Measures for Progress: A History of the National Bureau of Standards

MAIN STREET, 1900
Equally amazing were the phonograph and gramophone with their
sound tracks on cylinders and disks, the Pianola, and the kinetescope parlors
exhibiting Mr. Edison's 1-minute amusements on film. Everybody seemed
to be inventing something' and looking for ways and means to make their
notions commercial. A crude washing machine had recently been patented
and would soon be on the market, but the zipper, invented back in 1893,
• was still being 'tinkered with and as yet had no use.
• Business firms by the thousands had spawned across the country to
provide raw materials or to make new products, as well as to supply the
increasing everyday needs of the soaring population. Small, inefficient,
and often brutally competitive, they were destined to be swallowed up by
combines and corporations organized to exploit theiE growing success. The
last decade of the 19th century became an age of trusts as industrialists, bankers,
'and speculators bought out or merged the multitudes of individual enterprises
into great monopolies. The first had been Standard Oil, founded in
1882 when it began consolidating the oil industry by taking in 80 companies
that year. By 1900, sugar, whisky, tobacco, glass, lead, cordage, copper,
rubber, timber, waterpower, coal, steel and iron, wire nails, tinpiate, sheet
steel, urban railroads, farm machinery, gas, electric, and telephone utilities,
stoves, watches, carpets, beef, flour, matches, candles, kerosene, and even
coffins, school slates, and castor oil had passed into the hands of trusts.7
With no other power to appease but its conscience, monopoly in these commodities
more often than not resulted in higher rather than 'lower prices and
frequently in an inferior product. On the other hand, it was a manifest stage
in industrialization, the consolidation of scores and sometimes hundreds of
• small businesses engaged in a single commodity leading to a degree of standardization
of product and introducing economy and quantity production
,and centralized management.
Under a traditionally laissez-faire government, public and private
complaints against the abuses of big business fell on deaf ears, and the Sher-
Anti-Trust Act of 1890 remained unexercised lest it endanger continued
prosperity. Even Theodore Roosevelt, that maverick wielder of the big
stick, was to clinch his place on the McKinley ticket in 1900 by declaring:
"We are for expansion and anything else that will benefit the American
laborer and manufacturer." All monopolies profited from the assumption
• that such so-called natural monopolies as the railroads, the telephone and
• telegraph, gas and electric companies, and the traction systems in the cities
were public necessities, and theoretically at least, subject to some degree of
regulation in the public interest.
• London:
Ernst von Halle, Trusts or Industrial Combinations and Coalitions (New York and
Macmillan, 1895), pp. 328—337, lists over 473 commodities controlled by trade
combinations.
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