reflections from Bethlehem Steel / National Museum of Industrial History



On a family trip through Pennsylvania, we accidentally ended up in one of the biggest industrial sites in the country -- Bethlehem Steel, which produced 20% of the country's ships during WWII and 80% of the steel in New York buildings in 1940. The site had been shut since 1995, but there was a National Museum of Industrial History in the old electronics shop building that was fascinating for me to go through, both as an engineer interested in learning about steel and industry and as someone interested in the social science/STS/labor/politics side of things. Here are some quick notes -- not thought-through reflections; I haven't done more research than just my brief reading of museum signs, but maybe I will later -- from my visit.

1. Military-industrial complex



Reminers of the importance of war to the development of Bethlehem Steel -- and American industry -- was at practically every corner of the museum. The shelling of some enemy, the delivery of that shelling to the enemy's land: these tasks were a constant and major driver of industrial growth. Bethlehem Steel didn't just cooperate with the military: they patented armor-piercing shell designs and manufactured almost every part of battleships.

2. Labor exploitation



Did more efficient machines and stronger materials make life better for Americans? Not for the tens of thousands of laborers bound up with them. 12 hour, six day workweeks, starvation wages -- workers exploited about as much as they possibly could be, performing the hard and dangerous labor of mining iron ore, carrying around pig iron, shoveling coal into furnaces. These people, and their brutal conditions, were as necessary to the success of Bethlehem Steel's products as its technology.

3. Capitalism and technology



The museum's exhibits also made clear the connection between capitalism and technology development: technology must be profitable (and/or, re: section 1, useful for war: but war between imperialist, capitalist states also ultimately serves profit, as business interests ultimately dictate state policy) to be adopted, and once adoption starts it will force out old technologies and forms of production.

Early steam engines were adopted because they increased the rate at which lumber could be processed by orders of magnitude. The history of steamboat development in the museum was a long list of initiatives that were marked as failures not because they didn't work technically, but because they were not commercially viable. These economic conditions were what created the "culture of innovation" so celebrated in the museum's exhibits and elsewhere.

This relationship is sometimes obfuscated by the museum's framing. "Scientists and engineers are always searching for new, more efficient forms of energy to fuel industry and power machines." Well, they do because they work within a capitalist logic. Science and engineering themselves are not necessarily geared towards efficiency and industry. They could be greated towards sustainability instead, for example, but in a capitalist logic can only do so secondarily to profitability.

4. Learning how steel works

There's much more to get into on the social science-y side but here are a few reflections from the engineering side.



Iron ore => pig iron => steel! Impurities removed with slag! Carbon added with coke! Cool to learn how steel is made.



Rolled into slabs, blooms, billets, then into rails or structural beams. Casted or forged into tools and gears. Cool to learn how steel is then made into useful parts, and to see some of the earliest machines used to do so.



So many important applications!

5. Just like our machine shop



A 200 year old lathe? Jointer? Drill press? These look awfully familiar! Other than the lack of precision measurement tools, I could probably use these machines about as well as I could the ones in Harvey Mudd's machine shop.



But, plot twist, they're steam powered. A line shaft runs down the whole shop, while belts deliver power to machines below.



Here are the steam engines themselves, with all sorts of valves, pistons, flywheels and mechanisms I don't understand.

6. Me and Fulton

My dad used to tell me stories of Edison running a chemistry lab in his basement as a kid. Fulton did the same, apparently, and spent his childhood checking out machines around town. After a stint as a painter, he returned to mechanical invention to find success.

I need to keep unpacking the value system underlying the making of models out of inventors. Is it capitalistic? Is it fundamental human curiosity? How should I relate to the ambition to be on the cutting edge?

I don't know, but in the meantime I can identify similar patterns of technical success in my life: messing around with code as a kid, absorbing Medium articles and blog posts to learn how things are done -- learning that was pretty useless then in comparison to structured pursuits of academic and extracurricular excellence, but made my living during my gap year and continues to unlock opportunities for me today. I'm pretty confident that being on tech Twitter and doing web dev puts me closer to the cutting edge of human technology than a CS degree does.

Anyways, in terms of doing cool innovative technical things, this museum visit has made me doubt that any sort of mechanical engineering will be where it happens, but it's really nice to have the technical foundation to be able to dive into histories of technology, for both technical and political purposes. Thagard: those who ignore philosophy (or history in the original quote, of course) are condemned to repeat it. I don't understand how class and production and whatever work in software right now, but I hope this history gives me more foundation for probing these questions.