Robert Poole was an Irish-born engineer, inventor, entrepreneur, and benefactor. In 1843 he founded an ironworks in Baltimore, Maryland. For his workforce, he hired members of what would become the first generation of modern metalworkers (machinists, molders, pattern makers, and boilermakers)—an emerging trade whose numbers would swell to 250,000 nationally by the end of the 19th century.David R. Meyer, Networked Machinists: High Technology Industries in Antebellum America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2006), 17. Maier, Pauline, Merritt Roe Smith, Alexander Keyssar, and Daniel J. Kevles.  “Changing Occupational Structure 1870– 1900,” Table 18.1, Inventing America: A History of the United States. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2006), 517. His enterprise became the largest of its kind in Maryland,John Thomas Scharf, History of Baltimore City and County from the Earliest Period to the Present Day (Philadelphia: L.H. Everts, 1881), 838. “By 1881, Poole & Hunt was described as the largest iron works in Maryland…” From “Poole & Hunt Company Buildings”, Maryland National Register of Historic Places, 1973, National Register Reference Number, 73002194, Sec.7, p.1.  (This report originally carried the reference number, B-1007.) https://mht.maryland.gov/secure/medusa/PDF/NR_PDFs/NR-184.pdf. with 800–850 employees, and, from the 1850s on, played a central role in the manufacture of iron-based infrastructure essential for  private enterprise and public works in America.Steven C. Swett, The Metalworkers (Baltimore: The Baltimore Museum of Industry, 2022), 84–115 (U.S. Capitol), 116–121 (Washington Aqueduct), 123–130 (steam fire engines), 131–138 (horse cars), 139–144 (Union gunboats), 255–296 (fertilizer, textiles, inclined plane, lighthouses, dredging the Potomac River, pulp and paper mills, flour mills and grain elevators, urban cable cars), 307–330 (gun and mortar carriages, copper mining, hydroelectricity).
