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By Root 2105 0

the Corps of Engineers—were diffused and cross-pollinated throughout the rest of American industry by their former employees. When they left government service at, say, John Hall’s Rifle Works, these men collectively carried in their heads decades of experience with advanced manufacturing processes that they donated to their new civilian employers. Hall himself was most annoyed, for instance, by the loss of five highly skilled workmen—fully a third of his workforce—over the spring of 1827 to private firms in New England. Within a decade many more had left for higher-paid jobs and promotions at factories as far afield as Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Augusta, and Cincinnati. The last, thanks to an influx of expert armory machinists, eventually emerged as a leader in the burgeoning machine tool industry.6

Others, who joined as apprentices at Harpers Ferry and Springfield, learned their trades, rose rapidly up the ranks, and then departed to found their own businesses around the country. From there they interacted with other companies and thereby introduced the new technology and their specialist knowledge to a rapidly enlarging circle of firms. By the 1840s and 1850s America was home to an entire generation of talented, armory-nurtured mechanics, engineers, artificers, and inventors familiar with modern production processes and determined to make them personally profitable.7

Most of the firms set up by former arms makers—men accustomed to twisting, planing, cutting, turning, shaping, polishing, drilling, welding, and boring metal parts—were in the machine tool industry. Only by learning on the job had they imbibed the esoteric knowledge of how machines made machines. Not simply a matter of pushing a button or manipulating a lathe, it required an understanding of such technical issues as friction reduction, power transmission (gearing, shafting, belting), control devices, feed mechanisms, heat resistance, and the stress tolerances of metal.8

These individuals’ well-paid, much-coveted expertise provided a boost for the nascent mass-production industries of manufacturing shoes, watches, clocks, bicycles, typewriters, ready-to-wear clothing, elastic and rubber goods, and later, cars.9The most famous of these former arms-makers-turned-industrialists was Henry Leland. Upon leaving Springfield Armory, he went to the Brown & Sharpe Manufacturing Company, which made machine tools and sewing machines for Wilcox & Gibbs, and he would go on to found the Lincoln and Cadillac car companies.10

As production techniques mutated away from their armory-bred genetic inheritance, manufacturers began experimenting with materials unused by the arsenals, such as glass, silk, rubber, and sheet metal, to forge new consumer durables that were eagerly purchased by the growing middle class.11 Shopping at the mammoth new “department stores”—such as Macy’s, founded in 1858—American consumers loved their products’ affordability and uniformity.12

While armory-trained mechanics could always find a supervisory job on the shop floor, the managerial expertise of army officers, especially engineers, was highly prized by private companies, particularly by the railroads.13 Between 1827 and the 1850s the railroads recruited significant numbers of them to run their operations, reform their administrative procedures, and improve efficiency across the board.14 It was a natural match; who better than an army man knew how to transport matériel over vast distances, delegate responsibility to subordinates located in far-flung places, and coordinate supplies and financing with a large number of contractors? With some reason, then, for ninety-six years of its first hundred, the Pennsylvania Railroad would be presided over by former military engineers.15

Ex-officers, often irked by the snail’s pace of promotions and mediocre pay in the army, flooded the nation’s other great businesses. Of the 1,058 graduates of West Point between 1802 and 1866, no fewer than 35 became corporate presidents, 48 chief engineers, 41 superintendents and senior managers, and eight corporate treasurers.16