{"id":6667,"date":"2014-02-17T00:23:51","date_gmt":"2014-02-17T05:23:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phillyhistory.wpengine.com\/?p=6667"},"modified":"2014-05-13T09:40:54","modified_gmt":"2014-05-13T13:40:54","slug":"philadelphia-trivia-workshop-of-the-world-division","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/2014\/02\/philadelphia-trivia-workshop-of-the-world-division\/","title":{"rendered":"Philadelphia Trivia (Workshop of the World Division)"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Disston Saw Works, New State Road and Knorr Street, June 25, 1901. (PhillyHistory.org)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

No question about it: Philadelphia\u2019s WOW is greatly diminished. (And by WOW, we mean the city\u2019s claim to the title \u201cWorkshop of the World.\u201d) In the middle of the last century, just under half of the city\u2019s workers made things. Now only one in twenty does.<\/p>\n

With very few exceptions (like the surviving DisstonPrecision in Tacony, the subject of a recent post at AxisPhilly<\/a>) the city\u2019s sprawling industrial complexes are gone. And with the departure of the likes of Baldwin Locomotive Works, Stetson Hats, Quaker Lace and hundreds more smaller mills and factories, we can barely imagine what the city was like before it ran, literally, out of steam. What we have in their place are echoes of pride about all that once was Philly-made, a level of bluster and noise that rings as true with the city\u2019s character and soul that 1776 does\u2014and, come to think of it, maybe even truer. But what’s gone is gone.<\/p>\n

How did Philadelphians celebrate their WOW factor when they still had it? With as much pride and bluster as the facts might convey. Apparently, there’s a long tradition of finding solace in the scale of what Philadelphia made.<\/p>\n

Looking, for instance, at a printed bird\u2019s eye-view of the city from 1908, The Philadelphia Of To-Day, The World’s Greatest Workshop<\/a>, we see that the margins packed with what might be considered, for lack of a better word, trivia:<\/p>\n

Philadelphia with only one-sixtieth of the population of the Republic, produced one-twentieth of all its manufactures.<\/em><\/p>\n

Philadelphia has 16,000 manufacturing plants, employing 250,000 skilled laborers, each year consuming $400,000,000 of raw material and producing $700,000,000 of manufactures.<\/em><\/p>\n

Philadelphia manufactures 8 locomotives every working day, or 2,663 in the year. These locomotives on a perfectly level track would haul 168,000 loaded cars of 50 tons capacity.<\/em><\/p>\n

Philadelphia manufactures each year 45,000,000 yards of carpet, enough to put a belt around the earth and leave a remnant long enough to reach Cincinnati.<\/em><\/p>\n

Philadelphia manufactures each year 12,000,000 dozen hose and half hose, enough to allow 2 pairs for every man, woman and child in the United States.<\/em><\/p>\n

Philadelphia manufactures each year 4,800,000 hats. The bands, end to end, would reach from Philadelphia to Denver.<\/em><\/p>\n

Philadelphia manufactures each year 180,000,000 yards of cotton piece goods, enough to make a pair of sheets for every family in the United States.<\/em><\/p>\n

Of course, that\u2019s all in the past, unless we\u2019re talking about DisstonPrecision, the successor to Henry Disston\u2019s Keystone Saw, Tool, Steel & File Works, which started in a cellar near 2nd and Arch Streets in 1840. They no longer make handsaws at the factory, which moved to Tacony in 1872, and the place is a shadow of its former self. But the making goes on at New State Road and Knorr Street, as it has continuously since 1872. And so with Disston, (thanks to Scranton and Licht<\/a>, Silcox<\/a> twice<\/a>, and TIME<\/a>) the numbers resonate less abstractly, and even a bit more sweetly.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Henry Disston Keystone Saw, Tool, Steel & File Works, interior, ca. 1910. (DisstonPrecision)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The number of steps to manufacture a handsaw blade: 82.<\/em><\/p>\n

Disston\u2019s marketshare of the American handsaw business in 1940: 75 percent.<\/em><\/p>\n

Disston\u2019s annual usage of coal in the mid 1870s: ten thousand tons.<\/em><\/p>\n

Order placed by the country of Afghanistan in the mid-1930s: 10 Disston Tractor Tanks.<\/em><\/p>\n

The number of Disston saws sold annually to amateur and vaudeville musicians: about 500. <\/em><\/p>\n

In 1918, 3,600 men and women worked in 58 Disston buildings. Those who had been employed for a decade or more: 1,400.<\/em><\/p>\n

The number of cross-cuts through four-foot hemlock logs in an 8 hour shift made by Disston’s 9\u2019 2\u201d diameter saws: 900.<\/em><\/p>\n

And today?<\/p>\n

How long it takes the 600 teeth of DisstonPrecision\u2019s 6\u2019 10″ circular saw to cut through a steel I-beam: two seconds.<\/em><\/p>\n

Philadelphia’s WOW lives on, after all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No question about it: Philadelphia\u2019s WOW is greatly diminished. (And by WOW, we mean the city\u2019s claim to the title \u201cWorkshop of the World.\u201d) In the middle of the last century, just under half of the city\u2019s workers made things. Now only one in twenty does. With very few exceptions (like the surviving DisstonPrecision in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6667"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6667\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}