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# Industry

In Transylvanian industry, as in mining, the years 1770–1830 marked the beginnings of modern private enterprise, for numerous factories were established in the various production branches. In the preceding period, this sector consisted of the iron smelters, the prison-factory at Szeben, and one or two other minor factories. Nor would it have been realistic to expect a higher degree of industrial activity in the economically most backward region of the Habsburg empire. Lower Austria, which was the most industrialized of the Austro–Czech provinces, had no more than eleven factories in 1762. Even in the western half of the empire, the acceleration in the development of manufacturing occurred only after 1760. By 1783, Lower Austria counted at least 90 factories. In 1790, there were 280 manufacturing facilities in the Austro–Czech provinces. Of these, half were located in Lower Austria, and 30 percent in the Czech provinces. The remaining 20 percent was distributed among the other provinces; in Styria, the only strong sector was smelting, while the Tirol and the Vorarlberg showed comparatively little industrial development. In Transylvania, any industrial development that went beyond the scale of the long-established small crafts was worthy of note.

{2-640.} In fact, the workshops of guild craftsmen remained the basic form of manufacturing in Transylvania. The main concentration of craftsmen was found in the two larger Saxon towns, Szeben and Brassó, followed closely by Kolozsvár; there came, far behind, the other Saxon towns, then the non-Saxon towns and market towns. In 1780, Szeben counted forty guilds, with close to one thousand master craftsmen, as well as a few non-guild craftsmen; their number had risen to some 1400 by 1815–1830. At the end of the period, the strongest guilds were those of the furriers, the weavers of woollens and other textiles, the tailors, and the bootmakers. Around 1780, Brassó had 976 master craftsmen, roughly the same number as Szeben, along with 273 journeymen and 195 apprentices. Kolozsvár had some 800 guild-members in 1780, and the city counted twenty-seven guilds in 1788. The lower-ranked Saxon towns had far fewer craftsmen. At Beszterce, there were fifteen guilds with 500 craftsmen around 1800. The only data for Segesvár concerns its strongest guild, that of the wool weavers, who numbered ninety-six in 1809.

Even the guild crafts registered some modest growth, notably in the number of craftsmen, and also in the appearance of new guilds, such as that of German shoemakers, which reflected changes in fashion. However, the small scale of the market tended to make the guilds more exclusive. Individual guilds would strictly adhere to the limits they had set on membership; to the same end, they constrained the hiring of apprentices and extended the prescribed training period. It became more costly and onerous to acquire the status of master craftsman, which required the creation of a 'masterpiece'; the rules were rigorously enforced, and the period of apprenticeship lengthened to some 10–14 years. In 1775, around sixty apprentices were waiting to join the bootmakers' guild at Kolozsvár, and the situation showed little change at the end of the period. In 1833, the same guild approved the application of fifteen apprentices to produce a masterpiece, and postponed that of {2-641.} forty-two others. The cost of initiation into the guild was considerable, for the new master had to throw a lavish party for all guild members.

The apprentices in guild workshops worked very long hours. According to the 1766 statutes of the harness makers's guild at Kolozsvár, apprentices had to be at work from 5 a.m. to 8 p.m., summer as well as winter. The 1809 statute of the bookbinders required apprentices to work 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. in the winter, and from 5 a.m. to 8 p.m. in the summer. According to the tailors' guild statutes of 1807 and 1822, the working hours of their apprentices were 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. in the winter, and 5 a.m. to sunset in the summer. The guild statutes of the 19th century also required apprentices to work overtime on Saturdays in case of urgent need. Apprentices whose work on Monday suffered from the previous night's revelry were severely punished, and so were master craftsmen who showed leniency in the matter.

Pay scales varied from craft to craft. Around 1830, the weekly pay of Kolozsvár' goldsmiths was one and a half to two times that of tailors. The guilds were so well organized that they could regulate the wages of assistants in a particular craft, in a few towns or even nationwide. In 1798, the coopers' guilds formed a national association. At around the same time, the bootmakers' guilds of Kolozsvár and Zilah came to an understanding, and, in 1815, they were joined by their sister guilds in Marosvásárhely and several other Hungarian towns. In the early 1800s, several of Kolozsvár's guilds introduced the piece rate system to spur productivity, but joint action by municipal officials and the Gubernium soon put an end to the experiment. Apprentices spent most of their waking time at work (including, when required, Saturday afternoons), and it is hard to imagine that they would have the energy and time to take on more duties for extra pay; yet certain guilds permitted such moonlighting, in which the apprentice had to use his own tools. The number of craftsmen who were not affiliated with any guild slowly {2-642.} grew as well, and the traditional peasant and home crafts continued to flourish.

