How the Scots Invented the Modern World (60 page)

Other immigrants settled in Illinois (two of the original founders of Chicago were Scots, John Kinzie and Alexander White), Ohio, and the upper Midwest. But large numbers were drawn farther out, to the Pacific Northwest (Scottish-born Robert Stuart blazed the original Oregon Trail), Utah (the earliest Mormon missionaries were Scottish-born Presbyterian converts), and above all California. In 1814 California’s very first non-Hispanic, non-Indian resident was a Scottish sailor named John Gilroy. By 1830 there were fifty Scottish families living in California, and as early as 1839 Alexander Forbes, a Scottish merchant in Tepic in Mexico, was urging colonization of California—by
Britain.
George Simpson, top-hatted executive of the Hudson’s Bay Company, agreed. “English it must become,” he said of California. “Either Great Britain will introduce her well-regulated freedom of all classes and colours, or the people of the United States will inundate the country with their own peculiar mixture of helpless bondage and lawless insubordination.”

In the end, the “lawless insubordination” did win out, but not the forces for slavery. California’s multicultural mix, with whites, Spanish Creoles, Hawaiians, and Native Americans posed no problem for Scots. Scottish-descended mountain men such as Kit Carson and Isaac Graham came from Kentucky and Tennessee to live, trade, play, and quarrel with Spaniard, Indian, and Englishman alike. Hugh Reid was the sandy-haired, blue-eyed son of a Cardross shopkeeper who emigrated to Los Angeles in 1834 and became partners with James McKinley. Reid married the daughter of a local chief, opened a school for boys, and dubbed himself Don Perfecto Hugo Reid. He soon owned one of the largest haciendas in California, the Rancho Santa Anita, which covered most of present-day Pasadena. He sat in California’s constitutional convention when it became a state, and led the fight to bring it into the union as a free state. He also called the white settlers’ treatment of the Indians “the shame of this country and a disgrace” and became a leading defender of Indian rights and interests until his death in 1852.

Then, in January 1848, a Scottish immigrant named James Wilson Marshall was inspecting the mill race of John Sutter’s mill not far from San Francisco, when “my eye was caught by something shining in the bottom of the ditch. . . . I reached my hand down and picked it up. It made my heart thump, for I was certain it was gold. The piece was about half the size and shape of a pea. Then I saw another. . . .” Marshall raced back to the mill, shouting, “Boys, I believe I have found a gold mine.”

So he had. The California Gold Rush not only brought thousands of new residents, including Scots, but also changed the very nature of success in America. It offered instant wealth for the asking—by 1857, total production of gold reached over $500 million, almost all of it going to private individuals. Riches, for those who were quick or cunning or lucky enough to find them, became the promise of California and the West.

For example, the Donahoe brothers were actually of Irish ancestry, but born and raised in Glasgow. Michael was the first to come to America in 1831, to work with his uncle in New York. All three brothers, Michael, Peter, and James, then went to work for a locomotive builder in Paterson, New Jersey, until the Gold Rush drew them to California. All three became millionaires but, as is appropriate for hardworking Scots, not as gold prospectors. Peter opened a steamship line carrying prospectors and other immigrants between San Francisco and Sacramento. He built the first steam engine for a U.S. Navy vessel on the West Coast, and the first steam locomotive in California. James and Michael became partners in the Union Iron Foundry, and while James retired, rich and satisfied, Michael opened another major foundry in Davenport, Iowa, with a sideline in steam engines and agricultural machinery. Meanwhile, Scottish engineer Andrew Hallidie designed and built San Francisco’s cable car network in 1873, a symbol of the city to this day—but also of the Scottish aptitude for engineering, transportation, and communication.

