The Crystal Palace. the great hall of the Crystal Palace during the inauguration ceremony. It was the first largescale prefabricated ferrovitreous (iron and glace) strucure in the world, prefectly suited to illustrate the preeminence of British technology.

Countries with little industry to speak of paraded their treasures. The Greek exhibit displayed figures from the Parthenon and some ancient statuary, while Russians offered fabulous jewels, massive bronze candelabras, and Chinese vases that appear to be booty. Compared to such extravagances, the ragtag collection of homely objects in the American display drew quiet British jeering. Punch sniffed that America’s “contribution to the world’s industry consists as yet of a few wine glasses, a square or two of soap, and a pair of saltcellars.” In disgust, the New York Herald editor, James Bennett Forbes, suggested adding P. T. Barnum’s “happy family” exhibit, displaying “owls, mice, cats, rats, hawks, small birds, monkeys . . . and what-not, all in one cage, and living harmoniously together.”² Then the gods of coincidence came up with a boat race, forever after designated the America’s Cup, which quite unintentionally became a major side event of the Great Exhibition.

The Great Race

The notion of an American-British sailing race originated with an innocuous letter from a British merchant to John Cox Stevens, the president of the New York City Yacht Club. The merchant professed himself an admirer of American pilot boats. They were descendants of the famed Baltimore Clippers that so bedeviled the British during the War of 1812, and considered the fastest sailing ships afloat. The gentleman hoped that the club might send a few at the time of the exhibition, so Englishmen would have a better opportunity to assess their merits.³

John Cox Stevens was the son of John Stevens, the inventor and steamboat and railroad entrepreneur, and the elder brother of Robert, who was an entrepreneur and technical genius like their father. Stevens père earned enough from his enterprises to be a rich man but had also married into the super-rich Livingstons, allowing John Cox to spend most of his time with his boats and horses. He and his yachting friends quickly decided to take up the merchant’s idea but chose to construe it as a challenge to race, rather than as a simple invitation.

The Club contracted with the big William H. Brown shipyard and a young designer George Steers to construct a racing schooner to their specifications. (Much of the risk was borne by Brown and Steers; if the boat didn’t pass a series of trials in the United States and go on to win the race in England, they would be paid nothing.)

The bargain made, the new boat, named America, was built and passed its trials in the United States. It was captained by Dick Brown (no relation to the builder), who ran the fastest pilot boat in New York Harbor and brought his own crew.^bk America sailed to Le Havre in July. It was a difficult crossing, marked by alternating storms and calms, but was accomplished in nineteen days, well under the average for fast packet ships.

Their arrival in England, at Portsmouth, was preceded by tales from the Le Havre pilots about the American craft that sailed so smoothly and so fast. A racing cutter from the Royal Yacht Squadron met America on the Channel, offering to escort them into the harbor. Brown accepted and immediately found himself in an impromptu race. After a brief tacking duel, America sailed into the harbor with the cutter far in its wake.

Stevens was warmly welcomed by Britain’s sailing establishment and richly entertained. Although the talk was dominated by the America, no one offered a race. After making several direct challenges, Stevens was fobbed off with the suggestion that he enter America in an upcoming regatta for “all ships” of “all nations,” around the Isle of Wight, a fifty-three-mile run. It was clearly not the race he was looking for. America would be competing with speedy light cutters as well as schooners, with much of the race in light winds in the lee of the island, far from the conditions it had been designed for.

Irritated, Stevens took his boat out day after day intentionally showing up British yachtsmen, to the point at which the British press, always happy to tweak the idle upper classes, was getting interested. A reporter from the Times watched a club race that the America shadowed, and wrote:

As if to let our best craft see she did not care about them, the America went up to each in succession, ran to the leeward of every one of them, as close as she could, and shot before them....

Most of us have seen the agitation which the appearance of a sparrow hawk in the horizon creates among a flock of wood pigeons or skylarks, when . . . [they] are rendered almost motionless by fear of the disagreeable visitor.... Although the America is not a sparrow hawk, the effect produced by her apparition off West Cowes among the yachtsmen seems to have been completely paralyzing.⁴

Anxious to get home, and with no other options besides the all-comers regatta, Stevens swallowed his frustration and acquiesced to the regatta.

The day of the race, Friday, August 22, dawned with enough wind to at least give America a chance against the lighter cutters. At the cannon signal, America was caught by a sudden gust and got tangled in its cable, requiring it to strike its sails and restart. Brown still caught the first stragglers within five minutes, sailing aggressively through the pack, and within fifteen minutes was behind only three schooners and several light cutters. Shortly thereafter, the leaders entered a stretch more open to the channel winds, and America was finally in its element. After the second hour, it had left all the schooners in its wake and was running down the cutters one by one. Even many of the steamers carrying sightseers were having trouble keeping up. When America made the turn into the lighter winds for the final run, no other boat was in sight. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were watching from their yacht but, with the race obviously decided, took off for home. One steamer passing a dock was hailed from the shore: “Is the America first?” “Yes,” came the reply. “What’s second?” “Nothing.”⁵

The apparent runaway victory by America dominated the accounts of the race, although in reality it won by the slimmest of margins. With only five miles to go, the wind died, and America could barely creep forward, as a lightweight cutter, the Aurora, slowly closed the gap—“bringing the wind with her,” in Brown’s rueful phrase.⁶ That last five miles may have taken three hours, but the wisps of breeze finally stiffened enough that the America slipped over the line with just eight minutes to spare.

The British were as magnanimous in defeat as they had been reluctant to engage. For the yachting community, however, according to the Times, the loss had been like “a thunderclap . . . the sole subject of conversation here, from the Royal Yacht Commodore . . . to the ragged and barefooted urchin.” A wealthy American commented to a lady on British courtesy and the lack of mortification her friends seem to feel. “‘Oh,’ said she, ‘if you could hear what I do, you would know that they feel it most deeply.’”^bl ⁷

ON THE SAME DAY AS AMERICA’S VICTORY, AN AMERICAN SUCCEEDED IN opening a famous, exquisitely crafted, and “unpickable” British Bramah lock—meeting a challenge that had stood for forty years. (Joseph Brahma was a great British machinist, yet another graduate of the Henry Maudslay school of advanced precision manufacturing.) The lock breaker was Alfred C. Hobbs, a talented huckster with an excellent understanding of machine manufacturing. He adroitly downplayed that his lock-breaking feat took more than two weeks and then offered $1,000 to any British locksmith who could open his own machine-made locks. When no one could meet his challenge, he collected the exhibition’s lock medal and almost immediately made plans to open a factory in England.

