American Rifle - Alexander Rose [47]
What he had not succeeded in doing was producing actual rifles. By 1824, when he was supposed to have finished making the thousand stipulated in the contract, Hall had manufactured the grand total of twenty. Bomford, now head of Ordnance, was a patient master, and having received Hall’s assurances that he had surmounted the most troublesome mechanical obstacles, he not only allowed him as much time as he needed but sweetened the pot by adding another thousand rifles to the order. This was a remarkably brave show of support, particularly considering the judgment of a visiting government inspector that “Mr. Hall . . . is too fond of projects, too much of an innovator ever to have been entrusted with public means to complete machinery of his own invention.”49
Bomford’s confidence was not misplaced, and just two months into 1825 Hall had churned out the first thousand of his rifles. Best of all, the gunmaker observed jauntily, he had brought “every thing relating to my arms to its utmost point of perfection.” It was a technical triumph; for the first time, anywhere, Hall had achieved interchangeability. Now that each piece of his rifles would “suit all their corresponding parts in all of the arms,” he predicted that from now on costs per firearm would begin to fall.50 The average cost of each of the first batch of rifles was, Hall calculated, $20.59—significantly below the $25 Wadsworth had originally budgeted for—and he was confident he could reduce that figure to $14.71 for the next thousand.51
Bomford was most relieved to hear it: over seven years Hall had burned through $57,022—about $1.12 million—of taxpayers’ money (at a time when the country’s tax revenue was a minuscule fraction of today’s) on fewer than a dozen wood and iron machines. Stubblefield’s allies in Congress were beginning to ask probing questions about the Harpers Ferry accounts.52 Once Bomford’s vainglorious expenditure on the rifles came to light, they believed, Hall’s project would be shut down.
Their hopes were to be dashed. Prompted by the Stubblefield faction, three inspectors sent along in December 1826 to watch the Halls in action reported to the government that the experiments at Harpers Ferry were certainly not a waste of public monies; quite the opposite, in fact. They were bowled over.53 They had never before seen arms “made so exactly similar to each other,” and they fell over themselves recommending that Hall receive “that patronage from the government his talents, science, and mechanical ingenuity deserve.”54 A tactic that had been intended to highlight Hall’s weaknesses had actually backfired on Stubblefield by calling attention to his own lackadaisical management and accounting practices.
That month as well the Artillery School at Fortress Monroe, Virginia, reported on the results of its exhaustive five-month-long trials of the Hall, of a regular Harpers Ferry rifle, and of brand-new Springfield-made muskets. For Bomford and Hall, everything hinged on this test, but even they might have been surprised by the artillerists’ conclusions. The school’s testing staff “expresses its perfect conviction of the superiority of this [Hall’s] arm over every other kind of small arm now in use; and this opinion has been formed after