The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan Invented the American Supercompany

by Charles R. Morris

  The Crystal Palace Exhibition was the first occasion in which a wide swathe of British opinion makers encountered Blanchard-style production systems, which came to be known as the “American System of Manufacturing.” Reactions ran from utter disbelief, especially among British craftsmen, whose gun production methods had hardly changed for a century, to something like fear among industrialists and civil servants. The nastiest shock, perhaps, was how utterly different and radically complete the American approach to manufacturing appeared to be.

  Revolutions don’t boil up from a vacuum. Blanchard’s invention was just one flowering of a unique concentration of machine-geek talent taking shape in the Connecticut River Valley, much as Silicon Valley emerged as a center of innovation a century and a half later. The fact that it happened along the Connecticut River, or happened at all, was, just as in Silicon Valley, the semirandom consequence of basic predispositions and happy chance.

  Valley Guys

  The Connecticut River rises in the mountains of New Hampshire, then zigzags between New Hampshire and Vermont, and cuts a north-south divide through Massachusetts, passing between Mount Holyoke and Mount Tom, before traversing Connecticut and emptying into Long Island Sound near Old Saybrook. The site of savage Indian-settler wars in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the river valley was beginning to emerge as an important secondary manufacturing center in the 1800s, built around an artisanal culture of small workshops, especially in the metal trades.

  The attractions of the river valley started with its splendid endowment of physical resources. First, there was the prospect of almost unlimited power. The river’s fall across its entire length was greater than Niagara’s.* Even today, upriver dams provide a substantial fraction of the electrical power for the region. Then there was direct water transport to New York harbor; the state of rural roads was such that overland transport longer than thirty to forty miles almost always cost more than shipping goods to New York from any point on the river. And finally, there were the convenient iron mines of Salisbury, Connecticut, just south of the Massachusetts border.

  In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, New England manufacturing was “hot.” Samuel Slater smuggled British spinning technology into the country in 1791, and the pace of industrialization accelerated after Francis Cabot Lowell stole Samuel Cartwright’s power loom designs during an English tour in 1813. The mills drew from a swelling stream of farm girls and boys as New England agriculture withered under the onslaught of high-productivity New York farmers. Mill profits created an ample supply of venture capital, with activist investors prospecting for opportunities. The most talented young men perceived that a flair for machinery could be a fast track to financial independence. An English observer commented in 1854:

  [T]here is not a working boy of average ability in the New England states, at least, who has not an idea of some mechanical invention or improvement in manufactures, by which, in good time, he hopes to better his position, or rise to fortune and social distinction.

  And finally, there was the nearby Springfield Armory, the nerve center of the American military’s drive toward high-technology weapon-making. Ironically, the blueprint for the armory came from the industrially laggard French, with the help of that most committed of pastoralists, Thomas Jefferson. After the American Revolution, Frenchmen helped organize West Point and wrote the first American weapons manuals. The French took a highly rational approach to weapons design—it was called le système Gribeauval after the eighteenth-century artillery reformer Jean-Baptiste de Gribeauval, who had made simplicity and uniformity of weapons a career project. One of his disciples, Honoré Blanc, an arsenal expert, was a friend of Jefferson when he was the ambassador in Paris. Blanc insisted that true uniformity meant that parts should be freely exchangeable from one weapon to another. (It is not clear whether Blanc ever achieved such uniformity himself. If so, it would have been on a limited basis in small production lots. He did not use machinery, but rather promoted hand-shaping and filing parts with the aid of precise dies and jigs, or molds, which he may have learned from Swedish clock makers.) Jefferson pressed Blanc’s methods on Washington’s cabinet, and even attempted to create an armory for Blanc in the United States.

