302 THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONSstruction had turned from carpentry to millwork. Doors and windows
were cut and assembled to standard size; glass, precut accordingly. (A
French ship arriving in the young republic around 1815 with a cargo
of window glass of various sizes was surprised to find it had to give
most of it away.) Sawdust generated in the process might be recovered
for other uses.^21 Then, in the 1830s, invention of the balloon-frame
house normalized and deskilled the building itself. Gone were the
heavy members of traditional barns and dwellings; gone the mortise-
and-tenon joints; gone the masonry and plaster walls, interior and ex
terior, of Old World construction.* Instead, one used precut 2x4's
and nailed them together, then sheathed the frame and clapped on
such facade as was practical and pleasing. The new structures were not
beautiful or authentically local; but they were cheap, made use of abun
dant materials, and were prosaically utilitarian. The balloon technique
spread widely, except where wood was scarce.^22
This reliance on wood led to a whole family of machines: power
saws, lathes, millers, and planers, "machinery for boring, slotting, dove
tailing, edging, grooving, etc." These worked fast—faster than similar
machines for shaping metal—and they were, for that very reason,
hugely wasteful of material. But that was all right: America could spare
the wood, not the time or manpower.^23
Houses and buildings were only the beginning. The idea was to
make all assembled objects in such wise that the parts be similar, if not
interchangeable.^24 The degree of similarity was a function of materials
and tolerances: fit could be approximate for some purposes but not for
others; and wood was a lot more forgiving than metal. So a carpenter
could adjust pre-made doors and windows and a glazier could make
window panes tight with a judicious use of putty; but the firing as
sembly of a musket called for greater precision than the stock, and a
watch required closer tolerances than a clock. Meanwhile assembly de
pended on the skillful use of a file for last-minute adjustments and fit
ting; unless, that is, one wanted the parts to fit and work well from the
start, without fitting, and that called for even more exactitude.
Such work required precision tools capable of exact repetition and
the organization and siting of tasks in such manner as to gather, move,
process (machine), and put together the materials and components in
an efficient way—what we now call hardware and software. Hardware
- Fischer, Albion's Seed, p. 65, notes that the combination of timber framing and
wood sheathing was "commonplace" in southeastern England. It made even more
sense in the forested parts of the United States.