There is a tinge of melancholy about the life of such a pioneer as
Oliver Evans, that early American mechanic of great genius, whose
story is briefly outlined in a preceding chapter. Here was a man of
imagination and sensibility, as well as practical power; conferring
great benefits on his countrymen, yet in chronic poverty; derided by his
neighbors, robbed by his beneficiaries; his property, the fruit of his
brain and toil, in the end malevolently destroyed. The lot of the man
who sees far ahead of his time, and endeavors to lead his fellows in
ways for which they are not prepared, has always been hard.
John Stevens, too, as we have seen, met defeat when he tried to thrust
a steam railroad on a country that was not yet ready for it. His
mechanical conceptions were not marked by genius equal to that of
Evans, but they were still too far advanced to be popular. The career
of Stevens, however, presents a remarkable contrast to that of Evans
in other respects. Evans was born poor (in Delaware, 1755) and remained
poor all his life. Stevens was born rich (in New York City, 1749) and
remained rich all his life. Of the family of Evans nothing is known
either before or after him. Stevens, on the contrary, belonged to one of
the best known and most powerful families in America. His grandfather,
John Stevens I, came from England in 1699 and made himself a lawyer and
a great landowner. His father, John Stevens II, was a member from
New Jersey of the Continental Congress and presided at the New Jersey
Convention which ratified the Constitution.
John Stevens III was graduated at King's College (Columbia) in 1768. He
held public offices during the Revolution. To him, perhaps more than
to any other man, is due the Patent Act of 1790, for the protection of
American inventors, for that law was the result of a petition which he
made to Congress and which, being referred to a committee, was favorably
reported. Thus we may regard John Stevens as the father of the American
patent law.
John Stevens owned the old Dutch farm on the Hudson on which the city
of Hoboken now stands. The place had been in possession of the
Bayard family, but William Bayard, who lived there at the time of the
Revolution, was a Loyalist, and his house on Castle Point was burned
down and his estate confiscated. After the Revolution Stevens acquired
the property. He laid it out as a town in 1804, made it his summer
residence, and established there the machine shops in which he and his
sons carried on their mechanical experiments.
These shops were easily the largest and bestequipped in the Union when
in 1838 John Stevens died at the age of ninety. The four brothers, John
Cox, Robert Livingston, James Alexander, and Edwin Augustus, worked
harmoniously together. "No one ever heard of any quarrel or dissension
in the Stevens family. They were workmen themselves, and they were
superior to their subordinates because they were better engineers and
better men of business than any other folk who up to that time had
undertaken the business of transportation in the United States."*
* Abram S. Hewitt. Quoted in Iles, "Leading American
Inventors", p. 37.
The youngest of these brothers, Edwin Augustus Stevens, dying in 1868,
left a large part of his fortune to found the Stevens Institute of
Technology, afterwards erected at Hoboken not far from the old family
homestead on Castle Point. The mechanical star of the family, however,
was the second brother, Robert Livingston Stevens, whose many inventions
made for the great improvement of transportation both by land and water.
For a quarter of a century, from 1815 to 1840, he was the foremost
builder of steamboats in America, and under his hand the steamboat
increased amazingly in speed and efficiency. He made great contributions
to the railway. The first locomotives ran upon wooden stringers plated
with strap iron. A loose end--"a snakehead" it was called--sometimes
curled up and pierced through the floor of a car, causing a wreck. The
solid metal T-rail, now in universal use, was designed by Stevens
and was first used on the Camden and Amboy Railroad, of which he was
president and his brother Edwin treasurer and manager. The swivel truck
and the cow-catcher, the modern method of attaching rails to ties, the
vestibule car, and many improvements in the locomotive were also first
introduced on the Stevens road.
The Stevens brothers exerted their influence also on naval construction.
A double invention of Robert and Edwin, the forced draft, to augment
steam power and save coal, and the air-tight fireroom, which they
applied to their own vessels, was afterwards adopted by all navies.
Robert designed and projected an ironclad battleship, the first one
in the world. This vessel, called the Stevens Battery, was begun by
authority of the Government in 1842; but, owing to changes in the design
and inadequate appropriations by Congress, it was never launched. It lay
for many years in the basin at Hoboken an unfinished hulk. Robert died
in 1856. On the outbreak of the Civil War, Edwin tried to revive the
interest of the Government, but by that time the design of the Stevens
Battery was obsolete, and Edwin Stevens was an old man. So the honors
for the construction of the first ironclad man-of-war to fight and win
a battle went to John Ericsson, that other great inventor, who built the
famous Monitor for the Union Government.
