Part IThe Story
In November 1957 a reviewer named Paul C. Eaton sat down to describe six books that nobody could buy. The set had come into the possession of the humanities library at the California Institute of Technology as a gift. It "has not been offered for public sale," Eaton explained, but had been "published and distributed gratis to certain institutions as a public service" by a small foundation in Center Lovell, Maine. In his judgment it was "the most nearly complete collection of information on the design, building, and operation of American sailing vessels... that has ever been compiled—or perhaps that ever can be compiled." The title was Merchant Sail. The author had been dead for ten years.
Eaton was generous and he was precise. Then, in one sentence, he was wrong in a way that is more interesting than most things people get right. The chronicle opens with the Virginia of Sagadahock, launched into the Kennebec in 1607, which the city of Bath was celebrating that same year as the start of 350 years of American shipbuilding. The author, Eaton noted with some amusement, ignored the rival claims of Haiti (1495), North Carolina (1526), Florida (1528), South Carolina (1562), and Virginia (1585). "As befits a native of the state of Maine," he wrote, "Mr. Fairburn pays no attention" to any of them.
William Armstrong Fairburn was not a native of the state of Maine.
He was born in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, on October 12, 1876. According to the records of the historical society in the Maine town where his ashes are buried, his father's surname was originally not Fairburn but Fairbotham. At fourteen William was a Post Office boy. At fifteen he was a steerage-era statistic on a Cunard manifest. Between those two facts and the Caltech library lay half a century. In that time he became a master mechanic, a naval architect, the president of the Diamond Match Company, the patentee of new chemistries for the heads of matches, and the author of several dozen books about how men should be organized, governed, and improved. The last thing he did was the thing he did for recreation. He wrote the history of the wooden sailing ships that the steel he had once worked was putting out of business.
The reviewer's mistake was a kind of compliment, and it was also the end point of a project. By 1957 the boy from Huddersfield had been absorbed into Maine so completely that a careful reader in Pasadena could not see the seam. The question of how that happened, and what it cost, runs through everything else: the match, the kelp, the books nobody asked for, the house built so it could not be seen from the water. The answer is not in any one place. It is scattered across census returns, patent filings, a neighbor's newsletter, and a corporate pamphlet with an art deco cover.
By the Numbers
The Fairburn Ledger
1891Year he crossed from Liverpool to New York on the S.S. Servia, at 14
1 yearTotal formal university training: naval architecture at Glasgow, 1896
6 yearsFrom taking charge of Diamond Match operations (1909) to its presidency (1915)
130 acresCarved from Diamond's Maine timberland for Westways on Kezar Lake, 1926
24 yearsRun of the company's Good-Fellowship bulletins, 1923–1947
6 volumesOf Merchant Sail, published 1945–1955 and given away
12 billionMatches Diamond still produces each year
Fairbotham, Post Office Boy
Start with the father, because the father went first.
Thomas Fairburn, or Fairbotham, was born in Hull in 1849, the son of another Thomas. He married Elizabeth Jemima Frosdick in Leeds in 1867. He worked with ships. American census takers would later record him as a ship fitter and then as a foreman at a shipyard in Braintree, Massachusetts. In 1890 he crossed the Atlantic alone, the usual immigrant arithmetic of sending one wage-earner ahead to find out whether the new country would pay. It apparently did. He never fully left the old one, though. He kept making trips back to the family still in Huddersfield, and as late as 1923, when his son was running one of the largest industrial companies in America, Thomas was filling out a passport application that recorded his birthplace, his birth year, and his father's name. A man still keeping his paperwork straight between two countries.
The name change is the detail that sticks. Fairbotham to Fairburn. The local society that preserved it does not say when it happened or why, and I have found no record that does. The motive is easy to guess at and impossible to confirm. Some names travel well and some don't, and the new one sounds like a place someone might want to be from. Nobody bothered to note the exact moment the family stopped being one thing and became another. What survives is the fact of it.
The English census of 1891, the last one that would count William as a resident, lists him as a "Post Office boy." He was fourteen. In May of that year he boarded the S.S. Servia at Liverpool with his mother Elizabeth and his sisters Alice and Annie, bound for New York, to join a father who had now been gone a year. The family settled in Bath, Maine. On the Kennebec, Bath had been launching wooden hulls since before the Republic, and by the 1890s it was learning to launch iron and steel ones.
William attended the public schools there and Bath High School. He also, in the Lovell Historical Society's phrase, "apprenticed himself" to the Bath Iron Works. The reflexive verb suits him. Nobody seems to have placed him anywhere; he placed himself. By eighteen he was a master mechanic. That took four years from the Post Office counter in Huddersfield to the head of a trade in a shipbuilding town on another continent, a compression of the usual life that he would later expect, more or less explicitly, of everyone around him.
One Year in Glasgow
In 1896 he went back across the ocean, in the opposite direction, and enrolled at the University of Glasgow to study naval architecture and marine engineering. He stayed one year.
For an ambitious young mechanic in the 1890s, the Clyde was the center of the shipbuilding world. Formal credentials in naval architecture were scarce in America and plentiful in Scotland. One year was enough to learn the theory, absorb the vocabulary, and come home to Bath carrying something the Bath foremen did not have: the mathematics behind their instincts. It was not enough for a degree, and the record does not suggest he wanted one. It suggests he wanted what he needed and nothing more.
The standard accounts say that when he returned to Bath Iron Works he built an all-steel freighter, the first in America. That is the sort of claim that biographical dictionaries repeat from one another without much friction, and I would not stake much on the word "first." But the direction matters more than the priority. A young man raised in a wooden-ship town, the son of a ship fitter, spent his early professional life helping to make that wooden world obsolete. Steel did not rot, did not need adzemen, did not depend on the forests of Maine. It was the future, and Fairburn was building it.
