The Dawn of Innovation (22 page)

With the war mercifully ended, and procurement authority consolidated, Wadsworth and Bomford set out to fix the mess they had inherited, with the Springfield Armory serving as their primary development laboratory.
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The armory is located at about the geographic midpoint of the Connecticut River, near the Massachusetts/ Connecticut border. By 1815,
the spinning-mill industry created by Samuel Slater had enjoyed twenty years of development and growth. Lowell's Waltham mill had opened in late 1814, adding to a glut of new mills hoping to profit from the unavailability of British cloth. The mills, along with Terry's clocks, had force-fed the development of a native machine tool industry. David Wilkinson, one of Samuel Slater's first partners, was one of a pantheon of early American machining greats who created the technical substrate for advances in armory and other metal goods production.

That talent pool, the surplus capital in Boston, the fine water sites along the main river and its tributaries, the easy access to the Salisbury iron region, and the convenience of riverboat shipping to and from New York combined to make the Connecticut River Valley a cynosure of an East Coast tradition of advanced precision-machinery manufacturing development.

The armory's new superintendent, Roswell Lee, became the Ordnance point man in the valley and the third critical player on the Wadsworth-Bomford advanced-manufacturing team. Scion of one of the bluest-blood New England families, he had once been engaged by Whitney to maintain his Southern cotton gin establishments. He had been a high-ranking officer during the war, knew Wadsworth, and had lobbied him hard for a postwar civilian position in armory work.
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As Springfield superintendent—he served from 1815 until his death in 1833—Lee's wide, active correspondence with the valley's private contractors made the armory a clearing house for technical information, tools development, and hard-to-find skills. A practical mechanic and a competent manager, he maintained a record of steady productivity improvement and good financial controls, and gradually disciplined the armory's unruly workforce.

Wadsworth's and Bomford's goal at the outset was something well short of strict interchangeability of parts. They both talked in terms of “uniformity,” which probably meant little more than ensuring that all units of a firearm were built to the same design and dimensions with consistent quality and costs. Achieving even that proved far more difficult than expected.

Wadsworth kicked off the uniformity program with a June 1815 planning meeting in New Haven hosted by Whitney, with Wadsworth, Lee, James Stubblefield (superintendent at Harpers Ferry), and Benjamin Prescott (Lee's predecessor at Springfield) in attendance. After several days of discussions, they agreed on a first step of creating a set of “pattern muskets” for a new model 1816, which incorporated a number of small improvements, including several Whitney had introduced for his militia contracts. (American muskets were based on the French Charleville, a 1763 model supplied to Americans during the Revolutionary War and updated somewhat when production began at Springfield in 1795, becoming the model 1795.) The patterns were to be distributed among the armories and all federal contractors as the template for all future production. As the model number 1816 suggested, they assumed the patterns would be ready the next year.

But it took nearly three years just to produce patterns. The job was first assigned to Harpers Ferry, but Stubblefield botched it, since he had little interest in the idea. Wadsworth reassigned it to Lee, but the squabbling within the armories and with contractors went on for another two years before a design was agreed on.
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It had not yet dawned on Wadsworth and Bomford that they didn't know how to specify a pattern.
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The modern system of designs on blueprints with precise three-axis dimensioning didn't exist in 1815. No rule with graduated markings, as opposed to a plain straightedge, has been identified at Springfield before 1848. Reasonably priced vernier calipers, true precision measuring instruments, were not available until the early 1850s and were not used on the Springfield shop floor until the 1870s. Ordnance's idea of uniformity at this stage was to circulate several pattern muskets for contractors and armory workers to emulate as best they
could. None of the patterns would be exactly the same at the outset, and variations would inevitably accumulate and multiply.
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As Ordnance focused more explicitly on machine manufacturing and true interchangeability, each step forward revealed yet another abyss to be crossed. Achieving their objective would ultimately require reconceiving specification and production systems
all the way down
, in every detail. But one of the great advantages of military R&D is that it can take a long view. For more than thirty years, Ordnance stuck to the mission, steadily refined its objectives, and eventually got within reasonable proximity to its goal. Lee was at Springfield for the first eighteen years of the program, and Bomford for nearly the whole span.

The notion of interchangeability was definitely in the air. Jefferson had been an early apostle and was quick to climb on the Whitney bandwagon.
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Callender Irvine, as we have seen, made it an express but not enforced part of North's 1813 contract. Pressure to satisfy a political audience is the likely explanation for a peculiar 1818 directive from Wadsworth to all armories and contractors that all musket parts must be made “to fit
every
musket,” which he surely knew was not possible.
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When Lee was pressed by a contractor on the meaning of the instruction, he responded only that his “present station” forbade him from making unfavorable comments except to his superiors.
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Line officers were less restrained. Major James Dalliba, who inspected the Springfield Armory for Wadsworth in 1819, wrote in his report that pursuing uniformity “precisely to one pattern in all the detail of parts” was neither attainable nor advisable and would incur a large expense. He also poured cold water on the idea that interchangeability would facilitate field repairs, since weapons became deformed with use.
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Wadsworth was already terminally ill by the time of Dalliba's report, but Bomford and Lee never jettisoned the objective of interchangeability, vaguely defined though it was. Their sustained attention, constant cajoling, and alertness in scouting out technologists who might contribute to this or that piece of the puzzle are still characteristic of the kind of successful military development programs that have recently produced
the Internet and many developments in semiconductors and other advanced technologies.

