From its beginnings in the 1880s as a thrifty New England family enterprise, Norton Company has played an important role in the business and technological history of the United States. It came on the scene with a new product vital to the rapidly industrializing economy, man-made abrasive materials, and by World War I was among the nation's 400 largest industrial enterprises. The firm had become multinational by 1910, and by 1980 it employed over 25,000 people in 120 plants in 28 countries. This 100-year-old billion-dollar enterprise provides us with many insights into the character of the select group of five hundred or a thousand large, integrated, often multinational companies that have shaped and dominated the core industries of the American economy in the last century.

Yet Norton is intriguing as a case study because of its obvious differences from other firms during much of its existence. By World War I, most modern multinationals were publicly owned and professionally managed, but only in the last two decades, amid the challenges of diversification and decentralization, did the company evolve from a family-owned enterprise to public ownership and professional managers. Norton's history, so carefully detailed here from company records and interviews, illustrates both the continuity and change important in the evolution of large-scale business enterprise in the United States.

The development of public transit is an integral part of both business and urban history in late nineteenth-century America. The author begins this study in 1880, when public transportation in large American cities was provided by numerous, competing horse-car companies with little or no public control of operation. By 1912, when the study concludes, a monopoly in each city operated a coordinated network of electric-powered streetcars and, in the largest cities, subways, which were regulated by city and state agencies. The history of transit development reflects two dominant themes: the constant pressure of rapid growth in city population and area and the requirements of the technology developed to service that growth.

The case studies here include three of the four cites that had rapid transit during this period. Each case study examines, first, the mechanization of surface lines and, second, the implementation of rapid transit. New York requires an additional chapter on steam-powered, elevated railroads, for early population growth there required rapid transit before the invention of electric technology. Urban transit enterprise is viewed within a clear and familiar pattern of evolution—the pattern of the last half of the nineteenth century, when industries with expanding markets and complex, costly processes of production and distribution adopted new strategy and structure, administered by a new class of professional managers.