Historian and author, Gerald Carbone, will show how a Rhode Island metals company founded in the 1830s literally shaped modern material culture through its ingenuity and inventions. Company founder Joseph Brown developed the “X-Y-Z Machine” that Capt. Nat used in shaping his hull models, a predecessor of the modern Coordinate Measuring Machine that instantaneously provides manufacturers with three dimensional measuring points to prevent production errors. The link between Brown & Sharpe’s precision measuring tools and Herreshoff’s precise designs is inextricable.

Gerald Carbone has published three books about the American or Industrial Revolutions, including “Brown & Sharpe and the Measure of American Industry.” He is a former staff writer at the Providence Journal where he won a number of regional and national writing awards, including the American Society of New Editors Distinguished Writing Award for non-deadline writing. He has completed a John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University, and in 2013 he earned a master’s degree in Public Humanities from Brown University. He lives in Warwick.