Josiah White

Josiah White (1781–1850) was a key Pennsylvania industrialist who began early factory centered mill production in 1808 in water powered iron works near Philadelphia, along with his partner, Erskine Hazard when they quickly found their first mill at the Falls of the Schuylkill to be much too small. Subsequently, soon after they were forced to build a much more elaborate large mill nearby to refine pig iron and produce cast iron artifacts or roll wrought bar iron goods, including nails and wire. The pair were especially important after 1814 in helping make the American Industrial Revolution not only maintain, but accelerate its building momentum by agitating for infrastructure investment, sponsoring two key river navigations and the nation's first long railway,[1] and then after initial success, increasingly supplying an expanding part of the country's overall energy needs including that of other industrialists at a time when there occurred the prolonged first energy crisis in the brief history of the country[2] — where forests had grown remote from population centers through over logging, charcoal and imported coal were increasing in price rapidly, and fire wood was growing dearly expensive.[3]

Josiah White and Erskine Hazard-founding partners of the Lehigh Coal Company, the Lehigh Navigation Company, the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company, the Lehigh Canal, the Summit Hill & Mauch Chunk Railroad, the Ashley Planes, the Lehigh & Susquehanna Railroad.

Josiah White was a mill owner, and early pioneer in the advancement of civil engineering, mining, iron production, water transport and railroad development, boat and barge shipping & construction. An innovative open-minded pragmatist, most of all in response to the energy crises in the early 19th century, his focus from 1815 on was mostly about the mining, and delivery of anthracite coal to others for their manufacturing and domestic heating needs in everyday life. Having taken over an 1808 speculative charter to build locks and mill races along the Schuylkill River's Falls of the Schuylkill (today the shoreline alongside East Falls — the falls now being submerged by the water works dam a mile farther down river.) as Hagner relates: " Erskine Hazard was the partner of Josiah, White in the iron and wire business; in the, erection of the locks and mill-seats he had, another partner, Joseph Gillingham. They finished the locks and canal on the western side of, the river and two mills were built there — one a sawmill, the other for making white lead." These were in addition to the two main mills of White & Hazard Hagner spends more time discussing, which were on the east or left bank.[4]

During the War of 1812 he directed the effort to find a way to ignite and burn effectively Anthracite coal, and succeeded.[lower-alpha 1] This alone would give him a place in history, but that was but a start. Along with his partner, Erskine Hazard, he also helped found numerous companies, most either mining operations or transportation enterprises opened to establish a better transportation infrastructure for transport of this coal, people, and other industrial materials needs such as ores, timber, and finished goods in the Schuylkill Valley, the Lehigh Valley, the Greater Delaware Valley, and Wyoming Valley regions. Having commissioned anthracite shipment by mule train from up the Schuylkill, in 1815 White and Hazard started the Lehigh Canal machinations as commissioners, but were not selected by investors to become the operations managers elected to work out ways and means. Subsequently, the managers selected a slow plodding approach with which the partners quarreled, championing instead a means to deliver coal down river much more quickly using temporary dams and artificial freshets in order to produce revenue from one way traffic delivering coal. This method was rejected by the managers, resulting in the belated first deliveries of coal on the Schuylkill Canal only in 1823, while their method delivered record amount of 365 long-tons of anthracite coal down the Lehigh Canal to Philadelphia in December 1820, four years ahead of promises. Their Lehigh Coal and Navigation Companies are credited with being the earliest known example of vertical integration, the companies each sourcing at least part of the needs of the next domino in the chain.

His innovations reached into finished goods as well, having learned how to burn anthracite for industrial iron processing, he experimented with a succession of fireplace and furnace grates until he created artifacts allowing use of the stone coal to replace expensive fire wood for heating. In 1818 White's wire works built the first (temporary) wire suspension bridge 400 feet (120 m) over the Falls of the Schuylkill using trees and tall buildings near the river to string catenary cables from which a board walk was suspended attached by wires. Ever looking for better ways in the 1820s he and Hazard experimented with blast furnace production of smelted pig iron using charges of anthracite in Mauch Chunk, and succeeded in part, perhaps as much as any in America, for their processes could not always reliably repeat, so were not commercially viable in the long run. This primed them to import skills and necessary equipment when news of successful use of anthracite pig iron processes arrived from Wales in 1838; subsequently he invested heavily and had, as the operating manager, had the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company invest in the Lehigh Crane Iron Company backing the importing of professional talent from Wales to establish the first sustainably-successful blast furnaces of the region in Catasauqua,[lower-alpha 2] and established the first wire rope (steel cable) factory in the United States in Mauch Chunk which enabled the Ashley Planes and up cable railway conversion & expansion of the Summit Hill & Mauch Chunk Railroad.