Exactly

by Simon Winchester

  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.

  The French officials were at first vastly impressed. The army set Blanc up in an officially sponsored workshop, he began producing inexpensive flintlock parts for the military and profits for himself, and for four further years all seemed fine. Then came 1789 and the unholy trinity of the Revolution, Gribeauval’s death, and the Terror. 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. By the turn of the century, the idea of interchangeable parts had withered and died in France—and some say to this day that the survival of craftsmanship and the reluctance entirely to embrace the modern has helped preserve the reputation of France as something of a haven for the romantic delight of the Old Ways.

  In America, though, the reaction was very different, and all thanks to the prescient eye of Thomas Jefferson. The first time he described what he had seen was on August 30, in a long letter to John Jay, the then–secretary of foreign affairs. He began with the customary flourish of logistical explanation regarding the route by which his last letter had reached Jay, an inconvenience unknown today with postal services being such a commonplace.

  I had the honor of writing to you on the 14th. inst. by a Mr. Cannon of Connecticut who was to sail in the packet. Since that date yours of July 13 is come to hand. The times for the sailing of the packets being somewhat deranged, I avail myself of a conveiance [sic] of the present by the Mr. Fitzhughs of Virginia who expect to land at Philadelphia …

  … An improvement is made here 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. The government here has examined and approved the method, and is establishing a large manufactory for the purpose. As yet the inventor [Blanc] has only completed the lock of the musket on this plan. He will proceed immediately to have the barrel, stock, and their parts executed in the same way. 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.

  Jefferson was indeed seriously impressed with Blanc’s system, and wrote further to friends and colleagues back in Washington, and in Virginia several times, to underline his belief that American gunsmiths should be encouraged to adopt the new French system. And in due course, the makers began to get the message, most especially in New England, where most gunsmiths were to be found.* 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.

  Two firms of private gunsmiths led the bidding for this government contract to make the first batch of muskets: ten thousand by one account, fifteen thousand by others. The winner of the contract, which meant an immediate cash payment of the not insignificant sum of five thousand dollars, was one Eli Whitney, of Massachusetts.

  Whitney remains a man of great fame, still known to most in America today as he has been for two centuries. His face appears on a postage stamp. He is part of the educational curriculum. He ranks alongside inventors and businessmen—Edison, Ford, John D. Rockefeller. To any schoolchild today, his name means just one thing: the cotton gin. This New Englander, at the age of just twenty-nine, had invented the device that removed the seeds from cotton bolls, and thus made the harvesting of cotton the foundation of a highly profitable Southern states economy—but only if slaves were used to perform the work, an important caveat.

  To any informed engineer, however, the name Eli Whitney signifies something very different: confidence man, trickster, fraud, charlatan. And his alleged charlatanry derives almost wholly from his association with the gun trade, with precision manufacturing, and with the promise of being able to deliver weapons assembled from interchangeable parts. “I am persuaded,” he declared with a flourish of elaborate solemnity in his bid to make a cache of guns for the U.S. government, “to make the same parts of different guns, as the lock for example, as much like each other as the successive impressions of a copperplate engraving.”

  It was the utmost piffle. When Whitney won the commission and signed the government contract in 1798, he knew nothing about muskets and even less about their components: he won the order largely because of his Yale connections and the old alumni network that, even then, flourished in the corridors of power in Washington, DC. Once he had the contract in hand, he put up a small factory outside New Haven and promptly claimed to be manufacturing muskets there, weapons based, as were all smooth-bore American guns of the time, on the French Charleville design. He took an unconscionable time to produce any weapons, however. The contract specified a delivery of at least some of the muskets by 1800, but there were only a handful of finished guns, and all Whitney could offer as a salve by that due date was a demonstration of the quality, as he claimed, of the guns that his new factory was now notionally in the process of making.

  Whitney performed what is seen as his notorious demonstration in January 1801—a supposed confidence-building exercise, it would be called today—before a distinguished audience that included the then-president, John Adams, and his vice president, soon to become president, Thomas Jefferson, the man who had started the ball rolling fifteen years before. There were also dozens of congressmen and soldiers and senior bureaucrats, all men who needed to be convinced that public treasure was going to be expended on what would be a truly worthwhile venture. They had been told they were there to witness Whitney demonstrating, with the use of a single screwdriver, how his musket locks were properly interchangeable.

