American Rifle - Alexander Rose [41]
Bomford, to Hall’s mind, was not thinking ambitiously enough. He had ordered only two hundred rifles, evidently intending that they should merely form the nucleus of a specialized rifle unit, like those of the Revolution. If Hall were to persuade the brass to replace the army’s muskets, he would have to find some way of churning out more of his own rifles, faster. To that end, just as he had dreamed up a simple method to shorten loading time, Hall also thought long and hard about how to improve the speed of production.
The greatest time-waster, Hall noticed when watching his employees, was the handcrafting of each individual piece of a gun to mesh snugly with its neighbors. While every hammer or trigger looked basically the same, on closer inspection they weren’t. That was because a workman generally constructed a weapon from scratch: carving and polishing the wooden stock, boring and rifling the barrel, fitting the sights and firelock, and fashioning each piece according to his own dictates and judgment. Taking the Harpers Ferry Model 1803 rifles as an example, between 1804 and 1807 the armory made about four thousand of them, but barrel lengths could be an inch shorter or longer than regulations stipulated depending on the maker’s whim, and the style of rifling carved on the inside of the barrel also varied widely, leading to enhanced or diminished performance.19Though all the Model 1803 rifles were superficially similar, in other words, each weapon was individualized and its finished quality hinged on the skills and experience of the armorer. Some rifles might fire beautifully, while others tended to hang fire, and still more fell apart because the armorer had been in a hurry to go home and hadn’t bothered to securely fit together its parts.
The solution, Hall deduced, lay in removing the randomness introduced by individualization and in perfecting the manufacture of each rifle’s components. Since the human factor was causing the errors and slowing down production, the most obvious fix was to replace people with machines that would produce identical parts. Even so, several major problems remained. These extraordinary machines had to be designed and built; skilled armorers would still be required to assemble the pieces; the machine-built parts might not fit together as intimately as those made by hand; and lastly, taking into account the cost of developing these machines plus labor expenses, would it even be financially worthwhile? For the five sample rifles, Bomford had offered to pay $40 each—about $500 in today’s dollars—a price that Hall reckoned would cover the production costs, but that was for a tiny order. If Hall was serious about gaining a government contract for a significant number of rifles, Washington would not likely be willing to pay such a high figure.
Hall, for the moment, pushed these concerns aside. His immediate aim was to get Bomford’s signature on the dotted line before he went bust. To that end, and having successfully introduced his bayonet and priming-pan refinements, he approached the Ordnance Department in June 1816—and wrote what should be counted as among the most important letters in American history:
Only one point now remains to bring the rifles to the utmost perfection, which I shall accept if the Government contracts with me for the guns to any considerable amount, viz: to make every similar part of every gun so much alike that it will suit every gun, e.g. so that every bayonet will suit every barrel, so that every barrel will suit every stock, every stock or receiver will suit every barrel, and so that if a thousand were taken apart and the limbs thrown promiscuously together in one heap, they may be taken promiscuously from the heap, and will all come right—This important point I conceive practicable, and