PLEASE NOTE: This is a minimally-edited transcript that originates from a program that uses AI.
Anisa Khalifa: The turn of the 20th century was defined by earth shattering. Advances in technology spurred on by the minds of great inventors like Alexander Graham Bell and the Wright Brothers. But for every household name. There were countless innovators whose contributions have been lost to time, including a brilliant engineer from North Carolina named Stuart Cramer, like a genius, forest Gump.
He showed up all over the place,
Brad Campbell: air conditioning, electrical systems. Dozens of patents associated with mill construction. He was a economic advisor to presidents, and he actually received a patent for an improvement to bubblegum.
You know, how elected can you get?
Anisa Khalifa: I am Anisa Khalifa. This is the broadside where we tell stories from our home at the crossroads of the South this week, the extraordinary life of a man you've probably never heard of, and the factory he built that changed the world.
Brad Campbell: My name is Brad Campbell and I am a writer for our state magazine.
Anisa Khalifa: For the last year or so, Brad's been writing a monthly series for our state called Hidden History.
Brad Campbell: And it's a kind of a deep dive into some of the lesser known stories, uh, about North Carolina.
Anisa Khalifa: And he recently discovered one that amazed him, the life of a largely forgotten genius named Stuart Cramer.
Brad Campbell: I had the great privilege of talking to his grandson, Warren Cramer, and, uh, Warren called him an incandescent white light of prowess, which I thought was kind of an amazing, an amazing description, but actually very true. We often overuse the term, you know, Renaissance man or renaissance person. He, he really was that.
Anisa Khalifa: Stuart Cramer was born in Thomasville, North Carolina just after the Civil War. As a young man, he seemed destined for a career in the Navy. He studied naval engineering at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, but when he graduated in 1888, Cramer actually resigned his commission in the military. His next move would foreshadow the restless brilliance that would define his life instead of hopping on a ship, Stuart chose to continue his studies underground at the Columbia School of Mines.
Brad Campbell: And that experience led him to become an sayer at the Charlotte Mint.
Anisa Khalifa: It may sound surprising now, but Charlotte, North Carolina was an obvious landing spot for an ambitious young mining engineer. Today, the city is known as the banking capital of the south, but its association with money goes back hundreds of years.
In fact, the first documented discovery of gold in the United States happened nearby. In 1799.
Brad Campbell: Before the California gold rush, there was the North Carolina gold rush. There was a boy who skipped Sunday school and uh, went fishing and he found this 14 pound rock in the stream and it glittered. And he thought that that was really cool.
And so he took it home to his dad, and his dad used it as a doorstop for about two years. Before he finally decided, well, you know, maybe there's something to this. And he brought it to a goldsmith or a jeweler. And, and the guy said, well, that's gold. And the guy cheated him in a big time way. Uh, but he went back and staked a claim in that stream.
Anisa Khalifa: So North Carolina became the site of the first gold mine in America. And later in order to avoid the danger and expense of shipping gold out of state to be melted and coined, it also became home to the country's very first branch min, the Charlotte Mint, where Stuart Cramer worked.
As an Assayer Stuart's job was to test the purity of gold, which people were still finding in the area almost a hundred years after the Gold Rush started.
Brad Campbell: People wouldn't take him seriously. He was so useful looking, uh, when it came to their gold, you know, they weren't kind of taking him seriously and so they kept asking for the boss.
And so what he finally did was he brew this, this sort of very distinguished mustache and, uh, that gave him the sort of gravitas that he needed to deal with the, the people that he was working with at the Charlotte met.
Anisa Khalifa: But as influential as the Gold Rush was in the late 18 hundreds, the textile industry was the juggernaut business in North Carolina, and it attracted some of the region's brightest minds.
So after a few years, Stuart made another drastic life change. He left the mint to work for engineer and industrialist DA Tompkins, who was building textile mills throughout the south in these factories with their complex layouts and rapidly evolving technologies. He found his true calling.
Brad Campbell: He decided that he could do this on his own, and he did.
He went out on his own and he ended up by his grandson's estimate, he ended up designing between 150 and 180 textile mills throughout the south. Wow. So just an extraordinary achievement. He also wrote like a four volume set on mill construction, and as a result of that, he also earned. Dozens of patents, most of them associated with milk construction, but he also had some really offbeat things.
I was going through the list of patents that he had just a couple of days ago, and he actually had a patent for an improvement on bubblegum.
Anisa Khalifa: So it's not just, you know, like super, you know, narrow engineering, like mill related things. He's doing all kinds of stuff.
Brad Campbell: He was into everything.
Anisa Khalifa: This was the height of the American Industrial Revolution when the possibilities of steam and water power were lighting up the minds of inventors across the country.
But then in 1896, science and industry received an even. Bigger jolt when Nicola Tesla harnessed the power of Niagara Falls to make Buffalo New York, one of the first electrified cities in the world.
Brad Campbell: And that changes the game entirely. And so what these mill manufacturers begin to do is, uh, they're already, and in a lot of cases, they're already located next to water sources, and so they begin to dam these rivers and begin to generate hydroelectric power. And as a result of that, Stuart Cramer had a close relationship with both Westinghouse and Edison.
