The Dawn of Innovation (23 page)

Blanchard demonstrated the machine at Springfield in March. Lee was much impressed and, along with Wadsworth and Stubblefield, arranged for a demonstration at Harpers Ferry in June. Blanchard took two machines with him: one was installed at Harpers Ferry, and the other hauled to Washington to demonstrate for Wadsworth.

A contract with Springfield, however, had to await the resolution of a patent dispute filed by Asa Kenney, a brass founder across the river from Blanchard. Kenney had reason to be unhappy with the dispute process. The patent commissioner set up a three-man panel that included himself and Lee, who was arguably Blanchard's sponsor. Taking no chances, Blanchard kept Lee closely informed of Kenney's intentions during the pendency of the hearing and hired one of the most powerful lawyers in the state, Levi Lincoln Jr., later a governor and a Congressman, to represent him. The hearing was quickly resolved in his favor.
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Blanchard was clearly no naïf, and he always bargained hard with Lee. When he was in Washington with his stocking machine, he even had the effrontery to wangle a letter from Wadsworth ordering Lee to buy it.
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But then there is a charming series of letters with Lee after Blanchard had begun installing the machine at Springfield. Blanchard pleaded a “grait want of fifty dollars of money,” since he'd been buying machine castings. Lee replied that he would be delighted to pay him but needed a bill. A shocked letter from Blanchard shows him to be quite ignorant of billing processes. Lee finally prepared the bill for him and sent it to him for signature.
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(Clients like Waters probably contracted with a handshake and paid in cash.)

The spring and summer of 1820 was something of a crisis for Blanchard, for the Springfield stockers presented a solid wall of opposition to the stocking machinery. Adonijah Foot, the master armorer at Springfield, reported to Lee in early 1820, “The turning of Stocks progresses very well but I think the Machines for cutting in the lock and the one for jointing the face of the Stock will not be of very great advantage.”
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When Lee passed that on, and expressed his own worries, Blanchard sent an alarmed letter hoping that he had not complained to “head quarters.” (Lee in the
meantime had been proselytizing hard for the machine to the navy and private contractors.
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) Blanchard had reason to worry. A turndown at Springfield could kill the machine's prospects throughout the industry, and he promised Lee that he would have early solutions for all the difficulties.
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Blanchard did have a serious problem with the locks. His lock-cutting machine probably worked fine, but like all surviving models, it cut a standard seat for a standard lock plate. Springfield lock plates, however, were handmade and varied considerably in size. Oddly, rather than make the lock makers conform to a standard plate—as he had seen at North's plant—Lee left it to Blanchard to machine a standard stock to fit whatever lock plates the artisans turned out, which seems benighted. Conceivably, since Lee's tenure at Springfield had been dogged with labor disputes, he may have been reluctant to precipitate another fight.

Blanchard being Blanchard, he solved the problem anyway. It must have occupied him for the rest of the year, for the first working solution was installed at Lemuel Pomeroy's shop in Pittsfield, where he had gone at the end of 1820 to create a stocking system. The following February he wrote triumphantly to Lee (italics added):

Charles Fitch, a census analyst who produced a seminal 1883 report on the development of small-arms machinery, described the “curious invention” thusly: “Blanchard devised a combination of dies sprung inward toward a center, so they would conform inside to any shape of lock-plate set
in the interior, while the outer ends formed a surface which was used as a former, and
thus every cut in wood was made by machinery to conform with the irregularities of the metal work
^”
(emphasis added).
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Unfortunately, no example of the device has survived, but it would have been used at Springfield only until lock-plates were standardized sometime in the 1830s.

The final set of machines Blanchard installed at Springfield, like the one at Pittsfield, “half-stocked” the musket. As Lee described it to Wadsworth: “What we call half Stocking is to face and turn the Stock, fit on the heel plate, let in the barrel, put on the bands, fit on the Lock & trigger plate and bore the holes for the side and tang pins;—the other half is to let in the side plate & guard, hang the trigger, make the groove & bore the hole for & fit the ramrod, let in the band springs, smooth & oil the Stock.”
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Lee insisted on an extended bake-off at Springfield, pitting Blanchard and his crew and machine against the current stocking crew and standard methods, with the winner to be the one with lowest all-in costs. Blanchard was brought into the armory as an outside contractor, a common arrangement in nineteenth-century factories. He was paid a piece rate and paid for his own workers and machinery, but used armory space, raw materials, and waterpower. Blanchard reconfigured his machinery into fourteen different machines, each dedicated to a single operation, almost all of them completely self-acting, so he could use unskilled hands. He laid them out in a natural production flow. That was still unusual in America, but reminiscent of the Portsmouth block-making production line, which Blanchard had expressly referenced in a patent application.

Blanchard and his machines were the clear winner. Over the life of the contract, he received a gross of $18,500, a large sum for the day. The contract does not appear to have been a full-time occupation, since he continued filing other patents during its operation. His engagement was supposed to end in 1825, but the machinery was destroyed in an armory fire, and Lee strong-armed him to stay on until a replacement line was up and running. It was 1827 before he made his exit, although some of the delay was due to Blanchard's hard bargaining before agreeing to a 9-cent royalty on each musket stock subsequently produced with his machinery.

The Blanchard production line had been completely made over by the early 1850s and extended to incorporate many of the “full-stocking” production tasks. Most of the re-work was done by Cyrus Buckland, a legendary Springfield master machinist. An original Blanchard stock-turning lathe is the only one of Blanchard's own designs to have survived. Over several decades, mostly because of the new machinery, the time for producing a stock was reduced from a day and a half to only about an hour and a half on a timed test.

