In 1820, the Reverend Sidney Smith, a canon of St. Paul in London, commented on a statistical review of the United States. Quote, the Americans are a brave, industrious, and acute people, but they have hitherto given no indication of genius, and have made no approach to the heroic. Where are their art rights?
Their Watts? Their Davies? Who drinks from American glasses, or eats from their plates? End quote.
The sentiment was similarly captured in an 1829 review of books written by travelers to the United States, claiming there was quote, nothing in America to excite envy or jealousy. To the British, the standard bearers of the Industrial Revolution, America was a strange place. Class distinctions were limited. The cities were young and uncultured.
The government was shockingly plebeian. As one traveler noted, the New York state legislature consisted quote, chiefly of farmers, shopkeepers, and country lawyers, and other persons quite unaccustomed to abstract reasoning. This was Thomas Jefferson's America. I mean, Alexander Hamilton might have helped get industry off the ground at Patterson, New Jersey, but after the Democratic Republicans overpowered his federalists in election after election, industrial developments stagnated.
The economy became primarily agrarian, with over 95% of Americans working on farms or in agriculture related pursuits. And in this way, the United States was similar to every other country, soon to become independent, across the Americas. Its income was derived from cash crop exports, chiefly cotton, not from the more lucrative manufacturing pursuits that the British were engaged in. And yet, the US saw a very different economic trajectory from its American neighbors.
For 135 years, leading up to the First World War, which generally marks the end of the Second Industrial Revolution, the United States achieved an average economic growth of 3.9% annually. No other country in the world has ever come close to achieving that much growth, that rapidly, for such a long period of time. By the mid-19th century, the Unrepublic was industrializing and urbanizing. Its people were the best fed in the world, with a nutritional intake that rivaled their mid-20th century descendants.
They were taller and heavier than their European contemporaries, and their caloric intake led in turn to higher work output. During the Jefferson administration, the US was a loose connection of struggling ex-colonies, ripe for economic exploitation by European powers. But a half-century later, it was the second largest economy in the world, with productivity on par with, or perhaps even greater than, Great Britain. How did this happen?
How did the US diverge from its neighbors like that? How did they industrialize enough to catch up to, and eventually surpass, even the British? What if I told you, it was because of one of our most forgotten wars? As the French and British were constantly fighting each other during the age of Napoleon, the young United States frequently found itself in the crossfire.
Trying to trade with both Britain and France, American ships were frequently seized by both the British and French navies. By 1812, America had enough, and declared war on its former British rulers, becoming just about the only independent ally of Napoleon's. So sorry about that, Europe. The British responded by creating a continent-wide blockade, cutting off their former subjects from all international trade.
Suddenly, Americans discovered a reason to industrialize, out of necessity. Uniforms were needed for soldiers and sailors, employing the same production methods as in England, new textile mills popped up in New England, and then applied to many other industries. The Americans tried invading Canada, and the British tried invading from Canada, leading to a nonstop naval war unlike Ontario, requiring a shipbuilding arms race, in which, to everyone surprise, the Americans held their own. Supplying warships required guns and cannons, so iron foundries and metallurgical shops sprung up.
It was a critical moment in the overall history of industrialization, and it was perfect timing for the Americans to learn to fend for themselves. It convinced even the skeptics that the United States needed to follow the path of Great Britain. Thomas Jefferson, once a disdainful of the Industrial Revolution, conceded he had been wrong about mass-scale manufacturing. Defending the Republic, and its independence, he now argued, required industrialization.
There are other possible explanations, of course. Many foreigners visiting the US commented on how hardworking and entrepreneurial Americans were, though this is hard to say if it was unique to the American culture, or if we just placed special emphasis now on it in light of what happened. Americans were, as a whole population, among the best educated people of the 19th century. By the 1820s, the New England public school movement was spreading nationally.
By the 1830s, 70% of the white population between 5 and 19 years old were enrolled in school, and there's no doubt this contributed to later inventiveness. Americans also likely benefited from their ties to the industrial and financial power of Great Britain, ties of kinship, language, and culture. These probably made it easier to import British ideas and finance projects with British money on good terms after peace was finalized in 1815. It was likely a combination of all these causes and more that led the United States of America to one day become the world's industrial superpower.
