Pride of Precision – Part 3
America takes aim at precision engineering.
During the Revolutionary War and afterwards, it had long been recognized that the muskets used in battle suffered from a terrible flaw: they were all hammered together slightly differently by the individual blacksmiths who made them and their component parts. If only muskets could be manufactured in a way that allowed broken components to be replaced easily with identically made parts that could slide seamlessly back into the gun, making it new again, rather than having to replace the whole gun, or return it to a blacksmith for repair.
Such ease of repair had long been a dream of Thomas Jefferson. As Simon Winchester writes in his book The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World:
Jefferson, while U.S. minister to France, observed the early work on creating interchangeable parts for flintlock muskets, and told his superiors back home that American smiths should follow the French practice … Honoré Blanc had arranged before him a collection of fifty locks, each gleaming in such daylight as filtered through the slit windows. Once everyone was settled on the bleachers, with onlookers paying close attention, he quickly disassembled half of them, throwing the various components of the twenty-five randomly selected locks into trays: twenty-five frizzle springs here, twenty-five faceplates there, twenty-five bridles there, twenty-five pans in another box. He shook each box so that the pieces were as disarranged as possible—and then, with a calm and an aplomb born of his supreme confidence in his method, he quickly reassembled out of this confusion of components twenty-five brand-new musket locks. Each one of these was made of parts that had never been joined together before -- but it made no difference. Everything fitted to everything, for the simple reason that with the great precision of its making, and its faithful adherence to the dimensions of the master lock, each part was identical to each other. The parts were all, in other words, exactly interchangeable.
Yet while Jefferson and others were encouraging the development of precision engineering in America, France soon came to reject it:
Then came 1789 … and the Terror [of the French Revolution]. The château was stormed, and Blanc’s workshop was sacked by the rioters. His sponsor was suddenly no longer there to protect him, and there was a fast-growing, eventually fanatical, opposition among the sansculottes toward mechanization, toward efficiencies that favored the middle classes, toward techniques that put the honest work of artisans and craftsmen to disadvantage … In America, though, the reaction was very different, and all thanks to the prescient eye of Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson wrote the following words to John Jay, then the Secretary of Foreign Affairs, in 1785:
An improvement is made here [in France] in the construction of the musket which it may be interesting to Congress to know, should they at any time propose to procure any. It consists in the making every part of them so exactly alike that what belongs to any one, may be used for every other musket in the magazine … Supposing it might be useful to the U.S., I went to the workman, he presented me the parts of 50 locks taken to pieces and arranged in compartments. I put several together myself taking pieces at hazard as they came to hand, and they fitted in the most perfect manner. The advantages of this, when arms need repair, are evident. He effects it by tools of his own contrivance which at the same time abridge the work so that he thinks he shall be able to furnish the musket two livres cheaper than the common price. But it will be two or three years before he will be able to furnish any quantity. I mention it now, as it may have influence on the plan for furnishing our magazines with this arm.
As Winchester writes, “If skepticism lingered back in Europe, America proved herself, quite literally, to have the mind-set of the New World, any reluctance being swiftly dispelled by the U.S. government’s decision to place enormous orders for new muskets, so long as their parts were, in line with Jefferson’s thinking, interchangeable.”
A burgeoning gun industry in New England embraced the new philosophy of precisely made interchangeable part, which redounded to the eventual detriment of the South during the Civil War. As David Landes writes in his book The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor:
The colonials made guns -- muskets to begin with, and increasingly rifles, which along with hunting from childhood, gave them a substantial edge in marksmanship, an edge that would persist into the twentieth century. Guns had their particular virtues in a frontier society, to the point where some of the colonies imposed an obligation to bear arms, even to church … Demand, however, did not assure supply. Culture matters. The people of the South and of backwoods Appalachia went more heavily armed, but the guns were made in the northern colonies. The reason was simple: that was where the skills and tools were. By the time the South went to war against the Union in 1861, firearms production in the North outweighed that in the Confederacy by 32 to 1.
