Byzantine America
Dayton’s patent machine, Wright-Patterson, Pullman cars and hotel chains: private systems that worked like governments.
- 1Byzantine America: NCR, the Angletons, the Knights of Malta, and Dayton’s Hidden Architecture of Command
Long before Silicon Valley learned to describe the world in terms of data, networks, permissions and surveillance, Dayton, Ohio, was already building machines whose purpose was remarkably similar: make activity visible, record…
- 2When a Tire Company Owned Rockets, Radio, and Hollywood: The Strange History of General Tire, Aerojet, RKO, Howard Hughes, and a Factory in Wabash
There was a period in American business when the same corporate family could put rubber under an automobile, build rocket motors for the military, own radio and television stations, and control a Hollywood film library purchased…
- 3Building 828 Inside America’s Byzantine Vault: How Wright-Patterson Became the Place Where Rival Empires Were Taken Apart and Rebuilt as American Intelligence
There is an ordinary-looking building at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base whose history suggests a much stranger description than “intelligence headquarters.” Building 828 was conceived in the 1950s as the permanent home for a…
- 4The Empire That Became an Archive: Tsarist Russia and the White City of Byzantine America
In October 1957, men and women inside Stanford University’s Hoover Institution gathered around several battered wooden crates and began cutting through their seals. The boxes had crossed an ocean more than thirty years earlier.…
- 5The Hotel Is the Machine: Hilton, Hughes, TWA and the Birth of the Networked World
Long before anybody carried a smartphone, a certain kind of traveler was already moving through something that looked surprisingly like a digital network. A businessman could leave New York, board an aircraft whose seat had been…
- 6The Pullman State: How the Sleeping Car Became a Private Government on Rails
In the late nineteenth century, an American traveler could buy a ticket from one railroad and then spend the night inside a railcar belonging to an entirely different corporation. The man taking his coat was employed by that…
- 7The Wilmington Machine: Trump Brothers, DuPont, and the Industrial Corridor That Built Modern America
Most histories of American industry teach us to look toward Pittsburgh for steel, New York for finance, Detroit for automobiles, or Chicago for railroads and meatpacking. Wilmington, Delaware, usually enters the story as little…
- 8Before Silicon Valley: Dayton’s Patent Machine
Ask where the center of American technological innovation stood around 1900 and most people instinctively look toward Thomas Edison’s New Jersey laboratories, the steel works of Pittsburgh, the factories of Chicago, or eventually…
- 9The Commandery State: How Forts, Telegraphs, Patent Networks, and Bicycle Shops Built Ohio’s Machinery of Control
There is another way to tell the history of Ohio and the old Northwest, one that begins neither with statehood nor with the familiar progression from farm to factory. It begins with the problem of command: how a relatively small…
- 10Paris Hilton and the Corporate Avatar
In November 2003, the internet began distributing a version of Paris Hilton that she had never intended to offer it. The recording belonged to an intimate relationship; the audience belonged to a new communications system in…
- 11The Pope System: How a Civil War Officer Turned A Catalog Into A National Supply Network
In 1904, the Pope Manufacturing Company told American buyers that its catalogs could be found in the hands of ten thousand dealers across the country—or obtained through the mail for the price of a two-cent stamp. The boast…