Today, we're going to talk about how it started. This is the Industrial Revolutions, Chapter 33, industry in the USA. Alright, a little admin before we get started. Obviously, it's been busy on my end last few weeks because I had to delay the release of this chapter.
Sorry about that. I wish I could say it won't happen again, but it will happen again next week. So we'll be back for Chapter 34 on Tuesday, November 5th, so remember the 5th of November. For what it's worth, this episode is going to be quite a bit longer than usual, as this is a pretty big topic today.
We've got a lot to get through, so let's get started. Even before the American Revolution, there had been various small-scale industries across the colonies. Just like in Great Britain, blast furnaces for iron production could be found here and there across the countryside. Sawmills were also built to make use of the continent's vast timber resources.
These were typically the side hustles of local farmers. After the revolution, some merchants started growing these businesses to remarkable levels. The Holly family of Connecticut, for example, didn't consider themselves Ironmen per se, but they developed a substantial iron product business in the early 19th century. When the War of 1812 came, they became importance defense contractors.
They expanded other operations too, until, in the 1840s, their descendant Alexander Hamilton Holly decided to concentrate exclusively on the ironworks. He teamed up with one George Merwin in 1844 to make knives. For over a hundred years, then, their firm was a major employer in the state. Iron was a particularly important industry in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, where some 4,000 iron workers were employed during the American Revolution.
By 1810, the region accounted for 61% of the nation's total iron production, firing the blast furnaces with the area's seemingly endless supply of wood. But to move the new nation's industrial output required a vast new network of transport infrastructure. The most famous example of this was the Erie Canal, built between 1817 and 1825, stretching 360 miles across upstate New York, connecting the Hudson River to the Great Lakes. Financed by state bonds sold in London banking houses and built primarily by Irish immigrant laborers, the Erie Canal totally changed the course of American history.
Making use of the steamboats made possible by American Robert Fulton, shout out Chapter 12, the Erie Canal connected the vast Midwestern interior to New York City. Bulk industrial shipments could make it from over the Appalachian Mountains all the way to Europe. Afraid to be left behind other states, like Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, built canals too, over 1,000 miles of canals in the 1830s and 40s. Then came the railroads, cutting shipping times and dust costs even further.
The Baltimore and Ohio line, or B&O, was particularly important. And on the Mohawk and Hudson line, a new locomotive called the Dewitt Clinton soon replaced the Erie Canal as the best choice for passenger traffic. The railroads and locomotives fed back into the development of iron production and coal mining, which boomed after 1830. In northeast Pennsylvania, a pair of brothers, George and Selden Scranton, built a city on these industries, a city which now bears their name.
And with transport links back to the east coast in place, new industrial cities began to spring up in the Midwest. For most of the first industrial revolution, the most important of these cities was a port producing metropolis on the Ohio River, named in honor of George Washington's favorite Roman hero, Cincinnati. Both as a shipping outpost on one of America's more important transport veins before the Erie Canal, Cincinnati grew at a staggering rate, from less than 1,000 residents in 1800 to nearly 10,000 in 1820, and then over 115,000 by 1850. It took on the name Porkopolis, for its meatpacking industry, which was said to have, quote, originated and perfected the system which packs 15 bushels of corn into a pig, packs the pig into a barrel, and sends him over the mountains and over the ocean to feed mankind, end quote.
Over half a million pigs were slaughtered in Cincinnati every year, and then cut, cleaned, preserved, and shipped in a remarkably efficient operation. The carcass would be hung upside down on hooks and moved on a wheeled chain to each stage of the operation. Henry Ford credited this disassembly line system as one of the inspirations behind his model key plant many decades later. In some of these packing houses, the animals were driven up a ramp and slaughtered on the top floor, cut and dressed on the floor right below, with the hands, ribs, bacon, and other cuts dropped into shoots to various curing and salting tanks in the cellar.
This seamless flow system undoubtedly made Cincinnati's pork industry the most advanced food processing operation in the world. It also spawned additional industries, including America's first chemical industry, the lard industry. Hog lard contains fats and oils that can be adapted for the production of soaps, waxes, lubricants, and more. Lard soap was safer than that made from lys.
