The Dawn of Innovation (25 page)

Production of the Hall rifle ceased in 1848. Despite some passionate advocates among the officer corps for its accuracy and speed of loading, the weapons seem not to have been much favored by troops. In the Second Seminole War of 1836, which was fought in the Florida Everglades, troops complained that the Hall loading chamber quickly rusted shut and that spilled powder collected in the bottom of the loading chamber, corroding the iron and forcing the chamber out of alignment.
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In theory, such problems could be easily solved. The military issued small wire brushes to clear chambers of excess powder, and regular application of lubricant would have prevented rusting. But these are precisely the kind of fussy maintenance tasks that soldiers in the field can be depended on to neglect. A large number of the rifles were still in inventory when production ceased, but they were mostly distributed during the Civil War.

The achievement of Hall and North in manufacturing rifles with fully interchangeable precision parts was a signal milestone toward the final realization of the Wadsworth-Bomford-Lee program of “Uniformity” laid down twenty years before. By about mid-century, practical interchangeability became a fact for virtually all military muskets produced by the armories and private contractors. But legend to the contrary, machines by themselves were still far from being able to consistently achieve such tolerances. A series of microscopic analyses by Robert Gordon showed that precision fitting of firing action components required improvements in
hand-finishing
at least as great as those in machining. And until very recent
times, it was rarely cost effective to attempt to replace all hand-finishing with machinery. The achievement of armory practice and high-precision interchangeability, therefore, was the creation of an integrated process of specification, measurement, work flow, and the highest-quality standards in
both
machining and hand work.
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The value of mass production processes was proven in the crucible of the Civil War. Firearm production at Springfield in 1860 was a bit lower than 10,000 weapons, but it was ratcheted up quickly during the war. Springfield produced 14,000 weapons in 1861, 102,000 in 1862, 218,000 in 1863, and 276,000 in 1864. Colt was the most important private-sector military arms producer. From 1861 through 1863, its peak year, Colt's output of firearms increased from 27,000 to 137,000—or by a factor of 5—while at the same time Springfield's rose by a factor of 21.8.
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But the way in which the military achieved its interchangeability objective suggests its limitations. In the first place, it was a development that took many decades, which is usually possible only in the type of hothouse environment afforded by military settings. The original 1763 French Charleville musket, with only minor modifications became the Springfield Model 1795 and, with another set of small changes, the Model 1816. That was virtually unchanged until the flintlocks were replaced by percussion caps in the 1840s—they worked much like children's cap pistols, although the caps were made of copper. (The unnecessary lock parts were machined away, and a percussion cap receptacle was placed on the breech top with a new touch hole. The hammer remained on the side but was curved to strike the breech-top percussion lug.) With the 1848 advent of the Minié ball, which facilitated muzzle loading without fouling,
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the musket barrels were rifled. Civil War troops, therefore, mostly went to war with “rifle-muskets,” which were quite respectable weapons, with an effective range of six hundred yards, ten times that of the old smooth bores.
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The basic infantry weapon carried by Union troops in the Civil War, therefore, was still a modified version of the Springfield 1795 musket. Such longevity is not especially unusual in military procurement. The B-52 bomber, launched in 1952 as an anti-Soviet nuclear bomber, has long since been converted to deliver cruise missiles and other standoff precision weapons. There are a number of instances in which sons of first generation B-52 pilots also became B-52 pilots, and some reports of grandsons. Military platforms, in general, like bombers and ships—and the Springfield 1795—tend to have very long lives, so long as their lethality can be steadily upgraded.

While no private company could follow such a strategy, it is well-suited for military technologies. The sheer logistics of maintaining a global military force imposes an extreme conservatism in getting the most out of existing technologies. But by the same logic, the long planning time frame justifies spending resources on promising technologies with a very long payoff. The American military started working on the basic technologies of the Internet some four decades before it finally burst into commercial prominence. In the same way, armory practice in machining laid down a substrate of technologies—including gauging, pattern making, profiling, and milling—that were seized on later and taken in many different directions by private companies.

The apotheosis of armory practice—machine production lines with special purpose machinery turning out fully interchangeable parts with little or no manual intervention—came only with the first Ford Model T assembly line in 1913. That production model dominated much of American manufacturing in the twentieth century. For most of the nineteenth century, however, highly organized production lines using precision special-purpose machines accounted for a very modest share of national output.

The mass-production industries that drove American growth through the nineteenth century were those in which the United States had a massive comparative advantage, and they sprang primarily from the crops, husbandry, and natural resources of the West.

F
RANCES TROLLOPE WAS FORTY-SEVEN IN FEBRUARY 1828, WHEN SHE disembarked at Cincinnati with three of her five children in tow. She knew no one in the city and had made the last leg of her trip on borrowed money. Two sons, Tom, the oldest, and Anthony, the future novelist, were both in school in England, while her contentious and ineffective husband, a failed lawyer and a failed farmer, remained on their estate near Harrow to stave off creditors.
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The notion of publishing what was to be the wittiest, sharpest, and most caustic traveler's account of Jacksonian America was furthest from Trollope's mind. She had come to Cincinnati to repair the family finances by opening a proto-department store offering fine European goods to the grandees of Cincinnati—assuming there were such persons, for her research had consisted only of some pamphlets and conversations with a friend who had once passed through the city.

