Forging a Nation: Philadelphia’s Role in Industrial Growth

Engineer and inventor Josiah White and his partner Erskine Hazard established the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company to bring large amounts of anthracite coal from Northeastern Pennsylvania to Philadelphia. In the 1810s, workers at White and Hazard’s Philadelphia factory discovered that anthracite coal burned much longer and more intensely than the more commonly used bituminous coal, providing an exceptionally powerful energy source for manufacturing.

With the discovery of large deposits of anthracite in the Lehigh Valley, White and Hazard established their navigation company to bring massive amounts of the high-energy coal to power Philadelphia’s many factories and mills. With anthracite fueling steam engines throughout the city, Philadelphia became a key center of the First Industrial Revolution in the early nineteenth century.

On November 24, 1832, “Old Ironsides” a new locomotive engine built by Matthias Baldwin, was put in service to power the Philadelphia, Germantown, & Norristown Railroad. Opened in June of that year, the Philadelphia, Germantown, & Norristown line was the city’s first railroad and was drawn by horses until Baldwin’s new steam-powered locomotive was put into use.

An innovative craftsman, Baldwin had begun building steam engines in the 1820s and in 1835 established the Baldwin Locomotive Works, which would eventually grow into Philadelphia’s largest private company and the world’s largest locomotive manufacturer. The rise of railroads in the 1830s and 1840s would transform the city’s manufacturing landscape.

English immigrant Henry Disston started  the Keystone Saw Works near downtown Philadelphia in 1840 and moved it to Northern Liberties several years later. In 1855 Disston introduced the crucible steelmaking process to America and by the 1860s was one of the largest saw makers in the nation.

Needing more space, Disston began moving the company to a sprawling 50-acre riverfront site in Tacony in Northeast Philadelphia, where it grew into the largest saw manufacturer in the world. At its height, Disston employed some 4,000 workers who made nine million saws annually.

Philadelphia was one of nation’s leading pharmaceutical manufacturing centers in the 19th and early 20th century. Two of the city’s largest drug companies, Powers & Weightman and Rosengarten & Sons, founded in 1818 and 1822, respectively, were manufacturing chemists and makers of quinine.

They merged in 1905 to form the pharmaceutical giant, Powers-Weightman-Rosengarten Company, which operated in Philadelphia until it was bought out by Merck & Company in 1927 and moved to New Jersey.

Founded in Germany in 1907 to manufacture a leather tanning product, the Rohm & Haas company established a Philadelphia office two years later, under the direction of Otto Haas. During World War I, the Philadelphia branch broke off and was incorporated as a separate company and in 1921 it took over the former Lenning Chemical Company in Bridesburg.

In 1933, the company introduced Plexiglass, the lightweight, shatter-proof clear plastic that found a wide range of uses, from aircraft cockpits to general consumer applications. By 1999, Rohm & Haas was the largest specialty chemical company in the world.

ENIAC—Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer—was invented by J. Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania in the mid-1940s and unveiled at Penn in February 1946.

The world’s first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer, it was initially used by the US Army for rapid military calculations. The two inventors left Penn and formed  Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, which in 1951 introduced UNIVAC—Universal Automatic Computer—the first commercially produced electronic digital computer designed for business use. These Philadelphia inventions
ushered in the computer age and would eventually revolutionize manufacturing.

After 195 years of operation on the Delaware River—from 1801 to 1875 in Southwark, from 1875 to 1996 at League Island at the southern edge of the city, the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard was decommissioned by the US Navy in September 1996.

The shipbuilding part of the complex was taken over by Norwegian company, Kvaerner, which began constructing large container ships there in 2000. The site changed hands and names several times over the years. Now called Philly Shipyard and owned by a South Korean company, Hanwha, it manufactures large tankers, container ships, and special purpose vessels.

In 2005, researchers Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman at the University of Pennsylvania made a discovery that helped transform modern medicine. They found that modifying nucleosides in synthetic messenger RNA (mRNA) prevents the immune system from attacking it. Earlier attempts to use mRNA therapeutically failed because the body treated it like a viral threat. Their modification allowed mRNA to safely enter cells and produce proteins.

This breakthrough enabled the rapid development of mRNA vaccines, including the COVID-19 vaccines deployed worldwide in 2020. More broadly, it created a platform for designing medicines using genetic instructions rather than traditional chemical drugs.

The discovery helped establish Philadelphia as a global center for biotechnology and programmable medicine. Karikó and Weissman received the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for this work.

In 2019, Exyn Technologies, a Philadelphia robotics company, introduced one of the first fully autonomous aerial robots for industrial environments. Founded in 2014 as a spinout from the University of Pennsylvania’s GRASP Laboratory, Exyn focuses on drones that can operate without GPS or human pilots.

Using LiDAR sensors, onboard computing, and advanced navigation algorithms, the drones can explore unknown environments and generate detailed 3D maps. In 2019, the company launched commercial systems used for underground mine mapping and inspection.

Autonomous robotics is a key technology of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, combining AI, sensors, and automation to improve safety and efficiency in industrial operations.

Exyn’s work demonstrates how Philadelphia robotics research moved from university laboratories into real-world industrial applications worldwide.

In 2025, researchers at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and Penn Medicine treated the world’s first patient with a fully personalized CRISPR gene-editing therapy.

The treatment was developed for a baby born with carbamoyl phosphate synthetase 1 (CPS1) deficiency, a rare genetic disorder that prevents the body from properly processing ammonia. Researchers rapidly designed a customized gene-editing therapy targeting the patient’s specific mutation.

Using CRISPR-based base-editing technology delivered through lipid nanoparticles, the therapy corrected the genetic error inside the patient’s liver cells. The treatment was developed and administered in only a few months, demonstrating the potential for rapidly tailored genetic medicine.

This breakthrough represents a major milestone in precision medicine, showing that therapies can be designed specifically for individual patients rather than mass-produced for broad populations.

For the Fourth Industrial Revolution, personalized gene editing highlights how biotechnology, genomics, and advanced manufacturing are converging to transform healthcare.