Lard candles lasted longer than other tallow candles. In 1844, a Cincinnati meat packer named Ebenezer Wilson experimented with a pressure cooker to produce highly purified lard with minimum resum, which could be used for a variety of oils and glues. By 1847, he had four processing tanks and was pumping out 35,000 tons of prime lard per year. He also opened additional plants in Kentucky and Indiana.
Cincinnati soap makers, meanwhile, developed a system for boiling lard and then piping it as soap through steam-heated conduits. After cooling into blocks, wire machinery would cut the soap into uniformly shaped bars, or it would be poured directly into molds. From the mid-1840s to the mid-1850s, Cincinnati's soap exports jumped 20-fold, as did the production of other lard products. And as this chemical manufacturing increased in sophistication, other industrial chemical plants went into operation, making acids, dyes, and chemicals used in metalworks and food production.
A major one was founded by the husbands of the sisters, Olivia and Elizabeth Norris, after their father, Alexander, suggested his two sons-in-law go into business together. One was an English-born candlemaker named William Proctor, the other an Irish-born soapmaker named James Gamble. From 1837 to the start of the Civil War, they slowly grew the business, Proctor and Gamble, into an industrial powerhouse for home cleaning supplies. American expansion westward had begun even before the Louisiana Purchase, or the European Furcrays, that convinced the mountain men to escape the increasingly dirty eastern cities and go beaver-trapping.
Most Americans of the time wanted land of their own to farm, something that was in limited supply back in Europe. And on the western frontier, they started using important new farming tools. Farming tools that could now be shipped back east and then across the world, thanks to modern transport infrastructure. Among the most important of these tools were the mechanical reapers, built by Obed Husi and Cyrus McCormack.
The McCormack reaper in particular had a profound impact on agricultural productivity across the world. Invented in 1837, with the help of one Joe Anderson, a slave on his family's Virginia plantation, the McCormack reaper significantly cut down the need for labor during a harvest, which up to this point always created a bottleneck in farm output. The McCormack family was hit hard by the Panic of 1837, and it would be another decade before Cyrus moved with his brother to the small, undeveloped city of Chicago, and built a factory there to produce the machines. They were so transformative that he was later awarded the French Legion of Honor for quote, having done more for the cause of agriculture than any other living man.
Another was the Steel Plow, also invented in 1837 by a Vermont-born blacksmith in Illinois named John Deere. Heavy, highly polished, and well-shaped steel allowed this plow to cut through the thick clay and tough grass roots of the American prairies. He started a new company and began producing thousands of steel plows per year. Thanks to these inventions, a single family could now successfully farm a huge swath of land all by themselves, with the John Deere plow to get ready for planting and the McCormack reaper for harvesting.
This agricultural productivity freed up more and more of the labor force to pursue urban industrial activities instead. By the start of the Civil War, the percentage of Americans working on farms had been nearly cut in half. During the War of 1812 and the start of the Civil War, manufacturing employment increased nearly twenty-fold. Helping spur this growth was a new central bank, known to us today as the Second Bank of the United States, since the first one started by Hamilton wasn't renewed by his Democratic Republican rivals.
Known better at the time as the B.U.S., it was established in 1816 and, for the last thirteen of its 20 years, headed by a brilliant Philadelphian named Nicholas Biddle. Better than anyone else had up to this point, Biddle understood the incredible leverage he had over local banks, in terms of both monetary supply and regulatory power. With his leadership, the B.U.S. kept interest rates low, increased liquidity, and as a result increased the pace of commerce and levels of income across the American interior.
Now, the B.U.S. was eventually killed by President Andrew Jackson, who just distrusted banks. But while it lasted, this Second Bank of the U.S. had created critical stimulus for American industrial expansion.
But just like it was in Great Britain and continental Europe and everywhere else in the world, the first industrial revolution in the United States was first and foremost concentrated in textiles. Building British textile machinery in the United States was easier said than done. Alexander Hamilton had supported industrial espionage in the former mother country, but it hadn't worked out so well. His deputy, Tench Cox, sent a spy there to make drawings of the machines, but the spy was soon arrested.
