Don Sebastian says he loves explaining the history of manufacturing in New Jersey to his chemical engineering students at NJIT. As he sees it, joining a profession is like joining a fraternity — you need to know where it’s been and where it’s going.
Sebastian dropped his knowledge on more than 1,000 attendees at the Made in NJ Manufacturing Day last Friday at iPlay America in Freehold.
He certainly has the resume to tell it. Sebastian, after all, led the effort that helped New Jersey win its federally backed manufacturing extension center 30 years ago, the organization now known as NJMEP. He also was the founding CEO of the New Jersey Innovation Institute, NJIT’s independent innovation arm — a standalone 501(c)(3) that serves as the university’s conduit to industry and government.
NJMEP CEO Pete Connolly calls him “Doctor New Jersey.”
His story, in short, is that New Jersey played a role in the foundation of almost every major industry in America. Here are 10 chapters, as told by Sebastian.
10. Hamilton picks Paterson
On Dec. 5, 1791, Alexander Hamilton delivered his Report on Manufactures to Congress, a plan to make the young country a nation of makers, not just consumers. To prove it could work, he helped launch the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures.
He put it at the Great Falls in Paterson. Sebastian said Hamilton had been impressed by the falls’ power during the Revolutionary War, when he picnicked there with George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette. Pierre L’Enfant, who planned Washington, D.C., was hired to lay out the raceways that would carry the water to the mills.
9. The creation of Silk City
Paterson’s mills started with cotton from the South. Over time, the city specialized in silk, so many mills that it became known as Silk City.
Fabric needed color, Sebastian noted, and the dye works that supplied it helped give the region an early chemical industry and a workforce skilled in process engineering.
8. Engines of a nation
As steam replaced water power, the shops that built textile machinery moved into heavier equipment. The Stevens family of Hoboken built one of the country’s first working steam locomotives and went on to run the Camden & Amboy Railroad.
Paterson’s Rogers Locomotive Works built Union Pacific’s No. 119, one of the two engines that met at the Golden Spike ceremony in Utah in 1869 to complete the transcontinental railroad.
7. The cables that hold up the Brooklyn Bridge
They came from John A. Roebling’s Sons in Trenton, the wire rope maker whose founder designed the bridge.
6. Standard Oil
John D. Rockefeller figured out that the real money in oil wasn’t in owning the wells but in everything between the well and the customer. When he organized Standard Oil, it made New Jersey its home. Sebastian credited the state’s favorable tax policy, and he said much of the oil industry followed, with production facilities and offices across the state.
5. Plastics
In Newark, John Wesley Hyatt invented celluloid while trying to find a substitute for ivory billiard balls. He never quite won that market, Sebastian said, but celluloid became the first molded plastic, Hyatt invented an early injection molding machine, and celluloid film made possible the motion pictures Thomas Edison developed up the road in West Orange.
Decades later, Leo Baekeland, searching for a synthetic substitute for shellac, created Bakelite, the first truly synthetic plastic. He set up his first factory in Perth Amboy. The business later moved to Bound Brook and was acquired by Union Carbide.
4. The medicine chest
After the Civil War, the country began to understand the importance of sterility and hygiene in medical care. Johnson & Johnson got its start in New Brunswick making sterile surgical dressings. That, plus the state’s chemistry expertise, drew the modern pharmaceutical industry, and New Jersey’s claim to be the medicine chest of the world.
3. Beer, cans and coffee
Newark was a brewing town, home to Ballantine and many other brands. In 1935, Newark’s Krueger brewery, working with American Can, became the first to sell beer in cans. And for decades, Maxwell House coffee was roasted in Hoboken.
2. The wired world
Samuel Morse demonstrated his telegraph at the Speedwell Ironworks in Morristown. The telegraph inspired Edison’s first big moneymaker, a stock ticker, and the proceeds let him set up shop in Newark, then at Menlo Park, where he perfected the light bulb, and later in West Orange.
Camden’s Victor Talking Machine Co. became RCA Victor, part of the story of broadcast radio and television. And the telephone’s New Jersey roots ran all the way to the legendary Bell Labs.
1. The wrong turn — and the fix
By the 1970s, much of that manufacturing base was declining, in New Jersey and across the country. Sebastian was careful to say it wasn’t about who was in the White House. Companies found they could outsource production to cheap overseas labor, he said, while competitors abroad reinvested their profits in automation and modernization.
Meanwhile, he said, policymakers decided the country, and New Jersey especially, should become a service economy. Sebastian called that a mistake.
The response, in the Clinton era, was a national Manufacturing Extension Partnership. Sebastian said its model was agriculture extension, which had mechanized and modernized America’s farms: do the same for manufacturers. After 20 years at Stevens Institute of Technology, he led New Jersey’s winning proposal for its own center.
Thirty years later, he said, NJMEP’s work in operational excellence, innovation, growth and workforce development is what the industry needs as manufacturing reinvents itself again.
That’s where it’s going. And now the students know where it’s been.
