interchangeable parts

Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

by Paul Kingsnorth  · 23 Sep 2025  · 388pp  · 110,920 words

pursuit changes our felt relationship with life itself. We are trained from birth to see the living world and its people as a matrix of interchangeable parts, all of them potentially for sale. Our bodies, our nations, our forests, our heritage: Progress will not stop until everything is measured, commercialised, commodified, altered

The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution

by Charles R. Morris  · 1 Jan 2012  · 456pp  · 123,534 words

the cotton gin, which transformed the antebellum South (and unfortunately reinvigorated the institution of slavery); he was the first person to machine-produce precisely fitting interchangeable parts for muskets and was the inventor of critical new machine tools, like the celebrated Whitney milling machine. The Whitney role in military manufacturing came under

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withering challenge in the 1960s. The revisionists charged that Whitney’s pretension to making arms with interchangeable parts was merely a ploy to justify extensions of his contracts. Indeed, he had little idea of how to manufacture muskets at all, much less how

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extreme claims for his accomplishments were made by others, often long after his death. The traditional source for the story that he claimed to manufacture interchangeable parts appears to be itself a partial fabrication.6 While he did have a rocky start on his first musket contract, so did many other contractors

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current consensus is that Whitney was quite a competent manufacturer and one of the earliest advocates for mass production by machinery, if not expressly for interchangeable parts—in short, a respectable figure, if not the demigod of legend. My own view is that in his early career Whitney was indeed something of

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as to whether he invented his cotton gin (see Appendix). And I think the record supports the charge that he dangled the promise of machined interchangeable parts to gain extensions on his contracts. But it’s also true that he was a talented artisan and entrepreneur, and once he focused on actually

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the manner of Eli Whitney, when he was anxious to retain a much-needed government contract, he promised he would produce machine-made rifles with interchangeable parts—but he really did it.69 John Hall was born into an upper-middle-class family during the waning days of the Revolution. After his

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later and taken in many different directions by private companies. The apotheosis of armory practice—machine production lines with special purpose machinery turning out fully interchangeable parts with little or no manual intervention—came only with the first Ford Model T assembly line in 1913. That production model dominated much of American

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, no. 14 (October 1988): 774–778. 5 The locus classicus for the anti-Whitney argument is Robert S. Woodbury, “The Legend of Eli Whitney and Interchangeable Parts,” Technology and Culture 1, no. 3 (Summer 1960): 235–253. The traditional accounts are Jeannette Mirsky and Allan Nevins, The World of Eli Whitney (New

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Ferry Armory, 184–251, and R. T. Huntington, Hall’s Breechloaders: John H. Hall’s Invention and Development of a Breechloading Rifle with Precision-made Interchangeable Parts and Its Introduction into the United States Service (York, PA: G. Shumway, 1972), which has extensive selections from Hall’s correspondence and various official reports

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, John: iron and Collins, E. K. Collins, Sam Collins & Company Collins line Collinsville Colt, James Colt, John Colt, Roswell Colt, Samuel career of firearms and interchangeable parts and London armory and machinery of patents for Root and Colt Armory machines at(fig.) Colt guns rifling sales of Commerce Commerce Department, GE and

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water-mill machinery and Morfit, Campbell: soap-boiling apparatus of(fig.) Morgan, J. P. Morrill, Justin Morrill Act Morse, Samuel F. B. Mulcaster, William Muskets interchangeable parts for loading/firing making pattern problems with Napoleon Napoleonic wars Nasmyth, James Natural resources Naval Chronicle Naval power on Great Lakes(table) on Lake Champlain

The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World

by Simon Winchester  · 7 May 2018  · 449pp  · 129,511 words

pieces are to be the parts of a further machine—if they are gearwheels, say, or triggers, or handgrips, or barrels—then they will be interchangeable parts, the ultimate cornerstone components of modern manufacturing. Of equally fundamental importance, a lathe so abundantly equipped as Maudslay’s was also able to make that

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—kept in permanent shadow, as the dark side necessarily has to be. IT WAS IN the French capital in 1785 that the idea of producing interchangeable parts for guns was first properly realized, and the precision manufacturing processes that allowed for it were ordered to be first put into operation. Still, it