Carlyle's oft-quoted term, "Captains of Industry," may fittingly be
applied to the Stevens family. Strong, masterful, and farseeing, they
used ideas, their own and those of others, in a large way, and were able
to succeed where more timorous inventors failed. Without the stimulus of
poverty they achieved success, making in their shops that combination
of men and material which not only added to their own fortunes but also
served the world.
We left Eli Whitney defeated in his efforts to divert to himself some
adequate share of the untold riches arising from his great invention of
the cotton gin. Whitney, however, had other sources of profit in his
own character and mechanical ability. As early as 1798 he had turned his
talents to the manufacture of firearms. He had established his shops
at Whitneyville, near New Haven; and it was there that he worked out
another achievement quite as important economically as the cotton gin,
even though the immediate consequences were less spectacular: namely,
the principle of standardization or interchangeability in manufacture.
This principle is the very foundation today of all American large-scale
production. The manufacturer produces separately thousands of copies of
every part of a complicated machine, confident that an equal number of
the complete machine will be assembled and set in motion. The owner of a
motor car, a reaper, a tractor, or a sewing machine, orders, perhaps
by telegraph or telephone, a broken or lost part, taking it for granted
that the new part can be fitted easily and precisely into the place of
the old.
Though it is probable that this idea of standardization, or
interchangeability, originated independently in Whitney's mind, and
though it is certain that he and one of his neighbors, who will be
mentioned presently, were the first manufacturers in the world to carry
it out successfully in practice, yet it must be noted that the idea was
not entirely new. We are told that the system was already in operation
in England in the manufacture of ship's blocks. From no less an
authority than Thomas Jefferson we learn that a French mechanic had
previously conceived the same idea.* But, as no general result whatever
came from the idea in either France or England, the honors go to Whitney
and North, since they carried it to such complete success that it spread
to other branches of manufacturing. And in the face of opposition. When
Whitney wrote that his leading object was "to substitute correct and
effective operations of machinery for that skill of the artist which
is acquired only by long practice and experience," in order to make the
same parts of different guns "as much like each other as the successive
impressions of a copper-plate engraving," he was laughed to scorn by
the ordnance officers of France and England. "Even the Washington
officials," says Roe, "were sceptical and became uneasy at advancing so
much money without a single gun having been completed, and Whitney went
to Washington, taking with him ten pieces of each part of a musket.
He exhibited these to the Secretary of War and the army officers
interested, as a succession of piles of different parts. Selecting
indiscriminately from each of the piles, he put together ten muskets, an
achievement which was looked on with amazement."**
* See the letter from Jefferson to John Jay, of April 30,
1785, cited in Roe, "English and American Tool Builders", p.
129.
** Roe, "English and American Tool Builders", p. 133.
While Whitney worked out his plans at Whitneyville, Simeon North,
another Connecticut mechanic and a gunmaker by trade, adopted the
same system. North's first shop was at Berlin. He afterwards moved to
Middletown. Like Whitney, he used methods far in advance of the time.
Both Whitney and North helped to establish the United States Arsenals
at Springfield, Massachusetts, and at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, in which
their methods were adopted. Both the Whitney and North plants survived
their founders. Just before the Mexican War the Whitney plant began
to use steel for gun barrels, and Jefferson Davis, Colonel of the
Mississippi Rifles, declared that the new guns were "the best rifles
which had ever been issued to any regiment in the world." Later, when
Davis became Secretary of War, he issued to the regular army the same
weapon.
The perfection of Whitney's tools and machines made it possible to
employ workmen of little skill or experience. "Indeed so easy did Mr.
Whitney find it to instruct new and inexperienced workmen, that he
uniformly preferred to do so, rather than to combat the prejudices of
those who had learned the business under a different system."*
This reliance upon the machine for precision and speed has been a
distinguishing mark of American manufacture. A man or a woman of little
actual mechanical skill may make an excellent machine tender, learning
to perform a few simple motions with great rapidity.
* Denison Olmstead, "Memoir", cited by Roe, p. 159.
Whitney married in 1817 Miss Henrietta Edwards, daughter of Judge
Pierpont Edwards, of New Haven, and granddaughter of Jonathan Edwards.