As early as the 1850s Scottish clerical missionaries such as William Ander-son of San Francisco’s First Presbyterian Church and William Scott of the Calvary Presbyterian were prophesying that the new California would become the American Utopia. Scott, who had been born in Tennessee in a log cabin and had been Andrew Jackson’s personal spiritual adviser, even saw San Francisco as the new Athens—a kind of Edinburgh on the Pacific. But the most influential of these Scottish-descended California clerics was the Methodist William Taylor, whom one historian has dubbed the John the Baptist of the Gold Rush. In addition to preaching, “California” Taylor visited the San Francisco hospital daily where men from the gold fields had been abandoned by their friends to die. He organized revival meetings along the Long Wharf every Sunday, where hundreds would gather to sing hymns and hear him preach on a passage from Scripture particularly appropriate for Californians: “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”

In 1854 San Francisco became famous for another reason. The
Flying
Cloud
arrived in harbor from New York, having made the trip in eighty-nine days and eight hours—a world record. The
Flying Cloud
was built by Donald McKay, born in Canada of Scottish parents, whose shipyards in East Boston were the nursery of the great clipper ships of the age. “If great length, sharpness of ends, with proportionate breadth and depth conduce to speed,” wrote Duncan Maclean of the
Boston Daily Atlas,
“the Flying Cloud must be uncommonly swift.” She certainly was. Running 225 feet long and 41 feet wide, with iron straps stretched over her hull’s planks for more durability, the
Flying Cloud
set the Cape Horn world speed record not once but twice.

In the decades before steam “annihilated distance” in transoceanic travel, the McKay clippers could sail more than four hundred miles a day. They opened up the oceans to a new pattern of world trade, as did those of his Scottish competitors. Scottish-built China clippers became legends, such as the
Thermopylae
of William Thompson’s White Star Line from Aberdeen, and the
Cutty Sark,
built in Dumbarton in 1869, which started in the tea trade but then broke into the Australian wool trade as the fastest ship in the world, steam or no steam. Meanwhile, McKay’s nautical masterpieces, such as the
Lightning
and the
Great
Republic,
the biggest clipper ship ever built, connected the United States from east to west, from Boston and New York to San Francisco, before the railroads drew the coasts together with rails of iron.

Even before the railroads, however, the American continent became connected in another, perhaps more important way.

Samuel Finley Breese Morse was an accomplished portrait painter living in New York City. Like other Americans of Scottish origins or ancestry,
⁴⁴
such as Charles Willson Peale and Gilbert Stuart, he found portrait painting the perfect combination of artistic expression and good business. He painted the rich and famous, including President James Monroe; Morse also helped to found the National Academy of Design. To make even more money, he began experimenting with a new science the English and French had pioneered, the field of telegraphy. In 1834 Morse devised a system for transmitting messages electrically by wire, using a series of dots and dashes to represent each letter. The Morse telegraph, and Morse code, made a system of long-distance communication possible; a message could travel, without danger of being lost or destroyed, over thousands of miles in a matter of hours rather than months. He laid out a line between Baltimore and Washington in 1844, and sent the first true long-distance message. Ten years later America was covered with over 23,000 miles of telegraph wire. Laden with money and honors, Morse became a pillar of the New York community. He even ran for mayor twice. He had developed the ancestor of all forms of modern electronic communication, from satellites and television to radio and the telephone.

Alexander Graham Bell grew up in Edinburgh and was educated in Edinburgh High School and Edinburgh University. His family had built a reputation as experts on communication with the human voice; the old Scottish obsession with correct English pronunciation had spawned an entire industry devoted to elocution, phonetics, and speech. His father Alexander Melville Bell had developed a “visible speech system,” which he hoped would be the prototype of a universal phonetic alphabet. His son, in turn, invented a method for teaching the hearing-impaired to speak (Bell’s mother was deaf, as was his future wife), before the family emigrated to Canada in 1870.

In 1865, as telegraph wires connected the American continent from California to the east coast, and the transcontinental railroad was nearing completion, the eighteen-year-old Alex had conceived the possibility of the electrical transmission of actual human speech, not just dots and dashes on a keyed device. In the summer of 1874 he laid out his theory to his father at their house in Brantford, Ontario. “If I could make a current of electricity vary in intensity precisely as the air varies in intensity during the production of sound,” he concluded, “I should be able to transmit speech telegraphically.”

