Francis Cabot Lowell (entrepreneur, 1775)

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Paper cutting by Francis Cabot Lowell

Francis Cabot Lowell (born April 7, 1775 in Newburyport , Province of Massachusetts Bay ; died August 10, 1817 in Boston , Massachusetts ) was an entrepreneur who contributed significantly to the Industrial Revolution in the United States . The city of Lowell in Massachusetts was named after him. His son John Lowell, Jr. founded the Lowell Institute in 1839 .

Early life and education

Francis was the son of Susanna Cabot and John Lowell , who was a member of the Continental Congress and a federal judge . His great talent for mathematics was recognized in his childhood. He graduated from Phillips Academy in 1786 and from Harvard College in 1793 .

Career

Foundations of Success

The Boston Manufacturing Company in Waltham

In July 1795, Lowell sailed to Europe on a cargo ship and visited among others the Spanish Basque Country and Bordeaux in France to learn the basics of overseas trade. Overall, he spent a full year in France during the French Revolution and returned to Boston in July 1796, where he opened a business on Long Wharf .

Between 1798 and 1808, Lowell mainly imported silk and tea from China, as well as hand-spun and hand-woven fabrics from India. After the death of his father in 1802, he used most of his inheritance to acquire eight merchant ships and, together with a group led by Uriah Cotting and Harrison Gray Otis, built the now defunct India Wharf in Boston harbor into a central trading base with Asia. The same group of investors also developed the Boston Broad Street area into a retail hub . In addition to its work in the textile sector bought a Lowell Rum - distillery , several months used to optimize the production process and imported for their supply of molasses from the Caribbean.

Despite its political independence, the United States still relied on imports of finished goods , but conflicts in Europe and Jefferson's trade embargo interrupted trade between the USA, Great Britain, France and Asia or led to significant trade restrictions. Lowell concluded that the only way for the US to gain greater independence was by building its own manufacturing economy. Essentially for health reasons, but presumably also for a considerable business interest, he and his family traveled to Scotland and England for two years from June 1810 , where he particularly looked at textile production in Lancashire with its water and electricity-powered weaving machines and studied the technical functioning . This had to be done in secret as he could not acquire any drawings or models. With the start of the British-American War in 1812, Lowell returned to the United States with his family and was searched for contraband in the port of Halifax . Since he had memorized the technical details of the loom and made no records, he was able to leave the country unhindered.

Textile industry

In 1814, Francis Cabot Lowell, with the support of his three brothers-in-law Charles, James, and Patrick Tracy Jackson, and the financial help of Nathan Appleton , whom he met in Edinburgh , and Israel Thorndike, founded the Boston Manufacturing Company (BMC) in Waltham , where he ran hydropower of the Charles River . BMC was the first textile factory in the USA to combine all work steps from the raw cotton fiber to the finished textile under one roof. In order to build efficient machines on the basis of the British plans, Lowell hired the inventor Paul Moody and worked with him to develop technological improvements that took into account the conditions in New England . Lowell and Moody received a patent for their loom in 1815 .

To raise debt for their textile mills, Lowell and his partners were one of the world's first companies to capitalize on the financial market by selling $ 1,000 worth of shares to a group of investors including Christopher Gore , Israel Thorndike and Harrison Gray Otis belonged. This instrument is still used by companies - usually in the form of an IPO .

The BMC's first manager was Patrick Tracy Jackson, while Paul Moody had technical responsibility. Lowell was one of the first entrepreneurs to hire women between the ages of 15 and 35, mostly from local farms, as workers. He paid these Lowell Mill Girls less wages than the male workers. They lived in BMC guest houses , each of which also housed a chaperone . The working and production model of the BMC came to be known as the Waltham-Lowell system . In the Waltham Machine Shop right next to the BMC, Lowell manufactured looms on the basis of his patent, which he sold to other American textile mills, and Nathan Appleton built up a USA-wide distribution network for the textiles manufactured by the BMC. Your success in Waltham motivated them another production in East Chelmsford at the Merrimack River to establish that after Lowell's death in Lowell has been renamed.

The end of the British-American War posed a major threat to the US textile industry as the British flooded the American market with dumping prices . In 1816 Lowell traveled to Washington to obtain protective tariffs on imported textiles. These came into force in the same year.

Francis Cabot Lowell died on 10 August 1817 at the age of 42 years at a pneumonia . He left the BMC financially sound; In 1821 it was able to distribute a dividend of 27.5% to its shareholders . The machines of the BMC used the entire hydropower of the Charles River, so that in 1822 a new location was built further north at the Pawtucket Falls . The success of the New England textile industry lasted for over a century, until production facilities were gradually relocated to the Midwest and the southern United States.

family

Lowell married Hannah Jackson in 1798 and had four children with her, including John Lowell Jr. , who founded the Lowell Institute with his will in 1839 . Originally buried on the Central Burying Ground on Boston Common , his grave was moved to Forest Hills Cemetery during the construction of the Tremont Street Subway , where it is still located today.

literature

  • Thomas Dublin: Lowell . the story of an industrial city: a guide to Lowell National Historical Park and Lowell Heritage State Park, Lowell, Massachusetts. Ed .: National Park Service , Division of Publications. US Dept. of the Interior, Washington, DC 1992, ISBN 978-0-912627-46-5 (English).
  • Thomas Dublin: Women at work . the transformation of work and community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860. Columbia University Press, New York 1979, ISBN 978-0-231-04166-9 (English).
  • Arthur L. Eno: Cotton was king: a history of Lowell, Massachusetts . New Hampshire Pub. Co., Somersworth, NH 1976, ISBN 978-0-912274-63-8 (English).
  • Ferris Greenslet: The Lowells and their seven worlds: occasionem cognosce with illustrations . Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston 1946, OCLC 343098 (English).
  • Hannah Geffen Josephson: The golden threads: New England's mill girls and magnates . Duell, Sloan and Pearce, New York 1949, OCLC 492983 (English).

Web links

Commons : Francis Cabot Lowell  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Robert Sobel: The entrepreneurs: explorations within the American business tradition . BeardBooks, Washington, DC 2000, ISBN 978-1-58798-027-5 , pp. 8 (English).
  2. ^ Phillips Academy - 1700s. (No longer available online.) Phillips Academy , archived from the original on May 24, 2016 ; accessed on May 25, 2016 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.andover.edu
  3. ↑ a b c d Chaim M. Rosenberg: The Life and Times of Francis Cabot Lowell 1775-1817 . Lexington Books, Lanham, MD 2011, ISBN 978-0-7391-4685-9 (English).
  4. ^ A b c Francis Cabot Lowell - Biography in Context. In: Gale Encyclopedia of US Economic History. Thomas Carson, Mary Bonk, 1999, accessed May 25, 2016 .
  5. ^ A b c Paul Marion: Mill power: the origin and impact of Lowell National Historical Park . Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, Maryland 2014, ISBN 978-1-4422-3628-8 , pp. 4 (English).
  6. ↑ a b c d e Who made America? - Innovators - Francis Cabot Lowell. In: They made America. Public Broadcasting Service , accessed May 25, 2016 .
personal data
SURNAME Lowell, Francis Cabot
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American entrepreneur
DATE OF BIRTH April 7, 1775
PLACE OF BIRTH Newburyport , Massachusetts , United States
DATE OF DEATH August 10, 1817
Place of death Boston