Freed from his armory obligations, Blanchard became the hardest-nosed, and most innovative, of patent managers, coming up with a great variety of licensing arrangements to accommodate particular situations. His pursuit of infringers throughout the country—in the shoe-last, hat-block, and carriage-parts industries among others—must have kept a small phalanx of lawyers at work. He personally lobbied Congress for patent extensions and won two, bringing him protection through 1862, despite protests from his licensees. He also became something of a showman. To help win his third extension, he used his machine to produce marble busts of congressmen from plaster likenesses. (A wag said Blanchard “turned the heads” of Congress.
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) He repeated the feat at the Paris Exposition of 1857, executing a bust of the empress Eugénie.

Even while he was at Springfield, Blanchard had become interested in steam transportation and had built a steam carriage before concentrating on steamboats. He built and operated a line of steamboats for the Springfield-Hartford traffic with the shallow drafts for traversing rapids that later proliferated on western rivers. He patented a number of machines for nautical woodworking and created a large pulley-block production line in Burlington, Vermont. A well-known Blanchard wood-bending machine solved a long-standing problem of breakage in objects like plow handles. Blanchard came to the solution by careful study of the internal dynamics of bent wood. Before bending the wood, his machine first compressed it lengthwise to give it greater structural integrity—not unlike forging in metalwork—so it could be readily reformed without cracking.

Blanchard was only fifty-two in 1840, when he was immortalized in Henry Howe's collection of essays, “Great American Inventors.” He lived
for another twenty-five years, was thrice married and twice widowed, enjoyed a large family, and died a sophisticated and well-traveled gentleman of considerable wealth—even as he long maintained a small workshop to make and sell decorative busts and statues. A eulogy said, “One can hardly go into a tool shop, a machine shop, or workshop of any kind, wood or iron, where motive power is used, in which he will not find more or less of Blanchard's mechanical notions.”
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For all the brilliance of Blanchard's machinery, wood was a much more forgiving medium than metal. The challenge of aligning the lock's tumbler and sear was of a different magnitude than that of seating a lock plate in a stock. Achieving consistent interchangeability of metal parts in volume production turned out to be a tougher challenge than the early enthusiasts for uniformity had ever imagined. The practical methodologies evolved over many years, and the most important armory contribution came from John Hall, a gunsmith from Portland, Maine, and inventor of the Hall rifle.

Mastering the interchangeability challenge was not part of Hall's original business strategy. Rather, in the manner of Eli Whitney, when he was anxious to retain a much-needed government contract, he promised he would produce machine-made rifles with interchangeable parts—but he really did it.
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John Hall was born into an upper-middle-class family during the waning days of the Revolution. After his father's death, he opened a woodworking and boat-building business, married into a politically connected family, and had a very close marriage with seven children. A stint in his state militia sparked a fascination with firearms, and he switched his business to gun making. In 1811, at age thirty, he applied for a patent on a new type of breech-loading rifle, which eliminated the clumsy process of pushing ammunition down the muzzle at each reload. As Hall described his invention in an 1816 pamphlet: “The Patent Rifles may be loaded and fired . . . more than twice as quick as muskets . . . ; in addition to this, they may be loaded with great ease, in almost every situation.... [Since] the
American Militia ... will always excel as light troop . . . quickly assembling and moving with rapidity . . . these guns are most excellently adapted for them.”
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The critical advantage of the breechloader, of course, was that the soldier didn't have to stand and expose himself to reload.

But nothing came easily for Hall. In contrast to Blanchard, who moved readily from one product or technology to another, Hall was grimly focused, with perhaps a touch of the fanatic, and he could be impatient and confrontational with critics. Nevertheless, after many years of financial struggle, he obtained an armory contract that paid him an average of nearly $2,000 a year in salary and royalties for more than twenty years—a decidedly upper-class income. Total production of his rifles in all versions was about 40,000, and they were widely distributed among both state and federal troops, although their performance was controversial.
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Scholarly recognition of his achievements was similarly delayed. Until relatively recently, he was merely a footnote in a fable dominated by Whitney and others.

The first harbinger of the stony path ahead came when Hall applied for his patent. The commissioner of patents, William Thornton, notified Hall that there was a prior claim.
From whom?
inquired an incredulous Hall.
From me!
came the reply, although Thornton hastened to reassure him that he was prepared to share the rights.
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Thornton was a member of Jefferson's circle, the scion of a wealthy American family, educated in Europe, a medical doctor, with artistic and cultural pretensions, and a bit of a scientific dabbler. Standard biographies treat Thornton as an accomplished inventor, for he “held patents for improvements on steamboats, distilling equipment, and firearms.” One can imagine how he got them. The story of Hall's patent has the ring of modern machine-politics graft.
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Upon receiving Thornton's letter, Hall arranged to see him in Washington, whereupon Thornton showed him an older British breechloader that had never gone into production, and averred, according to Hall that, “he had thought of a plan which would have resembled mine & had given orders for its construction but nothing (except the drawings) had been done toward it (& they were not to be found).”
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When Thornton made
it clear that a patent would not issue unless it was in both their names, an outraged Hall appealed to James Monroe, the secretary of state, requesting a conflict-of-claims hearing under the patent law. Monroe blandly advised him not to rock the boat, because Thornton's influence “in that case . . . would be exerted against me.”
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