Steam Boilers and Ideal Accidents, 1850-1910

FAIN: FT-291447-23

Michael Newbury
Middlebury College (Middlebury, VT 05753-6004)

Research and writing of an article examining how industrial disasters made way for advancements in technology in nineteenth-century American industry.

Focusing on the history of boiler explosions in general and on a particular tragedy at the R B Grover shoe factory in Brockton, Massachusetts, this essay will examine how capitalists, managers, engineers, social scientists, journalists, insurers, laborers, lawyers, and courts battled over and shaped the meaning of workplace “accidents” near the turn of the twentieth century.