  Everyone in the room was ready to believe him, Whitney’s cotton-gin-based reputation having long preceded him. It seemed to be of no great moment to anyone in the room, however, that the man didn’t even bother to disassemble the locks he had on show. Instead, he merely took a number of finished muskets, used his screwdriver to detach the locks from their wooden gunstocks, then slipped them whole into slots on other gunstocks, and so made it appear to the guileless visitors as though his parts were, as promised, truly interchangeable.

  He ex
plained as he went along what he was doing, and not even Jefferson, who had seen Blanc’s demonstration at Vincennes in 1785 and might have had sufficient knowledge to splutter, “Hold on a minute!” had the temerity to challenge him, to express even the smallest measure of skepticism. Quite the reverse: the president-elect bought Whitney’s explanation in its entirety, and wrote enthusiastically to the then-governor of Virginia, saying that Whitney had “invented moulds and machines for making all the pieces of his locks so exactly equal, that take 100 locks to pieces and mingle their parts, and the hundred locks may be put together as well by taking the first pieces that comes to hand.”

  The truth is Jefferson had been hoodwinked, as had everyone else present that day. For there had been no molds, no machines for making all the parts “so exactly equal.” Whitney’s new-made factory, powered by water, not yet by steam (even though engines were readily available), had neither the tools nor the capacity to make precision-engineered pieces. Realizing this, he had instead hired a clutch of artisans, craftsmen, and told them to make the flintlock components with their own files and saws and polishers, and make them one by one, by hand—and not necessarily all the same, either, for the way he had planned his show did not allow for anyone to inspect the locks themselves, only that they fitted into the stocks.

  So there was no new technique. Everything had been done the old-fashioned way, but with the demonstration’s ringmaster, the master of ceremonies, working to convince all in the room that they had just seen a remarkable and revolutionary manufacturing process, live and in the flesh. Nothing about the display was genuine: no lock had to be taken apart, and even the gunstocks were preselected to make absolutely certain the slot in each of them was large enough to accommodate whichever of the ten locks was chosen as a replacement.

  Muskets made by Whitney survive in collections to this day, and they reveal the sorry story: that the promise of precision, with its reward of easy money, led to cunning and corruption. None of the surviving weapons is well made; nor do its locks show any indication of exacting similarity. They might well fit into the stocks, but their parts would not fit into one another.

  The demonstration worked, though. The sheer flamboyance of Whitney’s spectacle did end up convincing the government to hand him a further sum of much-needed money, even though those attending the demonstration had, to a man, been duped. Whitney was a fraud, and the fact that it took a further eight years before his guns were delivered suggests that, in the end, those who handed over the cash got all they deserved.

  TRUE CREDIT FOR taking Honoré Blanc’s French system and translating it into the American way of precision-based manufacturing actually belongs to three lesser-known figures: Simeon North and John Hall, gun makers, and to Thomas Blanchard, who could do remarkably replicable things with wood. North had his smithy not twenty-five miles away from Whitney’s factory in Middletown, Connecticut. John Hancock Hall was from farther away, in southern Maine, and he had made something of a fortune running first a tannery and later a series of cabinetmaking and boatbuilding wood shops. Guns were a sideline, a hobby—until, in 1811, when he filed applications for a patent for an entirely new kind of weapon: a gun of his own invention and design, a single-shot rifled weapon that could be loaded through the breech rather than, as with muskets, down through the barrel.

  Stacked guns in the so-called musket organ at the U.S. government’s Springfield Armory in Massachusetts, where the French system of making interchangeable parts revolutionized manufacturing.

  In time, both men, North and Hall, won government contracts for producing guns—North for horse pistols in Connecticut; Hall for his new breech-loading weapons up in Portland and then, later on, down at one of the two newly established federal armories in Harpers Ferry, Virginia. (The other was at Springfield, Massachusetts.) The rather more significant breakthrough made by both men—by all three men, in fact, though Blanchard’s was in a subsidiary and less focused role—was that, for the first time, they each used machines to make their gun components. This 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.

  Those who had initially planned for interchangeability, Blanc and Gribeauval in France and those in the U.S. government who had impenitently asked Eli Whitney to do as he had promised, did so by employing workers to hand-make their components and to keep them true to a master example of each piece. They achieved good results by making jigs, gauges, and master models. The workingmen they hired to perform the various tasks, all the while complaining that their time-honored skills were going to waste, had to create new pieces by using the jigs, then measure the pieces using the gauges, and finally compare their dimensions with those of the masters, confirming thereby that they were exact copies, and thus producing de facto interchangeability.