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engineering, and it had been around in principle for five centuries.) The second figure, the man who did the most to bring the system of interchangeable parts to the making of guns, and whose technique was, unlike Gribeauval’s, unchallengeable, was Honoré Blanc. He was not a soldier but a gunsmith, and

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up above in the Paris of July 8, 1785, it sweltered. Thomas Jefferson, while U.S. minister to France, observed the early work on creating interchangeable parts for flintlock muskets, and told his superiors in Washington that American smiths should follow the French practice. Honoré Blanc had arranged before him a collection

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the middle classes, toward techniques that put the honest work of artisans and craftsmen to disadvantage. By the turn of the century, the idea of interchangeable parts had withered and died in France—and some say to this day that the survival of craftsmanship and the reluctance entirely to embrace the modern

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derives almost wholly from his association with the gun trade, with precision manufacturing, and with the promise of being able to deliver weapons assembled from interchangeable parts. “I am persuaded,” he declared with a flourish of elaborate solemnity in his bid to make a cache of guns for the U.S. government

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barrel. Stacked guns in the so-called musket organ at the U.S. government’s Springfield Armory in Massachusetts, where the French system of making interchangeable parts revolutionized manufacturing. In time, both men, North and Hall, won government contracts for producing guns—North for horse pistols in Connecticut; Hall for his new

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too great a degree of, or reliance upon, precision, which is something the clockmakers of New England understood well. They knew that the use of interchangeable parts made the manufacture of things a great deal easier than before, and that they could make their goods both quickly and, most important for customers

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iron machines; machines that showed, and with a certain sense of disdain, that however obsessed America might be with the cleverness of her precisely made interchangeable parts, however pleased with the consequent beginnings of mass production and, if yet some way ahead, with the makings of the assembly line, this was a

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universe, one where electrons and protons and neutrons have replaced iron and oil and bearings and lubricants and trunnions and the paradigm-altering idea of interchangeable parts, and where, though the components might well glow with fierce lights or send out intense waves of heat, nothing moved one piece against another in

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recount his rise leaves one almost breathless. He set up an American-style factory for the mass production of clocks, employing the same principle of interchangeable parts that had been born in New England two centuries before. By 1909, Hattori’s concept of vertical integration was refined to the point where every

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its formidable strength and lightness. HA-HA: An artificial ditch created, often in large estates, as a near-invisible boundary around fields, meadows, and gardens. INTERCHANGEABLE PARTS: A basis for modern manufacturing whereby all the component parts are made to be identical one with the other, so they will always fit when

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Company, 152, 155–67 complaints about SKF bearings at, 170 Edsel, 236 gauge blocks, or Jo blocks, introduced at, 169–71 incorporation of, 131, 159 interchangeable parts essential at, 161n, 166, 170 Model A, 159–60 Model T, see Ford Model T (Tin Lizzie) precision’s role at Rolls-Royce vs., 131

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social implications of precision as concern in, 90, 92, 117 standards for length and mass created by, 334–40; see also metric system system of interchangeable parts developed in, 87–94, 97, 98, 102 Franklin, Benjamin, 90, 222–23 French Academy of Sciences, 335 French Revolution, 59, 66, 92 frequency: Doppler effect

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, William, 77 Gaudy Night, 105 gauge blocks, or Jo blocks, 167–71, 169 author’s introduction to, 2–4 Ford Motor Company and, 169–71 interchangeable parts and, 170 Johansson’s invention of, 167–68 gauges: go and no-go, for ensuring cannonball fit, 87 in gun manufacture, 89, 98–99, 100

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lathe for stocks of, 101–2 both precision and accuracy crucial in making of, 105 breech-loaded single-shot rifles, 97–98 French system of interchangeable parts applied to American precision-based manufacturing of, 97–100 Johansson’s invention of gauge blocks, or Jo blocks, and, 167–68 machines first used to