Despite her dubious judgment in practicalities, Trollope's adventure revealed a woman of rare intelligence, energy, and resilience. Her first year in Cincinnati she made money as the impresario of an elaborate, quasi-mechanical staging of Dante's
Inferno
at the Cincinnati museum. (Her son Henry did the voice of an invisible Oracle in Latin and Greek.) The production was reported as far away as Boston and ran for years. Samuel Colt, nineteen years old and touring the West as “Dr. Coult” delivering laughing-gas exhibitions and science lectures to raise money for
his pistols, did a stint with the show in 1833.
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The humorist Artemus Ward commented on it in 1861.

But Trollope had come to open a store and spent huge amounts of other people's money constructing it. Her “Bazaar” was a pastiche of Gothic and Byzantine architecture, eighty-five feet high. The shipments of expensive French fabrics her husband sent drew no customers, however, so the project was quickly underwater. The day after the sheriff distrained her household goods, Trollope gathered her children and absconded on a steamboat. She had spent twenty-five months in Cincinnati, leaving the Bazaar as her monument or, depending on her mood, her revenge.

With her family in desperate financial straits and her husband of no use, Trollope decided to extend her trip and recoup their fortunes by writing a book. She had never published anything and needed to scrape and scrounge to finance too-short visits to the South and New England. But she wrote beautifully. The book opens with her arrival from England at the mouth of the Mississippi, and she meditates briefly on the difficulty of recording scenery: “The Ohio and the Potomac may mingle and be confounded with other streams in my memory, I may even recall with difficulty the blue outline of the Alleghany mountains, but never, while I can remember any thing, shall I forget the first and last hour of light upon the Atlantic.”
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Trollope finished her book after she returned to England, working in the mean little farmhouse where her husband, having lost his estate, was sunk in invalidism. The first publisher she favored with the manuscript loved it, and
The Domestic Manners of the Americans
was a best seller on both sides of the Atlantic.

The new fortune was quickly squandered, but she kept writing, turning out 113 volumes of novels and travel books. Because of the Trollopes' financial heedlessness, her first books after
Domestic Manners
were again written under great financial pressure, made the worse by the successive deaths of her husband and two of her children. But she emerged from her crises in full blossom and lived to be eighty-three, hale and active to the very end, finally wealthy, a success throughout Europe, an invitee at royal
courts. When she was not traveling, she made her home in Florence, at Villino Trollope, where she was surrounded by her family, artistic friends, and a constant stream of visitors.

Posterity is fortunate in the foreign literary travelers who graced the United States in the crucial decades from the 1820s through the 1840s. Besides Trollope, there were Alexis de Tocqueville and his partner, Gustav de Beaumont, the most famous European rapporteurs on things American. They arrived in 1831 and covered some 3,000 miles in just ten months. Harriet Martineau, one of the world's first female political economists/sociologists, traveled for two years in 1835–1836, living almost everywhere, in both mansions and log cabins, and meeting almost everybody, including Jackson and Madison. Her
Society in America
(1837) is remarkable for both the lucidity of her mind and prose and her de haut en bas lectures on the solutions to America's problems. Charles Dickens compiled his
American Notes
during a four-month tour in 1842. He came to deliver a series of paid lectures and readings in the major eastern cities, but rounded out his trip with flying visits to Washington and Virginia, and to the “West,” the rich but thinly populated expanse between the inland slopes of the Appalachians and the Mississippi River.
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Trollope was in the United States longer than any of these, but more than half of her stay was confined to Cincinnati.

Each of their accounts is quite different, but there are some common threads. They had all arrived as opponents of slavery but were shocked and horrified when they confronted its reality, and felt the American prating of “liberty and equality” as the deepest hypocrisy. All were variously appalled at the strict separation of men and women in inns and public conveyances; the huge quantities of food consumed by Americans, how fast they ate, and the lack of conversation at meals; and, worst of all, the constant chawing and spitting by American men—spitting indoors and
outdoors, on good carpets and bare floors. It does sound awful; Dickens had the misfortune to take the lowest of a stack of bunks on a canal boat and awoke to find his coat drenched with spit from the upper bunks.

At a broader level, all of them understood that they were observing a vast interlacing of the country, as the northeastern and Middle Atlantic states were being drawn into tight commercial relations with the West. They were all stunned at the commercialism and struggled to understand the mechanics of a society without official classes. And, as with many of their impressions of American innovations, they were as dazzled by the beauty and adaptability of the western steamboat as they were appalled by its evident dangers.

In the modern era, an emerging-market country typically industrializes by exploiting cheap labor to become a low-cost manufacturing site for developed country markets, and then moves rapidly up the technology curve to higher-margin output. It was the model followed with great success by Japan in the early twentieth century and has been successfully adapted by most of the Asian Pacific Rim countries over the last thirty years or so.

At first glance, the nineteenth-century American pattern appears to be quite different, because labor was generally more expensive in the United States than in Europe. But only free labor was expensive. The United States had a huge reservoir of cheap labor—slaves—who produced the cotton that accounted for about half the value of American exports from 1820 through 1860. Over the same period, only about 15 percent of American exports were manufactured or semimanufactured goods. Everything else was extractive or farm-related—wheat and tobacco (which taken together were dwarfed by cotton), lumber, ores and metals, and processed foods.
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