Beyond winning wars, the consistency of precisely manufactured individual parts was essential to operating assembly lines at all, and winning the war for consumers worldwide. As Winchester writes:
[T]he production lines required a limitless supply of parts that were exactly interchangeable. If one happened not to be so exact, and if an assembly-line worker tried to fit this inexact and imprecise component into a passing workpiece and it refused to fit and the worker tried to make it fit, and wrestled with it … the line would slow and falter and eventually stop, and workers for yards around would find their work disrupted, and parts being fed into the system would create unwieldy piles, and the supply chain would clog, and the entire production would slow and falter and maybe even grind, quite literally, to a painful halt. Precision, in other words, is an absolute essential for keeping the unforgiving tyranny of a production line going.
Machine production “was a major change, and in making it, the men ensured, rather than simply hoped, that what was made was near perfect and true and precise, every time.”
While it was guns that led the way to precision engineering, its processes were widely adopted in other industries that made just about any components:
Simeon North up in Middletown [Connecticut] made one of America’s first metal-milling machines, replacing at a stroke the tedious handiwork of filing and checking, filing and checking, and instead putting a belt-driven cutting tool to work milling away the superfluous metal, while a mixture of oil and water kept the cutter and the workpiece cool as it was being reduced, smoothed, and shaped … Those who operated the machines that were locally bent to making the small components for the region’s armories (the triggers, the faceplates, the frizzle springs) found that they could with ease modify their lathes and milling machines to make small gearwheels and spindles and mainsprings, the necessary components for the intricacies of timekeeping … Perhaps we should not be as surprised as the visitor to the American West in the middle of the century who remarked that “In Kentucky, in Indiana, in Illinois, in Missouri, and in every dell in Arkansas, and in cabins where there was not a chair to sit on, there was sure to be a Connecticut clock.” That was part of the triumph of a means of making that was already being called, to the envy of all industrialized nations around the world (including the British, who could still rightly lay claim to having been the pioneers of precision and perfection), the American system.
This “American system” embodied the American cultural emphasis on innovation and practical improvements, which gave the country its most important advantage. As Landes writes, the United States:
had the paradoxical advantage of a climate that limited cultivation to grains and yielded little at first in the way of an exportable surplus. Economies of scale were negligible, at least before the invention of mechanical technologies, so that holdings were small, often no larger than subsistence, and more or less evenly distributed. Such equality did not always please those of aristocratic inclinations. In 1765, a British visitor to New England, Lord Adam Gordon, frowned his disapproval: “…the levelling principle here, everywhere, operates strongly and takes the lead. Everybody has property, and everybody knows it.” Equality bred self-esteem, ambition, a readiness to enter and compete in the marketplace, a spirit of individualism and contentiousness. At the same time, smallholdings encouraged technical self-sufficiency and the handyman, fix-it mentality. Every farm had its workshop and anvil, its gadgets and cunning improvements. Ingenuity brought not only comfort and income but also status and prestige. Good workers were the envy of their neighbors, the heroes of the community. Listen to a report of 1681 on the quickness of Quaker settlers to engage in industry: “…they have also coopers, smiths, bricklayers, wheelwrights, plowrights and millwrights, ship carpenters and other trades, which work upon what the country produces for manufactories…. There are iron-houses, and a Furnace and Forging Mill already set up in East-Jersey, where they make iron.” Another report of 1698 speaks of cloth manufacture: in the Quaker communities of Burlington and Salem, “cloth workers were making very good serges, druggets, crapes, camblets, plushes and other woolen cloths. Entire families engaged in such manufactures, using wool and linen of their own raising.” New England and the middle colonies of Pennsylvania and New Jersey became the “industrial heartlands” of the new nation. Ironmaking got its start in the 1640s (bog iron on the Saugus [at Lynn] in Massachusetts), only two decades after the Pilgrims’ landing at Plymouth. By the time of the revolution (1770s), some two hundred iron forges were in operation in Britain’s American colonies, and the annual make was some 30,000 tons. Only Britain, France, Sweden, and Russia made more. Along with smelting went refining, hammering, cutting, slitting, rolling, and the sundry other operations that turn iron into tools and objects. Inevitably, the demand for British metallurgical products fell sharply, leading British manufacturers to petition Parliament for laws prohibiting colonial manufacture. As much command the tides. Such laws only sensitized the colonists to the injustice of their subordinate status and of government without representation, also to the importance of economic autonomy. As Benjamin Rush, doctor and civic leader in Pennsylvania, put it in 1775: “A people who are dependent on foreigners for food or clothes must always be subject to them.” … When Francis Lowell of Boston introduced the power loom in 1814, he found a ready workforce, descendants of “many generations of farmer-mechanics in the workshops of New England.” … Already in colonial times, for example, much American house construction had turned from carpentry to millwork. Doors and windows were cut and assembled to standard size; glass, precut accordingly. (A French ship arriving in the young republic around 1815 with a cargo of window glass of various sizes was surprised to find it had to give most of it away.) … Unlike Europe, America made little resistance to this advance of deskilling and routinizing technique … Small wonder that when the British, with all their industrial achievements, belatedly (mid-nineteenth century) wanted to make good and cheap muskets for military use, they sent their people to the United States to study American arsenal methods.