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–78, 291–92 first-ever commercially available microprocessor made by (Intel 4004), 288–89, 290, 292 founding of, 288 mutual dependency of ASML and, 278 interchangeable parts, 63, 71, 105, 114, 276, 312 in Ford’s mass production assembly lines, 161n, 166, 170 for guns, 84–85, 86, 87–100 system of

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to make ships’ pulley blocks and, 65–66, 70–71, 72–73 at Springfield and Harpers Ferry armories, 98, 98, 101–2, 161n see also interchangeable parts master clocks, 104, 352–53 Maudslay, Henry, 54–55, 59, 60–66, 62, 276 bench micrometer made by (Lord Chancellor), 76, 77–78 Bramah’s

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, 102 “musket organ,” at Springfield Armory (Mass.), 98 muskets, flintlock, 88 French Charleville model, 84, 95 gunsmiths’ craftsmanship and, 89–90, 96–97, 98–99 interchangeable parts for, 84–85, 86, 87–97, 98–99 Jefferson’s advocacy of Blanc’s system for, 90, 92–94 master example for each component of

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, 101, 102, 161n Sputnik, 259–61, 262, 285 plotting location from radio signals of, 260–61 standardization, 86 French weaponry and, 86–93 see also interchangeable parts start-ups, invention of term, 284n steam, figurative use of word, 74n steam engines, 39, 44–52, 304 Boulton and Watt, 46, 48, 71 first

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: sewing machines, bicycles, and typewriters. Crucial to all these industries, and absolutely crucial in Henry Ford’s new automobile-manufacturing industry, was the use of interchangeable parts. It is worth noting that none of Ford’s early-model cars (the A, B, C, F, K, or N) relied entirely on its components

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the industrialist who pioneered the use of assembly lines in the making of cars, but he managed to make industrial history confusing by not using interchangeable parts—the workers on his Oldsmobile assembly lines still filed metal pieces to make them fit. * As well as the Lincoln—and the electric starter motor

Empire of Guns

by Priya Satia  · 10 Apr 2018  · 927pp  · 216,549 words

to produce a thousand muskets a day, six times the combined output of the ancien regime’s three armories. Uncompromising Enlightenment-minded engineers insisted on interchangeable parts production on principle, in the face of opposition from artisanal gunsmiths and arms merchants. After a year, the governing National Convention closed it, reestablishing the

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around 1808. Its first superintendent was a Birmingham gunsmith who maintained European-style craft practices, employing individual artisans to manufacture each part. The goal of interchangeable parts was adopted from French military traditions and guided developments, but it took time. The British government’s factory plan stalled until 1805, partly to avoid

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British craftsmen were recruited to the Continent in 1792–93 and 1802–3. Honoré Blanc, the Parisian musket contractor credited with inventing a system for interchangeable parts manufacture in 1784, probably with one of Alcock’s machine tools, bought out Alcock’s stamping factory upon his death in 1794. He used stamping

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a major role in the creation and employment of arguably the most iconic developments of the industrial revolution, including the steam engine, copper sheathing, and interchangeable-parts manufacturing. Early changes in iron production owed much to the state and to war demand. The first reverberatory furnace was developed in 1688–98. Abraham

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British liberalism. In Britain in 1791, Samuel and Jeremy promoted the Panopticon scheme. The Admiralty asked Samuel to design ships in 1795, and he included interchangeable parts for masts and spars to enable repair at sea. Then, as inspector general of the naval works, he determined to make the dockyards so efficient

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States. He shipped six of Blanc’s muskets to Philadelphia. In England, Henry Nock made screwless locks on a similar principle, and the Taylors used interchangeable-parts manufacturing to make pulley blocks for the navy. The objective of mass warfare produced the industrial principle of interchangeability, whose purpose shifted from easy repair

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engineers well; he prioritized uniformity especially because American ordnance was then so randomly assorted. In 1813, the Connecticut contractor Simeon North made pistol locks with interchangeable parts, and in 1815 the Ordnance Department acquired the teeth to implement uniformity as a general objective. It took time, however, not least because of resistance

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rifle he had patented in 1811. He used dozens of gauges and much machinery, showing definitively, in 1826, that his rifles could be made with interchangeable parts—the first of their kind. Legally, arms for militias had to be made by contractors, so the War Department had Hall share his technology with