By 1900 he had set up as an independent consultant. One of his papers from this period survives in the technical literature: an article on the steam yacht Wacouta, published November 1, 1902, under the byline William A. Fairburn. It is the earliest of his writings I can find, and it is about a rich man's boat. He was twenty-six.
Consulting brought him into the orbit of the Stirling Boiler Company, later folded into Babcock & Wilcox. There he met two men who would decide the rest of his life: Ohio Columbus Barber and Edward R. Stettinius Sr. Both were also executives at the Diamond Match Company. I have not been able to establish whether the Stirling of the boiler company has anything to do with Stirling City, California, where Barber's match company built a lumber mill in 1902, the same year as the Wacouta paper. It may be coincidence. American industry in that period was a small room, and the same dozen names tend to recur on every door.
In September 1904 Fairburn married Isabella Louise Ramsay, who went by Louise. She was born August 4, 1878 (the Lovell society's records say 1879) in Summerfield, Prince Edward Island. She was another arrival from somewhere else, from a province of fishing villages and shipwrights. They had two sons: William Armstrong Fairburn Jr. in 1910, and Robert Gordon Fairburn in 1912.
In 1909, Barber and Stettinius put him in charge of Diamond Match's operations, "in hopes," as the encyclopedia phrases it with bureaucratic delicacy, "of solving some problems it had encountered." The census taker who found the family in Groton, Connecticut, the following year wrote down Fairburn's occupation as "naval architect." He was already running a match company. He did not yet describe himself as a match man.
A Company Founded by People Who Changed Their Names
To understand what Fairburn walked into, go back to a bridge over Brandywine Creek in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1853.
Edward Tatnall had been given an English recipe for matches by a business acquaintance named William R. Smith. He set up shop at the Market Street Bridge and immediately ran into the defining problem of the industry. His matches lit too easily. They ignited at the slightest friction, which in a pocket, a drawer, or a child's hand is a disaster. Tatnall solved it by cutting the phosphorus content by 25 percent. The first engineering problem in the history of the company that would become Diamond Match, then, was not how to make fire. It was how to make fire behave.
A young Englishman joined Tatnall: Henry Coughtrey, an experienced match maker, who changed his name to Courtney. One immigrant chemist of fire, then, in the company's founding generation, quietly trimming the strangeness from his surname to fit the new country. Fairbotham and Coughtrey; Fairburn and Courtney. The rhyme is too exact to ignore, and there is no evidence either man ever knew of the other's revision.
The depression of 1857 closed Tatnall's plant. Courtney kept experimenting on his own, working on the safety and quality of his matches. In 1860 a man named William H. Swift came into Tatnall's firm to handle clerical and financial work. Swift saw what Courtney was doing and thought it was worth something. Tatnall had decided he had spent enough on the match business, and he handed it to Courtney and Swift for nothing. The relationship between the families held regardless. Decades later, in October 1897, Tatnall's grandson married Swift's niece.
In 1861 the two men formed Swift & Courtney and named their product Diamond State Parlor Matches, after a popular nickname for Delaware. The Civil War did the rest. Armies need fire. Demand grew and kept growing after the war, and the company set about absorbing its competitors: Beecher & Sons of New Haven in 1870, creating the Swift & Courtney & Beecher Company; the match business of Thomas Allen & Company of St. Louis later that year; McGiugan & Daily of Philadelphia in 1872, along with contracts with Joseph Loehy of New York and Charles Busch of Trenton. It became the largest match maker in America.
Then, in 1880, it sold everything to the Barber Match Company of Akron.
Ohio Columbus Barber was named for a state and a navigator, and he spent his life naming things after himself. He bought Swift & Courtney & Beecher and in 1881 renamed it, not after himself but after the trade name the Delaware men had built: the Diamond Match Company. That was the one act of self-effacement in his career. After the Panic of 1893 he moved the match factory out of Akron and into an adjacent town he had created, and called it Barberton. He converted the abandoned Akron factory into the Diamond Rubber Company. In 1902 he bought roughly 60,000 acres of California timber about thirty miles northeast of Chico for a lumber mill, and the manufacturing center south of Chico was designated, naturally, Barber.
By the turn of the century Diamond operated plants in Barberton; Wilmington; Barber, California; Springfield, Massachusetts; Oshkosh, Wisconsin; Oswego, New York; and Cloquet, Minnesota. At Stirling City it built a wood-processing mill and a 42-mile standard-gauge railroad down to the Chico plant for Southern Pacific to operate. It also built its own narrow-gauge branches up into the forest to drag out the logs, and a tie-manufacturing plant that made it a pioneer in treated railroad ties. In 1904 it opened the Chico Electric Railway, an electrified tram running along 9th Street and Main Street, built to carry its employees to and from work. Two years later the line became the northern terminus of the Sacramento Northern.
This was the company that hired a naval architect in 1909. It was vast, vertically integrated, and rich in timber and track, and it had a problem in the head of every match it sold.
The Problem in the Head of the Match
The problem was white phosphorus.
It was the active ingredient that made a strike-anywhere match strike anywhere, and it was poison. It sickened the people who made the matches. It killed children who ate them. The encyclopedia entry on Fairburn states these facts in a single flat sentence, and the flatness is appropriate. There was nothing ambiguous about the damage. The only questions were economic: whether an alternative existed, whether it worked, and whether anyone would pay for it.
Herbert Manchester, whom Diamond would later employ as its in-house chronicler, addressed this directly in a company booklet in 1926. A modern reader who picked up a copy found that it "rather surprisingly doesn't shy away from the economic pressures on the match industry to continue with dangerous chemicals and chemical processes when others were available, despite the toll on the workers." That was in a company-sponsored promotional pamphlet. Whatever else one says about Fairburn's regime, it did not pretend the old poison had been an accident.
