(TOLERANCE: 0.000 01)
A Gun in Every Home, a Clock in Every Cabin
To-day we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And to-morrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,
To-day we have naming of parts.
—HENRY REED, “NAMING OF PARTS” (1942)
He was a soldier, his name unknown or long forgotten, a lowly young volunteer in Joseph Sterrett’s Fifth Baltimore Regiment. It was August 24, 1814, and I imagine the youngster was probably sweating heavily, his secondhand wool uniform patched and ill fitting and hardly suitable for the blazing late-summer sun.
He was waiting for the fighting to begin, for battle to be joined. He was hiding behind a tumbled stone wall outside a cornfield, not entirely certain where he was, though his sergeant had suggested he was in a small port city named Bladensburg, connected to the sea by a branch of the Potomac that led into the Chesapeake Bay. British forces, the word went, had landed there from ships and were now rapidly advancing from the east. Washington, the capital of his country, a country now not even forty years old as an independent nation, was eight miles to the west behind him, and he was part of a force of six thousand that had been deployed to protect it. Whispers along the line held that President James Madison himself was on the Bladensburg battlefield, determined to make sure the Britons were made to run back to their vessels and flee for their lives.
The young man doubted he would be of much use in the coming battle, for he had no gun—not a gun that worked, anyway. His musket, a new-enough Springfield 1795 model, had a broken trigger. He had fractured it, cracked the guard, and so ruined the trigger during a previous battle, an earlier skirmish of what they were starting to call the War of 1812.
In all other ways he was well enough equipped. He had an ample supply of black powder paper cartridges, a pouch full of roundball ammunition. But the regimental armorer had told him it would be at least three days before they could forge a new trigger for him, and that he had best do all he could with his bayonet, which he had sharpened that very night, before the sun rose. Otherwise, the armorer had said with a grin, just hit the enemy hard with the gun’s oakwood stock—it should give him a black eye at the very least.
That turned out not to be at all funny. The British were close by, on the left bank of the East Branch of the Potomac, when their artillery opened up later that morning, first with a deafening volley of Congreve rockets, a terrifying technique they had learned from fighting in India. It was at that moment, as massive divots of torn earth and stones clattered down around him, that the young man decided his life was more valuable than the winning of this particular battle, and that if the army couldn’t be bothered to fix his musket, then he was going to run. So he turned and plunged into the high corn, heading back home to Baltimore.
He soon understood he was not alone. Through the stands of corn he could see at least five, ten, dozens of other men who were doing just the same, streaming away from the fight. Some he knew, young lads from Annapolis and the Washington Navy Yard and the Light Dragoons, all of them apparently believing that the defense of Bladensburg was hopeless. He ran and ran and ran, and they ran, too, and all of them were still running when they crossed the line marking the District of Columbia, and they continued running, loping breathlessly in many cases, when, half an hour later, there rose before him some of the mighty structures of his capital, great buildings from where his country’s government was dealing with the incomprehensible vastness of America.
He slowed to a walk. He felt he was safe now. His city was not. Before the night was out, the pursuing British troops had sacked it, more or less entirely. He found out later that the British told some of the city folk they were acting so cruelly because American forces some weeks before had had the temerity to wreck and damage buildings in the city of York, in Upper Canada. So here they burned out of revenge. They torched the half-built Capitol. They gutted the Library of Congress, and its three thousand books, and they sacked the House of Representatives. British officers dined that evening on the food Madison had been planning to eat at his Presidential Mansion, and then, after wreaking that domestic indignity, they burned his house down, too, until a ferocious rainstorm—some say a tornado—blew in and doused the flames.
The date, August 24, 1814, would be remembered for centuries to come. The Battle of Bladensburg, the last stand before the Burning of Washington and Burning of the White House, that most potent of incendiary symbols, had been one of the most infamous routs in all American history, a shameful and sorry episode indeed. The imagined account of this one soldier at war was typical of what happened that day, with battle lines being broken and troops running away in panic before the advancing enemy.
There were many reasons for the defeat, and they would be debated by clubbable old soldiers for many years. Inept leadership, ill-preparedness, insufficient numbers—the usual excuses for substantial loss have all been offered down the years. Yet one, a most notorious shortcoming of the American forces (who, after all, had fought little in the years since the War of Independence), was that the muskets with which their infantrymen had been equipped were notoriously unreliable. More important, when they failed, they were fiendishly difficult to repair.
