American Rifle - Alexander Rose [237]
Return to text.
5. H. Metcalfe, The Cost of Manufactures and the Administration of Workshops, Public and Private (New York: J. Wiley & Sons, 1885). See B.C. Hacker, “Engineering a New Order: Military Institutions, Technical Education, and the Rise of the Industrial State,” Technology and Culture 34, no. 1 (1993), p. 15;W. H. Reid, “The Development of Henry Metcalfe’s Card System of Shop Returns at Frankford Arsenal, 1880–1881,” Journal of Management 12 (1986), pp. 415–23.
Return to text.
6. M. R. Smith, Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 244–48. On Cincinnati’s dominance, see N. Rosenberg, “Technological Change in the Machine Tool Industry, 1840–1910,” Journal of Economic History 23, no. 4 (1963), p. 421.
Return to text.
7. J. W. Roe, English and American Tool Builders (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1916), contains a number of interesting “genealogies” of mechanics and the geographical diffusion of their skills. See W. C. Scoville, “Minority Migration and the Diffusion of Technology,” Journal of Economic History 11, no. 4 (1951), pp. 347–60, for a sixteenth-century example of this phenomenon.
Return to text.
8. N. Rosenberg, “Economic Development and the Transfer of Technology: Some Historical Perspectives,” in T.S. Reynolds and S.H. Cutliffe, eds., Technology and Culture: A Historical Anthology from “Technology and Culture” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 257–58.
Return to text.
9. The most important source for the influence of firearms on civilian development is Rosenberg, “Technological Change,” pp. 427–31.
Return to text.
10. W. C. Leland and M. D. Millbrook, Master of Precision: Henry M. Leland (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1966); O. A. Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1832 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), pp. 4–5.
Return to text.
11. D. R. Hoke, Ingenious Yankees: The Rise of the American System of Manufactures in the Private Sector (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).
Return to text.
12. One has to be very careful not to assume a progressive, teleological direction to technological or manufacturing development. The road to Fordist mass production was by no means destined or designed, but by inherently writing as if it were, historians pass over alternative means of production, such as flexible specialization, in which small companies are able to keep up with changing market demand by rapidly updating and adapting existing machinery. On this point see C. Sabel and J. Zeitlin, “Historical Alternatives to Mass Production: Politics, Markets, and Technology in Nineteenth-Century Industrialization,” Past and Present 108 (1986), pp. 133–76.
Return to text.
13. Regarding the role of the railroads at this time, see, for example, Alfred Chandler’s work in The Railroads: The Nation’s First Big Business (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965); and “The Railroads: Pioneers in Modern Corporate Business Administration,” Business History Review 29, no. 1 (1965), pp. 16–40.
Return to text.
14. C. F. O’Connell Jr., “The Corps of Engineers and the Rise of Modern Management, 1827–1856,” in Smith, ed., Military Enterprise, pp. 87–116.
Return to text.
15. C. Pursell, “Science and Industry,” in G. H. Daniels, ed., Nineteenth-Century American Science (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1972), p. 247. The most famous of these former West Pointers reaching for the glittering prizes available in the business world was George B. McClellan, subsequently general in chief of the Union Army during the Civil War. In 1857 he resigned his commission to become