One of the greatest difficulties confronting the writer of economic history is to convey to his audience a full sense of the kinds of problems which plagued and confounded his ancestors. This is particularly so in a country such as the United States, which prides itself upon its technological versatility and which tackles the most spectacular technological problems with an exuberant – not to say brash – self-confidence. In a society which now routinely practices such arcane crafts as “molecular architecture” and “genetic engineering” – activities which put to shame the medieval alchemist who would have been satisfied merely to turn dross into gold – it requires a great mental leap to understand the limitations confronting the colonial craftsman or the early nineteenth-century machinist. In a society which takes for granted a remarkably wide range of substitutability among material inputs in the production process – indeed, whose members would be hard-pressed even to identify the materials composing their table tops or sweaters – it is difficult in the extreme to appreciate the constraints confronting early Americans as they went about their ordinary productive activities. For our technological versatility is a recent acquisition – essentially a product of the past century or so. As we go farther back in historical time we enter a period one of the most distinctive characteristics of which was an extreme dependence upon the raw facts of the natural environment.

This dependence provides a central underlying theme of my paper, which concentrates upon the emergence of woodworking machinery in America between 1800 and the 1850's.