The Society for Useful Knowledge Read Free Page B

or behind the wheel of an early automobile.
    Already, the lighter-than-air balloon, or aerostat, had become the latest vogue in France, and it fired Franklin’s imagination to think of possible uses.“This Experiment is by no means a trifling one,” he reported to Joseph Banks, head of the Royal Society, whom he strongly encouraged to pursue similar experiments. “It may be attended with important Consequences that no one can foresee.” 13 Yet, the overall direction of America’s scientific and technological development would not have come as a surprise.
    Nor would Franklin have been particularly distressed, as are some modern students of the period, by the general absence of significant theoretical breakthroughs on the part of Americans. 14 On the contrary, the great milestones of nineteenth-century America were overwhelmingly the products of fields that Franklin, Rush, Rittenhouse, Coxe, and their associates would have recognized and encouraged as natural outgrowths of the movement for useful knowledge—applied science, practical invention, mechanics, and engineering.
    These included the steam locomotive, the typewriter, the sewing machine, the reaper, and the revolver, among other icons of America’s accelerating industrialization. The Civil War, an incubator of terrible innovation, produced ironclad ships, more accurate naval artillery, mass production of uniforms and shoes, modern ammunition, and the machine gun. 15 And, just as Tench Coxe had predicted, all were products of the machine applied to the American landscape, with its rich natural resources and its enormous, sparsely populated expanses ripe for reinvention, reinterpretation, and redevelopment by the mechanic, the engineer, and the inventor. In the face of such rapid developments, the struggle between the Federalists and the Republicans over the place of industry in immediate postrevolutionary American life would soon seem little more than a quaint fairy tale from long ago.
    Writing in the influential
North American Review
in 1831, Timothy Walker, a recent graduate of one of the country’s leading universities, expressed the view of many among the new educated generation that American technology and industrialization had simply realized the latent promise of the movement for useful knowledge, present at least since the 1720s and Franklin’s Leather Apron Club: “Where she [nature] denied us rivers, Mechanism has supplied them. Where she left our planet uncomfortably rough, Mechanism has applied the roller. Where her mountains have been found in the way, Mechanism has boldly leveled or cut through them.” 16

Acknowledgments
    Benjamin Franklin placed the social element at the very center of his conception of useful knowledge, so I am particularly delighted to note that the knowledge production on these pages represents something of a cooperative effort. Like Franklin, I, too, benefited from the opportunity to try out my ideas on a diverse group of talented friends, associates, and colleagues.
    Foremost, I want to thank Michelle Johnson for her steady hand as reader, adviser, and companion throughout this journey. Cecile Baril, Evelyn Lyons, and Bryce Johnson read early iterations of the manuscript and provided helpful comments along the way. Kevin Cross shared many pleasant hours over mussels and beer discussing theoretical and practical aspects of useful knowledge. Lewis Lapham contributed helpful leads and provided welcome enthusiasm for the project from the outset.
    Also, I want to thank my longtime agent, Will Lippincott, for once again helping me realize the promise hidden in the original conception, as well as my editors at Bloomsbury Press, Peter Ginna and Pete Beatty, for the support, advice, and close reading of the manuscript needed to see this project through to fruition. Needless to say, the final results and any errors of omission or commission remain firmly my own doing.

Bibliography
    Aldridge,