The Mason Machine Works was a machinery manufacturing company located in Taunton, Massachusetts, between 1845 and 1944. The company became famous for an early invention by its creator, William Mason, the self-acting mule, first patented in 1840. The company also later produced locomotives, rifles during the American Civil War, and later printing presses. However, the production of textile machinery would remain the company's core business during the late 19th century, until its decline in the 1920s.
The son of a blacksmith born in 1808 at Mystic, Connecticut, William Mason became a skilled master mechanic while still in his teens, working for various companies in the Killingly, Connecticut, area that were involved with machinery for the growing textile industry. [1]
In 1835, Mason moved to Taunton, Massachusetts, to work for Crocker and Richmond, a company that made ring spinning frames for the cotton textile industry. While the firm failed in the financial crisis of 1837, it was soon taken over by Leach and Keith. Mason was made foreman. [2]
By the time William Mason began his career, there had been a growing industry of machine building in the United States. It was a specialized art requiring tools, materials, skills and designs that had been gradually increasing through the early part of the 19th century. The ideas of early pioneers in the textile machine industry such as David Wilkinson at Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and Paul Moody at Waltham, Massachusetts, were constantly being tinkered with and improved upon during this time.
On October 8, 1840, Mason's greatest invention, the "self-acting mule" was patented. Competition required improvements and on October 3, 1846, he received a patent for "Mason's Self-acting Mule." The self-acting mule was a triumph of automation. [3] [ page needed ] This device would become the industry standard for years to come.
With the failure of Leach and Keith in 1842, William Mason convinced investors to help him establish his own company, the Mason Machine Works. In 1845, new buildings were erected and the plant became the largest one devoted to the manufacture of machinery in the country. It made cotton machinery, woolen machinery, machinists' tools, blowers, cupola furnaces, gearing, shafting, and railroad car wheels made with spokes.
The Mason Machine Works would become most important company in Taunton, Massachusetts, for much of the 19th century.
After 1852, the company expanded again, venturing into the locomotive business. Mason's innovative locomotive designs quickly drew praise from railroad engineers and operators, and were known to be the easiest engines to repair. His ideas and improvements would later be adopted by other locomotive builders.
The company would construct 754 steam locomotives between 1853 and 1889. However, after William Mason's death in 1883, the firm would mostly concentrate on its core business of textile machinery. [4]
Two locomotives built by Mason have been preserved, one of which is operational. One is the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad's number 25, a 4-4-0 type engine built in 1856, which was later named in honor of Mason. It is currently at the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Museum. The other, operating locomotive is Hecla & Torch Lake Railroad Number 3, a 0-6-4 engine of the Mason Bogie design built in 1873, currently at the Henry Ford Museum.
Also preserved is the tender that originally belonged to the Dalton locomotive, which the firm had built in 1864 for the United States Military Railroad. After the Civil War ended, the engine was sold, becoming the Western and Atlantic Railroad's William MacRae. When the engine was retired in 1890, its tender was salvaged and paired with the railroad's famed Texas locomotive, which had been built by Danforth, Cooke and Company. [5] [6] [7]
In 1861, with the start of the Civil War, Mason accepted a contract from the United States Government for the production of 100,000 Springfield model rifles. The company embarked on a large expansion to handle the new contract. However, the War Department eventually decided to cut the contract to only 30,000 rifles.
After the war, the company again focused on producing high-quality textile machinery and locomotives. The factory expanded to more than 10 acres (40,000 m2) near the western end of downtown Taunton.
In 1879, Mason's reputation for quality workmanship let to a contract to manufacture of the Campbell printing press, originally patented and built in Brooklyn, New York. [8] [ page needed ]
With the demise of the northern textile industry during the 1920s, Mason was reduced to producing mostly spare parts for the machines which it had sold previously to an ever-decreasing number of textile manufacturers. By the 1930s, portions of the site were occupied by Grossman's Lumber Company and the Southern New England Terminals trucking company. [9]
The Mason Machine Works finally went out of business in 1944. [10] [ page needed ]
Grossman's continued to occupy much of the former Mason property until the late 1960s, when the property became earmarked for demolition by the City of Taunton, as part of an urban renewal project. The site was vacated by October 1969. [11] [ page needed ]
However, with demolition slated to begin, the complex was destroyed by fire on December 30, 1970. [12]
Today the site is occupied by a bus depot and garage, an apartment building and other businesses. A portion of the site remains open and has not been redeveloped, due to likely soil contamination issues associated with the Machine Works operations. [13] [ page needed ]
Mason Bogie locomotives are a type of articulated tank locomotive suited for sharp curves and uneven track, once commonly used on narrow-gauge railways in the United States. The design is a development of the Single Fairlie locomotive.
