Josiah White
The pair were especially influential after 1814 in helping make the American Industrial Revolution accelerate its building momentum by agitating for infrastructure investment, sponsoring two key river navigations and the nation's first long railway,[1] and then after initial success, increasingly supplying an expanding part of the country's overall energy needs including that of other industrialists at a time when there occurred the prolonged first energy crisis in the brief history of the country,[2] where forests had grown remote from population centers through over logging, charcoal and imported coal were increasing in price rapidly, and fire wood was growing dearly expensive.
An innovative open-minded pragmatist, most of all in response to the energy crises in the early 19th century, his focus from 1815 on was mostly about the mining, and delivery of anthracite coal to others for their manufacturing and domestic heating needs in everyday life.
Having commissioned anthracite shipment by mule train from up the Schuylkill, in 1815 White and Hazard started the Lehigh Canal machinations as commissioners, but were not selected by investors to become the operations managers elected to work out ways and means.
His innovations reached into finished goods as well, having learned how to burn anthracite for industrial iron processing, he experimented with a succession of fireplace and furnace grates until he created artifacts allowing use of the stone coal to replace expensive fire wood for heating.
Ever looking for better ways in the 1820s he and Hazard experimented with blast furnace production of smelted pig iron using charges of anthracite in Mauch Chunk in present-day Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, and succeeded in part, perhaps as much as any in the United States, for their processes could not always reliably repeat, so were not commercially viable in the long run.
This primed them to import skills and necessary equipment when news of successful use of anthracite pig iron processes arrived from Wales in 1838; subsequently he invested heavily and had, as the operating manager, had the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company invest in the Lehigh Crane Iron Company backing the importing of professional talent from Wales to establish the first sustainably-successful blast furnaces of the region in Catasauqua,[b] and established the first wire rope factory in the United States in Mauch Chunk, which enabled Ashley Planes and up cable railway conversion and expansion of Mauch Chunk Switchback Railway.
No sooner had White, Hazard, and Hauto obtained a lease of the coal lands in what is now Mauch Chunk than they applied to the Legislature for an act authorizing them to improve the navigation of the river.
[6] The act of March 20, 1818, incorporating the Lehigh Navigation and Coal Company, "gave these gentlemen the opportunity of ruining themselves, since many members of the Legislature predicted would be the result of their undertaking."