  But humans are fallible, however legendary their craftsmanship. The hand of the man who shapes, the eye of the man who smooths, the mind of the man whose claims to inerrancy—all suggest he instinctively knows when something is right, yet all can and will eventually misjudge, make mistakes, fall afoul of fatigue. Machines, on the other hand, if properly set up and not yet worn out, are well-nigh incapable of error. Those machines that can perform the kind of tricky work hitherto reserved for skilled artisans (such as the abundance of machines made by Henry Maudslay for the naval pulley block factory in Portsmouth) can almost guarantee perfection and consistency in their production. The machine offers what one historian has called “the workmanship of certainty … in which the result is predetermined and unalterable once production begins.”

  And what North and Hall were able to do, independently, was to create machine tools that offered just that degree of certainty. Simeon North up in Middletown 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.

  John Hall, working five hundred miles to the south, in a government-gifted metal shop right beside the Harpers Ferry arsenal, then improved upon this milling machine,* and built a series of what were called drop-forges, which he sited upstream, as it were, of the milling devices in his workshop. A long piece of red-hot iron, soft and pliable, was forged between hard-tempered metal dies, one of them static, the other one lifted and repeatedly and heavily dropped onto the other until the piece between them (by now drop-forged) was roughly shaped—into a gun barrel, say—and then handed over to the men working the milling machine.

  Employing a variety of differently designed cutting tools fixed to the milling head, these men would mill away excess iron from the forged rod in order to shape and trim and turn it into a tube of iron that could then be rifled and made into a useful central part of a working gun. At every stage of the work, from the forging of the barrel to the turning of the rifling and the shaping of the barrel, John Hall’s gauges were set to work—he employed no fewer than sixty-three of them, more than any engineer before him, to ensure as best he could that every part of every gun was exactly the same as every other—and that all were made to far stricter tolerances than hitherto: for a lock merely to work required a tolerance of maybe a fifth of a millimeter; to ensure that it not only worked but was infinitely interchangeable, he needed to have the pieces machined to a fiftieth of a millimeter. And once the barrel, made with such a strict adherence to rules and numbers, had been shaped and checked and checked again, it remained necessary only to have the flintlock attached to it and the whole inserted into the wooden stock—which is where the last member of this holy trinity of early American precision engineers, Thomas Blanchard, comes in.

  In 1817, in his hometown of Springfield, Massachusetts, Blanchard invented a lathe that made lasts for shoes. It was a stroke of inventive genius: he simply placed a metal template of a s
hoe in his machine and, using a pantograph connected to a series of blades, attached the template to the shapeless hunk of ash, a last-to-be that was fixed in the path of a series of sharp knives. Turn the template, trace its outline with the pantograph rods, and let the other ends of the pantograph in turn press the blades against the timber—and presto! In ninety seconds or less, an exact copy of the template would be there, in freshly carved wood, ready to be taken from the machine and sent off to the cobbler.

  One simple consequence of such a machine lives with us today, in the matter of shoe sizes. For as Blanchard could now turn a shapeless block of wood into a foot-shaped entity of specific dimensions, and repeat the creation time and time again, so he could offer to the shoemaker lasts of different but exact sizes—one that was seven inches long, one nine, and so on. Prior to that, shoes were offered up in barrels, at random. A customer shuffled through the barrel until finding a shoe that fit, more or less comfortably. Now he simply asked for a size seven, or eleven, or five medium.

  And as with shoes, so later with gunstocks. Blanchard was soon offered work at the huge and growing Springfield Armory nearby, and was asked to adapt his shoe last lathe to make the wooden parts for guns that, though necessarily more complicated than feet, had the benefit of being needed in only one size. So he made a metal model of a gunstock (an irregular form, in the same sense that a foot is structurally unique) and set it high on the lathe, connected to a pantograph as before. And turning on the rotating driver of what was described as “a strange contrivance … at first glance less like a lathe than some primitive piece of agricultural machinery,” he commenced the process of regular gunstock manufacture, a process that survived at the armory for more than the next half century. Thomas Blanchard had cleverly patented the principle of his lathe, and a company in the nearby town of Chicopee manufactured it under license. The inventor lived on into old age, comfortably settled by a near-ceaseless fountain of royalties.