American Rifle - Alexander Rose [42]
Here, for the first time, Hall was confidently proposing the mass production of a good on the principle of pure interchangeability. In this respect he had gone further than anyone before him.
Hall was about to get his big break thanks to an astoundingly fortunate constellation of factors. The first was a defiantly igneous rock lurking in the sedimentary pile of the War Department by the name of Major Louis de Tousard.
After narrowly avoiding losing his head to the guillotine during the French Revolution, Tousard settled down on a hundred-acre farm near Wilmington, Delaware, where he served as a conduit of French military theory for America’s postwar army. At the time American officers looked to the British for military-tactical advice; but for military-technical advice, France remained their beacon. In his widely read American Artillerist’s Companion, an 1809 study commissioned by the late President Washington, Tousard neatly outlined the virtues of a weapons “system of uniformity and regularity” based on scientific observations and mechanical experimentation.21
Tousard had not invented the concept of “uniformity and regularity,” though another Frenchman had: General Jean-Baptiste de Gribeauval, a mentor of Tousard’s who in 1765 applied Enlightenment precepts to the art of war. If one man was born equal in reason to every other man, and if each soldier, thanks to strict discipline, was replaceable in the line with his comrades, then why, asked Gribeauval, should not his weapons also be identical? Uniform men with uniform firearms would surely produce a uniform army of mechanical precision. The idea appealed to his superiors, and Gribeauval was eventually permitted to rationalize the national armories with the aid of Honoré Blanc, a firearms designer. The rise of Napoleon—who prized personal loyalty and nationalist zeal over harmony of mechanical parts—put paid to these remarkably prescient efforts.22
But meanwhile Thomas Jefferson, the American minister in France, had noticed the commotion going on at the French armories. His interest in the project was unsurprising, for Jefferson himself was mad on guns—pistols mainly, particularly ones he commissioned with twenty-inch barrels for fine shooting—it being his considered opinion that ten-year-old boys should be handed a firearm and urged to go hunting in the forest because it “gives moderate exercise to the body . . . and independence to the mind.”23
Given the depth of Jefferson’s knowledge of firearms, when he informed John Jay of his findings after visiting Blanc, he was certainly listened to. The French advance in standardized production, he concluded, “may have influence in the plan for furnishing our magazines with this arm.”24 Unfortunately, Blanc turned down Jefferson’s invitation to emigrate to America and put his talents at the disposal of the government. Hoping instead that an American could divine the secrets of standardization, Jefferson sent six of Blanc’s improved muskets to Philadelphia in 1789 for examination.
Following the XYZ Affair—a financial scandal that almost led to war with France—the need for a reliable domestic manufacturing base became ever more urgent. Finally in 1798 Eli Whitney, a well-connected machinist, unlucky businessman, and future inventor of the famous cotton gin, won the first government contract for army muskets: ten thousand, standardized, with delivery two years later. Given the state of technology, this goal was forbiddingly implausible to begin with, but Whitney talked such a good game that he was advanced $5,000—the first of several huge payments based on his assurances that he was close to emulating Blanc’s success. In the end Whitney didn’t deliver a single musket until the summer of 1801, and he completed the order only in 1809, eight years after the guns’ scheduled delivery date. And even then, they were seriously flawed. Nevertheless, there were so few gunmakers in the