Turning to the emergence of authentic manufacturing, consideration will be given first to the branches where smaller-scale initiatives had been taken, independently of the guilds, in the preceding period. With regard to the paper industry, in 1770, the army treasury had established at Orlát a paper mill designed to supply military administration as well as the cultural needs of people serving in the Romanian frontier-guard regiments. The mill, which was leased out for a time, reached manufacturing scale during this period. After the turn of the century, it acquired a 'Holländer' machine, and by 1841 it was employing ten men and thirty women. Between 1711 and 1777, Transylvania's paper mills produced some 200–300 sheaves of paper a year; in 1841, the Orlát mill's output was 10,000 sheaves of printing paper, and an equal amount of other paper, while its revenues reached 60,000–80,000 exchange forints.

Only a few of the other paper mills — older ones and newly-established — reached what might be called manufacturing scale. One that did qualify was the Bornemissza family's mill at Görgény, which was valued in 1806 at 17,724 forints (including 3,085 forints for machines, instruments, and tools). Another was the Sztrugár mill, founded at Szászsebes in 1772; it was variously managed by the municipality and leased out until the turn of the century, when it was acquired by a local citizen. Between 1778 and 1784, this mill's annual output ranged from 550 to 1960 sheaves and 100 to 845 pounds of paper sheets . The municipal paper mill at Szeben, established in 1754, must have been of larger than average size. For decades, it was leased to Martin Hochmeister. The latter's original plan had been to build a modern paper mill near Szeben, but his project was obstructed by the municipal council and the leaseholder of the Orlát mill. By 1794, the Szeben mill had a 'Holländer' machine. The second paper mill at Enyed, founded in 1819, was also equipped with a 'Holländer', and may have been of similar {2-643.} scale. Although the Középfalva paper mill, which belonged to Miklós Bethlen and his wife, Kata Csáky, had both a 'Holländer' and a machine for mixing wood-pulp, it suffered from a lack of expert staff; its paper was of low quality, and by 1795, the enterprise was on its last legs. The other paper mills, which operated for a varying length of time, were little more than workshops.

A significant change in the glass industry was the advent of wealthy merchants as leaseholders or new proprietors. The Kálnoki family's glassworks at Zalánpatak was leased out between 1777 and 1781 to the Brassó merchants Toma and Manole Calfovici, and then, from 1781 to 1800, to partners (of Aromân origin) of the Marcu trading house in Szeben. Over the first eight months after the renovation effected in 1792, the glassworks produced net revenues of 1500 forints; in 1795, its stock of glass was valued at 4,248 forints. Some of the glass was exported to Moldavia. The lease of the Zalánpatak glassworks was taken over in 1800 by Dimitrie Hagi Ghidru. The Marcu trading house also owned a glassworks at Rozsnyó (1000 forints were invested in its renovation in 1792–93) and, perhaps, one at Pojána Meruluj as well.

The Mikó family's glassworks at Bükszád may also have reached manufacturing scale in this period. Earlier, the family had owned the glassworks at both Zalánpatak and Bükszád, but the volume of production had been very low; they relinquished the former, and concentrated on expanding the latter. In 1805, the Bükszád works exported some 7000–8000 forints' worth of glass to Wallachia alone. The Porumbák glassworks was already a major producer in the preceding period; by 1972, its annual turnover hovered around 8000 forints, and some of its output of window-glass and glassware was exported to Wallachia and Moldavia. The other glassworks remained of modest scale.

In the textile industry, the precursor of factory-scale producers had been the blanket-weaving workshop installed in Szeben jail prior to 1770. The next period brought a number of new initiatives, which enjoyed a varying degree of success.

{2-644.} Sericulture was launched in Transylvania in the 1780s, some thirty-five years after the relevant recommendation in the Teleki–Dobos plan. The initiator was an infantry captain, Giovanni Gallarati, who in early 1784 submitted to the Gubernium a proposal for the large-scale planting of mulberry trees and for teaching programs in silkworm breeding and silk-spinning. In spring 1785, Gallarati was appointed Transylvania's supervisor of sericulture, and he subsequently obtained the exclusive right to trade in silk cocoons. Mulberry trees came to be planted, more or less systematically, in various parts of the country. By 1788, Gallarati had dispatched Italian experts in sericulture to the four principal silk exchanges, in Szeben, Segesvár, Szászváros, and Gyulafehérvár, founded a silk-spinning plant at Szeben, and imported experts in silk ribbon-making and silk-dyeing from Vienna. In 1791, his plant at Szeben produced sixteen types of silk cloth, as well as pure and blended silk scarves and veils, silk thread, and five widths of silk ribbon. Sixteen silk looms were in operation at his mill. Responding to complaints that his products lacked sheen, Gallarati acquired, for 2500 forints, a 'brightening machine', as well as a smaller device for adding sheen to silk ribbons and another device for pumping water in the preparation of 'dotted ribbons'. He had twelve vats for boiling the cocoons, though he probably needed three times that number. The silkworks employed upwards of fifty people, whose daily wage ranged from 10 kreuzers to one forint, except for some master craftsmen who were paid as much as a thaler. In the period before 1800, his staff included sixteen skilled workers from Vienna, six from Munich, three from Lemberg, and fifteen from the Romanian principalities.