Hobbs’s demonstration came just a few weeks after Cyrus McCormick’s reaper had decisively bested a feeble array of local competitors in a series of field tests. The usually anti-American Times, which had earlier derided McCormick’s machine as “a cross between a flying machine, a wheelbarrow, and an Astley chariot,” abruptly changed its tune: “The reaping machine from the United States is the most valuable contribution from abroad, to the stock of previous knowledge that we have yet discovered,” predicting that it would “amply remunerate England for her outlay connected with the Great Exhibition.”⁸

But the praise heaped on reapers and locks were far eclipsed by the plaudits for Sam Colt’s repeating firearm exhibit; even the Duke of Wellington, a regular visitor to Colt’s booth, was heard proclaiming the virtues of repeating firearms. Another gun maker, the Vermont firm of Robbins and Lawrence, conducted a well-attended demonstration showing how its machine-made rifles could be disassembled, their parts mixed up, and then randomly reassembled by an unskilled workman using only a screwdriver—a feat that British gunsmiths had long declared impossible. Robbins and Lawrence won the exhibition’s firearms medal, while Colt, like Hobbs, let it be known that he too would open a plant to bring American technology to Great Britain.

It was sweet turnaround for the Americans. Even Punch gleefully switched to mocking punctured British pride:

Yankee Doodle sent to town
His goods for exhibition;
Everybody ran him down,
And laughed at his position;
They thought him all the world behind;
A goney muff or noodle,
Laugh on, good people,—never mind—
Says quiet Yankee Doodle
CHORUS Yankee Doodle, etc.

Their whole yacht squadron she outsped,
And that on their own water,
Of all the lot she went ahead,
And they came nowhere arter
Your gunsmiths of their skill may crack,
But that again don’t mention;
I guess that Colt’s revolvers whack
Their very first invention. . . .
But Chubb’s [another British lock maker] and
Bramah’s Hobbs has pick’d,
And you must now be viewed all
As having been completely licked
By glorious Yankee Doodle.
CHORUS Yankee Doodle, etc.

While the public was impressed with the sailing race, a portion of the British cognoscenti had become extremely interested in American gun manufacturing methods, which they often referred to as the “American system of manufacturing,” by which they meant manufacturing to an idealized model, with special-purpose machinery, to such a level of precision that parts could be freely interchanged between weapons without loss of performance. And it was Sam Colt who, deservedly, most captured their imagination.

Inventors had tried their hand at making repeating firearms for centuries. Colt spent a great deal of money and invested some three decades of his life to the challenge, and when he came up with a viable solution, he displayed true marketing genius in making it a reality. His correspondence shows that he had a good grasp of manufacturing processes, but the man who turned the Colt pistol into a triumph of mass production was Elisha King Root.

Elisha K. Root

Elisha Root was a Massachusetts farm boy who went to work in a cotton mill at age ten or twelve. He then apprenticed as a machinist and in 1832, at age twenty-four, was hired as a journeyman lathe hand by the axe maker Collins & Company at Collinsville, a new postal subdistrict in Canton, Connecticut. After just a few months on the job, he was given a two-year contract to build and repair machinery at a wage 75 percent higher than that of the average skilled worker. Sam Collins, the company’s primary owner and manager, had a nose for talent.⁹

The axe was a critical tool for the land clearing that enabled the spread of American agriculture. The intensive employment of axes since the first American settlements had evolved the world’s most efficient axe, with head weighting and balance that greatly reduced strain on the woodsman. In the early nineteenth century, axes were usually made by local smiths. Sam Collins started his company in 1826 on the bet that a superb factory-produced axe would command an enormous market. (Axe makers made only the axe head; local distributors procured and fit the handles.)

Collins was right. Although he was financially overextended from time to time, when Root joined the company it was already the largest and fastest growing American axe maker. Collins may also have had the ideal businessman’s temperament—even-tempered but running a tight ship, possessed of a fine sense of strategy and organization but staying close to the shop floor—and his axes quickly earned a reputation for quality.

The Collinsville plant used traditional methods: a hot skelp, or iron bar, was flattened with a trip-hammer and folded around a set of pins to form the eye, where the handle was inserted. A second bar piece, the plate, was welded into the space between the two ends of the fold, and the whole piece hammered, filed, and ground into the proper axe-head shape. The cutting edge, or bit, was made of high-grade steel—it still had to be imported from England—that was welded into a V-shaped seating on the business side of the head. That was followed by multiple tempering, grinding, polishing, and other finishing steps before shipping.¹⁰

Collins was constantly pushing for manufacturing improvements and maintained a cadre of first-class creative mechanics to that end, although Root outshone them all. By the time he left the company to take over the design and construction of Colt’s new Hartford factory in 1849, he had created and fine-tuned a nearly completely mechanized production system that enabled Collins to become a true global supplier.

Root’s most important patent, filed in 1838, was a fundamental change. Instead of folding the skelp around pins, he invented a machine that punched an eye through a solid block of hot iron. That gave the head far more structural integrity than the folding and welding method.¹¹ He followed that invention with a number of others to mechanize the finishing process—shaving and shaping machines, mass tempering on revolving racks, and consolidating operational steps to reduce machining stations.

Rather than introduce the inventions piecemeal, which would have unbalanced the production lines, Collins waited until Root’s entire line of machinery was sufficiently proven, then converted the whole company in one swoop, by elevating Root to the superintendency of the shops and building a new plant to accommodate the new mechanized system.

Root’s new building was up and running by 1847. An 1859 Scientific American article reports a machine array right from Root’s patent book, although greatly multiplied—there were twenty-six shaving machines, for instance. Root’s achievement was widely recognized by aficionados, and job offers had been coming his way for years. He always refused them. Root was well paid, lived modestly, and enjoyed the luxury of a boss who was willing to take major financial and production risks to put his ideas into action. His own building, designed from scratch, was worth more than the pay offers he was receiving.

But when the plant was up and in full production, the equation changed. Sam Colt had tried to hire Root years before but had been turned down.^bm In 1849 he was back, planning a major new plant in Hartford, anxious to bag Root as the plant designer and manager, and willing to let him name his price. Sam Collins, who greatly admired Root, proved himself a true friend by telling him that he should jump at the chance.

The Amazing Samuel Colt

Samuel Colt was born in straitened circumstances but far from the poverty that he liked to allege. The Colts were one of the oldest of New England families, with many successful merchants and entrepreneurs in the family tree, and the men had a knack for marrying into rich families—the Olivers, the Lymans, the Caldwells. Colts made fortunes supplying American and French troops in the Revolutionary War and were original partners with Alexander Hamilton in his Society for Useful Manufactures, a proto-industrial park in Paterson, New Jersey. At Paterson, the Colts were pioneers in developing and leasing water rights years before the directors at Lowell adopted the strategy.¹²

The family also had a streak of instability, and its financial annals are littered with bankruptcies. After the Paterson venture failed, Sam Colt’s uncle Roswell, a master promoter, fund raiser, lobbyist, and string puller, bought a controlling position and used it as the base for his ventures, most of them disreputable. Huge volumes of money ran through his fingers, much of it diverted to lavish homes and entertainments or misappropriated to support his private ventures.

