Preface 



This book describes the development of machines and mechanical skills 

 in the United States during the first half of the 19th century. It illuminates a facet 

 of our technological heritage that is little known despite its essential importance 

 to our understanding of the emergence of the United States as an industrial nation. 

 Here the reader will meet many of the craftsmen and engineers who devised and 

 developed the machines and techniques that made possible the growth of an indus- 

 trial complex. He will find many fresh details of surprisingly sophisticated tools 

 and skills that existed during an age that he has been taught was mechanically uncouth. 



Before one can understand why progress occurred as it did, it is necessary to 

 know what actually happened, who did what, and why. This is the kind of infor- 

 mation that is presented in the pages that follow. Written with rare precision, per- 

 ception, detachment, and good humor, these reminiscences have freshness and 

 vigor that commend them to every interested reader. 



The author, born in 1808 in Philadelphia, a block and a half from Independence 

 Hall, was from early boyhood a constant visitor in and an alert observer of the 

 many mechanical shops that were scattered about that part of the city. He knew, 

 and tells us about, many of the leading mechanicians of the generation that spanned 

 the administrations of Jefferson and Jackson. In these pages, the names of Phila- 

 delphians and sojourners in the shops of Philadelphia, as well as the names of other 

 Americans whose paths crossed that of the author, take on qualities of flesh and blood. 



Ranging farther afield as he grew older, the author made a visit to England 

 in 1832 that enabled him to hold a mirror to the state of the mechanic arts in 

 America, as he observed with a critical but kindly eye some of the great mechanicians 

 of the Old World. 



Most ol the narrative included here appeared in a scries of articles in the 

 American Machinist between 1884 and 1893, which until now has been effectively 

 buried in the stacks of the relatively lew libraries that have preserved early volumes 

 of this magazine. It was tracked down through an offhand reference that Sellers 

 made in 1895 to his "valedictory," written "several years ago." A few additional 

 episodes have been culled from two unpublished volumes in the Peale-Sellers Col. 

 lection of the American Philosophical Society Library. 



It is quite remarkable that the reminiscences of an old man Sellers was 75 

 w lien he wrote the first article— of events that occurred more than 50 years earlier 

 should stand up so well under careful testing of his factual statements against those 

 contemporary with the events described. The reader will quickly note that Sellers 