When any part of a gun failed, another part had to be handmade by an army blacksmith, a process that, with an inevitable backlog caused by other failures, could take days. As a soldier, you then went into battle without an effective gun, or waited for someone to die and took his, or did your impotent best with your bayonet, or else, as the young man of Sterrett’s regiment did, you ran.
The problem with gun supply was twofold. The U.S. Army’s standard long gun of the time was a smooth-bored flintlock musket based on a model first built in France and known as the Charleville. The first of these weapons had been imported into the newly independent United States directly from France; they were then manufactured by agreement at the newly built U.S. government armory in Springfield, Massachusetts. Both models had worked adequately, though all flintlocks had misfiring problems and suffered all the simple physical shortcomings that afflicted handmade weapons that were pressed into continuous service—they overheated; their barrels became clogged with powder residue; or the metal parts broke, snapped, got bent, unscrewed, or were simply lost.
This led to the second problem—because once a gun had been physically damaged in some way, the entire weapon had to be returned to its maker or to a competent gunsmith to be remade or else replaced. It was not possible, incredible though this might seem at the remove of a quarter millennium, simply to identify the broken part and replace it with another from the armory stores. No one had ever thought to make a gun from component parts that were each so precisely constructed that they were identical one with another. Had this step been taken, a broken part could have been replaced, swapped for another, because thanks to the precision of its making, it would have been interchangeable. Break a trigger in battle, and all one would have to do was fall back and get the armorer at the rear of the line to reach into his tin box marked “Triggers” and get another, ease it into place, secure it, and be back on the firing line as a fully armed and effective infantryman within minutes.
Yet no one had thought of such a thing—except that they had. Thirty years before the humiliating debacle at Bladensburg, a new manufacturing process had been created that, had it been in operation in the United States in 1814, might well have staved off a defeat occasioned by the failure of the soldiers’ guns. The new thinking about the principles of gun making, thinking that, if put into practice, might perhaps have kept Washington from being put to the torch, began not in Washington, nor in the two federal armories at Springfield and down at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, nor in most of one of the stripling gun-making factories that had sprung up during and immediately after the Revolutionary War. The idea was actually born three thousand miles away, in Paris.
BACK IN THE late eighteenth century, no one spoke about “the dark side.” The phrase is modern, too new for the OED. In almost all the interviews for this book, about the ultrahigh-precision instruments, devices, and experiments that indicate where the precision that originates here is likely to be going, engineers and scientists referred frequently, and usually obliquely, to what “the dark side” might be doing. Once in a while, I would meet someone who admitted to having security clearance, and would thus in theory be able to discuss in greater detail what this experiment was leading to, how this device might be constructed, what the future of such-and-such a project might be—but he would invariably grin and say that, no, he couldn’t discuss what “the dark side” was doing.
“The dark side” is the American military, and in terms of new weaponry or research into the unimaginably precise, that tends to mean the U.S. Air Force. Area 51 is the dark side. DARPA is the dark side. The NSA is the dark side. The role of the dark side in this story is immense, but in today’s world, it is mainly to be only alluded to.
Lewis Mumford, the historian and philosopher of technology, was one of the earliest to recognize the major role played by the military in the advancement of technology, in the dissemination of precision-based standardization, in the making of innumerable copies of the same and usually deadly thing, all iterations of which must be identical to the tiniest measure, in nanometers or better. The stories that follow, in which standardization and precision-based manufacturing are shown to become crucial ambitions of armies on both sides of the Atlantic, serve both to confirm Mumford’s prescience and to underline the role that the military plays in the evolution of precision. The examples from the early days of the science are of course far from secret; those from today, and that might otherwise be described in full to illustrate today’s very much more precise and precision-obsessed world, are among the most secure and confidential topics of research on the planet—kept in permanent shadow, as the dark side necessarily has to be.
IT WAS IN the French capital in 1785 that the idea of producing interchangeable parts for guns was first properly realized, and the precision manufacturing processes that allowed for it were ordered to be first put into operation. Still, it is reasonable to ask why, if the process was dreamed up in 1785, was it not being applied to the American musketry in official use in 1814, twenty-nine years later? Men were running, battles were being lost, great cities were being burned—and in part because the army’s guns were not being made as they should have been made. There is an answer, and it is not a pretty one.
