LeGrand Lockwood, Early Adopter Steven Lubar, Brown University Talk at the Lockwood Mathews Mansion Museum, April

2013

LeGrand Lockwood was an early adopter. Railroads, telegraph, indoor plumbing, gas, electricity these may seem old tech to us. But they were new once, and like new things today, not for everyone.

Let me make a comparison. If Mr. Lockwood had been born 150 years later, hed be one of those people standing in line at the Apple store, waiting for an iPhone. Hed be an angel investor in tech firms. And of course, hed be on Twitter, before any of his friends. *

Mr. Lockwood as early adopter, and as a very early Twitter adopter, gives us pause. We like to think that we live in the most fast-changing of times. But in fact, its very hard to know how to compare how rapidly the world is changing. What made the biggest changes in peoples lives the railroad, or electricity, or the telephone, or television, or the computer, or the internet?

And even more difficult: what did people think about it? In the exhibit, you can see the new technology but what did people think about it, when it was new? What did Mr. Lockwood, his friends and business associates, and others of his day, think about the future? Why was

he so taken with the latest new technologies, both for his home and for his investments? How did that change when his business failed? How has that changed over time?

And so this evening, I want to take a very quick look at the future, as seen from the past. What did Mr. Lockwood and also his children, and grandchildren - see when they looked ahead? More of the same? Constant change? Accelerating change? Did they look backwards with nostalgia, and maybe a fondness for the good old days, and forward with fear of the unknown? Or did they imagine that things were getting better every day, in every way? That, in the great words of the song, the futures so bright, youll have to wear shades?

Lets go back to the 1830s and 1840s, when LeGrande Lockwood was growing up. He was born in 1820, on a farm in Norwalk. What did he see when he was a teenager, a young man? How quickly was the world changing then, and what did people think of it?

*Heres what he might have seen in 1836, when he was 16 years old, and about to leave for New York City. He grew up on a farm but this is a surprisingly industrial scene. Those clouds of smoke are coming from factories and from a steamboat, and theyre there to advertise just how much Norwalk is part of the new technological revolution that is sweeping the country, and especially Connecticut. The artist who drew these was proud of

just how modern Norwalk was how quickly it was changing. Thats why he emphasized the smoke it meant new technology, progress, economic success.

This was the era of the industrial revolution. And Connecticut was its home guns, clocks, pins are all being turned out by machines in enormous numbers. In 1820, when Lockwood was born, Connecticut was mostly rural. In 1850, almost 50,000 people worked in industrial establishments. Investors had invested some $23 million perhaps a billion dollars in todays money in Connecticut industry.

*Perhaps the most dramatic new technology was the railroad. In 1830 there was just 40 miles of railroad track in the US. By 1850, almost 9000. Connecticut went from no

miles in 1835 to over 400 in 1850. More than half of the value of stocks bought and sold involved railroads. #

The railroad represented a change thats hard for us to imagine. *In 1820 a trip from New York to Chicago would have taken three weeks; in 1860 it would have taken less than two days.

Lets drop in on Norwalk again. *This view is just a few years later than the one I showed before, about 1850 LeGrand would have been 30 years old. It looks bucolic, but *look

closer thats a telegraph pole, with wires that connected the town to the New York City, and, soon, the entire world.

*The telegraph developed alongside the railroad. Samuel Morse built the first telegraph line, from Washington to Baltimore, in 1844. In 1850 the Bureau of the Census reported 75 telegraph companies with over 20,000 miles of wire. Again, an enormous investment by men with an optimistic sense of the future. To send a message from New York to Chicago in 1830 would have taken weeks. In 1860: instantaneous. And thats not all. By the 1860s the telegraph connected New York with San Francisco, and with London. *Heres a map, in 1857, of telegraph lines in operation, under contract, and contemplated, to complete the circuit of the globe. *And the triumph of its day, the Atlantic cable, celebrated here in an 1858 drawing.#

So, by the time that LeGrand reaches middle age, a success in the New York City financial world, hes seen remarkable change. When he was a boy, the speed of a fast horse was the fastest anyone could go. As an adult, fast trains of 60 miles an hour were not unheard of. A trip to Chicago, a weeks-long adventure in 1820, was a perfectly reasonable short business trip. He would think nothing of sending a telegraph to London or Paris.

The phrase that people of that era used was the annihilation of space and time. That was made possible by men like Lockwood investing millions tens of billions in todays dollars on grand technological projects that were unimaginable just a decade or two earlier. I think that Lockwood and the businessmen of his day were pretty optimistic about the future of technology. They put their money on new tech.

Lockwood grew up in a time of remarkable technological change, not unlike our own. Maybe, I would argue, even more rapid and disconcerting than our own. And he was just the right age to appreciate it, to jump on the bandwagon.