Anisa Khalifa: Brad is referring here to the giants of early electricity, George Westinghouse and Thomas Edison. This was the era of competing electric power transmission systems. Westinghouse wanted America to adopt alternating current ac. While Edison pushed for direct current dc their rivalry was so intense. It became known as the War of the Currents, and Stuart Cramer was right in the middle.
Brad Campbell: And so what you had during the late 18 hundreds is people who were interested in, in powering their plants or powering their cities, they were trying to make a decision on which of these two systems that they were going to use. And so Stuart Cramer spent a lot of time with both Edison. Westinghouse trying to figure out the merits of, of the two systems so he could make a recommendation for the plants that he was designing back in North Carolina and in other states in the south.
Anisa Khalifa: Stuart's practical recommendations had far reaching consequences during the adoption of electricity across the United States and later the rest of the world. But that was by no means the only time he would contribute to a worldwide technological advance. During this period, he also stumbled onto something that up until now seemed like science fiction.
Brad Campbell: What was happening in the mills at the time is that you're in the deep south. Humidity is a real problem, and it's actually a real problem in a textile mill because the humidity creates an inconsistent product, and what you wanna have is humidity that is stable, not high, not too high, not too low, and so he basically starts looking into systems.
Which they can manipulate to quote, condition the air to lower the overall humidity and also make it more consistent to create a more consistent product. And by lowering the U humidity, it actually also ends up, uh, chilling the air to a degree. And that really became the beginnings of air conditioning.
Anisa Khalifa: How incredible. Yeah,
Brad Campbell: so air conditioning was a byproduct of his mill work and his mill patents.
Anisa Khalifa: Now, this invention was in 1906, and an early form of air conditioning is widely acknowledged to have been invented by Willis Haviland carrier in 1902. But Stuart did later sell his patent to carrier, and it undeniably contributed to the first real modern AC unit. Which the company produced in 1933, and not only that, the first documented use of the term air conditioning is in a speech Stuart gave in Asheville in 1906.
Brad Campbell: So we all have Stuart Cramer to thank for our air conditioning, which is just an amazing achievement on his part.
Anisa Khalifa: But Stuart Cramer didn't just have a hand in the coolest thing since the invention of refrigeration. After the break, he goes on to change the fabric of American life forever.
At the turn of the century, Stuart Cramer was literally doing the most building mills, experimenting with early hydroelectricity. Getting 60 patents for his inventions, including air conditioning. He owned a furniture company. He even co-founded North Carolina's first electric power company with tobacco magnate, James Buchanan Duke.
But by 1915, his body couldn't keep up with the brilliance of his mind. Our state magazine's, Brad Campbell again.
Brad Campbell: When he was at the end of his tether, when he was just completely worn out from, from building all of these mills across the southeast, he decided to divest himself of all of these other separate outside interests that he had, and he decided to purchase an existing mill and really to create an ideal.
Mill community in North Carolina.
Anisa Khalifa: Stuart actually bought one of the mills he had built about 15 miles from his home in Charlotte and decided to transform it using all the expertise he'd gained over the years. He would eventually rename both the mill and the town. Cramerton.
Brad Campbell: So he, he built schools, he built churches, he built recreational facilities.
Um, you know, he had learned a lot by building all of these other mills, and he learned that the most successful mills were the ones that treated their employees better. He was very progressive in this way.
Anisa Khalifa: Remember, this is the early 20th century when industrialists were building huge mills. And creating entire self-contained company towns around them to attract workers.
And for the most part, these towns did not exist for the wellbeing of mill workers, but to extract the maximum value for mill owners.
Brad Campbell: And they didn't have a very enlightened view of their employees, but I believe that Stuart Cramer was just the opposite.
Anisa Khalifa: The mill houses he built in Cramerton had electricity, hot water, and ventilation.
He obsessed over the smallest of details in order to make the workers comfortable, and yet the town of Cramerton was segregated. It can't be described as a utopia, but it was ahead of its time in many ways. And that was in large part due to the inventions of its founder.
Brad Campbell: He built this mansion on top of Cramerton Mountain and it, they had this huge pool.
And again, in, in his, his cascading mind, he saw it. Well, here I've got this body of water at the top of this hill. This will be our backup emergency, uh, water. Supply if we have a big fire. And so, so he basically, uh, plumbed it so that he could run that water down to the plants and to the town so that they would have a, another source of water in case, uh, they had a big fire.
Another thing he did, I mean, just these sort of little touches that you would only get from someone who's also an inventor. He, instead of doing intersections, uh, with the trains and the cars, he would actually build overpasses and underpasses so that the trains wouldn't have to signal their whistle when they were crossing a road at night so that his mill workers wouldn't be awakened by the sound of the, the train whistle.
It
Anisa Khalifa: sounds like he was a very detail oriented person.
Brad Campbell: Yeah. Yes, very much so. Very much so.