The scale of sericulture remained modest. In the 1790s, no more than 150–175 pounds of cocoons were delivered each year to the silk exchanges. The 61,000 forints invested by Gallarati in the silkworks proved insufficient, and the captain ran into financial trouble. In 1791, he petitioned the diet for a state subsidy, which {2-645.} was duly voted in the shape of a ten-year, interest-free loan of 10,000 forints, but Leopold II withheld approval. Such difficulties were typical of the early stages of industrialization, but Gallarati's silkworks was a full-fledged manufacturing enterprise, the first privately-owned textile factory in Transylvania.

The textile mill at Cód was a rather smaller and less successful enterprise. It had been founded around 1801–02 by Ioan Piuariu-Molnár, a professor of ophthalmology at Kolozsvár, and one of the most eminent Transylvanian Romanians in the period of the Enlightenment. The Saxon felt makers of Szeben, Nagydisznód, and Brassó had opposed his project and enjoyed the backing of the authorities in Szeben. However, this noted scholar had earned the esteem and even friendship of members of the Gubernium, which twice intervened to facilitate his initiative. Piuariu-Molnár had a good business sense, but he could not raise sufficient capital, and the plant was unfinished when it passed to his son. With the help of loans, the latter managed to launch a wool mill that employed forty-four workers, but marketing problems soon drove him into bankruptcy. His creditors leased the plant to a Szeben entrepreneur, Karl Albrich, who managed to make it profitable.

Early in this period, merchants from Brassó established a number of workshops for the dyeing of cotton yarn. One, at Hídvég, was founded by Koszta Demetru Dzsauli. Another, set up at Felsőszombatfalva by Ioan Vlad, Dumitru Vlad, and Sztojka Sztojkovics, encountered the organized opposition of guild craftsmen from Brassó, and was shut down in 1772. Similar opposition prevented the Hídvég dyer from obtaining yarn in Brassó; it had to get its supplies from Alsó-Fehér County, Udvarhely, and Háromszék, and ultimately it, too, went bankrupt. There is no record of the scale of these dyeing operations. At the end of 18th century, there were two dyers at Hídvég; one processed 5000–7000, and the other 16,000–19,000 kilos of yarn each year. In 1810, another Romanian merchant from Brassó, Constantin Boghici, founded a textile mill at Ótohány.

{2-646.} A quite different social stratum, that of Hungarian aristocrats, stood behind Kolozsvár's society for aid to the poor, which, in 1823, established a textile works. Most of its output consisted of blankets ordered by the military Montours-Commission of Gyulafehérvár, but it produced other cloth as well. Presumably, the prison-factory at Szeben continued to produce blankets in this period.

In sum, sources indicate or at least suggest that seven or eight textile producers in Transylvania approached manufacturing scale. These results may seem modest in comparison with the textile industry in Lower Austria and the Czech provinces, but they represented a major advance over the conditions in the previous sixty years.

Manufacturing-scale enterprises emerged in a new industrial sector, that of potash production. Obtained by leaching wood ash, potassium carbonate, or potash, was essential for the bleaching of linen, and in the production of glass, soap, and potassium nitrate; it was also used in other branches of the chemical industry. Potash, and its production technique, were known in eastern Europe for centuries, partly thanks to English and Flemish merchants who traded through Danzig. In the first half of the 18th century, Hungary's forests came to be exploited more intensively as demand rose for potash. Potash production flourished in Moldavia at the end of the century.

As far as is known, there were only a few, small-scale potash producers in Transylvania around 1792. The potash plant at Doh, on the Réz in Kraszna County, had six permanent employees, along with a similar number of casual ash burners; most of its output was shipped to Pest. The other potash burner on the Réz, at Maladé, was running out of accessible wood by this time, and had virtually ceased production. Sources indicate the existence of another potash producer in 1792, at Felsőkomána, but there is no indication of its scale. The large-scale production of potash in Transylvania began {2-647.} with the plants established by the Bánffy family in 1815 at Magyarpatak and Kalin. Manpower came initially from Slovak potash burners who had migrated to Bihar County during boom, but they were soon joined by villagers from the Rézalj district. The potash burners enjoyed special privileges: they could exploit forest resources without charge for five years, and were given free use of a plot of land — on which they could build a house — as long as the potash plant remained in operation. They were exempt from taxes, military service, and services to the landowner. Those who lived in the settlement also included contractual service personnel and craftsmen: coopers, carters who transported firewood as well as ash to the plant, and, in the initial phase, workers responsible for the leaching and bleaching processes. The practice soon developed that the potash burners did their own leaching before taking the raw potash to the plant for bleaching.

