Steam power and the progress of industry in the late nineteenth century.

This article uses data from a nineteenth-century industrial community in the U.S. to consider the conditions under which entrepreneurs introduce the technology of steam power. The steam engine seems the quintessential technology of industrialization. Not surprisingly, historians have traditionally assigned a central role to the steam engine in the industrialization of western society. If steam was the critical pivot of industrialization, then the geographical and chronological pattern of the adoption of steam power in manufacturing would have paralleled the spread of U.S. manufacturing activity. But beyond an overall contrast between North and South, this was not so. The multiplication and spread of manufacturing enterprises was first a New England phenomenon and then, by the mid-nineteenth century, became most concentrated in the Middle Atlantic states. The relationship between steam and the size of steam users was much the same in 1870 and 1880 as it had been earlier; value added per industry and firm was nearly substantially higher among steam users. As with cost savings, steam's locational flexibility was more critical to Western manufacturers than their Eastern counterparts.