But the most lurid family highlight was provided by Sam’s brother John in 1842. He killed a colleague with an axe in a dispute over money, then chopped up the cadaver and attempted to ship it to New Orleans. When the ship was delayed, odor betrayed the corpse, and John was arrested and convicted in a sensational New York trial. The grisly details drew tabloid interest throughout the country, which only increased with the revelation of a triangle with a woman, who had become pregnant to boot. John died in his cell before he was hanged, possibly a suicide. Sam paid for the legal defense but also managed to work in pistol demonstrations during the course of the trial.¹³

In 1829, when Sam was fifteen, he had been sent to Amherst Academy but was quickly expelled for pranks and for allegedly setting off an explosion. He then went to sea, as the story has it, where he conceived of the idea for a repeating firearm. (All such stories of Colt’s early years must be taken lightly, for they usually originate with Colt, an inveterate tale spinner.) In any event, by the time he was seventeen, Sam was actively canvassing his firearm ideas, borrowing from his uncle Roswell and his financially pressed father to finance prototypes. An alliance with a Baltimore gunsmith, John Pearson, produced some beautiful sample guns, most of them long guns. Colt, typically, stiffed Pearson on his invoices, and for the rest of his life, Pearson justifiably insisted that the original Colt guns were his design.

Colt was a natural showman. Whenever he was really desperate for money, he transformed into Dr. Coult, traveling the boondocks giving natural science lectures and demonstrations of laughing gas and explosives. One wishes that Frances Trollope had still been in Cincinnati to give us a portrait of the youthful Dr. Coult when he did a turn at her “Inferno” show.

Colt acquired patents on his revolvers in both Great Britain and the United States, and in 1836, with the help of Roswell, he incorporated the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company in Paterson, raised capital, and, like his uncle, proceeded to run through enormous amounts of money. Colt mostly concentrated on sales and was constantly on the road, spending lavishly as he chased down state militias and wooed federal military brass. (Just his tailoring bills are astonishing.) He did get promising sales interest from Latin American governments and sold several thousand guns to the Texan independence forces and to Americans troops fighting Florida’s Seminole wars. The factory was under the supervision of Pliny Lawton, a respected mechanic recommended by Colt’s father who got a decent production line up and running. But the company was always at the financial edge in part because of Colt’s spending. It was probably doomed by the 1837 financial crash, but it was already in turmoil because of a serious split between Colt and his investors. The business was insolvent by 1841 and shut down the next year.¹⁴

The breakup with the investors may have had less to do with money than the fact that Colt still couldn’t produce reliable firearms.^bn ¹⁵ The weapons he was flogging in the 1830s may have been more dangerous to the user than to the target—which testified less to Colt’s incapacities than to the gnarliness of the challenge. For a century or more, the world’s most talented gunsmiths had been making runs at making repeating weapons without much success. Colt was not the first to try the revolving cylinder; all ran aground on the problem of multiple cylinders firing at once. Colt’s early revolvers were loaded much as muskets were: the gunman used a tool to remove the cylinder and pushed powder and ball into each chamber; ignition was by a percussion cap. If loose powder leaked around the cylinder, chambers could ignite indiscriminately, which could cause the weapons to explode. In early Colt models the chambers were open in the rear and would occasionally fire backward.

But Colt worked through it, which may be the most surprising part of his story. One half of Sam Colt was the buncoing fabulist, the walking bonfire of other people’s money, the drinker and carouser; the other half was a truly gifted inventor, not so much a mechanic as a man of fine mechanical intuitions, diligent and perseverant in pursuit of his objectives. An 1839 patent showed major strides on all fronts—preventing ignition contamination, simplifying the handling of the percussion caps, significantly reducing the part count.¹⁶ Those were the kind of micro-modifications that require long periods of experimentation and testing, and at the time, Colt was about the only person working on the problem. (Lawton executed Colt’s ideas in hardware, but there is no suggestion that he played a significant role in designing them, as Elisha Root later did. At one point, Lawton requested Colt to return a sample of a newly designed pistol so he could see how to make it.¹⁷) The combination of patient midnight-oil tinkerer with raucous huckster and con man is almost oxymoronic.

When his Paterson venture shut down, Colt removed to New York City, an ideal stage for his multiple talents. For six years, he lived in high style, if always from hand to mouth, spewing out a string of inventions. He developed a system of mines detonated by telegraphic signals to augment coastal defenses. The idea won military financing, allowing Colt to blow up giant ships in New York Harbor and the Potomac to the cheers of thousands-strong crowds. But it was peacetime, and the military wasn’t in a spending mood. He patented waterproof cartridges and actually made some money on them, and he started a telegraph company. Colt also stayed active in New York’s scientific societies, worked hard on a self-education in chemistry and physics, won a number of awards, and made a host of useful contacts, like Samuel F. B. Morse.

The 1846 war with Mexico brought both opportunity and allies. The war was a chapter in the American drive to push its western border to the Pacific and was triggered by the agreement to annex the newly independent Texas as a state. The Texans who had fought for independence loved Colt’s pistols and had passed them on to the newly organized Texas Rangers. An encounter in which a small force of Rangers with Colts decimated a much larger, conventionally armed band of mounted Comanches was already legendary. The famous Ranger captain Sam Walker insisted on Colts for his men in the new war. The actual sales were modest—only about 1,000—but it was still splendid publicity. Walker participated in the design, and the new pistol emerged as a saddle-carried weapon, one of the heaviest and most powerful Colts ever made.

It took all Colt could do to deliver on them. He had no time to build a factory, and his old financial network was in tatters, but after a frenzy of money scrounging, he put together a production consortium. Some parts—apparently barrels, chambers, and brass parts—were outsourced, with the rest of the manufacturing and finishing performed by Eli Whitney Jr. in New Haven. In the meantime, Colt returned to Hartford and raised money for his own factory on Pearl Street near the banks of the Connecticut River, which opened in the fall of 1847. From that point, the handguns were the stars of Colt’s product line. They were ideal for close combat after cavalry charges, for ship boardings, and for countering the close-quarter tactics of Native Americans or of the “Kaffirs” bent on complicating Great Britain’s imperial ambitions.

The year 1849 was a banner one for Colt. Intense lobbying and barefaced bribery finally secured a patent extension. It was also the year of the California gold strike, and the beginnings of a vast population movement to the West and Southwest, where guns were almost workaday tools. For the first time, Colt was in position to catch a very tall wave, and he made the most of it. In that same year, he produced the most successful single product of his lifetime: the 1849 .31 caliber pocket pistol, which eventually sold 325,000 units. It is a measure of how well he understood his business, and his own limitations, that he put on such an all-court press to nail down Root.