What Fairburn found, according to the Dictionary of American Biography's account, was not a new invention. It was an old one. In Diamond's own files he discovered company patents that offered an alternative to white phosphorus. The solution had been sitting in the cabinet. Working with the company chemists, he turned it into a product, and by 1911 Diamond introduced an improved match that substituted phosphorus sesquisulfide for the white phosphorus.
The dates soften the closer you look. The Meriam Library at California State University, Chico, which holds Diamond's bulletins, dates the development of a "safety, strike-anywhere match" to 1911–1912. The Lovell Historical Society, writing about its famous summer resident in 2013, credits him with "inventing and patenting the first non-poisonous wooden match in 1913." The encyclopedias say 1911. Fairburn himself is not available for comment. What matters is the sequence, not the exact year: a man trained to think about structures under load arrives at a company, reads its archive before he reads anyone's résumé, and finds that the answer to the company's worst problem is already company property.
There is a symmetry with Tatnall's first fix on the Brandywine, sixty years earlier. Tatnall's match was too eager, so he reduced the phosphorus by a quarter. Fairburn's match was too dangerous, so he replaced the phosphorus with something else. In both cases the industry's progress consisted not in more fire but in more control: fire that waited for a deliberate hand.
A Library of Congress photograph from sometime between 1920 and 1940 identifies Fairburn as "President of the Diamond Match Co. and winner of the Dr. Louis Livingston Seaman Medal." It is a head-and-shoulders portrait, facing right, and it is still sold as a print, William A. Fairburn, President of The Diamond Match Co, to anyone who wants the face. The caption does not say what the medal was for. I have not been able to find out. It is the kind of honor that appears on a caption and nowhere else, which may be exactly what its recipient preferred.
Kelp
In 1914 the war in Europe shut off the old supplies of potash.
Match heads need oxidizers and fillers. Potash was one of the ingredients, and muriate was another; the Chico archive lists both among the materials that went short. America had imported much of its potash, and the war cut the line. Every match maker in the country faced the same arithmetic: pay whatever the market demanded for a vanishing input and raise prices, or stop making matches.
Fairburn took a third route. He discovered, and then worked out, a chemical process for extracting potash from kelp. The Chico finding aid describes the company expanding "westwards, developing methods to extract these materials from kelp and salt deposits." The encyclopedia records the result in one line that is almost a boast: "Owing to this discovery, the price of matches did not increase when the start of World War I shut off the old sources of potash supply."
Think about what that requires. A man whose formal chemistry training consisted of whatever a naval architecture course in Glasgow taught in 1896 looks at a geopolitical supply shock and decides the answer is growing in the Pacific. It is the same move as the sesquisulfide match. Don't buy what you can find. Don't find what you can grow. Treat the raw world as an inventory waiting to be catalogued.
In 1915 he succeeded Stettinius as president of the Diamond Match Company. On August 12 of that year, Diamond filed an application for a patent titled "Match-head composition and method of making same," listing the inventor as William A. Fairburn. The indexed vocabulary of the patent, US1360282A, runs to sodium chlorate, zinc, binders, fillers. It took the Patent Office five years to grant it, on November 30, 1920. A second patent followed: application filed June 7, 1921, for a "Process of treating match compositions and the product thereof," granted February 14, 1922, as US1406176A. Its vocabulary is stranger: calcium carbonate, carbon dioxide, sulfuric acid, zinc oxide, and, recurring, the word "cellular." Read together, the terms suggest a process that used a gas-generating reaction to change the internal structure of the match head. I would not claim more than that from an index. Both patents were assigned to Diamond Match from the start. Both expired, in 1937 and 1939, while their inventor was still running the company.
The war that made him a hero of supply also exposed how far the company had grown past its needs. The Chico finding aid says it plainly: "As the company struggled after World War I, plant operations across California were cut back." In 1919, the Barber site that O. C. Barber had named after himself was converted to a millwork factory. The new president was four years into the job. The cuts were his.
Human Chemistry
In 1914, a year before he became president and the year the war began, Fairburn published a 55-page book called Human Chemistry.
Its premise is exactly what the title says. Workers are chemical elements in a well-stocked laboratory. The people who manage them are chemists. The successful handler, Fairburn argued, must know the characteristics and temperament of each individual thoroughly enough to optimize the "reactions resulting from combinations of individuals." He went further and proposed that people could be classified by their "personal entropy," borrowing the thermodynamic term for the energy in a system that is unavailable for useful work. An enthusiastic encyclopedia entry from 2007 placed the book second in the history of the theory of interpersonal chemistry, after Goethe's Elective Affinities of 1809. That is a sentence I would like to have seen Fairburn read. I suspect he would have accepted the company without a flicker.
It is easy to mock Human Chemistry, and the mockery would not be entirely unearned. But consider who wrote it and what he had just done. A man who had found the cure for his company's poison in its own patent files, and who would soon find its missing potash in seaweed, had every reason to believe the world was a set of elements awaiting the right combination. He had seen it work on phosphorus. Why not on foremen?
The books kept coming. The Individual and Society (1915). Man and His Health; Liquids (1916). Life and Work (1916). Mentality and Freedom (1917). The Diagnosis of the German Obsession (1918). Frederick the Great (1919). Organization and Success (1923). Justice and Law (1927). In 1931, two on the Soviet Union: Russia, the Utopia in Chains and Forced Labor in Soviet Russia. In 1933, Work and Workers, and Protection, Adjustment, Balance and Prosperity. Most of them came from the Nation Press of New York. The encyclopedias call his output "several dozen books." They were, according to the Lovell society, largely self-published, and "often required reading for his employees."
That last phrase deserves a second look. A Diamond man in the 1920s worked in a company whose president had written, and expected him to read, his views on justice, liquids, Frederick the Great, and the correct chemistry of human combination. From 1923 he also received the company's Good-Fellowship bulletins, which the Chico archive holds for every year from 1923 to 1947, full of "general announcements and news, articles and information on persons related to the company." The name of the newsletter was not ironic. It was a statement of intent, and the intent was total.
