The Dawn of Innovation (40 page)

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

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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 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.
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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.”
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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.