Colt’s first Hartford plant employed about thirty men and was in temporary space. The production was likely a small-scale version of that at Springfield. Much of the machinery came from Nathan Ames, who had long been selling knockoffs of the Springfield equipment; most of the rest were the lathes, dies, tools, patterns, and a furnace that Whitney had bought for the Mexican War contracts. (Naturally there was a prolonged spat over Colt’s past-due bills before Whitney released the equipment.)

Within months of getting his temporary plant underway, Colt began construction on a much grander plant that opened in early 1849. The Hartford Courant reported that it was “a museum of curious machinery.” For its time, it was a big building, 150 by 50 feet, with “long lines of shafting and machinery . . . performing difficult work and shaping irregular and intricate forms of solid steel as though it were soft as lead.” That same year, the credit service R. G. Dun’s reported Colt as “making money, large business, employs 100 hands, good credit.” He completed a new armory in London in 1853 and started work on his last, and most spectacular, plant in Hartford, which opened in 1855. Production soared in the new plant and jumped again with the coming of the Civil War. Colt died in 1862, at only forty-seven, so he missed most of the wartime boom that made his descendants among the richest of Americans. By his death, however, he had sold a quarter million guns.¹⁸

The last years of his life were satisfying ones, for he had finally created a stage equal to his self-conception. He married a wealthy young woman in 1856, built a lavish estate on the grounds of his new plant, held forth in Turkish costume at Newport summer soirées, and traveled the world with his wife, sightseeing, art collecting, and selling arms to distant potentates— all the while badgering his managers for details of their operations. The cause of his death was variously listed as “gout” or “rheumatism” but was probably a result of three decades of hard living combined with the day’s lethally ignorant doctoring.

The London Armory

Most of the information on Colt’s most advanced production processes comes from his London factory. A few months after being lionized at the Crystal Palace Exhibit, Colt became the first American to be invited to speak at the prestigious British Institution of Civil Engineers, and he was later awarded an engineering medal. The talk, in November 1851, was heavily attended, with both British and American government and military luminaries in the audience. The discussion following the presentation extended over two evenings. Opinion was virtually unanimous on the virtues of the weapons, as was the amazement that they had been made by machinery. In Colt’s words: “Machinery is now employed by the Author, to the extent of about eight-tenths of the whole cost of construction of these fire-arms; he was induced gradually to use machinery to so great an extent, by finding that with hand-labour it was not possible to obtain that amount of uniformity, or accuracy in the several parts, which is so desirable, and also because he could not otherwise get the number of arms made, at anything like the same cost, as by machinery.”¹⁹

The intense interest in Colt’s talk stemmed from an evolving crisis in British military arms procurement. Weapons requirements had dropped off sharply during the aristocratic stability that followed the Napoleonic wars. But as black war clouds gathered at mid-century, the military small arms industry had become slothful and stagnant, quite unequal to the task before them. Military gun making was concentrated in Birmingham and organized into forty-eight different trades and subtrades, all of them working by traditional methods. Each trade made its particular pieces and shipped them to the government for inspection. The proved work then went to highly skilled fitters, who assembled guns by hand-filing. While many of the craftsmen were superb, the process was wasteful, and the quality of work had deteriorated considerably. Nor was there much hope of reform, for the crafts were in full control of the shop floor.²⁰

Desperate for a solution, the doyens of British engineering grasped at the idea of attacking the problem with machinery, vaguely defined as the American system of manufacturing. James Nasmyth was one of the witnesses before a parliamentary committee looking into the advisability of greater reliance on machinery in arms making. Asked how he could be so sure that the British trade would benefit from more machinery, Nasmyth retorted:

Then I should ask why are the gunmakers of Birmingham so much at the mercy of their men; if they have that quantity of machinery that I think is applicable to gunmaking, they ought to be quite independent of those men, and not be knuckling down to them as they are.... I may quote Mr. Brazier as giving me that information.

[Committee] What account did Mr. Brazier give you?—That he has been tormented out of his life by his men striking.²¹

To Colt, the undisguised British admiration for American machinery looked like Opportunity writ large. When he left London in 1852, he was determined to return and open an armory. In the meantime, John Anderson, a senior civil servant with Ordnance responsibilities, created an expert delegation to travel to America to inform themselves on American applications of machinery, especially with reference to firearms. The fact that it was coheaded by Joseph Whitworth attests the high importance accorded the investigation. The group spent the summer and early fall of 1853 in the United States, with Whitworth focusing on metal trades and gun making, while the other cohead, George Wallis, one of Great Britain’s leading educators, investigated a broader rage of industries.

Moving with his usual alacrity, Colt had his London plant up and running on the banks of the Thames by January 1853, and it quickly became something of a tourist attraction for the British intelligentsia. By the time the Whitworth and Wallis groups returned from the United States and produced their initial reports, the new armory had been open for a year and was a convenient reference point for the parliamentary hearings that commenced in the spring of 1854.²²

The best available description of the armory is in a two-part 1855 article in the London Journal of Arts and Sciences that includes detailed line drawings of the major machines. The opening sentence says it all: “The establishment of a fire-arm manufactory at Thames-Bank Vauxhall, by Colonel Colt, is a fact from which we shall ere long have to date an entire revolution in the production of small arms in this country.”²³

The new armory was in a leased brick building, some 350 feet long, with a deep basement and three stories. The basement space was devoted to the heavy machinery used to make the factory’s machine tools; the first and second floors to multiple turning, boring, and milling machines; and the top floor to polishing, fitting, and final assembly. Large sheds in the yards were for carpenters and smiths, and housed a row of steam hammers, the drop forge, and associated furnaces. The steam engine was in the basement connected to a separate boiler house. Next to the plant was a well-kept garden area and a sales office and showroom.²⁴

The factory was a pinnacle for Root—a marked advance over his Collinsville machinery, with the same attention to detailed process flow. In the smiths’ sheds, for example, the forges allowed two smiths to work on a furnace at the same time, and the grates arrangement did not immerse the bars in fire, so their color could be readily observed. The barrel forging machines, built for octagonal barrels, each comprised four consecutive barrel-length dies and a cutter. The worker took a steel bar at the proper heat, placed it and pressed it in each die in sequence, and trimmed it—“shaping out the barrels, one after the other, with great rapidity.”²⁵

Of the machines in the shed, the drop forger drew the most comment. It was built as a rectangle with V-bar slides for drop hammers on each vertical corner. Two workers were normally in attendance, each managing two hammers. The heavy screw drive in the center was constantly in motion, lifting the hammers. A simple latch device allowed the attendants to place each hammer to any level on the slide to tune the force of the blow. After a hammer was released and dropped, it automatically reengaged with the drive and was lifted to either a preset height or the top of the forge, where it disengaged and remained in place until released again. Cast dies on the hammer and its drop site closed completely around the hot metal to minimize irregularities. The very heavy construction and extreme precision of the screw drive and the V-bar slides produced highly exact forgings, minimizing milling and filing.