Anisa Khalifa: This could have been his final act sitting in a mansion on a hill overlooking his own personal sim city, but in true workaholic fashion, Stuart still wasn't done reinventing his world. What is Cramer's most important legacy?
Brad Campbell: Well, I think a lot of people would say the cramerton khaki.
Anisa Khalifa: Now the word khaki actually originates in South Asia. It's a lone word from the Urdu word kki, which means soil colored. The first recorded cocky military uniform was worn by the British Indian army in Lahore in the mid 18 hundreds. I know this because my people are from the city of Lahore in what is now Pakistan.
Today, khaki is a globally iconic fabric, but it was first popularized in America by Cramerton Mills, and it came about due to a chance conversation Stuart Cramer had with his old college roommate from the US Naval Academy, a man who ended up becoming the Secretary of the Navy.
Brad Campbell: They were having, they were reminiscing several years after.
And um, the Secretary of the Navy, Curtis Wilbur, was complaining that the uniforms that the Navy had at the time were just as hot and poorly made as they had been when they were students at Annapolis. And Stuart Cramer said, well, I own a textile mill company. So he went back to Cramerton and by this time his two sons were running.
Bill and he brought the subject up with them and they thought it was a great idea. So they were able to talk to the quartermasters and, uh, were given a specification for a new uniform, and they came up with this khaki twill that was unique in, in a whole lot of different respects.
Anisa Khalifa: How was it different from the material that the Navy had been using before that?
Brad Campbell: Well, um, the, the Navy was actually using wool, and so wool was scratching. Oh, wow. Yeah. And heavy and, and hot. And, um, the, the. The twill that they came up with was this sort of, um, they actually first developed this really tight and silky yarn, and then they had this strong, very long fiber that was woven into this tight cotton twill that was kind of in diagonal stripes.
And it made for a very wrinkle resistant, almost waterproof fabric. Hmm. And the navy loved it. The Army ended up hearing about it, and they, they loved it as well, and so it became adopted throughout the military.
Anisa Khalifa: Cramer, Tim Khaki was born. The textile was first sold to the military in 1929. There wasn't a lot of demand for it at first, but it was enough to keep Cramerton Mills operating through the Great Depression. And then
Brad Campbell: we saw the rise of Hitler in Germany. We go into the wild sky, the,
and when the war started for the United States in December of 1941. Demand just. Skyrocketed and in fact the demand far outstripped Cramerton Mills capacity to manufacture it. So very generously. They ended up sharing that patent with other manufacturers throughout the country and actually sent out technical advisors who helped these other mills, or that help these other mills set up their looms properly so that they could produce the fabric and.
This fabric was in production and used by the military through the mid seventies into Vietnam before they started going to synthetic fabric. Oh, wow. So it was, it was in use for well over, uh, 30 some odd years.
Anisa Khalifa: Cramerton mills clothed, millions of soldiers around the world, and yet its most influential moment came about in peace time.
What was the impact of Cramer and khaki on fashion?
Brad Campbell: Well, khaki became sort of a defacto uniform for GIS coming back from World War ii who were benefiting from the GI Bill, and they had all these uniform shirts and pants. They ended up, uh, repurposing, uh, on college campuses. And it, it actually became a look and a kind of a fashion statement, if you will.
Anisa Khalifa: Today. This fabric isn't just college wear, but an essential part of contemporary fashion. Khaki can be seen virtually everywhere from business meetings to backyard barbecues, a lasting symbol of North Carolina's proud cloth making past,
Brad Campbell: I think. Cramerton Mills probably sits at the pinnacle of that textile mill tradition in North Carolina because of Cramerton khaki and because of how incredibly popular and effective it was as a material for our military uniforms at a at a critical time in our country's history.
Anisa Khalifa: The textile industry left long ago and the regions once booming, mill towns have since had their ups and downs. Now many of the former factories have become a part of our urban landscape, transformed into other uses. Loft apartments in Greensboro, restaurants and offices in Durham, a music venue in Saxapahaw.
As for Cramerton, they held out longer than most The last of the towns mills closed in 1999, but in their place, Stuart Cramer didn't just leave behind empty buildings to turn into trendy apartments. Writer, Brad Campbell says, the most enduring legacy of the man who helped bring us khaki electricity and air conditioning might just be a small town that works.
Brad Campbell: The school buildings are still there. The gymnasium and the tennis courts and the parks and the churches, all of those things are still there.
Anisa Khalifa: Wow.
Brad Campbell: It's just a really robust, uh, a really robust community.
Anisa Khalifa: You can find a link to Brad Campbell's story about Stuart Cramer for our state magazine in this week's show notes. This episode was produced by me, Anisa Khalifa, and edited by Jared Walker. The rest of our team includes producer Charlie Shelton Ormond, and executive producer Wilson Sere. The Broadside is a production of WUNC North Carolina Public Radio and is part of the NPR network.
If you have feedback or a story idea, you can email us at broadside@wunc.org. If you enjoyed the show, leave us a rating, a review, or share it with a friend. Thanks for listening, y'all. We'll be back next week.