Not everyone did. Let me compare Lockwood to two other men, born at just about the same moment.

*First, consider Henry David Thoreau, born just three years before LeGrande Lockwood. Thoreau too was part of this industrial revolution. He worked in his familys pencil factory, in Concord. * But he questioned the new technology. He warned that often, with these modern improvements, there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. Our inventions, he wrote, are want to be pretty toys, which distract us from serious things. They are an improved means to an unimproved end. He was skeptical of the telegraph: We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas;

but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. #

*And next, Chauncey Thomas, born in Boston in 1820, the same year as Lockwood. Thomas became a carriage maker, and then the author of The Crystal Button, or, Adventures of Paul Prognosis in the Forty-Ninth Century. He sleeps for 3000 years to awake in the Boston of 4872, where a combination of technological and concomitant moral advance has made for a world of universal peace and happy people. There are, as a review put it in 1891, flying machines and wonderful applications of electricity.

So when Thoreau devoted his time to travel and writing, to questioning the rapid technological advance of his day, and Thomas to imagining a future where technology would solve Americas social problems, Lockwood devoted himself to making money by investing in that new technology and by using it.

*His success in investing in railroads seems to have encouraged him to bring the technology home. And so while we see, in his house, a very traditional exterior, *and some lovely interior furniture and art theres also some quite cutting edge technologies.

Lockwoods new house was on the train line, for easy travel to New York. He had a telegraph system at home, so he could keep up with the stock market. *The house was wired

 not electric lights, yet, but a call system, and *an astonishing burglar alarm system. *There were two huge marine boilers in the basement to provide heat not too different from the boiler of a locomotive. *There are enunciators throughout, 23 bells connecting every room. *There was hot and cold running water, gas for lamps in every room.

Lockwood liked the new technology, both at home and in his investments. He was part of the new breed of Wall Street tycoon who saw that there was not only money to be made in being on the cutting edge of technology, but that it was would make his life easier, as well. #

He wasnt the only one who was taken with the new technology. Around this time artists and writers began to imagine what might come next. Lockwoods lifetime saw railroads spanning the continent, and the world wired with the telegraph. Who could imagine what could happen next? Lets take a look at some of yesterdays tomorrows. What well see is that the future of transportation seemed bright and optimistic and fun, but that communications well, people werent so sure that it would work out so well. #

Consider this: *The Steam Man of the Prairies was first published in 1866 just as the transcontinental railroad was conquering the West. *The Steam man soon found his way to more adventures, in New York. Soon he was joined by a steam horse. *When electricity

came along, the steam horse was, alas, replaced by the Electric Horse. *Which led, of course, to further adventures! #

Airplanes, of course, were the ultimate in the future, and have been for a long time. *Here are airplanes from 1885, and from 1897. *And my favorite this is in the Amtrak Station in Philadelphia, from 1895. Its titled transportation, and it shows both the history of transportation *and its future!

Heres another vision of transportation. *Maybe we could look forward, like this gentleman, to being our own taxicab, with electric skates and *a simple wireless arrangement that uses a natty umbrella to pick up power from the air. #

Steam men and electric horses and airplanes and maybe electric roller skates seem to bring unlimited promise. But other technologies - especially new machines that seem closer to what makes us human they made people a little nervous.* Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in The House of Seven Gables in 1851: by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? #

*This prediction about the future of the telephone just a year after its invention in 1876 leaves one wondering a bit. *Its quite wonderful, that our orator can be heard around the world. But that tangle of wire makes me nervous!

And, maybe, for good reason. Lets take a look at someone not too different from Mr. Lockwood and maybe someone a lot like us. *This is a bit later a 1903 Charles Dana Gibson drawing. The caption reads: Mr. A. Merger Hogg is taking a few days' much-needed rest at his country home. Theres the stock ticker the equivalent of the Bloomberg terminal. And the typewriter, and the telegraph and telephone. Theres no rest, no respite from business. Not that different from me checking my email all day long Lockwood probably felt the same way: technology everywhere.#

*This very early adopter of the cell phone, from 1908, raises similar questions. *He doesnt look so thrilled.

*Im not sure this gentleman is either. Well all be happy then reads the caption, from 1911 the opera delivered to your door, *events as they transpire, a list of live video streams to choose from its the iPad, the internet and even the robot butler on roller skates, who, alas, were still waiting for. On the hand, theres also the *observascope, letting us keep a watch on everyone and everyone keep a watch on us. #

*Maybe were not happy because of this kind of fear: information machines get a little too close to us. *

*We wanted flying cars, and robots, and we got the internet, TV cameras watching us, and too many buttons to push on our automatic machines.

But it doesnt matter, because, like LeGrande Lockwood, were spending our time tweeting, and that can be a pretty entertaining future, too.

#Thanks.

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