— David Woods, Lovell Historical Society newsletter, Summer 2013In the classic style of the late 19th and early 20th Century industrialist, Fairburn was every bit the paternalistic, authoritarian figure who harbored no doubts about his wisdom or abilities.
Herbert Manchester was the man who put this philosophy into narrative form. He wrote at least three works under Diamond's sponsorship or about its president. The Romance of the Match came out in 1926, issued by the Diamond Match Company. The Diamond Match Company: A Century of Service, of Progress, and of Growth, 1835–1935 followed in 1935. William Armstrong Fairburn: A Factor in Human Progress was published by the Blanchard Press in 1940. That is one house historian producing a history of the product, a history of the company, and a biography of the boss, roughly once every seven years. Manchester's own life is otherwise invisible in the record, which is the fate of house historians. He is known by his subjects.
The Romance of the Match opens magnificently:
— Herbert Manchester, opening line of The Romance of the Match (Diamond Match Co., 1926)How many thousand or hundred thousand years man lived on earth before learning to use fire is unknown.
It travels from the hearth fires of prehistory, through the poisons of the early match trade, and arrives, inevitably, at Diamond. The last page is a series of statements by Fairburn himself. One of them, as a bookseller who reviewed the booklet in 2015 put it, is "what I assure you is a complete sentence":
"Diamond men have for years led the world in the art of match making; today they lead in the science of progressive invention, in the art of efficient production and distribution, in the inestimable virtues of brotherhood, equity and undying good fellowship, and in the courage and energy that knows no failure and acknowledges no defeat."
"Please note," the reviewer added, "the semi-colon and the Oxford comma."
The sentence is worth reading twice, once for the bombast and once for the structure. It moves from art to science and back to art, from production to virtue, and ends at a pair of refusals: no failure, no defeat. It is the sentence of a man who learned English prose from technical manuals and Victorian moralists, who believed that saying a thing at sufficient length, with sufficient conviction, made it so. "Good fellowship" appears again, as it did in the name of the bulletin. The reviewer, writing almost ninety years later, calls Fairburn "the founder" of the company. He was not. The pamphlet does not say he was. But the pamphlet's last page is made of his voice, and a careful reader nine decades on concluded that the man who wrote the final word must have written the first.
Westways
In 1926 Fairburn carved out 130 acres on Kezar Lake, in Lovell, Maine, and built a house he called Westways.
The land was already Diamond's. Through the 1920s the company had been buying large parcels of Maine forest, including considerable acreage in Lovell and neighboring Stoneham, to secure the wood for its matches, tongue depressors, and clothespins. At one point Diamond owned most of the shoreline between Boulder Brook and the Garcelon estate at the north end of the lake. Fairburn took a slice of the company's inventory and made it into a home. Westways was, by the Lovell society's account, a corporate retreat as much as a summer house: Diamond's executives came to the lake, and what they did there no one in town ever learned.
There were three Westways. The others were in Morristown, New Jersey, and Ojai, California. A man who had arrived from the east as a child named all three of his houses after the direction he had traveled. The 1930 census found him in Morris County, New Jersey, and wrote down his occupation as "executive in a match factory." Twenty years earlier, already running Diamond's operations, he had told the census he was a naval architect. In 1891 he had been a Post Office boy. Three censuses, three men.
The Lake Kezar house was in the Adirondack style favored by rich men of the period: sturdy buildings, pine paneling, wood shingles. Everything was placed to fit the land and to deliver, in David Woods's description, "magnificent lake and mountain views without being seen from the lake." There was a main house for Fairburn, Louise, and the two boys. There was a recreation building with bowling alleys, a pool table, ping-pong tables, and, in the back, a card room. There were stables.
What we know of the interior we know from a neighbor's newsletter. Woods wrote that Fairburn was "one of Lovell's most famous but also most reserved summer residents," that "few local or seasonal residents had dealings with him," and that "the man treasured his privacy, so activities at the enclave were kept secret." Woods knows the bookshelf, though. "On our camp bookshelf," he wrote, "we have several volumes of self-published lengthy dissertations on such subjects as Life and Work, Work and Workers, Russia the Utopia in Chains." So the man who would not be seen from the lake had left his books in his neighbors' cabins. He hid his face and broadcast his voice.
The same paradox runs through all his work. He built a house designed to see without being seen, and he published book after book of his own convictions. He wanted to be everywhere in his company's mind and nowhere in its gossip. The match itself has the same character. It is a tool for the hand that holds it, nearly invisible until it is struck, and then it is the only thing in the room.
Founder, Owner, Native
The longer you follow Fairburn through his sources, the more you notice how often the record overstates him.
The Lovell society says that "by 1915 [he] was president and owner of the company." Nothing in the corporate histories suggests he owned Diamond Match. He succeeded Stettinius as an executive of a large and widely held company that Barber had built. The 2015 reviewer calls him the founder. Eaton, in 1957, called him a native of Maine. Each error enlarges him in a different direction. The neighbors made him its proprietor; the reader of the pamphlet made him its origin; the Caltech reviewer made him native to the place he had worked hardest to belong to.
The company did some inflating of its own. Manchester's centennial history is dated 1835–1935. The encyclopedia dates the company's roots to Edward Tatnall on the Brandywine in 1853. Something, somewhere, moved the clock back eighteen years. A predecessor firm, a looser definition of the trade, or simple appetite for a hundredth anniversary in the president's lifetime: I can't tell which, and the centennial volume is the only witness. Institutions that are constantly being told who they are by their own house historians tend to drift toward the more flattering date.
