Most Wonderful Machine: Mechanization and Social Change in Berkshire Paper Making, 1801-1885

On a visit to a Berkshire paper mill, the narrator of Herman Melville's "The Tartarus of Maids" views the "wonderful" papermaking machine with awe and calls it a "miracle of inscrutable intricacy." Manifesting in their factories and towns such nineteenth-century fascination with machinery, paper mill owners and workers made an industrial revolution in Berkshrie County, Massachusetts. This book examines their experiences from the era of craft production through several generations of sustain...