  The first American chief of ordnance, Decius Wadsworth, adopted the very Gribeauvalian motto, “Uniformity, Simplicity, and Solidarity.” Mechanized production was emphasized from the start. Springfield Armory reported in 1799 that the man-days to produce a musket had been reduced from twenty-one to just nine through “labor-saving machines.” Wadsworth’s chief assistant and long-serving successor, George Bomford, was a Gribeauval devotée, as was Roswell Lee, who was Springfield superintendent from 1815 to 1833. It was Lee who reached out to Blanchard and invited him to demonstrate his gun-stock machine at the armory. Their mantra was “interchangeability of parts,” in the spirit of Blanc. The military impetus behind interchangeability was the difficulty in finding skilled craftsmen to repair weapons in the field*; but in the longer run, the precision methodologies developed under military contracts became a critical technology behind American manufacturing dominance later in the century.

  The Valley’s venture investors were typically Boston merchant princes, men such as Israel Thorndike, S. A. Eliot, Samuel Cabot, Francis Stanton, and Harrison Gray Otis. Edmund Dwight, a Morgan cousin on his mother’s side, wasn’t in the same financial stratum as a Cabot, but gained access through his work at the law firm of Fisher Ames, the old Massachusetts Federalist leader. Political connections were taken for granted; these were men who kept Daniel Webster on their payroll while he was in the Senate, and Otis had been a U.S. senator himself. They committed money for the long term, for returns that look modest today—there was considerable excitement over a water-power investment in Waltham, for example, that was returning 15–20 percent a year to shareholders after five years. But money wasn’t the only motivator. James K. Mill, a substantial Boston merchant who participated in several investment groups, was absent from his primary business for months at a time getting new companies on their feet. He was clearly extremely capable and worked very hard. One imagines he enjoyed it.

  Since these were cotton men, primarily interested in new cotton mills, they did not target precision manufacturing as such. But they envisioned a manufacturing metropolis extending the entire length of the river, and their infrastructure investments benefited manufacturers of all kinds. A common strategy was to buy up stretches of the riverbank as mill sites, build a dam, some worker housing and amenities, then organize a textile mill and a machine company to supply the mill, often with a second round of investors, perhaps a successful mill manager putting up his life savings for the chance to own his own mill. The hope was that with anchor businesses in place, other entrepreneurs would lease the remaining mill sites, or “water privileges,” as the youthful Thomas Blanchard did. Investors put large sums at risk. The group that financed the town of Holyoke, for example, started with an initial paid-in capital of $2.45 million in 1847—a huge sum for the time, mostly for a thousand-foot-wide dam (which collapsed on the day of its opening and had to be rebuilt from scratch). After ten years of struggle, they lost it all, although Holyoke eventually prospered as a papermaking center.

  The whirl of entrepreneurial activity in the Valley, the presence of the machine-geek culture, and the technical leadership of the Springfield Armory made it the natural center for the military’s development of interchangeability-level precision machining. It took a long time, but in the first half of the century, striving for interchangeability was as important as actually achieving it. Machining is one of a small number of enabling technologies—like electricity in the early twentieth century and information technology now—that accelerate development across a very wide front; and the advances in “American system” precision machining had profound implications for the entire course of the country’s economic development.

  The Quest for the Holy Grail

  Until relatively recently, legend had
it that military-precision interchangeability was first achieved around the turn of the century by Eli Whitney of cotton gin fame, a tale that was assiduously watered by Whitney and his heirs. Whitney eventually became one of the Valley’s great manufacturers, but he never achieved interchangeability-standard machining. The source of the story was that he once promised interchangeability to win an important military contract, at a time when he was in serious financial trouble from mismanaging his cotton gin patents. Whitney had very limited manufacturing experience at the time, and none in rifles; besides not achieving the promised interchangeability, his deliveries were years late and dogged by disputes over their quality. Much later, Samuel Colt also claimed that his pistols were made with interchangeable parts, as did Cyrus McCormick for his reapers and Isaac Singer for his sewing machines, although none of them had actually achieved that standard of precision.* (When pressed hard by a British panel on one occasion, Colt retreated to the claim that he had achieved “approximate” interchangeability.)

