1845

Mass Production

Cost reduction is one of the key improvements that engineers offer society. Engineers take complicated, expensive processes and devices and make them affordable. One way they do that is through mass production.

If you go to the Williamsburg historical area in Virginia, you can see how gunsmiths made guns prior to the Industrial Revolution. They made each part—components like triggers, barrels, springs, and frizzens—and then fit them together by hand. Even the screws were made by hand.

During the Industrial Revolution, engineers worked out three big changes in the status quo: 1) Making standardized, interchangeable parts, 2) separating tasks into repeatable stations along an assembly line, also known as the division of labor, and 3) using machines to do as much of the work as possible. One of the first places where these three innovations came together was in a gun factory at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, starting in 1845.

In this factory, machines did a great deal of the work. For example, one especially interesting type of machinery allowed for the automated production of gun stocks from wood. Instead of a person carving the stock by hand and then custom fitting it around the other parts of the gun, each stock was identical and interchangeable, and it took very little direct human effort to make. That same mentality was applied to barrels, triggers, springs, etc.

The cost of guns fell as the amount of human labor fell. In addition, it was no longer necessary to send gunsmiths into the field to repair handmade guns. Anyone could remove a broken piece and replace it with an interchangeable part.

Mass production of this type became known as the American system of manufacturing, and from the gun industry it spread to many other industries. It acted as the foundation upon which Fordism was built to produce the Model T.

Today nearly everything we use is mass-produced. Look around you—there may not be a single handmade object in your line of sight. Everything from your shoes to your smart phone comes from a factory. That’s because factories bring down the cost of production to make more and more things affordable.

SEE ALSO Cotton Mill (1790), Top-Loading Washing Machine (1946), AK-47 (1947), Smart Phone (2007).

This photo shows mass airplane production at work.