TWO LITTLE-REMEMBERED FRENCHMEN got the honor of first introducing the system that, had it been implemented in time and implemented properly, would have given America the guns it should have had. The first, the less familiar of the pair, despite the evidently superior nature of his name, was Jean-Baptiste Vaquette de Gribeauval, a wellborn and amply connected figure who specialized in designing cannons for the French artillery. He supposedly came up with a scheme, in 1776, for boring out cannons using almost exactly the same technique that John Wilkinson had invented across in England, that of moving a rotating drill into a solid cannon-size and cannon-shaped slug of iron. Wilkinson had patented his precisely similar system two years earlier, in 1774, but nonetheless, the French system, the système Gribeauval, as it came to be known for the next three decades, long dominated French artillery making. It gave the French armies access to a range of highly efficient and lightweight, but manifestly not entirely originally conceived, field pieces.* (Gribeauval did employ what were called go and no-go gauges as a means of ensuring that cannonballs fitted properly inside his cannons, but this was hardly revolutionary engineering, and it had been around in principle for five centuries.)
The second figure, the man who did the most to bring the system of interchangeable parts to the making of guns, and whose technique was, unlike Gribeauval’s, unchallengeable, was Honoré Blanc. He was not a soldier but a gunsmith, and during his apprenticeship he became well aware of the Gribeauval system. He decided early in his career that he could bring a similar standardization to the flintlock musket, for the benefit of the man on the battlefield.
Yet there was a difference. A cannon was big and heavy and crude—a gunner simply touched his linstock, with its attached lighted match, to the vent, and the cannon fired—and so such parts as there were proved easily amenable to standardization. With the flintlock, however, the lock (that part of a musket that delivered the spark that exploded the priming powder that ignited the main charge and drove the ball down the barrel) was a fairly delicate and complex piece of engineering, made of many oddly shaped parts and liable to all kinds of failure. To the uninitiated, the names of the bits and pieces of a flintlock alone are bewildering: a lock has parts that are variously known as the bridle, the sear, the frizzle, the pan, and any number of springs and screws and bolts and plates as well as, of course, the spark-producing (when struck by the aforementioned metal frizzle) piece of flint. To render the lock into a standard piece of military equipment, with all its parts made exactly the same for each lock, was going to be a tall order.
The many component parts of the flintlock on a late eighteenth-century rifle were each made by hand, and had to be filed to fit.
Cost, rather than the well-being of the infantryman or the conduct of the battle, was the prime motive. The French government declared in the mid-1780s that the country’s gunsmiths were charging too much for their craftsmanship, and demanded they improve their manufacturing process or lower their prices. The smiths not unnaturally balked at the impertinence of the suggestion, and promptly tried selling their products to the new armories and gun makers across the Atlantic in America, a move that alarmed the French government, as it imagined it might well run out of weaponry as a result.
It was at this point that Honoré Blanc entered the picture, taking a civilian job as the army’s quality-control inspector. His brother gunsmiths expressed their dismay over the fact that one of their number was going over to the other side, was a poacher turning gamekeeper. Blanc dismissed the criticism and got on with his job, his own motivation being the welfare of the soldier out in the field rather than allowing the government to cut costs. He was greatly influenced by M. de Gribeauval, and decided he could ape his system of standardization, ensuring that all the component parts of a flintlock be made as exact and faithful copies of one perfectly made master.
This master he made himself, carefully and with great precision, and with all the specifications laid down as precisely as possible (using the arcane system of the Ancien Régime, which still employed dimensional measures such as the pointe, the ligne, and the pouce) to tolerances of about what today we would recognize as 0.02 millimeters. He then made a series of jigs and gauges to ensure that all the locks made subsequently were faithful to this first perfect master, by the judicious use of files and such lathes as were available. The gunsmiths hired by Blanc to perform this task—by hand, still—made each lock exactly as the original. Providing that they did so, exactly, all the pieces would then fit perfectly together, and the whole assembled lock would fit equally perfectly into each completed weapon.
Yet only a small number of gunsmiths were willing to work under these stringent new conditions. Most balked. Making guns simply by copying parts reduced the value of the gunsmith’s craftsmanship to near insignificance, they argued. Unskilled drones could do their work instead. By arguing this, the French smiths were voicing much the same complaints as the Luddites had grumbled over in England: that precision was stripping their skills of worth. This argument would be heard many times in the future as the steady march of precision engineering advanced across Europe, the Americas, the world. The kind of mutinous sentiments heard in the English Midlands half a century before were now being muttered in northern France, as precision started to become an international phenomenon, its consequences rippling into the beyond.
