(^234) Chapter Seven
by disassembling a number of pistols, jumbling the parts and then
reassembling them into workable revolvers once again.
Hence when production bottlenecks and frictions multiplied in the
early months of the Crimean War, enough persons in Great Britain
knew about American achievements to make it possible for a special
Committee on Small Arms to recommend the establishment of a new
plant at Enfield, using the American system of manufacture. Work
began in 1855 but the necessary machinery, imported from the
United States, was not fully installed until 1859—three years after the
Crimean War had ended.^14
Automation did not stop with the import of American machinery to
manufacture standard rifles. New machines, invented for the purpose,
began to spew forth Minié bullets at a rate of 250,000 a day in the
Woolwich arsenal, for example; and another machine turned out
200,000 completed cartridges a day, combining bullet and charge into
one simple package.^15 Nor did mass production long remain a
monopoly of government arsenals. The private gun trade was swiftly
compelled to follow suit. To pay for the expensive new machinery,
previously independent contractors merged to form the Birmingham
Small Arms Company in 1861, and a similar merger led to the foun
dation of the London Small Arms Company six years later. Thereafter,
government contracts were divided between Enfield and the two new,
modernized private arms manufacturers in proportions dictated partly
by political lobbying and partly by public officials’ desire to maintain a
suitable reserve capacity in case some new war should suddenly re
quire rapid escalation of rifle production. The two private firms main
tained themselves largely by sales of sporting weapons to private per
sons in Great Britain and abroad, but also undertook contracts for
foreign governments.^16
Other European governments, too, took note of how machines
- On American arms-making, in addition to Deyrup, see Merritt Roe Smith, Har
pers Ferry Armory and the Neu^1 Technology (Ithaca, N.Y., 1977); Robert J. Woodbury,
“The Legend of Eli Whitney and the Interchangeability ol Parts,” Technology and Culture
1 (I960): 235–51. For British arms trade and the revolution brought to it in the 1850s,
see Nathan Rosenberg, ed., The American System of Manufactures: The Report of the
Committee on the Machinery of the United States, 1855, and the Special Reports of George
Wallis and Joseph Whitworth, 1854 (Edinburgh, 1969), Introduction; H. J. Habakkuk,
American and British Technology in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1962); A. Ames
and Nathan Rosenberg, “Enfield Arsenal in Theory and History,” Economic Journal 78
( 1968):825–42; Russell I. Fries, “British Response to the American System: The Case
of the Small Arms Industry after 1850,” Technology and Culture 16 (1975): 377–403. - O. F. G. Hogg, Royal Arsenal 2:783, 792.
- S. B. Saul, “The Market and the Development of the Mechanical Engineering
Industries in Britain,” Economic History Review 20 (1967): 111–30; Fries, “British Re-