Instead, a British textile worker emigrated to America and brought his knowledge of the machines with him. Samuel Slater was born into a large farming family in Darbyshire in 1768. After receiving a very basic education, he went into the cotton mill to start working at age 10. His employer was Jedediah Strut, who'd come up a few times over the course of this podcast.
Strut was one of the original financiers of Richard R. Grite's Crumford Mill. At age 14, Slater's father died and the family indentured the boy to Strut. Over the next seven years, Strut guided Slater through an apprenticeship in which he developed a masterful understanding of cotton-spinning technology and principles of organization.
With the apprenticeship complete, Slater decided to take a bit of a leap. He knew that the newly-independent Americans were interested in developing the textile industry for themselves, and that the opportunities for advancing in said industry would be limited for him in Britain. Now, exporting British industrial technologies and expertise of them was still illegal, so he boarded a ship under an assumed name and headed off to America. Among his old friends and neighbors, he had earned the nickname Slater the traitor.
After briefly working in a yarn factory in New York, Slater learned of a New England merchant, Moses Brown, of Providence, Rhode Island, seeking an experienced spinning mechanic. Slater went up to Providence and Brown agreed to finance him $10,000 to build an art-grite-style cotton mill with water-powered carting, roving, and spinning machines. After finishing this first mill in Pawtucket, Slater soon discovered that American families were as quite well as willing to give up their children to factory labor as the British were. Amazingly, these farmers didn't want to see their kids working 12 hours a day, six days a week, in a dangerous cotton mill.
So Slater would basically hire the whole family. The mill company bought up farms and leased them back to families as part of a labor contract, the father would work the farm, and the wife and kids would go work in the mill. And apparently this arrangement worked out pretty well, if you worked the wife or kids. By 1799, the investor group back in Slater had three mills up and running.
And with no patents for their machines, for obvious reasons, the technology quickly spread into neighboring Connecticut and Massachusetts. And it was in Massachusetts where one of America's most important industrialists would launch an empire. This is Cabot Lowell, was born into an elite Boston merchant family in 1775. His father was among the colony's representatives to the Continental Congress before becoming a judge.
His mother came from one of the city's most important Patricia families. After graduating from Harvard, Lowell built up a successful shipping business. But shipping was a very stressful business to be in due to the incredible risks you were taking with your money back then. By 1810, when he was just 35 years old, Lowell needed a break.
So he took his family on a trip to Scotland in England. While in Scotland, he met Nathan Appleton, who also ran a mercantile house in Boston with his brother, Samuel. Lowell explained to Appleton what he was hoping to take away from this trip. Cotton, manufacturer.
A business type he believed, if set up properly, could be a high yield, low stress enterprise for him. While in England, Lowell used his mercantile contacts to get him access to the mills, where he learned the process flows, mechanical details, and other trade secrets. How exactly he got them out isn't definitively known. The legend is he memorized the ins and outs of the machines well enough to rebuild them from scratch in the US, but more likely he managed to smuggle out a few key drawings.
Either way, he returned to the US just in time for the War of 1812 to start, which cut off the entire American market from British trade. Southern plantations couldn't sell their cotton to textile mills in England anymore, and American consumers couldn't get finished textile goods imported from England. This was great timing for Lowell to set up his new enterprise, the Boston Manufacturing Company, a joint stock corporation that raised a whopping $400,000 in capital from a tight-knit group of friends and family investors, including a hesitant Appleton. Lowell's vision was to create an all-in-one textile plant, from carting to weaving the entire cotton-to-cloth process would take place in his mill on an integrated production line.
He believed not controlling the entire process was itself an unnecessary risk when working with these economies of scale. So, with a co-investor, he bought a vacant paper mill on the Charles River at Waltham, where they designed a three-story factory. Cotton would be cleaned and processed on the ground floor, taken a floor up to spin into the yarn, and then to the top floor to weave into the cloth. To equip the mill, the company hired a brilliant young machinist named Paul Moody.
