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

in his method, he quickly reassembled out of this confusion of components twenty-five brand-new musket locks.

      Each one of these was made of parts that had never been joined together before—but it made no difference. Everything fitted to everything, for the simple reason that with the great precision of its making, and its faithful adherence to the dimensions of the master lock, each part was identical to each other. The parts were all, in other words, exactly interchangeable.

      The French officials were at first vastly impressed. The army set Blanc up in an officially sponsored workshop, he began producing inexpensive flintlock parts for the military and profits for himself, and for four further years all seemed fine. Then came 1789 and the unholy trinity of the Revolution, Gribeauval’s death, and the Terror. The château was stormed, and Blanc’s workshop was sacked by the rioters. His sponsor was suddenly no longer there to protect him, and there was a fast-growing, eventually fanatical, opposition among the sansculottes toward mechanization, toward efficiencies that favored the middle classes, toward techniques that put the honest work of artisans and craftsmen to disadvantage. By the turn of the century, the idea of interchangeable parts had withered and died in France—and some say to this day that the survival of craftsmanship and the reluctance entirely to embrace the modern has helped preserve the reputation of France as something of a haven for the romantic delight of the Old Ways.

      In America, though, the reaction was very different, and all thanks to the prescient eye of Thomas Jefferson. The first time he described what he had seen was on August 30, in a long letter to John Jay, the then–secretary of foreign affairs. He began with the customary flourish of logistical explanation regarding the route by which his last letter had reached Jay, an inconvenience unknown today with postal services being such a commonplace.

      I had the honor of writing to you on the 14th. inst. by a Mr. Cannon of Connecticut who was to sail in the packet. Since that date yours of July 13 is come to hand. The times for the sailing of the packets being somewhat deranged, I avail myself of a conveiance [sic] of the present by the Mr. Fitzhughs of Virginia who expect to land at Philadelphia …

      … An improvement is made here in the construction of the musket which it may be interesting to Congress to know, should they at any time propose to procure any. It consists in the making every part of them so exactly alike that what belongs to any one, may be used for every other musket in the magazine. The government here has examined and approved the method, and is establishing a large manufactory for the purpose. As yet the inventor [Blanc] has only completed the lock of the musket on this plan. He will proceed immediately to have the barrel, stock, and their parts executed in the same way. Supposing it might be useful to the U.S., I went to the workman, he presented me the parts of 50 locks taken to pieces and arranged in compartments. I put several together myself taking pieces at hazard as they came to hand, and they fitted in the most perfect manner. The advantages of this, when arms need repair, are evident. He effects it by tools of his own contrivance which at the same time abridge the work so that he thinks he shall be able to furnish the musket two livres cheaper than the common price. But it will be two or three years before he will be able to furnish any quantity. I mention it now, as it may have influence on the plan for furnishing our magazines with this arm.

      Jefferson was indeed seriously impressed with Blanc’s system, and wrote further to friends and colleagues back in Washington, and in Virginia several times, to underline his belief that American gunsmiths should be encouraged to adopt the new French system. And in due course, the makers began to get the message, most especially in New England, where most gunsmiths were to be found.^* If skepticism lingered back in Europe, America proved herself, quite literally, to have the mind-set of the New World, any reluctance being swiftly dispelled by the U.S. government’s decision to place enormous orders for new muskets, so long as their parts were, in line with Jefferson’s thinking, interchangeable.

      Two firms of private gunsmiths led the bidding for this government contract to make the first batch of muskets: ten thousand by one account, fifteen thousand by others. The winner of the contract, which meant an immediate cash payment of the not insignificant sum of five thousand dollars, was one Eli Whitney, of Massachusetts.

      Whitney remains a man of great fame, still known to most in America today as he has been for two centuries. His face appears on a postage stamp. He is part of the educational curriculum. He ranks alongside inventors and businessmen—Edison, Ford, John D. Rockefeller. To any schoolchild today, his name means just one thing: the cotton gin. This New Englander, at the age of just twenty-nine, had invented the device that removed the seeds from cotton bolls, and thus made the harvesting of cotton the foundation of a highly profitable Southern states economy—but only if slaves were used to perform the work, an important caveat.

      To any informed engineer, however, the name Eli Whitney signifies something very different: confidence man, trickster, fraud, charlatan. And his alleged charlatanry derives almost wholly from his association with the gun trade, with precision manufacturing, and with the promise of being able to deliver weapons assembled from interchangeable parts. “I am persuaded,” he declared with a flourish of elaborate solemnity in his bid to make a cache of guns for the U.S. government, “to make the same parts of different guns, as the lock for example, as much like each other as the successive impressions of a copperplate engraving.”

      It was the utmost piffle. When Whitney won the commission and signed the government contract in 1798, he knew nothing about muskets and even less about their components: he won the order largely because of his Yale connections and the old alumni network that, even then, flourished in the corridors of power in Washington, DC. Once he had the contract in hand, he put up a small factory outside New Haven and promptly claimed to be manufacturing muskets there, weapons based, as were all smooth-bore American guns of the time, on the French Charleville design. He took an unconscionable time to produce any weapons, however. The contract specified a delivery of at least some of the muskets by 1800, but there were only a handful of finished guns, and all Whitney could offer as a salve by that due date was a demonstration of the quality, as he claimed, of the guns that his new factory was now notionally in the process of making.

      Whitney performed what is seen as his notorious demonstration in January 1801—a supposed confidence-building exercise, it would be called today—before a distinguished audience that included the then-president, John Adams, and his vice president, soon to become president, Thomas Jefferson, the man who had started the ball rolling fifteen years before. There were also dozens of congressmen and soldiers and senior bureaucrats, all men who needed to be convinced that public treasure was going to be expended on what would be a truly worthwhile venture. They had been told they were there to witness Whitney demonstrating, with the use of a single screwdriver, how his musket locks were properly interchangeable.

      Everyone in the room was ready to believe him, Whitney’s cotton-gin-based reputation having long preceded him. It seemed to be of no great moment to anyone in the room, however, that the man didn’t even bother to disassemble the locks he had on show. Instead, he merely took a number of finished muskets, used his screwdriver to detach the locks from their wooden gunstocks, then slipped them whole into slots on other gunstocks, and so made it appear to the guileless visitors as though his parts were, as promised, truly interchangeable.

      He explained as he went along what he was doing, and not even Jefferson, who had seen Blanc’s demonstration at Vincennes in 1785 and might have had sufficient knowledge to splutter, “Hold on a minute!” had the temerity to challenge him, to express even the smallest measure of skepticism. Quite the reverse: the president-elect bought Whitney’s explanation in its entirety, and wrote enthusiastically to the then-governor of Virginia, saying that Whitney had “invented moulds and machines for making all the pieces of his locks so exactly equal, that take 100 locks to pieces and mingle their parts, and the hundred locks may be put together as well by taking the first pieces that comes to hand.”

      The truth is Jefferson had been hoodwinked, as had everyone else present that day. For there had been no molds, no machines for making all the parts “so exactly equal.” Whitney’s new-made factory, powered by water, not yet by steam (even though engines were readily available), had neither the tools nor the capacity to make precision-engineered pieces. Realizing this, he had instead hired a clutch of artisans, craftsmen,