Standardization & the American System
The following is an excerpt from my new book, "Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge." Chapter 13 - The Birth of Quality Control and Standardization contains this section.
In 1785, the United States had been a country for only nine years. Jefferson wouldn’t become president for another sixteen years. In the meantime, he was ambassador to France, where he met a gunsmith named Honoré Blanc. Blanc had unknowingly copied the Qin of China: weapons that used interchangeable parts.
With Blanc’s invention, if the flintlock of your musket broke, you didn’t need to return it to a gunsmith to handcraft another one. Instead, you could pick up a new flintlock from a pile of parts and be back in the fray before you could say, “Wait, tell me again why I’m dying for some schmuck I don’t know?”
Jefferson saw the importance of the invention but couldn’t convince Blanc to move from France to America, which was still being carved out of the wilds. Instead, Jefferson wrote to the first Secretary of War, General Henry Knox, explaining Blanc’s ingenious system and urging its adoption.
In 1798, some ten years later, the US government granted a contract to Eli Whitney to manufacture ten to fifteen thousand muskets. (This was somewhat ironic, seeing as how he’d never created a musket in his life.) About ten months into Whitney’s government contract, the secretary of the treasury sent him a “foreign pamphlet on arm manufacturing techniques”—almost certainly French and, therefore, almost certainly Honoré Blanc’s. By 1801, Whitney had not only missed the contractual deadline but the quantity as well. By a magnitude of a thousand. However, with the ten guns he had, he demonstrated to Congress that the parts from any one musket could be switched out with another. If the gun broke, the Army wouldn’t have to buy a new one—just a replacement part. The legislators quickly mandated that all such equipment be standardized.
I imagine he failed to mention that it took more money to manufacture ten muskets with interchangeable parts than it did for a gunsmith to craft ten muskets. It did, however, buy him more time and earn him political support.
In a curious way, Whitney played an important role in an engulfing conflict decades later.
You might recall him as the inventor of the cotton gin, the machine that turned the American South from an agrarian society to an agricultural powerhouse, resulting in an ever-increasing reliance on slave labor. (By the mid-1800s, cotton composed over half of all the country’s exports.) At the same time, he’s largely responsible for popularizing the use of interchangeable machine parts, allowing the North to transform itself into an industrial powerhouse. That is, he’s responsible for the inventions that set the two economies on a political collision course resulting in the Civil War.
While Whitney didn’t invent interchangeable parts, he did a successful job of evangelizing the idea. More and more companies, and especially armories, began implementing the idea during the 1800s. On top of this, US manufacturers began shifting from hand labor to relying more heavily on mechanization. They went from skilled craftsmen using hand tools to semiskilled laborers operating machines.
These two developments led to what came to be known as the American System. While the Industrial Revolution had already begun in Britain, the American System was a profound evolution in industrial development. By 1880, the US, Europe, and elsewhere had entered what historians term the Machine Age. While these same historians might point to interchangeable parts as a key development, I think they’re missing the point. Interchangeable parts were the result, but standardization* was the catalyst.