Together, Lowell and Moody built crude machines that, while not state-of-the-art, could get the job done with rough threads. Lowell believed consumers would buy lower-quality cloths than those coming out of Britain if they could get them for lower prices, made possible with a heightened scale of production. Lowell then arranged a very unique system of labor for the mill. Both he and Appleton had come away from their trips to Britain, dismayed by what they saw in the mills there, tired, sick workers, many of them children, living and laboring and degrading conditions.
They were convinced this was a tinderbox for social upheaval, plus they didn't mind paying higher-than-average wages if they could get reliable workers. So, instead, Lowell recruited young women from New England farming families. They figured the women would be willing to work away from home for a few years to make a little extra cash, for a dowry, or to train to become teachers, or to help out their families. They would get excellent clean housing in a boarding village.
Other hours would be long, but the work wouldn't be too physically demanding, and it would pay better than other opportunities. And as it turned out, many of the women loved this arrangement. The work was easier, the village was cleaner, and their lives were much more social than the back-breaking, dirty, isolated experience of living on a farm. Plus, they were at that stage in their lives where their families were constantly driving them nuts, so it was good to get away from that, too.
As it happened, the war of 1812 ended at, like, the exact same time the mill began production. Former US textile producers swiftly went out of business, as Manchester started dumping its huge surplus of textile goods into the American market at rock bottom prices. But with its low-quality, low-cost strategy, the Boston Manufacturing Company survived the havoc. And then, in 1816, the federal government imposed a new tariff on British textiles, in part thanks to Lowell's lobbying efforts.
At that point, as one of the few cotton manufacturers left standing in the US, Lowell's firm began making serious profits. By October 1817, it paid out its first annual dividend to investors at 17%. Over the next decade, the average annual dividend was a remarkable 18.75%. That tight-knit group of investors soon dubbed the Boston Associates began amassing incredible fortunes never before held by Americans.
But Francis Cabot Lowell wouldn't survive to see it. He died of pneumonia on August 10, 1817, at the age of 42, just as his empire was taking off. And when the Boston Associates needed to expand off the limited site of the mills on the Charles, they looked northwest at a new site on the Merrimack River. And there they built new mills, a new company, and a new city, which they named Lowell, Massachusetts.
To create the water power needed for the new mills, they founded the Lowell-Loxen Canal Company, which hired a civil engineer named Cook-Boot. Actually, they didn't found the company, they bought it and renamed it. Over the next few years, boot worked alongside Moody and employed some 500 laborers to construct an ingenious canal system around the river. In fact, it was so well designed.
Appleton and Moody figured it could support as many as 60 mills. And then they realized, oh wait, how are we going to manage 60 mills? That's way too big of an operation. So they opened up the site to other businesses, who would like to set up shop at Lowell and pay regular fee to the Loxen Canal Company.
But Lowell's progressive vision of industrial labor didn't survive the expansion to the city that bears his name. While still staffed by young women, the working and living conditions fell significantly by the 1830s. The average workweek was 73 hours, during which the women were subjected to the constant definite noise of the machines. A single bedroom in the new villages would house up to six women.
Ventilation was poor, the rules were strict. Then in 1834, management declared a 15% wage reduction. The Lowell-Loxen-Loxen had had enough. In coordinated retaliation, they walked off the job for two days and withdrew all their savings from the local banks, intentionally creating a bank run.
Another strike came two years later, where they not only walked out of mills but one made a public speech — the first time a woman ever spoke in public in Lowell. In 1844, the Massachusetts State Legislature was considering a 10-hour workday law and and women's emancipation aside, the legislature resisted the workday law for another 30 years. The Boston associates consortium didn't last either. As younger generations of the families took over, they gravitated toward non-industrial activities as they developed an era of aristocracy about them.
But what did survive, and indeed flourish from the textile mills, was a new spirit of mass production in America. And Americans started applying it to everything. I've mentioned before how I think there were a few inventions more important to industrialization than the mechanical clock. And in the 19th century, it was the United States that came to dominate the world of clockmaking.
At the turn of this century, clockmaking was still more in art than an industry. Scaled craftsmen built their clocks with a variety of special purpose tools and gauges. They were complex instruments, with specially made gears and wires. The tools of production were mostly powered with hand cranks and foot treadles.
