BREWSTER’S RAMBLE #149 (continued)

BREWSTER’S RAMBLE #149

HIGH TECH IN THE EARLY 1800s

But enough of local for our present purpose. To look at Portsmouth now and compare it with what it was fifty years ago, no one will deny that it has made steady progress in many important particulars -- such as we may well be proud of.

The changes in the outer world have been as great as in any half-century since the flood. The printer's eye is naturally cast first on the progress of that art which is the preservation of all arts. In 1818, he put in type a paragraph which announced a new discovery in paper making. In March of that year, Messrs. Gilpin, on the Brandywine, gave notice of a discovery whereby paper can be made by machinery, in a continuous sheet of any length. Until then every sheet of paper was made singly by hand, and when used for paper hangings, sheets were pasted together to make the roll. This discovery saved more than half the expense of labor in paper manufacture.

Fifty years ago the most rapid Printing Presses in this country could not print more than 300 impressions per hour. The London Literary Gazette, in March 1818, announced that a wonderful invention had just been made in England, whereby one thousand sheets of that paper could be printed in an hour. It says that it is an improvement on the steam press of the London Times, which had been in operation about three years. Now, 30,000 impressions are made per hour by the Hoe presses, and only last month it was announced that a new press in Paris is sending out 600 impressions per minute! Although this statement needs confirmation, yet the known facts show that the progress of Printing in the last fifty years has been greater than from the time of its discovery in 1429 to 1818.

Fifty years ago he thinks there was not a City in any New England state, excepting Connecticut. The town of Boston contained about fifty thousand inhabitants. The cities of Lowell, Lawrence, Nashua and Manchester had not even received a name, -- and the flowing waters of the Cocheco and Salmonfalls were only used for grist and saw mills. Boston then had but one daily paper, the Boston Daily Advertiser, three or four years old. It was about half the present size of the Journal. The Boston Chronicle & Patriot was published on Mondays and Thursdays, the New England Palladium on Tuesdays and Fridays, and the Columbian Centinel on Wednesdays and Saturdays. These were all the regular commercial newspapers of Boston fifty years ago. The Daily Advertiser, now the first newspaper in New England, is the only survivor.

There are but few papers on our exchange list which have remained for fifty years. The Boston Daily Advertiser, the Salem Gazette, the Salem Register, the Newburyport Herald, the Keene Sentinel, the Concord Patriot, and the Amherst Cabinet, were in 1818 and are now on our exchange list.

Fifty years ago the art of Lithography was undiscovered. He well recollects the admiration excited by the first specimens of the new discovery. Daguerre had not then dreamed of enlisting the services of the sun to produce truer pictures than the fifty preceding centuries had ever known.

In 1818, the application of steam to propelling river boats was but just commenced. Fulton made his first expedition in 1807, and died in 1815. In 1818 there were on the Mississippi but 23 steamboats, where there now are over 1600. In 1818 the first outside boat commenced running between New York and New Orleans. In 1819 a company in Georgia built a steamer, called the Savannah, and sent her to Europe. This was the first time the ocean had been crossed by steam power. But nearly twenty years elapsed before any regular line of steamers was established. In that time the foreign news was received with no regularity. Thirty and forty days from Europe was not unusual, and sometimes we were favored with the latest dates by arrivals at Portsmouth. But the regular ten-days trips of the steamers are now put in the distance by another discovery of the day, the Telegraph, which will make a circuit round the world in less than the "forty minutes" of Shakspeare's fanciful imagination.

Fifty years ago our golden fields in California, then belonging to Mexico, were unexplored -- and the present fuel of our whole country laid in its undisturbed beds in Pennsylvania--the "great unknown," -- as was the author of Waverly, then at work on that array of novels which long after were acknowledged the productions of Sir Walter Scott.

In 1818, Napoleon Bonaparte who had been a terror in Europe, and still the lion of the day, was yet alive, held in St. Helena. His brother Joseph was in Philadelphia, Louis in Rome, and Jerome in Austria; their mother was also alive in Italy. Lafayette and his son were also then in France, and six years after came to America. All have since departed and passed into history.

Turnpikes were the only internal improvements made previous to 1818. There had been but two inconsiderable canals constructed in the whole country previous to that time--the Middlesex canal, connecting the Merrimac river with Boston, 27 miles; and the Santee and Charleston canal of 22 miles. The Champlain canal was constructed in 1824, the great Erie canal of 365 miles in 1826, the Ohio canal of 300 miles in 1832, and twelve other large canals were constructed in the country up to 1832 -- when Railroad facilities took the place of many of them, and stopped this mode of internavigation. The project of connecting lake Winnipisseogee with the tide water of the Piscataqua was also abandoned when the steam horse promised to do the labor better and more speedily. These improvements have all been brought forth in the country while the writer has been quietly noting their progress from his "loop hole of retreat."

BREWSTER’S RAMBLE #149 continued