Some of the record runs the opposite way. The encyclopedia entry on Diamond carries a single line about Fairburn's era that no source I have found confirms: "In 1932, Ivar Kreuger took control of more than 52% of the shares." The entry itself flags the claim with "citation needed." If true, it would mean that for at least part of his presidency, Fairburn ran a company controlled by someone else. The Chico archive records only that the company reincorporated in Maryland in 1931. Corporate reincorporation is usually done for reasons of control, taxes, or both. The record does not say which.
The pattern is clear even where the facts are not. Fairburn spent his life in the business of transmutation: phosphorus into sesquisulfide, kelp into potash, Fairbotham into Fairburn, Huddersfield into Bath, a naval architect into a match executive into a historian of sail. The people around him, and the people who came after, kept completing the transformations he had started. He became, in other people's sentences, more American, more central, more original than the records support. He did not do this alone. But he built the conditions for it. He wrote the books, paid the historian, filled the bulletins, and hid the house, and the space he left blank was filled with legend.
Merchant Sail
The work that most clearly bears his name is the one that had nothing to do with matches.
Merchant Sail ran to six volumes, published between 1945 and 1955 by the Fairburn Marine Educational Foundation of Center Lovell, Maine, and edited by Ethel M. Ritchie. Ritchie is otherwise almost absent from the record. She is a name on a title page, attached to the largest project of a man who spent his life attaching his name to things. Like Manchester, she is known by her subject. Unlike Manchester, she carried his work past his death: five of the six volumes appeared after October 1947.
Eaton called it "the result of a lifetime of research, carried on as the recreation of a busy man."
— Paul C. Eaton, reviewing Merchant Sail, 1957Merchant Sail is the result of a lifetime of research, carried on as the recreation of a busy man, of the late William Armstrong Fairburn, naval architect, marine engineer, and industrial executive.
Note the order of the titles: naval architect first, executive last. In his books about society Fairburn was a chemist of men. In his book about ships he went back to being what he had told the census taker in 1910 that he was.
The scope is enormous. It begins in 1607 with the Virginia of Sagadahock sliding into the Kennebec, a few miles from where a fifteen-year-old from Huddersfield would go to school 284 years later. Through the first volumes it follows the ups and downs of American seaborne commerce from wood to steel, from sail to steam, "pretty well down to World War II." The famous ships are there, Eaton noted (Grand Turk, Great Republic, Shenandoah, Wyoming), and so are the obscure ones, Polly, Gold Hunter, Jere C. Shaw, and something called Transfer No. 6. There are pinnaces, brigs, snows, privateers, clippers, barks, barkentines, coasting schooners from the early pinks to the great six-masters, even rigged wooden barges. Then there are the people. Eaton's list reads like a register of a whole vanished economy: "designer, master and mate, sailor and supercargo, rigger and adzeman, longshoreman and wharfinger, clerk, banker, lawyer, managing owner, underwriter, crimp, cabin boy, and cook."
It is impossible to read that list without thinking of Human Chemistry. Here, finally, is the well-stocked laboratory: every element of a maritime civilization named and placed. But the tone is different. In 1914 Fairburn was prescribing. In Merchant Sail he is describing, and the thing he describes is gone. The young man who had helped build an all-steel freighter at Bath spent his last decades recording, plank by plank, the wooden world his steel had replaced.
Wood ran through his life in two directions. There was the wood that floats, the Maine pine and oak of the Kennebec hulls, and there was the wood that burns, the Maine pine of Diamond's forests around Kezar Lake, cut into sticks and tipped with sesquisulfide. He made his fortune from the second and spent his leisure mourning the first. The same forests, possibly the same trees, had once been sought by shipwrights and were now sought by a match company. Fairburn sat at the junction, in a house built from that pine, looking out at a lake that could not see him, writing about sails.
He did not sell the book. The foundation gave it away to selected institutions. A man who had spent thirty years running a company that sold twelve billion small fires a year (the modern figure, but the scale was never small) ended by distributing his life's real work for nothing, the way Tatnall had once handed the match business to Courtney and Swift.
Ash
William Armstrong Fairburn died on October 1, 1947, eleven days before his seventy-first birthday. Three days later, on October 4, his ashes were buried at Center Lovell.
The Good-Fellowship bulletins, the Chico archive notes, run from 1923 to 1947. They end the year he did. The company newsletter whose title came from his favorite phrase did not outlive him in the archive.
Everything else came apart more slowly. The Stirling City logging branches, with their three Lima Shay locomotives and one from Willamette Iron and Steel, were abandoned in 1952. In 1957, the year Paul Eaton reviewed Merchant Sail, Diamond Match acquired the Gardner Board and Carton Company and renamed itself Diamond Gardner. The word "Match" left the corporate name. Diamond National followed in 1959, the same year operations ended at the California lumber mill, and Diamond International in 1964. The company bought Heekin Can in 1965 and the United States Playing Card Company, maker of Bicycle cards, in 1969. In library catalogs, Manchester's 1940 biography of Fairburn is now filed under the subject heading "Diamond Gardner Corporation," a name its subject never worked under.
In 1982 James Goldsmith bought Diamond International and sold it off in pieces. Jefferson Smurfit took the match business. James River took pulp and paper. Wesray Capital took Heekin Can. Jesup & Lamont took the playing cards. Roseburg Forest Products took the California timberlands. Goldsmith kept most of the rest of the forest, merged it with Crown Zellerbach's, and sold parts of it, including land in the Adirondacks, the region whose architecture Westways had imitated. Seaver Kent bought the match business in 1998 and went bankrupt in 2001. Jarden bought it in 2003. Newell Brands inherited it in 2016. In 2017 it went to Royal Oak Enterprises, a maker of charcoal and fire starters. Diamond remains the leading American match maker, at twelve billion matches a year.
Louise died in 1962. Bill, William Jr., died in 1966. Bob, Robert Gordon, died in 1976.