Then came a clockmaker named Eli Terry. Born in Connecticut in 1772, Terry had served as an apprentice to two well-known clockmakers of the area, before setting up his own business in 1793. He'd make three or four clocks at a time, and then go out on horseback trying to sell them. He also invented an impressive astronomical clock in 1797, but there was no market for it.
Frustrated by the slow pace of business, Terry started to think more about scale. In 1802, he decided to take a risk and build a small water-powered factory employing several apprentices and other workers. He then announced his intention to sell clocks by the thousand. That was a pretty extraordinary goal, but much to everyone's surprise, he did start producing thousands of clocks per year.
In 1814, he built yet another factory in Connecticut, even more productive than the last. He rethought the product design and realized the economies of scale to be accomplished with a simplified clock. I'll spare you the nitty-gritty details, which would probably take an entire episode to explain, and just say that he significantly reduced the number of parts needed while maintaining a good margin of performance acceptability. This also made the clocks easier to maintain, since fewer parts meant fewer repairs.
He adopted a new ad slogan, rightfully claiming his clock will run as long without repairs and be as durable and accurate for keeping time as any kind of clock, whatever. Plus, of course, it was way more affordable. Now, not a whole lot of records about Terry's survive, so it's hard to know exactly what kind of scale he achieved here, but based on what his successors accomplished, it could have been over 100,000 clocks per year. By mid-century, Americans were dumping their clocks in the British market, putting British clock makers out of business.
By the 1860s, it was taken for granted that the insides of clocks in the average British home had been made in America. E.I. Terry and clocks were hardly unique in the American drive to mass-produced stuff. In the 1780s, a quicker merchant north of Boston built a huge distribution network for local shoemakers to supply shoes for slaves in the south.
While more characteristic of the putting-out system than the factory system, the labor organization that went into it was unlike anything before. Similarly, there was no single-factory mass-producing iron stoves. And yet, by the mid-19th century, virtually every American household of even modest means had a stove. Iron foundries had started specializing in stove casting and set up on rivers and canals across the country, allowing easy transportation and distribution of their products throughout the vast American landscape.
Americans also found a variety of industries ripe for mechanization. Among them was furniture making. In the 1840s, several furniture factories were set up across the Midwest. Among them was the Mitchell and Ramelsburg plant in Cincinnati.
Using a floor-by-floor system similar to levels, or to the meat packing plants in the neighborhood, they finished the wood, assembled the products, and varnished and dried. Workers used a huge variety of saws, lathes, routers, boring machines, and other tools powered by two steam engines in the basement. Steam engines themselves started to be mass-produced by industrialists like George H. Corless, who not only improved the technology, but started figuring out how to more efficiently organize the labor that went into constructing it.
And the industry for steam locomotives, like those constructed by Matthias Baldwin, saw incredible productivity gains. Baldwin more than tripled his workforce over the years, but in that same period of time increased the number of locomotives he was building by a factor of 7.4. He formed strong relationships with vendors to get the parts standardized so they could start being more easily assembled. Then there were the printing presses, which until the 1830s had changed very little since the days of Gutenberg.
Richard March Ho was born in 1812 to an English immigrant family in New York City. His father and uncles had started a successful manufacturing business for wooden presses and later saws, and when his father was dying in 1832 he stepped up to take over the business. It was around that same time Ho learned about a new kind of printing press, first built by German inventor Friedrich Keenig for the times in London in 1814. This steam-powered cylinder press could produce as many as 400 pages an hour.
While widely adopted and improved by the British, it was Ho in the United States who figured out how to crank that baby up to 10, literally. He produced his own version in 1833 and sold hundreds of them, then created a double cylinder press in the 1840s, which could print 4,000 pages an hour with just two feeders. Demand for printed materials was out there, especially after guys like Louis Nicholas Robert and Henry and Silly for Drennier developed new paper-making machines that could produce continuous rolls of paper. Ho then patented his signature invention, the Ho type revolving machine, which put the type on a large central cylinder, with paper fed in flat and taken up by a stationary roller.