  Achieving consistent interchangeability in volume production turned out to be a much tougher challenge than French military reformers or American ordnance officials had ever imagined. The practical methodologies evolved over many years, and were largely the work of John Hall, a gunsmith from Portland, Maine, and inventor of the “Hall carbine” that became notorious when muckrakers dug into the youthful Pierpont Morgan’s dealings with Civil War procurement authorities.

  John Hall was born into an upper-middle-class family during the waning days of the Revolution, and judging by his letters, was much better educated than Blanchard. He became fascinated with firearms after a stint in his state militia, and in 1811, at age thirty, he applied for a patent on a new type of breech-loading rifle, which eliminated the clumsy process of pushing ammunition down the muzzle at each reload. As Hall described his invention in an 1816 pamphlet:

  The Patent Rifles may be loaded and fired . . . more than twice as quick as muskets . . . ; in addition to this, they may be loaded with great ease, in almost every situation. . . . [Since] the American Militia . . . will always excel as light troop . . . quickly assembling and moving with rapidity . . . these guns are most excellently adapted for them.

  In contrast to Blanchard, who moved easily from one product or technology to another, Hall was grimly focused, with perhaps a touch of the fanatic. He devoted thirty years to his rifle, suffering one cruel turn of fate after the other. Although his work influenced almost every aspect of the post–Civil War manufacturing revolution, when he died he could fairly be considered a failure. He had never made much money, and had to scrape and scratch to educate his children. Despite the accolades accorded his rifle, it never achieved wide distribution and was already obsolete at his death; the credit for his great manufacturing innovations was accorded to Whitney and others.

  The first harbinger of the stony path ahead came when Hall applied for his patent. The commissioner of patents, William Thornton, notified Hall that there was a prior claim. From whom? inquired an incredulous Hall. From me! came the reply, although Thornton hastened to reassure him that he was prepared to share the rights.

  Thornton, a friend of Jefferson, was the scion of a wealthy American family, educated in Europe, a medical doctor, prominent in Philadelphia artistic and cultural circles, and a bit of a scientific dabbler. After investing in John Fitch’s pioneering steamboat in 1788, he insisted that the much-harassed Fitch incorporate “improvements” of his own design, none of which worked. Thornton was admitted to Jefferson’s circle when he won the design competition for the projected president’s mansion and Capitol building for the new federal city. He was forced to share the award with a professional architect when it turned out that his design was unbuildable. But both Jefferson and Washington loved his facades, and the current White House and Capitol apparently incorporate substantial elements of his original design. Standard biographies treat Thornton as an accomplished inventor, for he “held patents for improvements on steamboats, distilling equipment, and firearms.” One can imagine how he got them. The story of Hall’s patent has the ring of modern machine-politics graft.

  Upon receiving Thornton’s letter, Hall arranged to see him in Washington:

  Upon my arrival there a gun was shewn me, the barrel of which was made broad at the butt as large as to receive a piece of metal . . . sufficient to contain a charge of powder & ball. Such a contrivance it appeared to me would never have been of any utility, at any rate was very different from mine. [It has been identified as a British Ferguson, dating from about 1776.] In conversation upon it he remarked . . . that he had thought of a plan which would have resembled mine & had given orders for its construction but nothing (except the drawings) had been done toward it (& they were not to be found).

  When Thornton made it clear that a patent would not issue unless it was in both their names, an outraged Hall appealed to James Monroe, the secretary of state, requesting a conflict of claims hearing under the patent law. Monroe blandly advised him not to rock the boat, because “[I]t would be more to my interest to be connected with Doct. Thornton even at the expence of half my right than to have it wholly to myself, because his influence in that case would be exerted in my favor but otherwise would be exerted against me.”

