American Rifle - Alexander Rose [36]
Their like had never before been seen. As astounded visitors goggled, Colt’s salesmen informed them that these pistols had been made by machines, while the Robbins & Lawrence people disassembled the six rifles, mixed up the pieces, and put them back together again.2 Their various metal parts were perfectly interchangeable; one rifle was exactly the same as another. Cynics, who knew such a thing was impossible, suspected that a trick was being played upon them.
Unlike today, interchangeability and machine production were not synonymous. An advanced machine of the time could make uniform parts, but because they did not mesh perfectly, a trained artisan had to fine-tune them, finish them, and fit them together. Parts that appeared to be similar would be loose or grind together, or they might be slightly misshapen and mismatched. Interchangeable parts, however, were identical and could be slotted together by a semiskilled worker following a set procedure. Machine-produced uniformity was in itself a tall order, but true interchangeability was regarded as the Holy Grail of industrialism by some (and as a fool’s errand by most others).
Robbins & Lawrence, and for that matter Colt, had not invented machine production; nor had they conceived the principle of interchangeability. Despite Colt’s boasts, the pieces of his weapons were not truly interchangeable, and armorers were still required to fit them together, filing and bending them when necessary.3 But Colt, and many others, had benefited from several decades of firearms development funded by the American government—most particularly in the field of advanced rifle design—which had diffused technology to, and seeded know-how among, to a wide array of private companies. By such means manufacture of the rifle kick-started American industrialism, shaped the rise of modern capitalism, changed society (for better or worse), and propelled the United States to world economic mastery.4
A lethal symbol of the “American System of Manufactures”: An interchangeable Robbins & Lawrence percussion rifle, the same model thatamazed spectators at the 1851 Crystal Palace exhibition in London.
In that single Robbins & Lawrence demonstration at the Crystal Palace, the world in which a single craftsman painstakingly created one product at a time vanished. “The old universe was thrown into the ash-heap,” Henry Adams once curmudgeonly commented, and in its place would rise the tyranny of time-punching, the machine epoch, and later the era of mass production, when millions of identical rifles (and cars, and appliances, and plastic products) would be churned out by sleepless robots and tired workers.5
This wrenching economic change occurred neither painlessly nor overnight, and its success depended heavily on locality. In the industrialized North many former artisans adapted relatively quickly to wage-labor work. Factory production surged, though income declined, as did working conditions, which led to often bitter class conflicts. In the rural South the natural rhythm of the weather and the unhurried ease of life bestowed by slavery (on prosperous whites) continued to dominate the pace of production. Partly because they could always look down on blacks as being more subordinate and miserable than they, small yeoman farmers did not suffer from the same travails afflicting northern industrial workers. This absence of rancor had the benefit of defusing social agitation, but at the price of remaining defiantly, and nostalgically, antimodern.6
The new federal armories at Springfield (Massachusetts) and Harpers Ferry (Virginia) provide a most striking example of