That same intelligence was displayed throughout the plant. Colt’s barrels were bored, rather than hammer-welded or rolled, for greater integrity. The barrel-boring machine had a lever device that allowed the bore to be withdrawn straight out for lubrication, in place of the usual slow reverse rotation. The rifling machine rifled four barrels at a time, automatically resetting the tool placement for the six or seven grooves that were standard for Colt pistols. The breech cylinders were bored in two machines: the first made three progressively finer bores in each chamber location; the second involved four separate boring and finishing tools operating on the six chambers of eight target cylinders on a rotating wheel. All the tool placements and workpiece adjustments were accomplished by self-acting cams. There were dozens of other machines operating on similar principles.

Great Britain’s wide-eyed reaction to the London armory was fully warranted. Colt’s plants in London and Hartford were the most advanced precision-manufacturing operations in the world, far in advance of any of the American armories. When the British investigators toured the Springfield Armory, for instance, they were much impressed with the Blanchard stocking machinery. But they were surprised that the line was not set up for a true process flow. When the great machinist Cyrus Buckland reconstructed the Blanchard line, he used fifteen different machines. The times required for the different machines to do their specific tasks naturally varied, so the slower machines were bottlenecks. At Collinsville, and at Colt, Root naturally multiplied the slower machines to keep the flow even and all machines occupied, which seems just common sense. But for thirty-five years, the armories either didn’t notice or, since they were working to a quota, not a profit line, had no incentive to run full.

Colt London Armory Machines: from 1855 London Journal of Arts and Sciences

A. Two-dimensional end view of forging engine. A hot bar was rapidly forged and cut in the row of tools indicated.

B. The drop hammers and dies (indicated) manufactured near-finished forgings. Note the different drop heights of the two hammers shown. An airburst cleanses the dies after each pass.

C. The rifling machine rifled four barrels at a time, automatically resetting to each of the six or seven grooves in a pistol.

D. The machine applied four separate finishing operations to each of the six chambers of eight cylinders mounted on a wheel. Tool changes and workpiece management were all self-acting, except that an attendant pulled a lever to move a fresh cylinder to the cutting tool station.

The Colt Armory’s effect on the British cognoscenti was quite powerful. Nasmyth said: “In those American tools there is a common-sense way of going to the point at once, that I was quite struck with; there is great simplicity, almost a quaker-like rigidity of form, given to the machinery; no ornamentation, no rubbing away of corners, or polishing; but the precise, accurate, and correct results. It was that which gratified me so much at Colonel Colt’s, to see the spirit that pervaded the machines; they really had a very decided and peculiar character of judicious contrivance.”²⁶ John Anderson, the civil servant driving the reform of military procurement, himself a talented engineer and a prolific inventor, testified on his visit: “I went to Colonel Colt’s factory with high expectations . . . and I did not leave with disappointment.... So far as an old building would admit of, the work in this manufactory is reduced to an almost perfect system.... There is also much that is new in England, and abundant evidence of a vigorous straining after a large and accurate result, which is well fitted to inspire us all with healthy ideas; indeed it is impossible to go through that work without coming away a better engineer.”²⁷

Charles Dickens, who visited in 1854, was inspired to even more vaulted reflections:

To see the same thing in Birmingham and in other places where fire-arms are made almost entirely by hand labour, we should have to walk around a whole day, visiting many little shops carrying on distinct branches of the manufacture.... Mere strength of muscle, which is so valuable in new societies, would find no market here—for the steam-engine—indefatigably toiling in . . . the little stone chamber below—performs nine-tenths of all the work that is done here. Neat, delicate-handed little girls do the work that brawny smiths do in other gun-shops. . . . Carpenters, cabinet-makers, ex-policemen, butchers, cabmen . . . are steadily drilling and boring at lathes all day in the upper rooms. Political economists tell us that the value of labour will find its level as surely as the sea: and so, perhaps it will: but [rarely] . . . quickly enough to prevent a great deal of misery. Perhaps if men who have learnt but one trade . . . could be as easily absorbed into another . . . as these new gunsmiths are, the working world would go more smoothly than it does.²⁸

The dénouement of the hearings was that the British pressed ahead and opened a government armory at Enfield, the source of the famed Enfield rifle, and furnished it with American machinery. They naturally inquired of Colt for machinery, but he was in the middle of launching his 1855 plant in Hartford, which consumed all of his machine-making capacity. The final sourcing was primarily from Nathan Ames (for Blanchard-style equipment) and Robbins and Lawrence for most of the milling and other metalworking machinery. At full production, Enfield regularly turned out 1,000 rifles a week.

Once again, one is struck by the British obliviousness to the broad possibilities of the new mechanical age they had so recently inaugurated. Time and again, in the British commentary on the Colt factory, or some other American mechanized plant, someone would say more or less, “Well, that’s simply another type of the old Brunel-Maudslay pulley-block factory”—which, of course, was so. The final report of the parliamentary Committee on Machinery struck a similar note in its comment that in the United States, “a considerable number of different trades are carried on in the same way as the cotton manufacture of England, viz., in large factories, with machinery applied to every process, the extreme subdivision of labour and all reduced to an almost perfect system of manufacture.”²⁹ The British, of course, had been the first to mechanize cotton production but had been surprisingly torpid in attempting similar revolutions in other industries. It’s not that they were reluctant to adopt machinery—British shipbuilding factories were the most advanced in the world, employing massive, very precise machines that mid-century Americans could not yet replicate. What was missing, perhaps, was the American instinct to push for scale, the conviction that the first objective of any business should be to grow larger.

In any event, the success of the Enfield factory made no more impact on British industrial practice than the Portsmouth pulley-block factory had. In 1908, Cadillac won the British Thomas Dewar automobile prize. Three Cadillacs were given a test drive, taken apart and disassembled, their parts mixed up and reassembled, and subjected to another test drive, which they passed handily—and the British still found it amazing.³⁰

The Colt Armory in London was closed down in 1856 because it was unprofitable. The government had opened its Enfield plant and was not willing to send enough orders Colt’s way to keep so productive a plant running full. Colt tried for a while to use it as a base for servicing all of Europe, but it was cheaper to ramp up his new Hartford plant and service his export markets from there. It was also a convenient way for Colt to shed an emotionally and financially taxing relation with his younger brother James, an unreliable whiner and malcontent whom Sam had foolishly appointed to head the London operation. While he continued to support James, he did it in ways that wouldn’t put his business at risk.³¹

Colt capped his career by joining with Root to come up with their “most perfect design,” the model 1860 .44 caliber army, navy, and police revolver. Very powerful but much lighter than its predecessor, sleek and streamlined, with a price point designed to sell, it dominated its market long after the Colt patents had expired.³² The final evolution of small arms into their modern form came with the introduction of the self-contained, metal primer-powder-bullet cartridge, which was adopted in larger caliber handguns about ten years after the close of the Civil War. Beginning in the 1870s, most handgun and all long-gun revolvers were gradually supplanted by varieties of magazine-fed, spring-driven mechanisms like those in the famed Henry and Spencer rifles during the last years of the Civil War.

