Part 8 (1/2)

The youngest of these brothers, Edwin Augustus Stevens, dying in 1868, left a large part of his fortune to found the Stevens Inst.i.tute of Technology, afterwards erected at Hoboken not far from the old family homestead on Castle Point. The mechanical star of the family, however, was the second brother, Robert Livingston Stevens, whose many inventions made for the great improvement of transportation both by land and water.

For a quarter of a century, from 1815 to 1840, he was the foremost builder of steamboats in America, and under his hand the steamboat increased amazingly in speed and efficiency. He made great contributions to the railway. The first locomotives ran upon wooden stringers plated with strap iron. A loose end--”a snakehead” it was called--sometimes curled up and pierced through the floor of a car, causing a wreck. The solid metal T-rail, now in universal use, was designed by Stevens and was first used on the Camden and Amboy Railroad, of which he was president and his brother Edwin treasurer and manager. The swivel truck and the cow-catcher, the modern method of attaching rails to ties, the vestibule car, and many improvements in the locomotive were also first introduced on the Stevens road.

The Stevens brothers exerted their influence also on naval construction.

A double invention of Robert and Edwin, the forced draft, to augment steam power and save coal, and the air-tight fireroom, which they applied to their own vessels, was afterwards adopted by all navies.

Robert designed and projected an ironclad battles.h.i.+p, the first one in the world. This vessel, called the Stevens Battery, was begun by authority of the Government in 1842; but, owing to changes in the design and inadequate appropriations by Congress, it was never launched. It lay for many years in the basin at Hoboken an unfinished hulk. Robert died in 1856. On the outbreak of the Civil War, Edwin tried to revive the interest of the Government, but by that time the design of the Stevens Battery was obsolete, and Edwin Stevens was an old man. So the honors for the construction of the first ironclad man-of-war to fight and win a battle went to John Ericsson, that other great inventor, who built the famous Monitor for the Union Government.

Carlyle's oft-quoted term, ”Captains of Industry,” may fittingly be applied to the Stevens family. Strong, masterful, and fa.r.s.eeing, they used ideas, their own and those of others, in a large way, and were able to succeed where more timorous inventors failed. Without the stimulus of poverty they achieved success, making in their shops that combination of men and material which not only added to their own fortunes but also served the world.

We left Eli Whitney defeated in his efforts to divert to himself some adequate share of the untold riches arising from his great invention of the cotton gin. Whitney, however, had other sources of profit in his own character and mechanical ability. As early as 1798 he had turned his talents to the manufacture of firearms. He had established his shops at Whitneyville, near New Haven; and it was there that he worked out another achievement quite as important economically as the cotton gin, even though the immediate consequences were less spectacular: namely, the principle of standardization or interchangeability in manufacture.

This principle is the very foundation today of all American large-scale production. The manufacturer produces separately thousands of copies of every part of a complicated machine, confident that an equal number of the complete machine will be a.s.sembled and set in motion. The owner of a motor car, a reaper, a tractor, or a sewing machine, orders, perhaps by telegraph or telephone, a broken or lost part, taking it for granted that the new part can be fitted easily and precisely into the place of the old.

Though it is probable that this idea of standardization, or interchangeability, originated independently in Whitney's mind, and though it is certain that he and one of his neighbors, who will be mentioned presently, were the first manufacturers in the world to carry it out successfully in practice, yet it must be noted that the idea was not entirely new. We are told that the system was already in operation in England in the manufacture of s.h.i.+p's blocks. From no less an authority than Thomas Jefferson we learn that a French mechanic had previously conceived the same idea.* But, as no general result whatever came from the idea in either France or England, the honors go to Whitney and North, since they carried it to such complete success that it spread to other branches of manufacturing. And in the face of opposition. When Whitney wrote that his leading object was ”to subst.i.tute correct and effective operations of machinery for that skill of the artist which is acquired only by long practice and experience,” in order to make the same parts of different guns ”as much like each other as the successive impressions of a copper-plate engraving,” he was laughed to scorn by the ordnance officers of France and England. ”Even the Was.h.i.+ngton officials,” says Roe, ”were sceptical and became uneasy at advancing so much money without a single gun having been completed, and Whitney went to Was.h.i.+ngton, taking with him ten pieces of each part of a musket.

He exhibited these to the Secretary of War and the army officers interested, as a succession of piles of different parts. Selecting indiscriminately from each of the piles, he put together ten muskets, an achievement which was looked on with amazement.”**

* See the letter from Jefferson to John Jay, of April 30, 1785, cited in Roe, ”English and American Tool Builders”, p.

129.

** Roe, ”English and American Tool Builders”, p. 133.

While Whitney worked out his plans at Whitneyville, Simeon North, another Connecticut mechanic and a gunmaker by trade, adopted the same system. North's first shop was at Berlin. He afterwards moved to Middletown. Like Whitney, he used methods far in advance of the time.