Such was the hostility in France to Honoré Blanc, in fact, that the government had to offer him protection, and so sequestered him and his small but faithful crew of precision gun makers in the basement dungeons of the great Château de Vincennes, east of Paris. At the time, the great structure (much of it still standing, and much visited) was in use as a prison: Diderot had been incarcerated there, and the Marquis de Sade. In the relative peace of what would, within thirty years, become one of postrevolutionary France’s greatest arsenals, Blanc and his team worked away producing his locks, all of them supposedly identical. Blanc made all the necessary tools and jigs to help in his efforts—according to one source, hardening the metal pieces by burying them for weeks in the copious leavings of manure from the castle stables.
By July of 1785, Blanc was ready to offer a demonstration. He sent out invitations to the capital’s nabobs and military flag officers and to his still-hostile colleague gunsmiths, to show them what he had achieved. Many officials came, but few of the smiths, who were still seething. Yet one person of great future significance did present himself at the donjon’s fortified gates: the minister to France of the United States of America, Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson had arrived in France the year before, to work as official emissary of the new American government alongside Benjamin Franklin and John Adams. By chance, both these men left Paris that July (Adams for London, Franklin for Washington), leaving the intellectually curious and polymathic Jefferson alone in the ferment of prerevolutionary France. A demonstration of something scientific, with possible application for his own fledgling arms industry across the ocean, sounded like an ideal way to spend a hot Friday afternoon. Besides, it was pleasantly cool down in the château’s dungeons, while up above in the Paris of July 8, 1785, it sweltered.
Thomas Jefferson, while U.S. minister to France, observed the early work on creating interchangeable parts for flintlock muskets, and told his superiors in Washington that American smiths should follow the French practice.
Honoré Blanc had arranged before him a collection of fifty locks, each gleaming in such daylight as filtered through the slit windows. Once everyone was settled on the bleachers, with onlookers paying close attention, he quickly disassembled half of them, throwing the various components of the twenty-five randomly selected locks into trays: twenty-five frizzle springs here, twenty-five faceplates there, twenty-five bridles there, twenty-five pans in another box. He shook each box so that the pieces were as disarranged as possible—and then, with a calm and an aplomb born of his supreme confidence in his method, he quickly reassembled out of this confusion of components twenty-five brand-new musket locks.
Each one of these was made of parts that had never been joined together before—but it made no difference. Everything fitted to everything, for the simple reason that with the great precision of its making, and its faithful adherence to the dimensions of the master lock, each part was identical to each other. The parts were all, in other words, exactly interchangeable.
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 explained 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 shoe 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.
The management of the Harpers Ferry Armory was eager to try out all these new contrivances—despite its remote location, the armory was more accepting of innovation, oddly, than was the busier, bigger, older armory at Springfield, where Blanchard worked, and at which Simeon North was a regular visitor. Harpers Ferry became almost certainly the first establishment in the United States, maybe the first in the world, to employ precisional techniques and mass production to create weapons for the country’s military. To do so, it employed an array of these new technologies and ideas. It used the products of Blanchard’s gunstock machine; it also used John Hall’s milling machine, his fixtures, and his drop-forges; and its locks were made by the process invented by Honoré Blanc and perfected by Simeon North. From iron smelted in Connecticut to finished guns smelling of linseed oil (for the ashwood stock) and machine oil (for the barrel and lock), these were the first truly mechanically produced production-line objects made anywhere—they were also American and, just as Lewis Mumford had predicted, they were guns. Also, they were machine-made in their entirety, “lock, stock, and barrel.”
THE NEWBORN MANUFACTURING community had other irons in the fire besides, and most of them of a decidedly nonbelligerent nature. One Oliver Evans was making flour-milling machinery; Isaac Singer introduced precision into the manufacturing of sewing machines; Cyrus McCormick was creating reapers, mowers, and, later, combine harvesters; and Albert Pope was making bicycles for the masses. And while the Northeast of the United States has long worn its still-surviving reputation for firearms making—the broad lowland reaches of the Connecticut River have long been known as Gun Valley, as gun makers were (and mostly still are) all here: Colt, Winchester, Smith and Wesson, Remington—it was soon to be known for other creations: for another high-precision industry had lately moved into the valley towns and cities of America at about the same time.
Those who operated the machines that were locally bent to making the small components for the region’s armories (the triggers, the faceplates, the frizzle springs) found that they could with ease modify their lathes and milling machines to make small gearwheels and spindles and mainsprings, the necessary components for the intricacies of timekeeping. The region, in consequence, became famous for the production of clocks, for generations of precisely made, and occasionally accurate, plainly beautiful American timepieces.