Now this way you could put in paper from a number of feeders. The best of these models was the 10-cylinder version, which could print 20,000 pages an hour, enabling a vast proliferation of newspapers across the world. But the industry most famous for employing this American system of manufacturing, as the British called it, was the gun industry. Okay, so after he invented his cotton gin, Eli Whitney headed back to New Haven, Connecticut to start manufacturing the technology, while a friend developed a distribution system down in Georgia.
But almost immediately, the business fell apart, as copycat gins spread like wildfire. Whitney nearly went bankrupt as he spent the next few years suing as many patent infringers as he could. But the publicity he got for inventing the gin made him a household name, and in 1798, the US government threw him a lifeline when they asked him to manufacture muskets. Whitney promised to produce 10,000 muskets over two years, for the price of $134,000, with a $10,000 advance to get the operation up and running.
Now he was almost certainly conning the government. Not only was that promised totally unrealistic, he also used the advance to pay off his heavy debts instead. But he insisted that it was being used for some kind of R&B project, a project which would result in an irresistible outcome for the American military. As he put it, quote, one of my primary objectives is to form the tools so the tools themselves shall fashion the work and give to every part it's just proportion, which when accomplished will give expedition, uniformity, and exactness to the whole.
In short, the tools which I contemplate are similar to an engraving on copper plate, from which may be taken a great number of impressions precisely alike, end quote. And with that, he got an additional advance. Militaries across the world had been seeking a means to mass produce guns with interchangeable parts for years. But in an age before precision tools, it was basically impossible.
On top of that, Whitney had no experience with gun manufacturing, and despite reports that he could from a very optimistic Thomas Jefferson, he never did achieve interchangeability. Nevertheless, he remained the foremost American gun manufacturer through the War of 1812, producing about 2,000 muskets per year. During the war, the government expanded its supplier base, buying more and more firearms from contractors like Simeon North and the ever so inconsistent Isaac Chauncey. Now, perhaps the most incredible, although not well remembered, American industrialist of this period was Thomas Blanchard.
Born in Massachusetts in 1788, Blanchard had been a mediocre student with a bad stammer, but he found his calling as a teenager, when he was sent to work for his older brother's tack factory. His job at the factory was hand-fixing heads on tacks, and he absolutely hated it. So, he invented a couple labor-saving devices, so he could stop working there. First, Blanchard created an automatic tack counter, so he wouldn't have to do any tedious record-keeping.
Then eliminated his job altogether by inventing a tack-making machine that could produce 500 tacks per minute. Blanchard received his first patent for a wool cloth-sharing machine in 1813 at age 25. In 1817, he patented that tack machine and sold the licensing rights for a cool $5,000. That money allowed him to buy his own factory in Millbury, where some 40 mils had already set up to take advantage of the local water power.
Over the course of his life, Blanchard received a total of 12 patents. He invented new mortising machines, machines for cutting and folding envelopes, a wood-bending machine, a shoe-lasting lathe, which is why we now have standardized shoe sizes, and a steam-powered automobile. But his most significant inventions were his gun-making machines, particularly his gun-stocking lathe. Gun-stocking was the process of carving an inlet in the wooden stock of a gun where the locking trigger would go.
Without a precision tool, the gun-stock carvings were highly inconsistent and created a major bottleneck at government armories. Blanchard had been working with a local gun manufacturer, Asa Waters, since 1814, and while the technology they produced was important and sold well, it couldn't quite solve that interchangeability problem. Then, one day, the exact date is unclear, he was on a trip home when he had a breakthrough. As Waters' son tells the story, quote, the whole principle of turning irregular forms from a pattern burst upon his mind.
Blanchard stood in the road shouting, I've got it, I've got it, I've got it! A passing farmer muttered under his breath, I guess that man is crazy. What Blanchard had come up with was a lathe with two distinct parts, powered separately. They rotated slowly and identically, while moving back and forth.
The first part would follow the contours of a metal mold, a singular pattern, while the second part would carve those exact same contours into the stock. He built a similar device that allowed consistent carving of stocks from wooden blanks. Now, many of Blanchard's inventions had profound impacts on the growth of industrialization, but these were especially significant, because the technology had applications far beyond gun manufacturing. Now, any irregular piece of wood could be carved into a uniform shape.