Both Whitney and North helped to establish the United States a.r.s.enals at Springfield, Ma.s.sachusetts, and at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, in which their methods were adopted. Both the Whitney and North plants survived their founders. Just before the Mexican War the Whitney plant began to use steel for gun barrels, and Jefferson Davis, Colonel of the Mississippi Rifles, declared that the new guns were ”the best rifles which had ever been issued to any regiment in the world.” Later, when Davis became Secretary of War, he issued to the regular army the same weapon.

The perfection of Whitney's tools and machines made it possible to employ workmen of little skill or experience. ”Indeed so easy did Mr.

Whitney find it to instruct new and inexperienced workmen, that he uniformly preferred to do so, rather than to combat the prejudices of those who had learned the business under a different system.”*

This reliance upon the machine for precision and speed has been a distinguis.h.i.+ng mark of American manufacture. A man or a woman of little actual mechanical skill may make an excellent machine tender, learning to perform a few simple motions with great rapidity.

* Denison Olmstead, ”Memoir”, cited by Roe, p. 159.

Whitney married in 1817 Miss Henrietta Edwards, daughter of Judge Pierpont Edwards, of New Haven, and granddaughter of Jonathan Edwards.

His business prospered, and his high character, agreeable manners, and sound judgment won. for him the highest regard of all who knew him; and he had a wide circle of friends. It is said that he was on intimate terms with every President of the United States from George Was.h.i.+ngton to John Quincy Adams. But his health had been impaired by hards.h.i.+ps endured in the South, in the long struggle over the cotton gin, and he died in 1825, at the age of fifty-nine. The business which he founded remained in his family for ninety years. It was carried on after his death by two of his nephews and then by his son, until 1888, when it was sold to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company of New Haven.

Here then, in these early New England gunshops, was born the American system of interchangeable manufacture. Its growth depended upon the machine tool, that is, the machine for making machines. Machine tools, of course, did not originate in America. English mechanics were making machines for cutting metal at least a generation before Whitney. One of the earliest of these English pioneers was John Wilkinson, inventor and maker of the boring machine which enabled Boulton and Watt in 1776 to bring their steam engine to the point of practicability. Without this machine Watt found it impossible to bore his cylinders with the necessary degree of accuracy.* From this one fact, that the success of the steam engine depended upon the invention of a new tool, we may judge of what a great part the inventors of machine tools, of whom thousands are unnamed and unknown, have played in the industrial world.

* Roe, ”English and American Tool Builders”, p. 1 et seq.

So it was in the shops of the New England gunmakers that machine tools were first made of such variety and adaptability that they could be applied generally to other branches of manufacturing; and so it was that the system of interchangeable manufacture arose as a distinctively American development. We have already seen how England's policy of keeping at home the secrets of her machinery led to the independent development of the spindles and looms of New England. The same policy affected the tool industry in America in the same way and bred in the new country a race of original and resourceful mechanics.

One of these pioneers was Thomas Blanchard, born in 1788 on a farm in Worcester County, Ma.s.sachusetts, the home also of Eli Whitney and Elias Howe. Tom began his mechanical career at the age of thirteen by inventing a device to pare apples. At the age of eighteen he went to work in his brother's shop, where tacks were made by hand, and one day took to his brother a mechanical device for counting the tacks to go into a single packet. The invention was adopted and was found to save the labor of one workman. Tom's next achievement was a machine to make tacks, on which he spent six years and the rights of which he sold for five thousand dollars. It was worth far more, for it revolutionized the tack industry, but such a sum was to young Blanchard a great fortune.

The tack-making machine gave Blanchard a reputation, and he was presently sought out by a gun manufacturer, to see whether he could improve the lathe for turning the barrels of the guns. Blanchard could; and did. His next problem was to invent a lathe for turning the irregular wooden stocks. Here he also succeeded and produced a lathe that would copy precisely and rapidly any pattern. It is from this invention that the name of Blanchard is best known. The original machine is preserved in the United States Armory at Springfield, to which Blanchard was attached for many years, and where scores of the descendants of his copying lathe may be seen in action today.

Turning gunstocks was, of course, only one of the many uses of Blanchard's copying lathe. Its chief use, in fact, was in the production of wooden lasts for the shoemakers of New England, but it was applied to many branches of wood manufacture, and later on the same principle was applied to the shaping of metal.

Blanchard was a man of many ideas. He built a steam vehicle for ordinary roads and was an early advocate of railroads; he built steamboats to ply upon the Connecticut and incidentally produced in connection with these his most profitable invention, a machine to bend s.h.i.+p's timbers without splintering them. The later years of his life were spent in Boston, and he often served as a patent expert in the courts, where his wide knowledge, hard common sense, incisive speech, and homely wit made him a welcome witness.