ABSTRACT
Against stiff competition from other cities Philadelphia supplied the machines and motive power for a range of industries vital to the expansion of the American economy. Builders favoured massive steam engines, machine tools, pumping engines and iron ships - the large, self-acting machines that contemporaries called, 'Philadelphia Style'. Machine building required well-equipped and sophisticated foundries, forges and machine shops. The industry soon dropped early handicraft techniques and turned to using machines powered by steam. The largest centre of population in eighteenth-century United States, with strong artisan involvement in science, technology and manufacturing, a large pool of merchant capital and a hinterland rich in minerals and agriculture all contributed to expansion and to making Philadelphia an important eastern industrial city. Failure to capture economies of scale made the city's builders vulnerable to competition from elsewhere. In New England, unlike Philadelphia, textile machinery was the midwife to the industrial revolution.
