Industrialization of War, 1840–84 237
tween 1855 and 1870 as a direct by-product of the Crimean War. The
new machinery remained, for the most part, safely inside arsenal walls.
Indeed, public management of small-arms design and manufacture
became far more exact and pervasive than had been possible when the
work of artisans had been subject only to crude official inspections.
Quite the opposite happened to the manufacture of artillery. This was
partly due to bitter competition in Great Britain among would-be
gun manufacturers. But a new factor confirmed and stabilized what
began as a merely accidental result of personal rivalries, to wit, the
emergence of a new gunmetal—steel—whose manufacture required
resources that lay beyond the reach of all existing government
arsenals.
As with small-arms manufacture, the decisive stimulus to new de
partures in artillery came from the Crimean War. British and French
difficulties in the Crimea achieved unprecedented publicity through
newspapers; and the detailed accounts of military actions that war
correspondents sent back to Paris and London provoked, among other
things, a remarkable outburst of warlike inventiveness.^23 Only a few
ideas for new weapons ever got past the drawing boards. Those that
did often proved abortive, like the forty-two-ton mortars, completed a
year after the fighting had ended, which subsequently became heraldic
guardians of the Woolwich arsenal’s main gate, offering an oddly apt
symbol—too clumsy and too late—of the arsenal’s nineteenth-century
role in artillery design and production.^24
But some of the new ideas and inventions had far-ranging and en
during consequences. Most important of all, probably, was the dis
covery of the “Bessemer process” for making steel. Henry Bessemer
was one of England’s busy inventors, whose experiments with artillery
of novel design led him to discover a method for refining steel by
blowing air through molten ore. This permitted large-scale steel pro
duction and more exact regulation of its chemical content and struc
ture than had been possible before. Consequently, patents issued to
Bessemer in 1857 inaugurated a new metallurgical era. Within twenty
years, older methods for gun-casting became hopelessly obsolete even
though efforts by arsenal officials to cling to traditional gunmetals did
not completely cease until 1890.^25
- The Patent Office in Great Britain issued a total of about 300 patents for inven
tions pertaining to firearms between 1617 and 1850, but approved more than 600 such
patents in the single decade beginning in 1850, according to Rosenberg, American System
of Manufactures, p. 29.
- Hogg, Royal Arsenal 2:756–60.
- Sir Henry Bessemer, An Autobiography (London, 1905), pp. 130–42, gives a