Good as the Colt-Root machinery was, Colt never strove for interchangeability of the most demanding precision parts, like those involved in the cylinder alignment and firing action. The machinery of the day was not up to the task, and there was little point in striving for interchangeability of such parts in any case. To serve a private market required many models and frequent model changes; redesigning machinery for each part change would have been prohibitively expensive.

But the machinery was good enough that probably the great majority of parts would have been effectively interchangeable with only minimal filing cleanup from the machining. So Colt was exaggerating, but not strictly lying, when the old medicine-man persona resurfaced in his address to the British Civil Engineers. Knowing the British fascination with interchangeability, he naturally fibbed a bit: “All the separate parts travel independently through the manufactory, arriving at last, in an almost complete condition, in the hands of the finishing workmen, by whom they are assembled, from promiscuous heaps, and formed into fire-arms, requiring only the polishing and fitting demanded for ornament.” Later, having been undercut by his own employees on the point and pointedly questioned by the parliamentary inquiry, Colt somewhat testily fell back on the claim that his pistol parts were “very nearly” interchangeable.³³

The Expansion of Armory Practice

What the British called the “American system” of manufacturing was more accurately American armory practice. The great Colt plants were the most perfect exemplars of the methodologies first pursued by Decius Wadsworth, Simeon North, and John Hall decades before. In mid-century, besides clocks, there were just a few modestly sized industries that fit the model. And, without the luxury of producing exactly the same product year after year, as the armories did, they all had to reach various accommodations with the demands of a private sector market, much as Eli Terry had done by creating a last-step adjustment device to ease the requirement for absolute dimensional precision.

Three other precision-manufacturing industries were in their relative infancy in the years just before the Civil War: sewing machines, typewriters, and watches. The three followed different strategies for achieving high precision in complex, high-volume products. Sewing machines came closest to the armory-practice paradigm, although the market leader, Singer, reached high volume levels before it finally adopted rigorous manufacturing methods. The typewriter and watch industries each followed routes more reminiscent of Terry’s than of Springfield’s.

SEWING MACHINES

Sewing machine inventions proliferated from the eighteenth century on, but the core patent, which included a needle with the eye at its point, a shuttle to form a lock stitch, and an automatic feed, was filed in 1846 by Elias Howe, a former cotton-mill apprentice. A poor man with a family, he failed to raise enough capital to start a business in America and failed again in England. Upon returning, he found that his patent had been appropriated and improved on by others. A successful lawsuit ended with all the infringers agreeing to contribute their patents to a patent pool, freeing them to compete while Howe assembled a substantial fortune from his royalties.

One of the competing firms was Willcox & Gibbs. Their market share was always modest, but they are of special interest because they contracted their manufacturing to Providence’s Brown & Sharpe, a firm that made fundamental contributions to high-precision manufacturing. Joseph Brown, as the American pioneer of near-perfect screw threads and thousandths-of-an-inch measurement instruments, might be considered the nearest American equivalent of Henry Maudslay. Brown was also a key developer of the universal milling machine, which was able to cut metal into any shape by manipulating the workpiece and the cutter along multiple axes.

Lucien Sharpe, who had apprenticed with Brown before becoming his partner, managed the sewing machine contract, and from the start chose to apply the whole armory practice treatment: a precise model, complete gauging, and special-purpose machinery. It was much harder and more expensive than he expected, but the firm had extraordinary mechanics, and they got it right. Collectors today treat the Willcox & Gibbs machines as a superb example of Victorian-age engineering. They ran very fast, were durable, and were known for their near-silent operation. The business was a success in the sense that it made a profit and lasted into the 1950s, although primarily as an industrial sewing-machine vendor. Brown & Sharpe remained their manufacturer, and a number of their more important machine tools, like the 1877 universal grinding machine, were developed in the sewing-machine plant. Henry Leland, the brilliant mechanic who ran the Brown & Sharpe sewing-machine plant for eighteen years, went on to found the Cadillac Automotive Company. It was his engineers who amazed the British with the interchangeability of their automobile parts at the 1908 Royal auto show.

The runaway winner in the sewing-machine competition, however, was Isaac M. Singer, an actor, theater manager, occasional inventor, and genius promoter who had little interest in manufacturing but knew how to sell. Singers were produced by traditional handcraft methods well into the 1880s, when sales regularly topped a half million a year, fifteen times the production in Willcox & Gibbs’s best year. It was only at such volumes that traditional machine-artisanal processes could not keep pace, and Singer finally brought in talented manufacturing professionals who, over time, created the kind of streamlined, highly mechanized production system that accorded more closely with the armory practice paradigm.³⁴

TYPEWRITERS

Typewriter startups proliferated through the 1850s and 1860s, but most were far too slow to compete with handwriting. (A common device was a letter wheel requiring the user to turn the wheel to strike each letter.) The idea of an individual key for each letter was turned into a working solution primarily by a former newspaper editor, Christopher Sholes, in Milwaukee. On a third try, he produced a small number of working machines that outpaced manual scribes, one of which, from 1872–1873, survives. It is recognizably a modern mechanical typewriter, complete with a QWERTY keyboard. (The original keyboard was in alphabetical order, but Sholes realized that when closely spaced keys, like s and t, were struck in sequence, they tended to jam. The QWERTY sequence was the random outcome of multiple key rearrangements to reduce high-frequency, closely spaced sequences. The DFGH sequence in the middle row is a remnant of the original layout.)

Successful though they were, the Milwaukee prototypes highlighted the severity of the manufacturing challenge, for typewriters were “the most complex mechanism mass produced by American industry, public or private, in the nineteenth century.”³⁵ Sholes and a financial partner had the good sense to seek a professional manufacturer; they settled on E. Remington & Sons, an important small arms maker in central New York. Remington was nominally an armory-practice production shop: they understood models, gauging, and special purpose machinery. But their operations were a mess, with typewriters, arms, pumps, cotton gins, and other production lines tangled together in the same shops. Remington did succeed in making thousands of typewriters but was unable to ramp up production to meet demand. After a number of financial reverses, it spun off the typewriter business to the biggest distributor in 1886. The new company, the Standard Typewriter Company, renamed itself Remington Typewriter in 1902 and was later part of Sperry Rand.

