FRONTIERS^303is often the focus of attention, because the machine tools invented for
this purpose were spectacular achievements of the mechanician's art.
But layout and synchrony were more important in operations such as
meat slaughtering that called for disassembly rather than assembly; or
where, as in flour milling and petroleum refining, higher throughput
yielded major economies of scale.
In all these areas of manufacture, the United States was, if not the
pioneer, then the great practitioner. * From the start, the adoption of
machines, in textile manufacture for example, was followed by the cre
ation of machine shops to maintain and build the equipment; and these
shops, litde worlds of assembled and interchangeable skills, often took
to making other kinds of machinery: steam engines, furnaces and boil
ers, locomotives, above all, machine tools. These last in turn, dedi
cated originally to one or another special purpose, found application in
diverse industrial branches. It was not only the craftsmen who had
children and grandchildren to carry the torch; their machines prolifer
ated as well.^25
Unlike Europe, America made little resistance to this advance of
deskilling and routinizing technique. In a country of continuing rev
olution, old ways had litde leverage. Listen to an official visitor to the
Springfield Armory in 1841:
... the skill of the armorer is but little needed: his "occupation's gone." A
boy does just as well as a man. Indeed, from possessing greater activity of
body, he does better.
- In matter of organization, one thinks of the naval arsenal in medieval Venice; in mat
ter of production techniques, of Henry Maudslay's manufacture of Joseph Bramah's
lock in 1790-91 and Marc Isambard Brunei's famous pulley blocks (machine tools by
Maudslay) in the Portsmouth naval shipyard around 1803. But locks and pulley blocks
are nowhere near so intolerant of variance as guns or clocks. Note also French prece
dents in arms manufacture: thus Gribeauval in the manufacture of gun carriages toward
the end of the Old Regime and the plans of Honoré Blanc for mass production of mus
kets in the 1780s and '90s. The latter were sensible and rational but were never car
ried out. That is the difference between imagining and doing, logic and culture. See
Landes, Revolution in Time, pp. 309,459, n. 2; Cohen, "Inventivité," p. 54 and n. 5.
See also, on the "failure" of Blanc, the work of Ken Alder, "Innovation and Amnesia"
and Engineering the Revolution. Alder, whose analysis gains but also loses by his focus
on arms manufacture, sees engineering interests as motivating the pursuit of uniformity
in France—a mix of power and aesthetic considerations, a desire "above all... to de
couple the nation's security from the activities of unruly and money-minded artisans
and merchants" ("Innovation," p. 310). This sequence from theoretical and schematic
to practical was very French. It contrasted sharply with American practice, where
money and market drove the pursuit of interchangeability and where progress took
place in a whole range of industries.