Similarly, important breakthroughs came from a gunsmith in Maine, named John Hall. Born into an upper-middle-class family in 1781, Hall had started a woodworking and boatbuilding business, but after a stint in the state militia, he switched over to firearms in 1811. Over the next 14 years, he developed a variety of rifles with more and more sophisticated manufacturing techniques. When he tried getting a patent for his work, he came into conflict with a politically connected patent troll, who, I'm not making this up, was the commissioner of the patent office.
But by 1819, Hall had impressed the War Department enough to get an R&D contract. As part of the agreement, he got to work at the Harpers Ferry Armory in Virginia. At the time, Harpers Ferry was considered heavily politicized, financially corrupt, and technologically lackluster. But with his emphasis on manufacturing experimentation, like steam-powered middle-cutting work, Hall was turning it around.
Breakthroughs by Simeon North and Thomas Blanchard were introduced there as well. Soon enough, Harpers Ferry was America's Portsmouth Blackmells. But in all American gun-making history, no character stands out quite like Samuel Colt. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1814, Colt came from one of New England's oldest and most successful families.
They had made a fortune supplying American and French troops during the War of Independence and had been among the original partners of Hamilton Society for useful manufacturers in Patterson, New Jersey. The family also had streaks of instability, with members frequently living beyond their means, misappropriating funds, and engaging in all kinds of corrupt ventures. Sam Colt embodied both the successful entrepreneurial aspect of his family, as well as the lavish crazy one. At age 11, Colt was indentured to a farmer.
Then, four years later, he spent some time in his father's textile plant learning about manufacturing tools and techniques. He was then sent to Amherst Academy, now Amherst College, where he was quickly expelled for some kind of pyrotechnic prank that set a building on fire. His father then sent him to learn seafaring, and it was supposedly on a voyage to Calcutta that Colt came up with an idea for a repeat-firing pistol. By age 17, he was actually promoting said idea and borrowing money from his dad and uncle to develop a prototype.
The result was mixed, and his financially-pressed father cut him off. So Colt took to the road, traveling the American interior as some kind of medicine-shell performer, the celebrated Dr. Colt, COU-LT, of New York, London, and Calcutta, demonstrating pyrotechnics and laughing gas for the audience. With the money he saved from these performances, Colt perfected his prototype for a single fixed barrel revolver.
He then got patent in both the US and UK, and in 1836 set up his patent arms manufacturing company in the family's old stomping grounds at Patterson. He continued to raise capital and then immediately spend it on sales and marketing, as well as things that would supposedly support his sales and marketing efforts, like fancy clothes. All of it was to woo military brass and state and lish officers. Now, he managed to sell a few thousand guns, but then the panic of 1837 came and put him out of business.
He dabbled in various industrial pursuits over the next ten years. Then, in 1847, the newly established Texas Rangers bought some second-hand Colt revolvers, loved them, and wanted more. Colt was back in business. He frantically scrounged for money from wherever he could get it, built up a new factory, and found suppliers, including Eli Whitney Jr., to send him all the parts he'd need.
With Americans flying into the Wild West at this point, from the planes of newly admitted Texas to the Gold Rush of California, and with a new factory using an assembly-line system to mass-produce handguns, Colt was suddenly selling hundreds of thousands of his revolvers. I think it would surprise exactly no one that Sam Colt lived his life to the max, and that lifestyle led to an early death, from complications of doubt at age 47. The United States was just a year into the Civil War when it happened, and the profits his company would make from that bloodbath has kept it in business to the present day. He wouldn't live to see it, but he had still sold nearly a quarter million guns in his lifetime, while setting up three firearm manufacturers in the US and UK.
And by that point, the British were starting to change their tune. They were starting to be impressed with the advancements Americans were making, not just in the firearms industry, but in all industries. A long-standing partnership of mutually beneficial trade picked up between the two nations. And in both nations, engineers were building the most advanced means of trade the world has ever seen.
Massive, fast-moving, reliable steamships. Next time on the Industrial Revelations. Thanks again to everyone who filled out the listener survey for the podcast this month. If you still need to, it should be a near-inbox.
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