At the top of the labour hierarchy stood the master burners; initially team leaders, they later functioned more as small entrepreneurs. Then came the journeymen who worked under a particular master burner, followed by the temporary labourers from the villages. Their income was greater than that of peasants; around 1820, a potash burner would earn 80–100 forints a year, not including the money he might make from cultivating the newly-cleared land; he paid no taxes, and he was not burdened with socage services. The cooper's special skills earned an even higher reward: a basic annual wage of 120 forints, plus two forints for each barrel as well as payments in kind. Over its first fifteen years of operation, the two potash plants earned an annual net profit of some 3,000 forints, and this despite the fact that potash prices were driven down by as much as 40 percent during the credit crisis that hit Europe in 1825. The plant at Kalin closed down in 1840, mainly because the Bánffy-owned forests had become depleted (in the 1815–32 period alone, some 4,000 cadastral acres, or close to 2,300 hectares of prime forest had been consumed in potash burning). Leaseholders kept the plant at Magyarpatak in operation.

{2-648.} The large-scale production of earthenware was inaugurated at a plant in Batiz around 1815. In the early years of the century, earthenware was also produced at Görgény, Kolozsvár, and Szeben, but there is no record of the scale of output. The landowner at Batiz, József Naláczi, was an agile and entrepreneurial aristocrat; he had established a paper mill around 1814–15, and he exploited the mineral waters on his domain by constructing public bathing facilities. The precursor of the Batiz factory was small workshop, staffed by villeins, that dated from around 1813. Naláczi hired an Italian from Trieste, György D'André, to manage the plant. D'André had probably learned his craft at one of the Habsburg empire's longest-established fine earthenware factories, in Trieste; he also spent time at the fine earthenware factory in Kassa, then moved to Kolozsvár around 1805. When he came to Batiz, he brought along a Czech craftsman and, probably, a few skilled workers from Kassa. D'André's son, Ferenc, studied at Vienna's technical university before spending a few years in the late 1820s working as a chemist at the Wedgwood plant in Newcastle. When, in 1832, he returned to Transylvania, his family had already leased the Batiz factory for an annual 4,000 forints; the net revenues must have been considerably higher. The plant's sixty employees earned, on average, 20–35 forints a month, four times the amount earned by the comparatively well paid miners of the day, and about the same as the salary of a municipal clerk. Batiz earthenware made a distinctive contribution to industrial arts in Transylvania.

The fabrication of wax candles may also have reached manufacturing scale in this period. The candle factories at Szeben, Kolozsvár, and Erzsébetváros each had an output of some 4,000–5,000 kilograms, and net revenues in the range of 1,200–2,000 forints. The mercury plant at Kisfalud and the Treasury's gunpowder and saltpetre plant near Gyulafehérvár continued to operate on their earlier scale.

{2-649.} There was significant growth in the iron and steel industry. In 1778, the equipment at Vajdahunyad consisted of thirteen aging foundries with twenty-six furnaces; these were replaced, after 1779, with modern, high blast-furnaces. In 1779–1801, an iron refinery was constructed at Kudzsir; this plant, like the smelter at Sebeshely, got its raw iron supplies from Toplica and from Limpért, near Vajdahunyad. A smelter was erected around this time at Felsőtelek, and a larger one was built in 1805–1813 at Govásdia. In 1820, the installations along the Cserna River, in the Vajdahunyad mining district, included the large smelter at Toplica and four other foundries, as well as workshops producing scythes and swords. Along the Govásdia River, there were four small and one large smelters, ten bloomeries, and three stamp mills. A forge had operated along the Zalasd River since 1782, complete with three stretching fires and two hammering machines. Foundries were also operating at Kudzsir and Sebeshely. In 1842, the Treasury's smelters at Vajdahunyad produced over five thousand tons of iron, almost three times as much as in 1778. The main development in precious-metal processing was the construction by the Treasury of a smelter, at Offenbánya, complete with four furnaces.

To sum up, the larger elements in Transylvania's industrial sector were seven or eight textile factories; one major paper mill, as well as a few others that may have been of manufacturing scale; four or five factory-scale glassworks; the two Bánffy-owned potash plants at Réz; the earthenware factory at Batiz; three sizeable workshops that produced candles; one plant for mercury, and another for gunpowder and saltpetre; two precious metal foundries; and, finally, the smelters at Vajdahunyad. Developments in the textile sector made for a more balanced industrial sector than was the case in the preceding period, but metallurgy continued to dominate Transylvania's industry.