{"id":8350,"date":"2014-12-31T15:01:10","date_gmt":"2014-12-31T20:01:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phillyhistory.wpengine.com\/?p=8350"},"modified":"2014-12-31T17:47:06","modified_gmt":"2014-12-31T22:47:06","slug":"when-mechanization-took-command","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/2014\/12\/when-mechanization-took-command\/","title":{"rendered":"When Mechanization Took Command"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Street<\/a>
Street Cleaning Machine \u2013 Elgin Motor Sweeper, October 31, 1917 (PhillyHistory.org)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Great 20th<\/sup>-century cities demanded forward looking solutions. When Philadelphia announced its intentions to join the City Beautiful Movement, grandiose cleanups would call for something more than the pith-\u00adhelmeted army of \u201cWhite Wings.\u201d Marching, uniformed \u00a0broomsmen<\/a> were more reminiscent of 19th<\/sup>– century colonial conquests than 20th-century urban efficiency.<\/p>\n

The new solution would be a machine, and the more newfangled the better. Sprinkling and sweeping devices were horse drawn and required abundant supporting labor on foot. Squeegee machines<\/a> were moving in the right direction. They slicked down miles of asphalt, but anything pulled by a horse was still old-school, manure producing, and self-defeating. What could maintain the explosion of new highways and byways and blend in with booming vehicular traffic? It would need to be something self-contained, something that looked and played the part.<\/p>\n

In 1911, the first internal combustion powered sweeper<\/a> seemed<\/i> to have it all. But it was limited by a too-small collecting capacity. And its steel-rimmed wheels were out of step with rubber tire technology. \u00a0This sweeper did accomplish twice the work \u201cat half the cost of the horse-hauled machine sweeper\u201d but its engine moved it along at a snail\u2019s pace and its inability to maneuver led to increased traffic congestion.<\/p>\n

John M. Murphy, an Illinois farmer turned windmill maker turned Elgin, Illinois City Father crafted the solution with a new and improved \u201cstreet sweeping machine<\/a>.\u201d Murphy\u2019s machine was agile; it kept up with automobile traffic. It didn\u2019t damage the pavement; it didn\u2019t raise dust and left no debris behind. The Elgin Motor Sweeper received U. S. Patent number 1,239,293 on September 4, 1917. And a month later, an unidentified city official called for the city’s new acquisition to be brought up to the northeast corner of Philadelphia City Hall where he posed with it.<\/p>\n

No question: the Elgin Motor Sweeper would cost-justify itself in Philadelphia, just as it had in beta testing on the roads of Boise, Idaho. There, the sweeper worked two, eight-hour shifts and cleaned 275,000 square yards of pavement per day\u2014twice as much as the horse-drawn method. The operating cost? Nine cents per 1,000 square yards compared with a whopping 31 \u00bd cents using the old technique, according to the company history<\/a>. \u201cNews of the fantastic new sweeper spread to Pocatello, Idaho\u2014to Portland, Oregon\u201d and, of course, to Philadelphia. \u201cFifteen Elgins were produced and put to use in 1915, twenty-three in 1916, forty-two the following year\u201d\u20141917\u2014when Philadelphia\u2019s was proudly photographed.<\/p>\n

The days of the \u201cWhite Wing\u201d army were over. Machines with names like \u201cGutter Snipe<\/a>\u201d would clean city streets in the 20th<\/sup> century. Mechanization, made elegant by innovation and compelling by fiscal responsibility, had taken command.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Great 20th-century cities demanded forward looking solutions. When Philadelphia announced its intentions to join the City Beautiful Movement, grandiose cleanups would call for something more than the pith-\u00adhelmeted army of \u201cWhite Wings.\u201d Marching, uniformed \u00a0broomsmen were more reminiscent of 19th– century colonial conquests than 20th-century urban efficiency. The new solution would be a machine, and […]<\/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-8350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8350","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=8350"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8350\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}