Industrialization of War, 1840–84 233of ironworking attuned to the manufacture of the Brown Bess (almost
unchanged since Marlborough’s day) did not readily achieve the accu
racy needed for the new rifles. But when inspectors sought to enforce
narrower tolerances by rejecting badly made parts, they provoked
bitter quarrels with the artisans. On top of this, the sudden upsurge of
demand when the Crimean War broke out offered the workmen what
looked like a golden opportunity to cash in by holding out for higher
wage rates. Consequently, with long-standing routines and expecta
tions already in radical flux, the gun trade suffered innumerable stop
pages at every stage of the production process. Instead of turning out
more and better guns on demand, output actually fell in the country’s
hour of need.
Resulting indignation both within and outside government circles
persuaded the responsible authorities that something drastic would
have to be done to accelerate and improve rifle manufacture. As it
happened, an alternative scheme was already familiar to officials of the
Woolwich arsenal. They called it the “American system of manufac
ture” because it had been developed in the United States arsenal at
Springfield, Massachusetts, and among private manufacturers of small
arms in the Connecticut River Valley between 1820 and 1850. The
key principle was the use of automatic or semiautomatic milling ma
chines to cut component parts to prescribed shapes.^13 These machines
produced interchangeable parts, so that a gun could be assembled
without the delicate filing and adjustment which the less exact hand
methods of manufacture required. Milling machines were costly, of
course, and wasteful of material as well, for they produced more scrap
than a skilled man with a hammer and file would do. But if a large
number of guns were needed, automation paid for itself many times
over through the economies of mass production.
Englishmen had become aware of the American methods of gun-
making at the Great Exhibition of 1851, where Samuel Colt put his
revolvers on display and demonstrated the interchangeability of parts- Such machines were not particularly difficult to design. The principle was the
same as that used to make extra keys from an original today: that is, mechanical linkages
forced a cutting tool to follow a path defined by a tracer that moved along the contours
of an original master shape or jig. This pantograph principle had been known since
Hellenistic times, when such machines had been used to mass-produce statuary for
export from Alexandria. Cf. Gisela M. A. Richter, The Sculpture and Sculptors of the
Greeks, 4th ed. (New Haven, 1970), p. 246. Americans developed these machines
partly because skilled gunsmiths were in short supply; partly because after the War of
1812, U.S. government policy, by giving long-range contracts to suppliers, encouraged
heavier capital investment. Cf. Felicia Johnson Deyrup, Arms Makers in the Connecticut
Valley, Smith College Studies in History, No. 33 (Northhampton, Mass., 1948).