Exactly: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World. Simon Winchester

to arrive.

      There would be forty-three of them in total, each performing one or another of the sixteen separate tasks that transformed a felled elm tree into a pulley block to be sent to the naval warehouse. Each machine was built of iron, to keep it solid and sturdy and able to perform its allotted task with the kind of accuracy the navy contract demanded. So there were machines that sawed wood, that clamped wood, that morticed wood, that drilled holes and tinned pins of iron and polished surfaces and grooved and trimmed and scored and otherwise shaped and smoothed the blocks’ way to completion. A whole new vocabulary was suddenly born: there were ratchets and cams, shafts and shapers, bevels and worm gears, formers and crown wheels, coaxial drills and burnishing engines.

      And all inside the Block Mills, as the structure was named in 1808, which was soon set to thundering activity. Each of Maudslay’s machines was sent power by ever-rotating and flapping leather belts, which themselves were spinning by their connection to long iron axles mounted to the ceiling and that, in turn, were set eventually rotating by an enormous thirty-two-horsepower Boulton and Watt steam engine that roared and steamed and smoked outside the building, in its own noisy and dangerous three-story lair.

      The Block Mills still stand as testament to many things, most famously to the sheer perfection of each and every one of the hand-built iron machines housed inside. So well were they made—they were masterpieces, most modern engineers agree—that most were still working a century and a half later; the Royal Navy made its last pulley blocks in 1965. And the fact that many of the parts—the iron pins, for example—were all made by Maudslay and his workers to exactly the same dimensions meant that they were interchangeable, which had implications for the future of manufacturing more generally—as we shall soon see, when the concept of interchangeability was recognized by a future American president.

      But the Block Mills are famous for another reason, one with profound social consequences. It was the first factory in the world to have been run entirely from the output of a steam engine. True, earlier machines had been driven by water, and so the concept of mechanization itself was not entirely new. But the scale and the might of what had been built in Portsmouth were different, and stemmed from a source of power not dependent on season or weather or on any external whim. Providing there was coal and water, and an engine made to specifications demanding of the greatest precision, the factory powered by it would run.

      The saws and the morticing devices and the drills of the future would thus be powered by engines. These engines would (both here in Portsmouth and then very soon thereafter in a thousand other factories elsewhere, making other things by other means) no longer be turned and powered and manipulated by men. The workers who in their various wood shops had hitherto cut and assembled and finished the navy’s pulley blocks had now become the first victims of machinery’s cool indifference. Where more than a hundred skilled craftsmen had once worked, and had filled, just, the navy’s insatiable appetite, now this thundering factory could feed it with ease, without ever breaking a sweat: the Portsmouth Block Mills would turn out the required one hundred thirty thousand blocks each year, one finished block every minute of every working day, and yet it required a crew of just ten men to operate it.

      Precision had created its first casualties. For these were men who needed no special skills. They did no more than feed logs into the slicing machine hoppers and, eventually, take the finished blocks away and stack them inside the storehouses; or else they took their oilcans and their bunches of cotton waste and set to greasing and lubricating and polishing and keeping a weather eye on the clanging and clattering maelstrom of black-and-green and brass-trimmed behemoths, all endlessly mocking them, by revolving and spinning and belching and rocking and lifting and splitting and sawing and drilling, an immense orchestra of machinery that was crammed into the massive new building.

      The social consequences were immediate. On the plus side of the ledger, the machines were precise; the machines did accurate work. The Lords of the Admiralty declared themselves content. Brunel received a check for the money saved in one year: £17,093. Maudslay received £12,000 and the acclaim of the public and of the engineering fraternity and became generally regarded as one of the most important figures in the early days of precision engineering and one of the prime movers of the Industrial Revolution. The Royal Navy shipbuilding program would now go ahead as planned, and with the new squadrons and flotillas and fleets that were able to be created so swiftly, the British saw to it that the wars with France were duly ended, and to Britain’s advantage.

      Napoleon^* was finally defeated, and was shipped off to Saint Helena in exile, traveling aboard a seventy-four-gun third-rate ship of the line, the HMS Northumberland, with as escort the smaller sixth-rate twenty-gun HMS Myrmidon. The rigging and other rope work of these two vessels were secured with about sixteen hundred wooden pulley blocks, almost all of them made in the Portsmouth Block Mills, sawed and drilled and milled with Henry Maudslay’s iron engines, all operating under the supervision of ten unskilled navy contract workers.

      Still, the ledger had two sides, and on the minus side, a hundred skilled Portsmouth men had been thrown out of work. One imagines that over the days and weeks after they were handed their final pay and told to go, they and their families wondered just why this had happened, why it was that as the need for products demonstrably increased, the need for workers to construct these products began to shrink swiftly away. To this scattering of Portsmouth men, and to those who relied upon these men for security and sustenance, a sum total rather too few for any serious political consideration, the arrival of precision was not altogether welcome. It seemed to benefit those with power; it was a troubling puzzlement to those without.

      There was a social consequence, a reaction, although the best known, mainly because of its intermittent and spectacular violence, took place some hundreds of miles to the north of Portsmouth and was specifically involved in another industry altogether. Luddism, as it is known today, was a short-lived backlash—it started in the northern Midlands in 1811—against the mechanization of the textile industry, with stocking frames being destroyed and mobs of masked men breaking factories to stop the production of lace and other fine fabrics. The government of the day^* was spooked, and briefly introduced the death penalty for anyone convicted of frame breaking; some seventy Luddites were hanged, though usually for breach of other laws against riot and criminal damage.

      By 1816, the steam^† had gone out of the rioters, and movement generally subsided. It never entirely died, though, and the word Luddite (from the movement’s presumed leader, Ned Ludd) remains very much in today’s lexicon, mainly as a pejorative term for anyone who resists the siren song of technology. That it does so serves as a reminder that, from its very beginnings, the world of precision-based engineering had social implications that were neither necessarily accepted nor welcomed by all. It had its critics and its Cassandras then; it has them still today, as we shall see.

      Henry Maudslay was by no means done with inventing. Once his forty-three block-making machines were all thrumming along merrily down in Portsmouth, once his contract with the navy had been completed, once his reputation (“the creator of the industrial age”) was secure, he came up with two further contributions to the universe of intricacy and perfection. One of them was a concept, the other a device. Both are essentials, even at this remove of two centuries, the concept most especially so.

      It involves the notion of flatness. It involves the notion that a surface may be created that is, as the Oxford English Dictionary has it, “without curvature, indentation or protuberance.” It involves the creation of a base from which all precise measurement and manufacture can be originated. For, as Maudslay realized, a machine tool can make an accurate machine only if the surface on which the tool is mounted is perfectly flat, is perfectly plane, exactly level, its geometry entirely exact.

      An engineer’s need for a standard plane surface is much the same as a navigator’s need for a precise timekeeper, as John Harrison’s, or a surveyor’s need for a precise meridian, such as that drawn in Ohio in 1786 to start the proper mapping of the central United States. The more prosaic matter of the making of a perfectly flat surface, a critical part of the machine-made world, required only a little ingenuity and a sudden leap of intuition—both these gifts combining in the late eighteenth century in the workshop of Henry Maudslay.

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