Others were working on similar devices, and some aspects of Bell’s original design were already in experimental use. As usual, however, with Scottish scientists and engineers, it was his ability to organize and systematize the ideas of others, and beat them to the punch, that ultimately paid off. In 1875 Bell was teaching at the Boston School for the Deaf—among his students was Helen Keller—when he and his friend Thomas Watson devised a telephone, or “harmonic telegraph,” which transmitted sounds over a wire. His patent application went on file at the United States Patent Office on February 14, 1876—just two hours before his leading competitor took the first step in filing his own. On March 10, Bell and Watson spoke to each other for the first time from different rooms. Bell showed his device at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, and the following year he was talking from Boston to New York, using the Western Union Company’s telegraph wires. In 1878 President Rutherford B. Hayes (the third U.S. president of Scottish descent) installed the first telephone in the White House. By the 1880s it was becoming a familiar instrument to residents in New York, Boston, and Chicago.

What appealed to Bell about the telephone was that it permitted direct, personal, long-distance communication, not just station-to-station messaging, as the telegraph did. He was determined to make telephones available to everyone who could afford them, and set up his National Bell Telephone Company in 1877 to manufacture them. By then his rivals had gotten into the act. Bell had to contend with more than six hundred lawsuits from individuals and corporations such as Western Union, whose employees Elisha Gray and Thomas Edison were working on a similar device. Eventually Bell won out, securing his monopoly of patents for telephone technology.

Bell was now a rich man. By 1883, just seven years after he had unveiled his invention to the rest of the world, his net worth was nearly a million dollars. He moved his family to Washington, D.C., where, on Winfield Scott Circle, he built a magnificent home that filled an entire block, complete with electric lighting and heating. He built himself an estate in Nova Scotia, where the ocean and the mountains reminded him of his native Scotland. He continued his work with the deaf, spending over $450,000 of his own money on new research, and became president of the National Geographic Society. Bell never became as rich as a Morgan or a Rockefeller or a Carnegie. But thanks to the telephone, he was at least as well known and powerful. Bell had become one of the new breed of American businessmen: the industrial magnate.

The rise of industrial corporations such as Bell Telephone and its long-distance subsidiary, American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T), signaled a radical change in the way capitalism organized itself. Big business was replacing the merchant-entrepreneur as the driving wheel of commerce: technology had spawned mass production, which in turn gave birth to a new system for meeting the demands of consumers and suppliers. That system, however, did not spring out of nowhere. It was the brainchild of another Scot, the creator of the prototype of modern corporate enterprise and the most famous self-made man of all: Andrew Carnegie.

He was born in 1835 in Dunfermline, a linen-weaving town that was also the final resting place of Robert the Bruce. The first distinct sound he could remember hearing as a child was the sound of his father’s hand loom working in the living room below his crib. Machinery would play various roles in Carnegie’s life, just as the whole range of Scotland’s past and present seems to come together in the education of this poor handloom weaver’s son.

From his maternal uncle he learned about traditional Scottish history, and acquired a lifelong love for the novels of Sir Walter Scott and the poetry of Robert Burns. His grandfather Andrew Carnegie, Sr., was the self-appointed discussion leader of the workingman’s “college” in nearby Pattiemuir, a working-class representative of the Scottish Enlightenment. “The participants,” the grandson recalled, “well fortified with malt whisky, were equal to any topic—philosophical, political, or economic, that might be presented.” His other grandfather, Thomas Morrison, came from a wealthy Edinburgh merchant family who had lost their fortune and position. Undeterred, Thomas had learned to be a shoemaker and made a snug life for himself in Dunfermline. He was also a committed Radical and a correspondent with the English reformer William Cobbett, and published numerous articles in Cobbett’s
Political Register.
From the one grandfather Carnegie learned his own egalitarian politics, summed up in the Scottish Radicals’ motto, “Death to privilege.” From the other he got his sense of optimism and intellectual energy, as well as a belief in education as the foundation of democracy.