Transportation, especially inland transportation, has played a more important role in the economic development of the United States than that of any other nation. After a long, slow start in which it faced the necessity of dealing across 3,000 miles of open ocean, the young nation found itself expanding westward across an equally vast land mass, without much idea of how its people might conveniently get to the Promised Land or how they would send its fruits back to market. Until the problem of inland transportation began to be solved following the War of 1812, America remained just another of the important maritime nations of the world, tied to a coastline and the few miles of coastal plain that bordered it. Such areas of the world had been virtually synonymous with “civilization” for many centuries; but in a generation or two after about 1815, the ancient domination of the sea was emphatically erased.

By systematically analyzing ship registry documents it is possible to illuminate shipholding practices at major American ports in the early national era. In this article, Professor Gilbert focuses on shipholding in Baltimore in the period just prior to the late eighteenth century European war-induced shipping boom. He finds the port's foreign trade to be largely controlled by Baltimore residents. Merchants owned by far the largest percentage of the shipping, while mariners constituted an important, albeit secondary, investor group. Sole ownership of vessels was more extensive in Federalist Baltimore than in colonial Boston or Philadelphia. More detailed comparisons of shipowning practices among the major United States ports, Gilbert concludes, await further research.

The Westinghouse air brake, a significant technical innovation in the railroad industry of the late nineteenth century, was applied to freight trains much more gradually than it was to passenger trains. In this article, Mr. Usselman explains why this was the case. Many factors, including the public movement for railroad safety, the organization of railroad brakemen, the rise of effective regulatory mechanisms at the federal level, and technical problems with the device, influenced the diffusion of the air brake and differentiated the freight and passenger cases. New administrative procedures for moving freight trains through the extensive national railroad system, which involved the interchange of equipment among many companies, presented obstacles to innovation that did not exist in the passenger branch of the industry. Individual companies seeking to adopt the air brake for freight service found that these procedures limited the independence they had traditionally enjoyed when assessing new technology. Most railroads equipped their freight trains with air brakes only after they developed new methods of coordinating industrywide action on matters of technological change.

Industrial standardization, when noted at all by historians, has usually been associated with the rise of large corporations in the late nineteenth century. In this article, however, Professor Seely contends that, in the highway industry, the introduction of uniform standards and specifications in the early twentieth century was spearheaded by federal engineers in the Bureau of Public Roads—the government's highway agency—through a variety of indirect and cooperative arrangements with state governments, trade associations, and professional organizations. Government leadership in the standardization of highway engineering practices and materials requirements, Seely concludes, suggests the significant role engineers played in the drive for uniformity. Linking nineteenth-century business-sponsored standardization efforts with the government-sponsored efforts of the twentieth century, engineers brought, despite a shift in institutional base, a singleness of purpose to the movement as a whole.

Between 1921 and 1926, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover took an active role in shaping the relationship between the federal government and the fledgling commercial aviation industry. In this article, Professor Lee shows how Hoover, drawing largely on a form of American corporatism, prompted the industry to formulate answers to its own problems through trade associations, groups which would then cooperate with government to implement those solutions. Such thinking was an important ingredient in the Air Commerce Act of 1926, the first federal law regulating commercial aviation.

In this note, Dr. Ville expands upon an analysis of the English coal trade in the eighteenth century made by William J. Hausman in the Winter 1977 issue of the Business History Review. Drawing upon the recently discovered papers of Michael Henley and Son, London shipowners between 1775 and 1830, Ville contends that Hausman underestimated both the underlying level of the trade's profitability and its highly volatile nature. Central to Ville's argument is his claim that the high degree of vertical integration in the coal trade pushed up profit levels. These high profits, Ville suggests, played an important role in British industrialization.