklin ten years before his death. “It is impossible to imagine the Height to which may be carried in a 1000 Years the Power of Man over Matter. We may perhaps learn to deprive large Masses of their Gravity & give them absolute Levity, for the sake of easy Transport. Agriculture may diminish its Labor & double its Produce.” 12 Franklin was prescient in his predictions, if not in the timing. Had he somehow managed to live just another century, he would certainly have been among the early adopters of new technologies. One can readily imagine a joyful Franklin reveling in train travel,