Early Surviving Scholes Typewriter, c. 1872–1873. The typewriter developed primarily by a Milwaukee editor, Christopher Scholes, was the first to look like a recognizable modern typewriter. Note the QWERTY keyboard. Schole’s first keyboard was alphabetical, but closely-spaced frequent companion letters tended to jam. The new keyboard arrangement was the random outcome of Schole’s trial-and-error method of addressing the problem.

By the 1890s, there was a host of competitors—Hall Typewriters, American Writing Machine, Oliver, L. C. Smith & Brothers—and the industry, unlike sewing machines, evolved into a manufacturing competition. Major advances were made in ball bearings, in the use of new materials—vulcanized rubber, glass, sheet metal, cellulose—and in new machinery, like pneumatic molding devices and “exercise machines” that would put the finished products through grueling tests of high-speed typing. All of the critical parts were interchangeable to a high degree, but given the large number of parts, assembly and adjustment was one of the most important steps in the manufacturing sequence. Parts were not filed to fit, as in the old armories, but were manufactured for easy adjustment by screws or other devices. It was the same principle as the adjustable escapement setting in Terry’s shelf clock, but carried to the nth degree.³⁶

WALTHAM WATCHES

Although watchmaking seems a natural extension of the brass clock industry, the required precision at very small dimensions created an entirely different order of technical challenge.

The father of the American watch industry was Aaron Dennison, an entrepreneur and skilled mechanic who, in 1849, together with clockmaker Edward Howard and a small coterie of investors, set out to mass-produce quality watches. At the time watchmaking was the province of British handcraft artisans. Individual parts were farmed out to subspecialists to be later fitted and assembled by masters of the trade. Although he was committed to machine manufacture, Dennison recruited a number of British craftsmen for their know-how and their highly specialized tools.

The company started in a corner of Howard’s clock factory, but in 1854 Dennison built a factory in Waltham and dubbed the company the Waltham Watch Company. By the time he ran out of money in 1857, he had produced some 5,000 watches. Most of the output was by traditional methods, although the company worked on developing new machinery from the earliest days. An investor bought the company at auction and supplied the capital to maintain its development. A new factory superintendent hired in 1859, Ambrose Webster, created a highly rational, lightly mechanized, new production system just in time for a boom in watch sales from the sudden Union military demand and the disruption of British trade. By 1864, with 38,000 watch sales in a single year, the company was solvent and had capital to spare.

From that point, Waltham Watch commenced a single-minded, three-decade drive to fully automate watch production. Various competitors entered the industry from time to time, most of them falling by the wayside as Waltham relentlessly drove down prices and improved its quality, along the way creating entirely new swathes of production technology. The Elgin Watch Company, founded in 1864 by former Waltham mechanics, was the only one of the era’s start-ups to survive in the long term.

Among Waltham’s many process inventions, they were the first to adopt dimensioned gauging—based on precise measurements instead of tests of fitting—since the small size of watch parts made traditional gauging impractical. Needle gauges tested the diameters of jeweled hole collars, eventually to accuracies of 1/17,000 inch. By the 1880s, all screws, by far the most common watch part, were produced internally with automatic screw-cutting machines. Escapement wheel-cutting machines carried fifty blanks at a time and were completely self-acting, making ninety cuts per wheel with three steel and three sapphire cutters. (The hardness of sapphire eliminated the need to polish the finished escapement teeth.) The list of new machining and control processes could be extended almost indefinitely.

Much as in typewriters, the final adjustment and tuning of the watch was a critical step. Tiny shifts in the ratio of balance weight and hairspring strength affected accuracy. Multiple set screws tuned the balance between all the critical parts. Adjustment of the cheaper watches was often left to dealers, but adjustment on top of the line products could take months. Among other things, they had to assure consistent time keeping at temperature extremes. With sales of 18 million watches by 1910, steadily falling prices and costs, and the most precise production machinery in the world, Waltham wrote a unique chapter in the annals of automated manufacture.³⁷

ARMORY PRACTICE-STYLE OF MANUFACTURING WAS AN IMPORTANT THREAD of American industrial development, but it became a major feature of the economy only with the mass manufacture of automobiles, kitchen appliances, and other complex national consumer products in the twentieth century. As we have seen, the intense interest of the British in American gun making, their dubbing it the American system of manufacturing, and American pride in making such a positive impression naturally led industrial historians, at least implicitly, to treat armory practice as an important driver of nineteenth-century growth.^bo

The real story is that in a labor-short country, Americans were quick to resort to mechanized solutions to a wide range of production problems, like the portable sawmills in midwestern forests, or the high-pressure lard-processing systems, or the steam-powered threshers of the 1870s, processing 5,000 bushels a day on Great Plains factory farms, pouring them directly into freight cars lined up on the farms’ own rail spurs.

The overwhelming proportion of nineteenth-century American mechanization efforts went into basic processing industries, not precision manufacturing. Food and lumber processors were 60 percent of all power-using manufacturing industries in 1869. Add textiles, paper, and primary metal industries like smelting, and the number rises to 90 percent. Industries that would plausibly lend themselves to armory practice methods—fabricated metal products, furniture, machinery, and instruments—accounted for only 7.5 percent of 1869 manufacturing power demand. And the mere use of power machinery doesn’t qualify as armory practice. It’s safe to say most furniture and metal fabrication shops stuck with craft-based methods. There are only small differences in the data in the 1889 census.³⁸

All industries were moving to higher levels of precision as the century passed the halfway point. Continuous-flow processing, as in lard, grains, and later petroleum, imposes requirements for precise valves, gauges, temperature control devices, and protection from contaminants. And those requirements mount exponentially as volumes and levels of customer sophistication rise in tandem. It took new generations of superb machinists, and superb new tooling, to meet those standards, but for the most part, it had little to do with armory practice.

One index of the pervasiveness of armory practice is the sales of precision metal-shaping machinery from Brown & Sharpe, the quintessential armory-practice vendor. The company sold almost 24,000 machines between 1861 and 1905. Of that total, it took until 1875 to sell the first 1,000 and until 1883 to sell another 1,000. That is consistent with the picture of armory-practice industries expanding very late in the century before its apotheosis in the Model-T plants.³⁹

Mid-century America was still a predominately agricultural country. On the eve of the Civil War, only 16 percent of the workforce was in manufacturing. ⁴⁰ They worked in grain milling, meatpacking, lard refining, turning logs into planks and beams, iron smelting and forging, and making steam engines and steamboats, vats and piping, locomotives, reapers and mowers, carriages, stoves, cotton and woolen cloth, shoes, saddles and harnesses, and workaday tools. These were the industries in which America’s comparative advantage loomed largest and were the ones that dominated American output. It was the drive to mass scale in those industries, by a wide variety of strategies and methods, that was the real American system, or perhaps the American ideology, of manufacturing.