In the summer of 2005 the Ventura County Community Foundation, in California, announced its annual scholarships. Among them was the William A. Fairburn, Jr., and Cynthia D. Fairburn Memorial Scholarship, $1,200 a student. That year it went to, among others, Adryana DeLaRosa, Rosalia Garcia, Juan Herrera, and Dalia Navarro of Fillmore; Courtney Groden, Neal Glatt, Christina Kapucija, Naomi Klimasewska, Shannon Pflaumer, and Sergio Pacheco of Moorpark; Brian Kim, Jiakun Liu, Alexandra Martin, Kevin A. Potter, and Sabrina Chou of Oak Park; Shalra Hameed and Jordan Michaels of Westlake Village. One of the three Westways had been in Ojai.
The foundation that published Merchant Sail still carries his name in Center Lovell, a few miles from the land Diamond once bought for clothespins and matchsticks. The last volume came out in 1955, eight years after his ashes were buried in that town. A librarian in Pasadena opened one of the six volumes in 1957, looked for the publisher, and found the line that convinced a careful reviewer the author had been born there. It was printed beneath the title, where a birthplace might go: Center Lovell, Maine.
Part IIThe Playbook
Fairburn is not an obvious model. He was authoritarian, self-mythologizing, and convinced that his employees should read his views on Frederick the Great. But underneath the bombast is a set of operating habits that solved hard problems: a lethal product, a wartime supply collapse, a sprawling conglomerate, the problem of what to do with a fortune and a private obsession. The principles below are drawn from the record in Part I. Some are worth copying. A few are worth studying mainly as warnings.
The principles
- 1.Read the archive before you build the lab.
- 2.Take the one year of training that changes how you see.
- 3.Import a discipline, not just a résumé.
- 4.Make the dangerous thing behave.
- 5.When a supply line breaks, look for it in the ocean.
- 6.Own the forest, but cut what you don't need.
- 7.Assign the patent to the company.
- 8.Write the operating system down — and know what that costs.
- 9.A house historian writes the version you'll be remembered by.
- 10.See without being seen.
- 11.Keep an obsession the business can't touch.
- 12.Give the real work away.
F
The Fairburn Decision Line
Key moves from apprentice to historian, as the record supports them.
1891
Crosses on the S.S. Servia at 14; family settles in Bath, Maine.
1894
Master mechanic by 18 after apprenticing at Bath Iron Works.
1896
One year of naval architecture at the University of Glasgow.
1900
Independent consultant; meets Barber and Stettinius via Stirling Boiler Co.
1909
Put in charge of Diamond Match operations.
1911
Sesquisulfide match replaces white phosphorus, built from existing company patents.
1914
Publishes Human Chemistry; WWI cuts off potash; kelp process follows.
1915
Becomes president; files match-head composition patent August 12.
1919
California operations cut back; Barber site converted to millwork.
1926
Builds Westways on 130 acres of Diamond's Kezar Lake timberland.
1945
First volume of Merchant Sail; six volumes through 1955, all given away.
Principle 1
Read the archive before you build the lab
Fairburn's most important contribution at Diamond, the end of white phosphorus in its matches, did not start with an invention. It started with a search. He found company patents that already offered an alternative, then worked with the company's chemists to turn paper into product. The solution to the business's gravest liability was already company property. Nobody had put it to use.
Most incoming operators do the reverse. They arrive with a mandate to solve "some problems," as the encyclopedia delicately puts it, and reach immediately for new hires, new consultants, and new programs. The archive is treated as history rather than inventory. Fairburn treated it as inventory. A naval architect is trained to check the existing drawings before he redesigns the hull, and he applied that habit to a match company's intellectual property.
The lesson is not that there is always gold in the filing cabinet. It is that the cost of looking is trivially small compared with the cost of reinventing, and that institutions routinely forget what they own. Tatnall's own first fix, cutting phosphorus by a quarter, had been there since 1853. The company had a sixty-year habit of solving the problem of overeager fire. Fairburn noticed the habit.
Tactic: In your first ninety days in any role, inventory the organization's patents, abandoned projects, and shelved proposals before commissioning anything new.
Principle 2
Take the one year of training that changes how you see
Fairburn spent exactly one year at university: naval architecture and marine engineering at Glasgow, 1896. Before it he was a master mechanic with eighteen years of age and four years in America. After it he was a man who could build steel freighters, write technical papers on steam yachts, and consult for boiler companies. The year did not give him a degree. It gave him the mathematics behind work he already knew with his hands.
There is a specific kind of education worth paying for: the kind that formalizes practical skill you already possess. A mechanic who learns naval architecture can check his instincts with numbers; an architect who has never been a mechanic can only check numbers with more numbers. Fairburn went to Glasgow already knowing what a ship was. He went to learn why.
He also went to the right place. Crossing back over the ocean he had just crossed, to a country that was not his, for one year, was an expensive way to get an education. The cost bought him a credential that almost nobody in Bath had.
Tactic: Before pursuing a credential, ask whether it will formalize something you already do; if not, it is probably the wrong one.
Principle 3
Import a discipline, not just a résumé
Barber and Stettinius did not hire a match man in 1909. They hired a naval architect, and the 1910 census confirms he still thought of himself as one. That mismatch looks strange until you consider what the company actually was: a vast physical system of mills, railroads, plants in seven states, timber in two oceans' watersheds, and a chemistry problem in every unit sold. It was a ship, in all but water.
Naval architects think about loads, materials, and failure modes across an entire structure. That is an excellent frame for a vertically integrated industrial company, and it explains Fairburn's sequence of moves. He found the failure mode (white phosphorus). He found a substitute material (sesquisulfide). When the supply line broke under wartime load, he redesigned the input (kelp potash). None of that required a career in matches. It required a habit of seeing the whole system as one structure.
| Credential on paper | What it actually brought |
|---|---|
| Naval architect | Systems view of load, material, and failure |
| Master mechanic at 18 | Practical fluency on the shop floor |
| Consultant | Exposure to many companies' problems before owning one |
Tactic: When hiring for a structural crisis, look for people who have solved the same shape of problem in a different industry.