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had to share their inventions without royalty, which helped innovation spread; few changes of this period were patented. The scale expanded in the 1840s, and interchangeable-parts manufacturing was adopted in the machine-tool and sewing-machine industries. This “American system of manufacture” was the result of long state investment in and

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affair. Only it could give out the contracts that enabled private manufacturers like North and Whitney to make large investments in factories with machinery for interchangeable-parts manufacturing. These American developments soon impinged on the British debate about arms making. In 1850, tenders for British government arms came in at the same

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workmanship; barrel welders won a certificate of merit and a gold medal for the perfection of their work. But the exhibition included American guns with interchangeable parts. With help from the American government, Samuel Colt had also established a pistol factory in London, since England was “the greatest mart of fire-arms

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emerged on the Continent, especially in cheaper weapons. Those who produced diverse products could not compete for military contracts after the Ordnance Office committed to interchangeable parts only. Many small masters were driven out or drafted into other branches with better prospects. Much skilled labor remained unemployed. The London Armoury Company was

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-produced small arms, rather than the trade’s own quest for greater profits or love of innovation and efficiency, fueled revolution in the gun industry. Interchangeable-parts manufacturing had a wide impact on the economy, as in the United States. The capital needs of large factories dramatically altered the structure of the

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of gunmaking, eliminating firearms from two centuries of Japanese history without giving up on technological progress in other fields. Even France forgot its invention of interchangeable parts. We might even reinvent guns as stores of metal and money value, in the manner of the Mexican artist Pedro Reyes, who recently melted 1

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, 423n elites and, 21 factory organization and, 133–35, 140–41 increased production in, 20–21, 135, 141, 145 innovations in, 147–54, 354, 369 interchangeable parts and standardization and, 19, 38, 86, 121, 134, 135, 147, 149, 153, 154, 191, 353–55, 357, 360, 365–67 in London, 6, 28–37

Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World

by Joshua B. Freeman  · 27 Feb 2018  · 538pp  · 145,243 words

of complexity. It was a long road to enable such complicated machinery to be produced on a mass scale. Fordism built on two manufacturing innovations, interchangeable parts and continuous flow. Until the early nineteenth century, products with interacting metal parts, like guns or clocks, were individually made by skilled artisans, who spent

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sure they worked together. No one finished product was exactly like the next. The standardization of parts occurred first in the United States. Generally, introducing interchangeable parts initially increased the cost of production, since it required a huge investment in specialized machines, tools, jigs, and fixtures and a great deal of experimentation

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custom fitting. The key innovations took place before the Civil War in New England armories. The military greatly valued the ease of repair allowed by interchangeable parts and cared less about costs than private manufacturers. “Armory practice” slowly spread to the making of clocks, sewing machines, typewriters, agricultural equipment, bicycles, and other

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of skilled workers and relatively high wages made it expensive and sometimes impossible to produce complex products in large quantities using traditional artisanal methods. With interchangeable parts, skilled workers were still needed to build specialized machinery and tooling, but less skilled workers could churn out parts and assemble them.6 None of

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-priced model made with traditional metalworking techniques. During the war, Singer began mechanizing, but it would take almost two decades before the company fully achieved interchangeable parts. In the interim, it expanded by hiring more and more workers to make parts using some specialized machinery and employing fleets of fitters, who filed

The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication From Ancient Times to the Internet

by David Kahn  · 1 Feb 1963  · 1,799pp  · 532,462 words

unknown. But his attraction to mechanical devices may well have fostered his friendship with Eli Whitney, whose cotton gin he admired and whose muskets with interchangeable parts he inspected and approved for use by the Army. When, in 1812, he became the first chief of ordnance of the U.S. Army, he

The Connected Company

by Dave Gray and Thomas Vander Wal  · 2 Dec 2014  · 372pp  · 89,876 words

can’t see the big picture, so they must make decisions and act with a very limited perspective. Interchangeable Parts Another core idea from the age of the industrial revolution is the concept of interchangeable parts. Standardization does make it easier to mass-produce quality products. We run into problems, though, when we try

