Today, a look at interchangeable parts. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
The full industrialization
of the West took place in two stages. First the
Industrial Revolution -- the rise of steam-powered
manufacturing in England around the 1780s. Second
was the wide development of assembly-line
techniques using interchangeable parts. That
occurred only 100 years ago.
The idea of making machine parts interchangeable is
pretty old, but that was harder than you might
think. Gutenberg's printing press absolutely
depended on letters being completely
interchangeable. To make it work, he had to couple
remarkable ingenuity with his jeweler's skills.
It takes the skill of a jeweler to make precision
parts interchangeable. And when the Industrial
Revolution gave us machine tools that could work
with a jeweler's precision, interchangeability
quickly became a kind of holy grail for
manufacturers. Even Boulton and Watt managed some
degree of interchangeability in their steam
engines.
But the first country that tried to manufacture
parts that could be interchanged in factory
assembly was France. In 1785 Benjamin Franklin told
about a French gunsmith who'd managed to make
muskets with interchangeable parts. Still, when Eli
Whitney got American government support to do the
same thing in 1794, he did it by convincing people
the idea was unknown in Europe. Worse than that, he
also did some hand-work and hand-selection on the
parts he used in his demonstration.
Making guns with truly interchangeable parts was
very hard to do. We'd made clocks with
interchangeable parts as early as 1828 -- that was
easier. But the military wanted to be able to
interchange the parts of guns in the field. They
never did manage to do that with their service
revolvers, but their muskets and rifles could be
made with looser tolerances. By 1860, on the eve of
the Civil War, we'd achieved interchangeability in
military rifles and muskets, but we were far from
it in making handguns.
After the Civil War, the idea of interchangeable
assembly spread quickly through American
manufacturing. The small-arms maker Remington
expanded the idea -- first to make sewing machines
and then typewriters. By the time Henry Ford
carried the assembly line to such a remarkable
level in 1913, America was already established as
the world leader in production. But getting there
was the result of a dogged, hundred-year effort to
make interchangeability work.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
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