Principle 4
Make the dangerous thing behave
The history of Diamond Match, from the Brandywine to Fairburn's office, is the history of fire being taught manners. Tatnall's first matches lit at the slightest friction; he cut the phosphorus. Courtney spent the 1857 depression experimenting with safety and quality. Fairburn took out the poison. Each generation's breakthrough was a constraint, not an expansion: fire that waits for a deliberate hand and doesn't kill the hand that makes it.
The commercial insight is that safety is not a tax on the product. It is the product. A match that poisons its makers and the children who chew it is a liability stored in every kitchen drawer in America. A match that strikes anywhere and harms nobody is an asset. Even Diamond's own promotional booklet, Manchester's Romance of the Match, acknowledged the industry had kept dangerous chemicals in use "when others were available, despite the toll on the workers." Fairburn's regime let that be printed. The candor marked the change.
Tactic: Identify the single most dangerous property of your core product and treat removing it as a growth strategy, not a compliance project.
Principle 5
When a supply line breaks, look for it in the ocean
In 1914, the war cut off potash. Fairburn's response was to find it in kelp. The company expanded west and developed methods to draw both potash and other scarce materials from kelp and salt deposits. The encyclopedia's summary is the whole case study: the price of matches did not increase.
This is not the same as stockpiling, which buys time, or paying up, which passes the shock to the customer. It is substitution of the source, made possible by a willingness to treat the raw natural world as an unindexed inventory. It is the same instinct as the patent search, applied outward rather than inward. Fairburn did not ask where to buy potash. He asked where potash was.
The tactic has an obvious cost: capital, chemistry, and the risk of building a process that only works during an emergency. Fairburn took it anyway. Holding prices through a war is the kind of achievement customers do not notice and competitors never forget.
Tactic: For every critical input, map at least one source you could develop yourself, even if you never intend to use it.
Principle 6
Own the forest, but cut what you don't need
Diamond under Barber built an empire of vertical integration: 60,000 acres of California timber, its own railroads, a treated-tie plant, an electric tram for employees. Under Fairburn the company kept buying forest in Maine in the 1920s, around Lovell and Stoneham, to guarantee the wood for matches, tongue depressors, and clothespins. Control of the raw material was a strategic pillar.
But Fairburn also cut. After World War I, the company "struggled," and plant operations across California were reduced. In 1919, the Barber site, named by the company's previous dominant figure after himself, was repurposed as a millwork factory. The new president did not treat his predecessor's monuments as sacred. He treated them as assets to be redeployed.
D
Integration vs. Contraction Under Fairburn
He extended control of inputs while trimming outputs that no longer paid.
| Move | Year | Type |
|---|---|---|
| Kelp and salt extraction in the West | WWI era | Scale |
| California plant operations cut back | Post-1918 | Risk |
| Barber site converted to millwork | 1919 | Try |
| Maine timberland acquired around Lovell and Stoneham | 1920s | Scale |
| Reincorporation in Maryland | 1931 | Scan |
Tactic: Integrate backward into whatever you cannot afford to lose, and be ruthless about forward capacity you can no longer fill.
Principle 7
Assign the patent to the company
Both of Fairburn's match-head patents, US1360282A (filed 1915) and US1406176A (filed 1921), name him as inventor and Diamond Match as assignee from the start. The president of the company put his chemistry in the company's name. That is not unusual for an employee-inventor, but it is a meaningful choice for a chief executive who could plausibly have negotiated otherwise.
The logic connects back to Principle 1. Fairburn had solved Diamond's greatest problem by finding patents the company already owned. Every patent he assigned to the institution was a future solution waiting in the drawer for the next executive. He was stocking the archive he had once searched.
There is a cost to this kind of institutional generosity, and it is memory. Patents expire. His did, in 1937 and 1939. A man who gives his inventions to the company gives up some claim to be remembered for them. Fairburn evidently made up for that elsewhere, in books and pamphlets, which leads to the next principle.
Tactic: If you are building something meant to outlast you, put the core intellectual property in the institution's name, not your own.
Principle 8
Write the operating system down — and know what that costs
Fairburn wrote several dozen books, beginning with Human Chemistry in 1914: workers as elements, managers as chemists, people measured by "personal entropy." He published them mostly through the Nation Press, and his employees were often required to read them. The company newsletter, Good-Fellowship, carried his worldview in name and content for twenty-four years.
The upside is real. A leader who writes his philosophy down gives the organization a shared vocabulary and removes ambiguity about what is valued. Diamond men knew what their president believed about work, organization, justice, and success, because it was printed and bound.
The downside is also real, and the record preserves it. Neighbors describe "lengthy dissertations" on a cabin shelf. A modern reader parses his prose for its punctuation. The local historian calls him "every bit the paternalistic, authoritarian figure who harbored no doubts about his wisdom or abilities." Writing the operating system down is powerful. Making it mandatory reading turns it into doctrine, and doctrine invites both obedience and quiet mockery.
Tactic: Write down your operating principles in short form, and never make reading them a condition of employment.
Principle 9
A house historian writes the version you'll be remembered by
Herbert Manchester produced, under Diamond's auspices or about its president, a history of the match (1926), a centennial history of the company (1935), and a biography titled William Armstrong Fairburn: A Factor in Human Progress (1940). Fairburn's own voice closed the first one. The centennial dated the company to 1835 rather than Tatnall's 1853. The biography appeared seven years before its subject's death.