A Fairlie locomotive is a type of articulated steam locomotive that has the driving wheels on bogies. The locomotive may be double-ended or single ended. Most double-ended Fairlies had wheel arrangements of 0-4-4-0T or 0-6-6-0T.
A cotton mill is a building that houses spinning or weaving machinery for the production of yarn or cloth from cotton, an important product during the Industrial Revolution in the development of the factory system.
Textile manufacture during the British Industrial Revolution was centred in south Lancashire and the towns on both sides of the Pennines in the United Kingdom. The main drivers of the Industrial Revolution were textile manufacturing, iron founding, steam power, oil drilling, the discovery of electricity and its many industrial applications, the telegraph and many others. Railroads, steamboats, the telegraph and other innovations massively increased worker productivity and raised standards of living by greatly reducing time spent during travel, transportation and communications.
Rogers Locomotive and Machine Works was a manufacturer of railroad steam locomotives based in Paterson, in Passaic County, New Jersey, in the United States. Between its founding in 1832 and its acquisition in 1905, the company built more than 6,000 steam locomotives for railroads around the world. Most 19th-century U.S. railroads owned at least one Rogers-built locomotive. The company's most famous product was a locomotive named The General, built in December 1855, which was one of the principals of the Great Locomotive Chase of the American Civil War.
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Under the Whyte notation for the classification of steam locomotives by wheel arrangement, 2-4-4 is a steam locomotive with two unpowered leading wheels followed by four powered driving wheels and four unpowered trailing wheels. This configuration was only used for tank locomotives; no tender locomotives with this wheel arrangement were made.
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William Mason was a master mechanical engineer and builder of textile machinery and railroad steam locomotives. He founded Mason Machine Works of Taunton, Massachusetts. His company was a significant supplier of locomotives and rifles for the Union Army during the American Civil War. The company also later produced printing presses.
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Samuel Leonard Crocker was a businessman and U.S. Representative from Taunton, Massachusetts. Crocker graduated from Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, in 1822. Throughout his life, he engaged in various manufacturing and civic interests in his hometown of Taunton and throughout Massachusetts.
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The Taunton Locomotive Manufacturing Company was one of the earliest firms in the United States established especially for the manufacture of steam locomotives. Located in Taunton, Massachusetts, the company was organized in 1849 and incorporated the following year by William A. Crocker, Willard W. Fairbanks, William R. Lee and their associates. Their first engine, the Rough and Ready was delivered in May 1849.
Ring spinning is a spindle-based method of spinning fibres, such as cotton, flax or wool, to make a yarn. The ring frame developed from the throstle frame, which in its turn was a descendant of Arkwright's water frame. Ring spinning is a continuous process, unlike mule spinning which uses an intermittent action. In ring spinning, the roving is first attenuated by using drawing rollers, then spun and wound around a rotating spindle which in its turn is contained within an independently rotating ring flyer. Traditionally ring frames could only be used for the coarser counts, but they could be attended by semi-skilled labour.
William Mason is a 4-4-0 steam locomotive currently on display at the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. It was built for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, carrying that railroad's number 25. The locomotive is named in honor of its builder, William Mason, who built around 754 steam locomotives at his Mason Machine Works firm in Taunton, Massachusetts, from 1853 until his death in 1883. The engine had been one of the oldest operable examples of the American Standard design, and is the fourth oldest Baltimore and Ohio locomotive in existence, the oldest being the 0-4-0 no. 2, the Andrew Jackson from 1836, second oldest is the no. 8 0-4-0, John Hancock built later that same year, and the third being the 0-8-0 no. 57, Memnon of 1848. While operable, William Mason had been one of the oldest operational locomotive in the world, and the oldest in the western hemisphere.
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