I write this to the steady beat of a Seth Thomas thirty-day kitchen clock, made in Plymouth, Connecticut, in the 1920s. It is a thing of solid utilitarian beauty, the sort of thing the Shakers would have made if they had concerned themselves with time beyond daybreak and dusk. It is not alone: there are many other clocks scattered around this old farmhouse, most of them eight-day clocks, five of which need winding every Sunday morning, one that has as its pendulum two cylinders half-filled with liquid mercury. In the hall there is a long-case clock made in Winchester, Connecticut, which I bought for reasons of eponymy and which is a little troublesome: it is more than a century old and has wooden gearwheels, which are inconveniently susceptible to changes in the ambient temperature and humidity. The others are more or less reliable, though, and so long as I wind them with an eye to synchronicity, they all remain ticking and chiming as they should, with the exception of one in the kitchen, a former British Railways station clock that has a mind of its own and sometimes demands winding in midweek, which I find confusing.
Still, what I particularly like about old-fashioned clocks is that they may well have been made precisely (their gearwheels fashioned to tolerances of some thousandths of an inch, their springs tight-enable to precisely calculated and specific torques, their pendulum bobs precisely weighed, and their pendulum sticks of exactly measured lengths), but they are often anything but accurate. And part of the pleasure of my Sunday morning ritual is correcting them all, pushing this hand a little forward, that one a minute or so backward, putting the grandfather (which gains inordinately) back by ten minutes or more.
One of the best-loved films of my childhood was The Fallen Idol, a genteel drawing room thriller made by Carol Reed, in which most of the drama takes place inside the French embassy in London. One scene remains in my mind: at the same moment as the details of what looks like a gruesome murder are being unpicked by a group of burly policemen, the Sunday morning clock winder makes his appearance, performing work on the embassy’s elegant clocks, all ormolu and cloisonné, just as I do on my much humbler collection. Hay Petrie, a diminutive character actor from Dundee, has the role, and checks the clocks by his own pocket watch, presumably an impeccable timekeeper. My own domestic standard timekeeper is a pocket watch, too, a Ball railroad watch wound daily and which keeps to about ten seconds a week. When, every month or so, I find it necessary to reset this, I telephone the time recording from the U.S. Naval Observatory master clock, which has as its own standard a series of cesium fountain atomic clocks in a secure building in Boulder, Colorado.*
Though by Sunday breakfast all my clocks are in harmony, it takes only a day or so for them to fall slightly out of rate once more. By Wednesday, I head up to bed listening, just as Harriet Vane does when, in Gaudy Night, she listens to Oxford’s clocks, the various iterations of midnight being chimed out in “friendly disagreement.” In writing that line, Dorothy Sayers was celebrating a mild and meaningless inaccuracy from which one might well take (as I most certainly do) a considerable but inexplicable satisfaction.
To the ordinary and reasonable human, there can perhaps be too great a degree of, or reliance upon, precision, which is something the clockmakers of New England understood well. They knew that the use of interchangeable parts made the manufacture of things a great deal easier than before, and that they could make their goods both quickly and, most important for customers, cheaply. They knew also that accuracy was not of supreme importance in clocks, even though such a sentiment seems to fly in the face of what a clock is intended to do.
Both precision and accuracy are crucial in the making of guns—a soldier’s life depends on his weapon, on its reliability and the honesty of its making—but a clock in a family home, in an early nineteenth-century home, that is, was there more for the decorative augmentation of the kind of daily events that marked time more conventionally: the passage of cows from meadow to byre, the children’s morning yearning for breakfast, the blast of the steam whistle, the peal of church bells. Clocks of the kind being made in America, necessarily very different from the kind of timekeepers John Harrison had been making for the Board of Longitude in England in the previous century, were offered as symbols of arrival into the middle class, much as were sewing machines and washing machines, also Connecticut Valley–made at around the same time.
Clocks that were cheap, repairable, moderately accurate—these were the requirements of the customer, and it was the benefit of precision-based engineering that allowed them to be made so. Perhaps we should not be as surprised as the visitor to the American West in the middle of the century who remarked that “In Kentucky, in Indiana, in Illinois, in Missouri, and in every dell in Arkansas, and in cabins where there was not a chair to sit on, there was sure to be a Connecticut clock.” That was part of the triumph of a means of making that was already being called, to the envy of all industrialized nations around the world (including the British, who could still rightly lay claim to having been the pioneers of precision and perfection), the American system.