William A. Fairburn

William Armstrong Fairburn is the rare industrialist remembered for two opposite acts: giving an invention away, and then cornering an entire industry. A self-taught naval architect from Yorkshire who had designed steamships before he was twenty-five, he came to the Diamond Match Company in 1909 to fix a chemical problem and stayed to run the company for thirty-eight years ^[1][2][6]. The problem was white phosphorus, the cheap, luminous poison in every match head, which rotted the jawbones of match workers in a disfiguring affliction known as "phossy jaw" and killed children who swallowed the matches ^[4][5]. Fairburn, working with Diamond's chemists, substituted a compound called phosphorus sesquisulphide, producing a match that was non-poisonous, non-explosive, and easy to strike ^[2][6].

What Diamond did next made Fairburn briefly a national hero. Rather than hoard the patent and monopolize the safer match, the company, at the personal urging of President William Howard Taft, dedicated its patent to public use in 1911, free to every competitor ^[4][5][8]. Congress then taxed the old white-phosphorus matches out of existence with the White Phosphorus Match Act of 1912, and an industrial disease that had crippled match workers for two generations was eradicated in America ^[5]. For the work, Fairburn was decorated with the Dr. Louis Livingston Seaman gold medal as president of Diamond Match ^[8].

He became president in 1915, and almost immediately the First World War handed him a crisis that revealed his real gift ^[6]. Germany had been the world's only source of the potash from which the chlorate in every match head was derived, and the embargo threatened to shut Diamond down ^[6]. Fairburn's chemists found three new domestic sources, at Lawrence, Massachusetts; Wilmington, California; and Burmester, Utah, and he built a plant on the California coast to wring potash from kelp dredged off the Palos Verdes beds ^[6][7]. Diamond not only supplied itself but sold chlorate to its rivals, and the price of a box of matches never rose ^[6].

Over the next two decades Fairburn turned that chemical leverage into something close to total control of the industry, and here the hero becomes the monopolist ^[3][6]. He out-maneuvered the Swedish "Match King" Ivar Kreuger himself: when he learned Kreuger wanted the Ohio Match Company, Fairburn bought it first for $7 million, then sold Kreuger a half-interest for $6 million, eliminating his chief competitor in strike-anywhere matches for a net $1 million ^[3]. Through subsidiaries and a holding company, the Pan-American Match Corporation of Delaware, he swept up Lion, West Virginia, Federal, and Universal match companies, several of them picked from the wreckage of Kreuger's 1932 collapse ^[3]. By 1939, when Fortune devoted thirteen pages to the company, Diamond was making roughly 90 percent of all matches sold in the United States ^[3].

Fairburn was a Gilded-Age archetype born a generation late: a paternalistic autocrat who wrote dozens of dense volumes on the management of men, Human Chemistry, Life and Work, Organization and Success, in which he cast workers as "human chemicals" and the manager as the "human chemist" who combines them, and which were sometimes required reading for his own employees ^[1][2]. He guarded his privacy fiercely from estates in Ojai, Morristown, and the Maine woods, where a company seaplane ferried him to a lakeside compound few outsiders ever saw ^[2]. Time magazine, in 1944, simply called him "secretive" ^[2]. He ran Diamond Match until the day he died, in 1947, and was succeeded by his own son ^[1][2][6].

Fairburn was born on October 12, 1876, in Huddersfield, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, the son of Thomas Fairburn, a Hull-born ship fitter and shipyard foreman, and Elizabeth Jemima Frosdick ^[1][2]. The trade of building ships was in the family, and in May 1891, Fairburn not yet fifteen, Thomas brought his wife and children across the Atlantic from Liverpool aboard the S.S. Servia, settling in Bath, Maine, the shipbuilding town on the Kennebec ^[1][2]. The boy apprenticed himself to the Bath Iron Works, attended the local public schools, and rose with startling speed; by eighteen he was a master mechanic ^[1][2].

He spent a year, around 1896, studying naval architecture and marine engineering at the University of Glasgow, then returned to Bath and to the drawing board ^[1]. The claim his biographers repeat is striking: that at the age of twenty-three Fairburn designed the first all-steel cargo freighter built in America, and went on to draw the lines of some of the largest cargo steamships of the day ^[1][2]. By 1900 he had set up as an independent consulting engineer, and his reputation as an analytical mind for hire spread well beyond shipyards, he was reportedly in Europe studying Diesel engines for the railroad magnates James J. Hill and Edward H. Harriman when Diamond Match came calling ^[2][3].

The ship work also produced the scholarship for which he is still cited: a monumental, multi-volume history of American wooden shipbuilding, Merchant Sail, compiled over a lifetime and published posthumously through the Fairburn Marine Educational Foundation he endowed in Maine ^[1][2]. It was the obsession of a man who left the shipyards for the chemistry of matchsticks but never stopped thinking of himself as a builder of ships.

Fairburn's most enduring monument is invisible: the ordinary, safe, strike-anywhere match. The sesquisulphide formula his team perfected and Diamond gave to the world is essentially the one still in matchbooks today, and the elimination of white phosphorus, sealed by the 1912 Match Act, ended one of the era's ugliest occupational diseases ^[2][5][6]. That a single industrialist could be credited both with eradicating a workplace plague and with building a 90-percent monopoly captures the contradictions of the Progressive-era capitalist better than almost any contemporary ^[3][5].

The empire itself did not long outlive him. His son Robert ran and expanded Diamond Match before selling it in 1957, and the great Maine and California timber and chemical holdings were eventually broken up and dispersed ^[2]. What survives of Fairburn the man is oddly literary: the dozens of earnest, now-forgotten books on the "chemistry" of human organization, and above all Merchant Sail, the exhaustive history of American wooden shipbuilding he labored over for decades and endowed a foundation to publish, the work of an engineer who spent his life among matchsticks but measured himself by ships ^[1][2].