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7-Eleven (company), Information Transparency, Rate of Flow, Rate of Flow A A/B testing, Amazon is Podular Accenture survey, Service-Dominant Logic Ackoff, Russell, Interchangeable Parts adaptive moves, impact of, What is a Coevolutionary Process?–Coevolutionary Relationships Can be Very Complex, Adaptive Moves Can be Competitive—and Cooperative, Adaptive Moves Can

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, an Agile Team of Agile Teams, Democratic Management at Semco, Information Transparency, Density insurance, selling, Service Networks Intel (company), Disrupt Yourself Before Someone Else Does interchangeable parts, Interchangeable Parts–Conflicting Constraints Lead to Rigidity, Conflicting Constraints Lead to Rigidity iPhone device, Participation Ismail, Salim, Failure to Invest in the Platform iterative software, Agile Development

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Age of Abundance–An Age of Abundance, An Age of Abundance, An Age of Abundance mass production, Interchangeable Parts–Conflicting Constraints Lead to Rigidity, Interchangeable Parts, Conflicting Constraints Lead to Rigidity standardization and, Interchangeable Parts–Conflicting Constraints Lead to Rigidity, Interchangeable Parts, Conflicting Constraints Lead to Rigidity Maverick (Semler), Democratic Management at Semco McCarthy, Patrick D., Freedom to

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Experiment, Not Enough Autonomy Spector, Robert, Freedom to Experiment, The Nordstrom Way standards and standardization, Interchangeable Parts–Conflicting Constraints Lead to Rigidity, Conflicting Constraints Lead to Rigidity, Reducing Variety, Reducing Variety, Loose Coupling customers resisting, Reducing Variety interchangeable parts, Interchangeable Parts–Conflicting Constraints Lead to Rigidity, Conflicting Constraints Lead to Rigidity loose coupling and, Loose Coupling

Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks (Cambridge Studies in the Emergence of Global Enterprise)

by Andrew L. Russell  · 27 Apr 2014  · 675pp  · 141,667 words

in an ad hoc manner within individual firms. The “American system of manufactures” that was born in the federal armories relied on the use of interchangeable parts to facilitate faster and more efficient production. As mechanical engineers moved from the armories to firms that made other products, including machine tools, farm equipment

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brought with them techniques and tools that could mechanize production, which they hoped would make manufacturing more efficient and profitable. Some firms did not embrace interchangeable parts but nevertheless developed their own standard practices in custom and batch production to make products such as locomotives, furniture, and jewelry. On the whole, there

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standardization with the level of coordination employed by governments in Western Europe. Instead, de facto standards for American industrial production emerged from the practices of interchangeable parts manufacturing in a variety of machine tool–based industries.13 Rather than depending on the federal government to coordinate economic activity, antebellum Americans were prolific

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor

by David S. Landes  · 14 Sep 1999  · 1,060pp  · 265,296 words

trains of these machines were known as “clockwork.” The repetitious work of these machines suggested in turn the first experiments in mass production based on interchangeable parts (clocks, guns, gun carriages, pulley blocks, locks, hardware, furniture). All these gains, plus the invention of machines to build machines, came together in the last

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tools became available, division of labor was enhancing productivity. The later interest of the young American republic in the mass production of small arms using interchangeable parts was anticipated well before the revolution. Thus the colonists imported and copied models of European devices and machines, and skilled machinists and craftsmen were invited

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faith at will, while the natives were slandered as “Indian givers.” Here, too, technology made the difference. Repeating weapons, batch-or mass-produced with roughly interchangeable parts, multiplied the firepower of even small numbers and made Indian resistance hopeless. Of course, many Americans are sorry now, while Europeans invite Indian chiefs to

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its own—the production of machines and machine-made objects. The first hints of trouble came in American clocks and firearms, mass-produced with quasi-interchangeable parts.18 In 1854, the British government sent a mission to the United States to look further into this “American system.” Back came the message that