There followed an explosion of manufacturing. As Landes continues:
The figures tell the story. In 1788, Philadelphia’s Fourth of July parade featured a hand-powered cotton carding machine and an eighty-spindle jenny—symbols of a preindustrial (pre-power) economic independence. Twenty years later, the young United States was powering almost 100,000 cotton spindles; between 1810 and 1820 the number tripled, and in the next decade more than tripled again. So, by 1831, the industry counted 1.2 million spindles and 33,500 looms, most of them power-driven by piedmont streams from New Hampshire in the North to Maryland in the south. A recent comparison of productivity in manufacturing shows America well ahead of Britain by the 1820s. This was an extraordinary achievement, bringing together enlightened and often explicitly patriotic enterprise, knowledge and know-how, and an intelligent workforce … [S]ome employers left much to be desired. Even so, conditions were apparently better than in old England. To cite Charles Dickens, the contrast was “between the Good and Evil, the living light and deepest shadow.”
As Landes summarizes the globally historic effects of the “American system”:
[It] set standards of productivity for the rest of the industrial world. Each technology became a stepping stone to others. Clocks and guns prepared the way for watches and sewing machines. Mowers and harvesters led to sowers (planters and drills), reapers, binders, threshers, and eventually combines; bicycles, to automobiles; cash registers, to typewriters and calculators. And machines invented for one purpose slid easily to others: a sewing machine could be used on leather and canvas as well as fabric, could make boots and shoes and sails and tents as well as cloth garments. This was a mechanic’s wonderland, in agriculture as in industry. A letter writer to the Scientific American of July 1900 exulted: “Indeed there is scarcely a thing done on the farm today in which patented machinery does not perform the greater part of the labor.” So agriculture became an industry too, with economies of scale, division of labor, attention to labor productivity. And to land productivity as well … Other countries could copy; some indeed made forays along similar lines. But these older societies did not have the tabula rasa and the optimistic, open culture that eased the task of the American farmer and manufacturer. They had to work with cramped systems of land tenure, peasants (no peasants in the United States) who scrimped on equipment to add to their holdings, great landlords who saw land more as the foundation of status and style than as capital; and with craftsmen who saw mechanization as a personal diminution, an offense to status, a threat to jobs. The older countries had their machine-breakers; America did not.
And the American rejection of rigid class structures helped, too:
European countries also had a consumption problem. Class structures and segmented tastes made it harder there to adopt standardized products … The world had long learned to live with the lavishness and indulgences of the rich and genteel; but now, for the first time in history, even ordinary folk could aspire to ownership of those hard goods—watches, clocks, bicycles, telephones, radios, domestic machines, above all, the automobile—that were seen in traditional societies as the appropriate privilege of the few.
In the next and last essay on Pride in Precision, we’ll look at how precision in the manufacturing of microchips and the precise measurement of time gave us today’s global positioning systems.
Links to all essays in this series: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4