Watch Phil Scranton talk about the Pennsylvania Railroad.

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Transcript of the interview with Phil Scranton:

Cramps was, if anything, the City's premier example of a successful transition from wooden shipbuilding to iron and then steel shipbuilding in the latter half in the 19th Century. And like so many of the firms in the earlier period, um, they built both coastal ships and oceangoing vessels out of large amounts of wood. And eventually with, um, steam engines down below and, and various kinds of propulsion, there's side wheelers, all that sort of stuff they were involved in undertaking, but in the wake of the Civil War. And some of this stuff about Monitors and Merrimacs and all of that really does play into it.

Um, it was very clear internationally in shipbuilding that the shift was gonna come. That wooden ships were on their way out. They didn't actually go all the way out until the early 20th Century, but nonetheless, there's an overlap.

And since we had these, these iron and steel making facilities in the region Cramps decided, all right, let's give it a try. Uh, two things happened. One is successful, and the other not so successful. Um, they were very good at building these ships, but they were very expensive to build in the United States.

Q. The iron ships you're talking about.

The iron ships. Um, partly because we had, um, highly paid labor, not just in Philadelphia, but in the United States generally compared to European labor. And the best shipbuilders in Europe in this period, um, were the British. Indeed, the Scots up along the Clyde. And they could build a ship as good as anything we could make for probably 20 or 30 percent less.

Well ships go on the ocean. Ship buying is thus, an international market. And Philadelphia shipbuilders as skilled as they were, never were able to get, gather in enough of the world demand for ships, of the commercial demand for ships to make a go of it.

This is where the bad part comes in. The only way they could sustain their relationships in the marketplace with all their suppliers, keep the skilled workers on-hand, was when the United States commenced to build it's own Navy a steel, iron and steel Navy, was to start building ships for the U.S. military forces.

Now that's a patriotic thing and a perfectly good thing, but the problem was that the Navy constantly wanted changes. They're constantly attentive to the improvements that were necessary to make these ships state-of-the-art.

If you're just building a ship that's gonna carry coal, or oil, or something, you want it to be efficient. But, but being absolutely up to date isn't so crucial.

If you're gonna put that ship out there to contend with other ships in a warfare environment, uh, it matters a whole lot more. So changes, lots of changes, lots of tests, and ultimately no profits, because of the expenses of doing this sort of work, very often over matched the budget that had been allocated.

Um, in consequence, Cramps built a lot of ships, but had a very great trouble making money out of it, because the military shipbuilding business was dramatically different than the commercial shipbuilding business.