  To his lifelong regret, Hall caved. He later exacted a measure of revenge, but it cost him dearly. When he and Thornton settled their respective rights under the patent, Hall retained the manufacturing rights, while allocating the licensing income to Thornton. Hall then refused to sign off on licenses, thereby denying Thornton the profits of his blackmail, but crippling the marketing of the weapon.*

  Hall’s time in purgatory was only beginning. He desperately needed a military contract, but Thornton had become his nemesis, using his connections to block any assistance. Developing his rifle and equipping a factory had strained Hall’s resources to the limit, and private sales were disappointing, despite pamphlets claiming his rifle’s success against a “bulletproof sea monster” on the Maine coast. Hall finally managed to squeeze a small contract out of Bomford at Ordnance, who liked the weapons, and a trial in 1816 gave them high marks. That led to an offer for a somewhat larger contract, which Hall, to his chagrin, was forced to decline because he was losing his factory. With the War of 1812 over, military requirements had fallen as well.

  Hall then upped the ante with the same promise that Whitney had made almost twenty years before, that he would manufacture his weapons by machine in such a way that all parts would be interchangeable, which was sure to get Ordnance’s attention. In the meantime, Hall’s family, which had some political connections of its own, had gotten the ear of John Calhoun, the new secretary of war. In a series of interventions, Calhoun arranged for two separate trials, and finally a rigorous three-month military review to rate the Hall rifles against standard ordnance, which was conducted in 1818–19. Although Hall thought the report “very guarded,” it is actually a ringing confirmation of his claims. His rifles proved more durable, and as accurate and powerful, as the standard rifle—both scoring much higher than any musket—but with an ease of loading that the review board rated as 2:1 over the standard rifle and 3:2 over the musket. The board rated the ease of loading “of infinite consequence in the rifle, the difficulty of loading this arm being the great objection to its more general introduction.” (Muzzle-loading was a special problem for rifles because of fouling of the rifling grooves.)

  The consequence was an R&D contract, somewhat like Blanchard’s. Finalized in 1819, it would have answered Hall’s fondest prayers, but for a near fatal Catch-22 that plagued the rest of his days. He was awarded a salaried armory position, an appropriation for equipment and a work force, and, to boot, a $1 royalty for each delivered rifle. But the contract had to be performed at Harpers Ferry rather than Springfield—Harpers Ferry was the “southern” armory, heavily politicized, in part because of the proximity to Washington, and technically backward compared to Springfield. Hall put up an argument, but finally had litt
le choice but to accede, and was to work at Harpers Ferry the rest of his life. As he had feared, the Harpers Ferry superintendents, who were all politicians, had no interest in his project and undermined him at every turn—skimming his appropriations, shortchanging him on equipment and space, filing endless complaints about the wastefulness and ineffectiveness of his methods—while Hall slowly and steadily created the manufacturing processes that underpinned mass production technology for the next century. He later conceded that his own naïve underestimate of the challenge lent credibility to his critics:

  I was not aware of the great length of time that would be consumed . . . to effect the construction of the arms with the perfect similarity of all their component parts. . . . I had been told it had been pronounced impossible by the French Commissioners . . . and I know that all attempts to effect it in Great Britain and this Country had failed; but from an unswerving reliance on my own abilities I expected to accomplish it in a short period . . .”

  Hall had divined, as no one else, that achieving true precision manufacturing entailed reconceiving the entire process in all its details. Better machines by themselves would not answer. It was essential, for example, always to begin with an ideal model of the target product, and take subsequent measurements only from that model.* Hall insisted on special-purpose machines for each part, and also special-purpose machines to make the production machines. Placing and fixing a part in a machine required the same attention as the precision of the machine itself. Precision gauges were constructed for every measurement—there were some sixty-three separate gauges for the rifle, leaving nothing to a workman’s judgment. The gauges were always made in three sets, one for workmen, one for inspectors, and a master set in the plant manager’s office to monitor wear on the other two. Inspections of inspections helped ferret out any nonconforming part, and a final batch of finished rifles was always disassembled, their parts mixed up, and reassembled before shipping. Along the way, Hall made substantial contributions to a wide range of processes, especially in milling and forging, created new systems for controlling cutting tools, and solved the problem of forging shrinkage during cooling, which had stumped all of his predecessors. He also lavished attention on dampening vibration and chatter in his machines, redesigning drives and spindles so they stayed true, and creating gauges to measure a machine’s drift from trueness.