America in 1860: On the Brink

The Civil War violently disrupted economic growth, but by finally resolving the sectional conflict, and excising the cancer of slavery, it removed the last important obstacle to continental expansion and vigorous industrialization. Abraham Lincoln came out of the old Whig tradition of Henry Clay—egalitarian, pro–manufacturing and protective tariffs, pro-education, and pro–canals, roads, and interior development. His favorite speech in a pre-election lecture tour was on discoveries and inventions. In his famous 1858 debates with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln stressed the economic perils of the extension of slavery as much as he did the system’s moral depravity. Extending slavery into western territories, he insisted, would inevitably drive the wages of free working men to the slave standard. Those were not trumped-up fears. Throughout the border and “blue grass” states, like Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia, there were at least a hundred major iron plantations, with predominately slave labor, turning out quite decent iron. The admixture of white workers, often about a quarter of the workforce, were themselves virtually enslaved by the proverbial company store and the hard-driving boss characteristic of the plantation culture.⁴¹

During one of the darkest periods of the War, in 1862, the Republican Congress passed one of the great development programs in American history. The Homestead Act allowed any citizen, including single women and freed slaves, to take possession of virtually any unoccupied tract of public land for a $12 registration and filing fee. Live on it for five years, build a house, and farm the land, and it was yours for just an additional $6 “proving” fee. Over time, the act helped settle some 10 percent of the entire land mass of the United States. Senator Justin Morrill’s (R-VT) 1862 land-grant college act awarded each state a bequest of public lands that it could sell to finance state colleges for the agricultural and industrial arts. No other country had conceived the notion of educating farmers and mechanics, and the Morrill Act schools are still the foundation of the state university systems.

The 1862 Pacific Railway Act made yet another lavish grant of public lands to finance a railway line from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean, a dream of the pro-development party for more than twenty years. The project was scarred by financial problems and scandal but was actually completed more or less as its promoters promised and surprisingly close to the original schedule. Over time, its development impact justified the airiest promises of its supporters. The Republican/Whig agenda was rounded out with major tariff increases and a federal banking act that, for all its flaws, got the country through the war and its financial aftermath.

Development economists speak of a “takeoff” point when an economy is poised for a long-term ratchet upward in growth. The United States was clearly at or approaching such a point in 1860, but the progression was violently disrupted by the war. When growth resumed at the end of the 1860s, it was accompanied by dramatic turns in the economy that are still not completely understood. The 1870s was a time of jagged economic ups and downs, including a steep railroad-led crash in 1874 and an equally sharp recovery late in the decade. But over the full decade, nominal growth (not adjusted for inflation), was 3.9 percent, or about the long-term average.^bp

The surprise came when economic historians adjusted the 1870s data for price inflation. In the modern era, we assume moderate price inflation is a normal condition, so “real” (inflation-adjusted) growth is always somewhat lower than nominal growth. But when the price adjustment was applied to the 1870s data, output rose by nearly 60 percent. In other words, prices fell, and quite substantially, through most of the decade even as output soared. The deflation was felt by almost everyone as a dreadful, and extremely disruptive, experience. It was a period of extraordinary social unrest. The year 1877, for reasons that are obscure, saw riots in most major cities, and Pittsburgh mobs put the torch to virtually all the main installations of the Pennsylvania Railroad. The phenomenon of real prices falling even as real output rose continued through most of the 1880s.

As Japan has painfully shown, generally falling prices now tend to be associated with stagnation or depressions. But in the 1870s, wholesale prices fell by about 25 percent, the population grew by about 25 percent, employment grew by 40 percent, and real output grew by a blazing 67 percent. All real indices were up strongly. Fuel consumption doubled, metal consumption tripled, and the real value of manufacturing output was up by 40 percent. Food production showed the same picture. Home consumption of grains and cotton rose by half, and per capita beef consumption increased by 40 percent. Wheat exports were up 250 percent, and beef exports rose eightfold. Total agricultural exports more than doubled, and railroad freight loadings were up strongly. At the end of the decade, Amer-icans were better fed, better clothed, and better educated, with bigger farms and higher output, and with access to a much broader range of products like stoves, washtubs, new farm machinery, and much else. Real growth in the decade, at 6.2 percent, is among the fastest in the country’s history, although real people, it seems clear, mostly felt awful.^bq ⁴²

The evidence suggests a “supply shock,” a rare event on an economy-wide basis. Supply shocks frequently occur in individual commodity markets: the recent success in exploiting large shale-based natural gas fields in the United States has sent natural gas prices plummeting and may ultimately affect all fossil-derived fuel prices. But a supply shock in a large nation that occurs more or less across the board implies a far-reaching increment in national capacity.

A reasonable speculation is that in the United States, after the Civil War, the combined impact of a deepened national transportation network and the spreading application of mechanized, rational production methods to every kind of industry triggered new economies of scale, in both production and distribution, across a wide swath of industries. Both factory productivity and labor productivity registered a sharp jump upwards in the mid-1870s and maintained that level for the rest of the century.

The jump in per capita output is consistent with the large accretion of capital in the United States in this period. Per capita consumption roughly doubled from mid-century to 1900, but savings increased by two and a half times, to nearly 30 percent of household incomes by the century’s end, possibly its highest ever. The country’s capital stock tripled from the Revolution to 1799, but from 1800 to 1860, it multiplied sixteenfold, albeit from a relatively small base, and then grew another eightfold from 1860 to 1910. Over the entire run, American capital stock increased 388 times, and compared to Europe’s, it was much newer.⁴³ The falling prices seen throughout the economy were especially sharp in capital goods, like machinery and tooling, which further amplified the impact of increased savings and rising capital investment. Since the transportation sector was by far the most capital-intensive of the day’s industries, as well as a major productivity enhancer, a virtuous circle of savings, investment, and greater productivity came to dominate the entire economy.^br

The increase in capital was paralleled by a great expansion of American territory, and continued strong population growth. But although the population tripled between the Civil War and the eve of the First World War, the stock of capital per citizen continued to grow. Finally, the contribution of immigration to American population growth was generally strong in this era, and immigrants punched above their weight. They were disproportionately young adults with few dependents—adventurous risk takers who had come to work.

Great Britain, in the meantime, continued to grow at about its long-term rate, or roughly 2 percent, while United States grew twice as fast. A curve of a steadily compounding advantage sufficiently prolonged inevitably starts to turn in a near-vertical direction. Sometime in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the United States moved past Great Britain on nearly all major economic indicia, and by the eve of the First World War, US output was larger than that of Great Britain, France, and Germany combined.

That takes us to the close of the main portion of the story: how America built the economic platform that allowed it to replace Great Britain in the global economic catbird seat. To bridge the gap between the creation of the platform and the climactic event, the next chapter is a compressed account of the vast American industrial expansion in the second half of the century.