By using unskilled labor, Blanc's method had made manufacturers independent of government control over the old crafts. The government raised the arcane argument that workers who don't function as a whole can't produce harmonious products. They simply declared that Blanc's method wasn't working and they scrapped it.
Meanwhile, America built upon Whitney's scam. By , English visitors back from America described what they now called the American System of Manufacture. When they told the French about the use of interchangeable parts, they found the French military had never even heard of it.
The French had buried it that completely! The story grimly reminds us that technology does not progress in simple logical ways. Our choices depend on a hundred subjective matters, and they are only thinly influenced by what works best. I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we're interested in the way inventive minds work.
Colt founded a company to manufacture his revolving-cylinder pistol; however, sales were slow and the The automobile was first invented and perfected in Germany and France in the late s, though Americans quickly came to dominate the automotive industry in the first half of the twentieth century. Henry Ford innovated mass-production techniques that became standard, and Ford, The Model T, sold by the Ford Motor Company from to , was the earliest effort to make a car that most people could actually buy.
Modern cars were first built in in Germany by Karl Benz, and the first American cars in Springfield, Massachusetts in by Charles The internet got its start in the United States more than 50 years ago as a government weapon in the Cold War. For years, scientists and By the s, technology had evolved to the point that individuals—mostly hobbyists and electronics buffs—could Developed in the s and s by Samuel Morse and other inventors, the telegraph revolutionized long-distance communication.
It worked by transmitting electrical signals over a wire laid between stations. Click here for audio of Episode Today, a look at interchangeable parts. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.
T he full industrialization of the West took place in two stages. First the Industrial Revolution -- the rise of steam-powered manufacturing in England around the s. Second was the wide development of assembly-line techniques using interchangeable parts. That occurred only years ago. The idea of making machine parts interchangeable is pretty old, but that was harder than you might think.
But they had trouble making it work. The piston cylinder, formed of hand-beaten panels of metal, didn't have a perfectly circular cross section and so steam leaked out everywhere around the piston head. Give it here, said John Wilkinson, and used his cannon-boring method to make a pleasingly round piston cylinder. His supplier, a Scotsman named James Watt , never looked back. Equipped with Watt's brilliantly efficient steam engines and Wilkinson's precisely-bored cylinders, the industrial revolution entered a higher gear.
Wilkinson and Watt weren't worried about interchangeable parts, as such. They wanted cannonballs to fit into cannons, and pistons to fit into cylinders. But the engineering problem they were solving also held the key to the interchangeability that Blanc prized, but was finding it expensive to achieve. Wilkinson had built a machine tool - a tool that automates a manufacturing process. It comprised a very sharp drill, a water-mill, and a system of clamping one thing while smoothly rotating another.
But as Simon Winchester observes in his history of precision engineering, Exactly, these machine tools had a curious side-effect: they put skilled craftsmen out of work in large numbers. Monsieur Blanc's fellow gunsmiths had been worried that they would lose out on lucrative repair work. But they were about to lose manufacturing jobs, too.
Not only were machine tools better than hand tools, they also didn't require hands to wield them. If you could use machine tools to produce perfectly precise interchangeable parts, that not only made for simple battlefield repair - as Jefferson had seen - but it also made the process of assembly simpler and more predictable.
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