It worked, in a sense. The narrative Diamond paid for has outlasted the company's corporate structure. It also sent the record astray: a modern reader of the pamphlet concluded Fairburn was the "founder"; a local historian called him the "owner." Commissioned history tends to get the shape right and the details wrong in the subject's favor, and those details compound with every retelling.
| What the commissioned record implies | What the documents support |
|---|---|
| Company dates from 1835 | Tatnall began in 1853 |
| Fairburn as founder or owner | Executive who succeeded Stettinius in 1915 |
| The match as his invention | Built from existing company patents, with company chemists |
Tactic: If you commission your own history, insist that it cite primary documents — the accurate version will serve your reputation longer than the flattering one.
Principle 10
See without being seen
Westways on Kezar Lake was designed to "deliver magnificent lake and mountain views without being seen from the lake." It served as Diamond's corporate retreat, and "activities at the enclave were kept secret." Fairburn owned three houses called Westways, on two coasts and in between. He was among Lovell's most famous summer residents and among its least known.
Privacy here was a management tool. A corporate retreat that nobody in town can observe is a place where executives can speak freely, where the president can test ideas, where the bowling alleys and card room build loyalty without generating gossip. Visibility outward, invisibility inward: the architecture expresses a theory of leadership.
The cost is that invisibility leaves room for legend. Because no one in Lovell knew Fairburn, they knew what they could infer from his land and his books, and in time they made him the company's owner. A leader who hides his face but publishes his opinions should expect the public to fill in the face from the opinions.
Tactic: Build a space where your senior team can work unobserved, and accept that whatever you keep private will be invented by others.
Principle 11
Keep an obsession the business can't touch
Merchant Sail was "the result of a lifetime of research, carried on as the recreation of a busy man." It ran to six volumes and traced American wooden shipping from 1607 to the eve of World War II, down to the wharfinger and the crimp. It had no connection to matches. It is the work most institutions now associate with his name.
There is an argument here about how executives keep their minds supple. Fairburn's business writing, from Human Chemistry onward, is prescriptive and confident to the point of self-parody. His maritime history is descriptive, patient, and humble before the facts. The private obsession seems to have kept alive the part of him that observed instead of instructed, the naval architect from the 1910 census, and that part produced the work that lasted.
It also connected him to the place he had chosen. He was not born in Maine, but by the end, writing about the Kennebec, he could be taken for a native of it.
Tactic: Maintain one serious, non-commercial intellectual pursuit that you treat as research, not hobby, and let it run for decades.
Principle 12
Give the real work away
Merchant Sail was never offered for public sale. The Fairburn Marine Educational Foundation of Center Lovell distributed it "gratis to certain institutions as a public service." Volumes appeared for eight years after Fairburn died. A Caltech reviewer called it the most nearly complete work of its kind that ever could be compiled.
The choice echoes the company's founding. Tatnall gave the match business to Courtney and Swift "for nothing," and from that gift came the largest match maker in America. Fairburn spent his career inside a commercial machine that sold billions of small fires. He finished by giving away the work that mattered most to him, placing it in libraries rather than shops. The result is that his name is now attached less to a product than to a reference: the place scholars go to find out about a ship called Transfer No. 6.
M
Two Kinds of Legacy
What Fairburn sold versus what he gave away.
| Sold | Given |
|---|---|
| Diamond matches, now owned by Royal Oak Enterprises | Six volumes of Merchant Sail, to selected institutions |
| Patents assigned to Diamond, expired 1937 and 1939 | A foundation in Center Lovell bearing his name |
| A corporate identity renamed four times after his death | A Maine imprint on every volume's title page |
Tactic: Identify the one body of work you would want attached to your name in fifty years, and make sure it is free and permanently available.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
Fairburn wrote several dozen books, but few of his sentences survive in accessible sources. The one that does is characteristic. The rest of these come from people who read him, reviewed him, or lived down the lake from him.
— William A. Fairburn, final page of The Romance of the Match (Diamond Match Co., 1926)Diamond men have for years led the world in the art of match making; today they lead in the science of progressive invention, in the art of efficient production and distribution, in the inestimable virtues of brotherhood, equity and undying good fellowship, and in the courage and energy that knows no failure and acknowledges no defeat.
— Paul C. Eaton, reviewing Merchant Sail, 1957This is the most nearly complete collection of information on the design, building, and operation of American sailing vessels, and of the relation of maritime commerce to the history of the colonies and of the Republic, that has ever been compiled—or perhaps that ever can be compiled.
— Paul C. Eaton, reviewing Merchant Sail, 1957As befits a native of the state of Maine, Mr. Fairburn pays no attention to the claims of Haiti (1495), North Carolina (1526), Florida (1528), South Carolina (1562), Virginia (1585) or any other local "firsts" in shipbuilding.
— David Woods, Lovell Historical Society newsletter, Summer 2013The man treasured his privacy, so activities at the enclave were kept secret.
— A bookseller's 2015 review of The Romance of the Match, on Fairburn's closing sentencePlease note the semi-colon and the Oxford comma.
Maxims
- Search before you invent. The cure for Diamond's poison was already in Diamond's patent files; the cheapest breakthrough is the one you already own.
- Constraint is the product. From Tatnall's 25 percent cut in phosphorus to Fairburn's sesquisulfide, every advance in the match was fire taught to wait.
- Find the input where it grows. When war closed the potash markets, kelp kept the price of a match from rising.
- Hire the adjacent expert. A naval architect saw a sprawling match company as one structure under load, which is what it was.
- Formalize what your hands already know. One year at Glasgow turned a master mechanic into an engineer because he arrived knowing what a ship was.
- Doctrine invites parody. Philosophy made mandatory ends up on a neighbor's shelf, read for its punctuation.
- Commissioned history drifts toward flattery. Over time, the president was called founder, owner, and native, and none of it was true.
- Privacy creates legend. A house built to see without being seen leaves the town to imagine the man inside.
- Keep one obsession outside the business. The work Fairburn did for recreation is the work that lasted.
- Give the best work away. The six volumes nobody could buy are the reason his name survives in libraries.