His business prospered, and his high character, agreeable manners, and
sound judgment won. for him the highest regard of all who knew him;
and he had a wide circle of friends. It is said that he was on intimate
terms with every President of the United States from George Washington
to John Quincy Adams. But his health had been impaired by hardships
endured in the South, in the long struggle over the cotton gin, and he
died in 1825, at the age of fifty-nine. The business which he founded
remained in his family for ninety years. It was carried on after his
death by two of his nephews and then by his son, until 1888, when it was
sold to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company of New Haven.
Here then, in these early New England gunshops, was born the American
system of interchangeable manufacture. Its growth depended upon the
machine tool, that is, the machine for making machines. Machine tools,
of course, did not originate in America. English mechanics were making
machines for cutting metal at least a generation before Whitney. One of
the earliest of these English pioneers was John Wilkinson, inventor and
maker of the boring machine which enabled Boulton and Watt in 1776 to
bring their steam engine to the point of practicability. Without
this machine Watt found it impossible to bore his cylinders with the
necessary degree of accuracy.* From this one fact, that the success of
the steam engine depended upon the invention of a new tool, we may judge
of what a great part the inventors of machine tools, of whom thousands
are unnamed and unknown, have played in the industrial world.
* Roe, "English and American Tool Builders", p. 1 et seq.
So it was in the shops of the New England gunmakers that machine tools
were first made of such variety and adaptability that they could be
applied generally to other branches of manufacturing; and so it was
that the system of interchangeable manufacture arose as a distinctively
American development. We have already seen how England's policy of
keeping at home the secrets of her machinery led to the independent
development of the spindles and looms of New England. The same policy
affected the tool industry in America in the same way and bred in the
new country a race of original and resourceful mechanics.
One of these pioneers was Thomas Blanchard, born in 1788 on a farm in
Worcester County, Massachusetts, the home also of Eli Whitney and
Elias Howe. Tom began his mechanical career at the age of thirteen by
inventing a device to pare apples. At the age of eighteen he went to
work in his brother's shop, where tacks were made by hand, and one day
took to his brother a mechanical device for counting the tacks to go
into a single packet. The invention was adopted and was found to save
the labor of one workman. Tom's next achievement was a machine to make
tacks, on which he spent six years and the rights of which he sold for
five thousand dollars. It was worth far more, for it revolutionized the
tack industry, but such a sum was to young Blanchard a great fortune.
The tack-making machine gave Blanchard a reputation, and he was
presently sought out by a gun manufacturer, to see whether he could
improve the lathe for turning the barrels of the guns. Blanchard
could; and did. His next problem was to invent a lathe for turning the
irregular wooden stocks. Here he also succeeded and produced a lathe
that would copy precisely and rapidly any pattern. It is from this
invention that the name of Blanchard is best known. The original machine
is preserved in the United States Armory at Springfield, to which
Blanchard was attached for many years, and where scores of the
descendants of his copying lathe may be seen in action today.
Turning gunstocks was, of course, only one of the many uses of
Blanchard's copying lathe. Its chief use, in fact, was in the production
of wooden lasts for the shoemakers of New England, but it was applied to
many branches of wood manufacture, and later on the same principle was
applied to the shaping of metal.
Blanchard was a man of many ideas. He built a steam vehicle for ordinary
roads and was an early advocate of railroads; he built steamboats to ply
upon the Connecticut and incidentally produced in connection with these
his most profitable invention, a machine to bend ship's timbers without
splintering them. The later years of his life were spent in Boston,
and he often served as a patent expert in the courts, where his wide
knowledge, hard common sense, incisive speech, and homely wit made him a
welcome witness.
We now glance at another New England inventor, Samuel Colt, the man who
carried Whitney's conceptions to transcendent heights, the most dashing
and adventurous of all the pioneers of the machine shop in America. If
"the American frontier was Elizabethan in quality," there was surely a
touch of the Elizabethan spirit on the man whose invention so greatly
affected the character of that frontier. Samuel Colt was born at
Hartford in 1814 and died there in 1862 at the age of forty-eight,
leaving behind him a famous name and a colossal industry of his own
creation. His father was a small manufacturer of silk and woolens at
Hartford, and the boy entered the factory at a very early age. At
school in Amherst a little later, he fell under the displeasure of his
teachers. At thirteen he took to sea, as a boy before the mast, on the
East India voyage to Calcutta. It was on this voyage that he conceived
the idea of the revolver and whittled out a wooden model. On his return
he went into his father's works and gained a superficial knowledge of
chemistry from the manager of the bleaching and dyeing department. Then
he took to the road for three years and traveled from Quebec to New
Orleans lecturing on chemistry under the name of "Dr. Coult." The main
feature of his lecture was the administration of nitrous oxide gas to
volunteers from the audience, whose antics and the amusing showman's
patter made the entertainment very popular.
