New Departure Manufacturing Co., Bristol, Conn. 116.

New Departure Manufacturing Co., Bristol, Conn. 116.

View of an early modern steel and concrete industrial building divided into bays with large windows. This image is part of a series made by one of the three Eastern Illustrating & Publishing Company photographers assigned to cover New England or upstate New York. The quest for images that would be saleable as postcards resulted in the documentation of small towns and small town life at the turn of the 20th century. As the photos were shot, the glass plates were promptly sent back to Belfast, Maine, and processed into postcards at the printing plant on High Street. Bruce Clouette and Matt Roth's book "Connecicut: An Inventory of Historic Engineering and Industrial Sites" provides the following background, which places the New Departures Manufacturing Company squarely at the center of the centuries-long Connecticut hardware industry: "Albert Rockwell began his career in Bristol in 1888 by manufacturing clock-work doorbells, but he rode to prominence on production of ball bearings for bicycles and automobiles. Entry into bearing manufacture began in 1898 when Rockwell's firm, New Departure Manufacturing Co., brought out a bicycle coaster brake that used steel balls for friction reduction, and accelerated as New Departure supplied bearings for automobiles made by Bristol Engineering Co., a subsidiary organized in 1907. In 1919 General Motors acquired New Departure, which continued to make bicycle parts and to sell bearings to other automobile firms. At full capacity the company employed some 7,000 workers who produced 225,000 ball bearings per day. In the 1920s and 1930s New Departure and other Connecticut firms, notably Fafnir, the Torrington Co., Marlin-Rockwell Corp. (formed by Rockwell after leaving New Departure) and Norma-Hoffman Bearings Corp., made more than half of the ball bearings in the world, and New Departure was the world's largest producer. New Departure moved into a new factory in Bristol in 1971..." The part of the plant pictured was likely new from the ca. 1920s construction period, when steel and reinforced concrete building technologies were replacing traditional masonry and wood timber for industrial facilities, allowing more daylight and air into the interiors and greater unbroken spans of interior work spaces.