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. 1997a. Engineering the Revolution: Areas and Enlightenment in France, 1763-1815. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press. —————. 1997b. “Innovation and Amnesia: Engineering Rationality and the Fate of Interchangeable Parts Manufacture in France,” Technology and Culture, 38, 2 (April): 273-311. Alexander, David. 1970. Retailing in England During the Industrial Revolution. London: Athlone Press. Algazi

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity

by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson  · 15 May 2023  · 619pp  · 177,548 words

machinery gives greater productive force to the laborer it is possible to pay him more.” This was one outcome of Eli Whitney’s focus on interchangeable parts, which strove to build standard pieces that could be combined in different ways, making it easier for unskilled workers to produce guns. Whitney himself described

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a “systems approach,” combining specialized machinery and labor to increase efficiency. The gains were evident to the British Parliamentary Committee inspecting American arms factories using interchangeable parts: “The workman whose business it is to ‘assemble’ or set up the arms, takes the different parts promiscuously from a row of boxes, and uses

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out at one end with a small chisel.” This was not a deskilling technology, however. A former superintendent at Samuel Colt’s armory noted that interchangeable parts reduced labor requirements by “about 50 per cent” but required “first-class labour and the highest price is paid for it.” In fact, quality output

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formed with inventor Allen B. Wilson started out producing fewer than 800 machines in 1853 using traditional handcraft methods. By the 1870s, it had introduced interchangeable parts and new specialized machine tools, and its annual output exceeded 170,000 units. Soon the Singer sewing machine company went further, combining

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interchangeable parts, specialized machinery, and better designs, and was producing more than 500,000 units per year. Woodworking and then bicycles were the next industries to be

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in Chapter 6, the American path of technology strove to raise productivity to make better use of labor that was relatively in short supply. The interchangeable parts system was first and foremost an effort to simplify the production process so that workers lacking in artisanal skills could produce high-quality products. Efforts

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early vehicles, known as models A, B, C, F, K, R, and S, were produced using techniques common in the industry, combining elements of the interchangeable parts system with artisanal skills. These were medium-priced automobiles serving a niche market. Henry Ford’s ambition from early on was to produce many more

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organized on a single floor and had a range of new electrical machinery. The plant combined the novel factory organization with full-scale adoption of interchangeable parts and, later, conveyor belts to achieve mass production. Around that time the company boasted: “We are making 40,000 cylinders, 10,000 engines, 40,000

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in the US South, paving the way for the expansion and intensification of slavery. 10. Eli Whitney was also a pioneer in the adoption of interchangeable parts in the US North, increasing the productivity of unskilled labor and reducing the need for skilled labor. This illustration shows machine gears designed by Charles

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the nineteenth-century US economy. We are not aware of any other accounts that have a similar theory, although many scholars emphasize the importance of interchangeable parts and the American System of Manufacturing in the early twentieth century—for example, in the context of the introduction of new electrical machinery and especially

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]) and Noble (1977). The central role we give to electricity and the reorganization of factories that enabled the introduction of advanced machinery and more advanced interchangeable parts draws on Hounshell (1984) and Nye (1992, 1998). Our discussion of the Ford factories also follows these references. Rosenberg (1972) is the basis for our

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Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World

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Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology

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Reskilling America: Learning to Labor in the Twenty-First Century

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Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion ofSafety

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The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008

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Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto

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MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World

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Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data

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The Bonfire of the Vanities

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The Making of Global Capitalism

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Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight

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A Man and His Ship: America's Greatest Naval Architect and His Quest to Build the S.S. United States

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Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis

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A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet

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Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

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The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine Is in Your Hands

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Inflated: How Money and Debt Built the American Dream

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1,000 Places to See in the United States and Canada Before You Die, Updated Ed.

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How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World

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Jennifer Morgue

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Two Nations, Indivisible: A History of Inequality in America: A History of Inequality in America

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Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local - and Helped Save an American Town

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The Market for Force: The Consequences of Privatizing Security

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The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature

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Tomorrowland: Our Journey From Science Fiction to Science Fact

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Crude Volatility: The History and the Future of Boom-Bust Oil Prices

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Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products

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An Empire of Wealth: Rise of American Economy Power 1607-2000

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The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

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