A fine illustration of the Bomford-Lee system in action can be seen in the early career of Thomas Blanchard, perhaps the greatest of a handful of outstanding American inventors in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Thomas Blanchard was the classic nerd, a technology geek, but since he came of age in the Connecticut River Valley in the early 1800s, he was a machine geek. An indifferent student with limited social graces—he was afflicted with a bad stammer—his father early despaired of turning him into a farmer. As a teenager he was shipped off to work for his eldest brother, who ran a tack factory—and Thomas had found his milieu. His first job was hand-fixing heads on tacks, which he hated. He quickly invented an automatic tack counter to eliminate his record-keeping and then proceeded to eliminate his job by inventing a tack-making machine that turned out five hundred tacks a minute. He patented his tack machine in 1817 and sold the licensing rights for $5,000—a stupendous sum for a young man. That money allowed him to buy his own manufactory in Millbury on a site with waterpower privileges, in an area with some forty water-powered mills and factories already in place.
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Blanchard must already have had a local reputation. His first patent, for a wool-cloth shearing machine, had been awarded in 1813 when he was twenty-five, and the year after he opened his shop, he was called for a consultation by Asa Waters, one of the region's gun-making elite. Waters had several patents, including ones for a trip-hammer barrel welder
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and a lathe to produce a tapered
barrel. He was struggling, however, with the challenge of creating a lathe that could machine the “flats and ovals” required for a musket's breech end.

According to Waters's son, who was later an important manufacturer in his own right, Blanchard listened to the problem and then “glanced his eye over the machine, began a low monotonous whistle, as was his wont through life when in deep study, and ere long suggested an additional, very simple, but wholly original cam motion . . . which upon being applied, relieved the difficulty at once.” (A cam is an accessory that can modify a circular motion into an elliptical or linear path.
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Blanchard was also well known to Lee. With his ear always to the ground for new technology, Lee quickly learned of Blanchard's flats and ovals machine and invited him to build one at Springfield along with a draw-grinding machine—a new machine type for fine-sandstone barrel grinding just before buffing.
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Both machines were also later installed at Harpers Ferry. We also know that in 1820, Blanchard had a machine-building contract with the Boston Company, the nine-hundred-pound gorilla of the region's technology buyers.
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Any Waltham-Lowell machine-building contract would have gone through Paul Moody, arguably the top machinist in the area, who normally manufactured his own machines and also had a profitable sideline selling them to other textile firms. A Moody outsourcing to Blanchard was a gold-star endorsement.

Blanchard's lasting fame is based on the Blanchard gun-stocking lathe, a truly original manufacturing breakthrough with broad implications for all machining of irregular shapes. Once again, the junior Waters tells the story, for the stocking machine arose from his father's new flats-and-ovals lathe. Delighted with Blanchard's solution, the elder Waters exclaimed, “Well, Thomas, I don't know what you won't do next. I should not be surprised if you turned a gun-stock!”
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When Thomas stammered out that he would like to try, the shop workmen broke into guffaws. Making gun stocks had long been a serious bottleneck at government armories: the variety of curves and the multiplicity of recesses and connection points made it impossible to machine.

As Waters tells the story, Blanchard mulled the problem until one day, on a trip home, “the whole principle of turning irregular forms from a pattern
burst upon his mind.” A neighbor reported that Blanchard stood in the road shouting, “I've got it! I've got it! I've got it!,” while a passing farmer muttered, “I guess that man is crazy.”
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Blanchard's breakthrough was as simple as it was brilliant. He constructed a lathe with two distinct parts, each separately powered. The first was a V-shaped frame holding on its two branches the target block of wood and a copy, usually in metal, of a finished gun stock, the “pattern.” They both rotated slowly and identically while moving back and forth on the horizontal axis. The second part of the machine comprised the cutting tool, geared to revolve at a high speed, connected on a similar frame to a tracer, just a freely moving wheel. The tracer wheel rested against the pattern, while the cutting wheel rested against the wood block. As the pattern rotated and moved longitudinally, the tracer wheel undulated with the pattern shape, imparting the same action to the cutting wheel—and voilà, with just a few passes, the target block assumed the shape of the pattern.
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Blanchard perfectly understood that he had solved a general problem—how to machine any irregular shape at all. As usual, Lee heard of it and, even before it was finished, reached out to Blanchard in January 1819. Blanchard responded:

 

The Blanchard profiling cutter was a highly original pairing of a moving high-speed cutting tool and a moving workpiece. In the top drawing, both the workpiece blank and the metal pattern rotate and move back and forth on their horizontal axes, while the cutting tool replicates the motion of the feeling piece against the pattern. Once established, the same concept can be applied in a nearly infinite number of arrangements, as illustrated by the second drawing. The invention was later widely replicated in generations of profiling milling machines.