Colt's ambition, however, soared beyond the occupation of itinerant
showman, and he never forgot his revolver. As soon as he had money
enough, he made models of the new arm and took out his patents; and,
having enlisted the interest of capital, he set up the Patent Arms
Company at Paterson, New Jersey, to manufacture the revolver. He did not
succeed in having the revolver adopted by the Government, for the army
officers for a long time objected to the percussion cap (an invention,
by the way, then some twenty years old, which was just coming into use
and without which Colt's revolver would not have been practicable) and
thought that the new weapon might fail in an emergency. Colt found
a market in Texas and among the frontiersmen who were fighting the
Seminole War in Florida, but the sales were insufficient, and in 1842
the company was obliged to confess insolvency and close down the plant.
Colt bought from the company the patent of the revolver, which was
supposed to be worthless.
Nothing more happened until after the outbreak of the Mexican War in
1846. Then came a loud call from General Zachary Taylor for a supply
of Colt's revolvers. Colt had none. He had sold the last one to a
Texas ranger. He had not even a model. Yet he took an order from the
Government for a thousand and proceeded to construct a model. For the
manufacture of the revolvers he arranged with the Whitney plant at
Whitneyville. There he saw and scrutinized every detail of the factory
system that Eli Whitney had established forty years earlier. He resolved
to have a plant of his own on the same system and one that would far
surpass Whitney's. Next year (1848) he rented premises in Hartford. His
business prospered and increased. At last the Government demanded his
revolvers. Within five years he had procured a site of two hundred and
fifty acres fronting the Connecticut River at Hartford, and had there
begun the erection of the greatest arms factory in the world.
Colt was a captain of captains. The ablest mechanic and industrial
organizer in New England at that time was Elisha K. Root. Colt went
after him, outbidding every other bidder for his services, and brought
him to Hartford to supervise the erection of the new factory and set
up its machinery. Root was a great superintendent, and the phenomenal
success of the Colt factory was due in a marked degree to him. He became
president of the company after Colt's death in 1862, and under him were
trained a large number of mechanics and inventors of new machine tools,
who afterwards became celebrated leaders and officers in the industrial
armies of the country.
The spectacular rise of the Colt factory at Hartford drew the attention
of the British Government, and in 1854 Colt was invited to appear in
London before a Parliamentary Committee on Small Arms. He lectured the
members of the committee as if they had been school boys, telling them
that the regular British gun was so bad that he would be ashamed to have
it come from his shop. Speaking of a plant which he had opened in London
the year before he criticized the supposedly skilled British mechanic,
saying: "I began here by employing the highest-priced men that I could
find to do difficult things, but I had to remove the whole of these
high-priced men. Then I tried the cheapest I could find, and the more
ignorant a man was, the more brains he had for my purpose; and the
result was this: I had men now in my employ that I started with at two
shillings a day, and in one short year I can not spare them at eight
shillings a day."* Colt's audacity, however, did not offend the members
of the committee and they decided to visit his American factory at
Hartford. They did; and were so impressed that the British Government
purchased in America a full set of machines for the manufacture of arms
in the Royal Small Arms factory at Enfield, England, and took across the
sea American workmen and foremen to set up and run these machines. A
demand sprang up in Europe for Blanchard copying lathes and a hundred
other American tools, and from this time on the manufacture of tools and
appliances for other manufacturers, both at home and abroad, became an
increasingly important industry of New England.
* Henry Barnard, "Armsmear", p. 371.
The system which the gunmakers worked out and developed to meet their
own requirements was capable of indefinite expansion. It was easily
adapted to other kinds of manufacture. So it was that as new inventions
came in the manufacturers of these found many of the needed tools
ready for them, and any special modifications could be quickly made.
A manufacturer, of machine tools will produce on demand a device to
perform any operation, however difficult or intricate. Some of the
machines are so versatile that specially designed sets of cutting edges
will adapt them to almost any work.
Standardization, due to the machine tool, is one of the chief glories of
American manufacturing. Accurate watches and clocks, bicycles and motor
cars, innumerable devices to save labor in the home, the office, the
shop, or on the farm, are within the reach of all, because the machine
tool, tended by labor comparatively unskilled, does the greater part
of the work of production. In the crisis of the World War, American
manufacturers, turning from the arts of peace, promptly adapted
their plants to the manufacture of the most complicated engines of
destruction, which were produced in Europe only by skilled machinists of
the highest class.