The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan Invented the American Supercompany

by Charles R. Morris

  It took almost five years, but in 1824 Hall could finally invite Calhoun and Bomford, who had recently moved up to Ordnance chief, to examine a production run of rifles manufactured on his principles. They could see for themselves “the manner in which the several parts, promiscuously taken, came together, fitted and adapted to each other.” Just as important, the guns had been manufactured almost entirely with unskilled machine operatives. Both men were much impressed, but before Bomford could move forward with a further contract, Congress intervened, demanding Hall’s dismissal. The Virginia delegation, after years of complaints from Harpers Ferry, insisted on a full investigation into the alleged “waste & extravagance of the Publick money on the Patent Rifle.” Bomford had no choice but to suspend all production activities pending a full field trial of the rifles and an external review of Hall’s manufacturing methods.

  One of the many critical steps toward precision manufacturing was to establish precise gauges for each part. This is a partial gauging set for an 1841 Springfield Armory rifle. John Hall’s carbines had sixty-three separate gauges like these.

  Two more years were consumed convening the review boards and completing the investigations, but the final reports were stunning vindications of Hall. After a five-month field trial, the military board expressed “its perfect conviction of the superiority of this Arm over every other kind of Small Arm now in use,” and supplied a statistical analysis of its great advantages in speed of firing, accuracy, and durability.

  The manufacturing review was even more glowing. Hall’s system was adjudged to be “entirely novel” with “the most benefitial results to the country.” The inspectors, who were all experienced men, had never before seen arms “made so exactly similar to each other . . . [that] parts, on being changed, would suit equally well when applied to every other arm.” They conducted an experiment of freely intermixing parts from 200 rifles drawn from different annual production runs and found that “We were unable to discover any inaccuracy in any of their parts.” Overall, they pronounced Hall’s work “greatly superior to anything we have ever seen or expected to see in the manufacture of small arms”—especially since it was mostly executed by “boys from twelve to fifteen years of age, at small wages.” The board concluded by noting Hall’s poor working conditions and hoped that he might “receive that patronage from the Government that his talents, science, and mechanical ingenuity deserve.”

  The board’s hopes were in vain. Spectacular as they were, the reviews still did not quell the sniping from Congress and Harpers Ferry. Bomford at least was able to protect Hall’s contract, although it was renegotiated on less favorable terms. When state militias in 1828 demanded to be supplied with Hall rifles, the manufacturing contract, larger than any Hall had been awarded, went to Simeon North, of Middletown, Connecticut. In part to ease Hall’s disappointment, Bomford made him inspector of North’s output. The relationship got off to a rocky start when Hall arrived at Middletown with his full panoply of gauges and pronounced North’s output unacceptable. But North was one of America’s great gunsmiths—he had invented the milling machine and had tried to fabricate pistols with interchangeable parts as early as 1807—and as he came to understand Hall’s achievement, he replicated the system in his own factory. It took another several years, but in 1834, Hall and North proudly demonstrated to the War Department that parts from both Middletown and Harpers Ferry could be “promiscuously” intermixed and readily reassembled into perfectly functional rifles.

  By then Hall was in his midfifties, and seems to have wearied of the struggle. None of his manufacturing innovations was patentable, since they had all been developed while he was in government employ. His rifle, good as it was, was slowly becoming obsolete, and was soon eclipsed by more modern weapons, from gunsmiths like Christian Sharps—the Sharps rifle may have been the favorite of Union troops—and B. Tyler Henry, whose Henry rifle was a prototype for the long-running Winchester. Hall quietly continued on salary at Harpers Ferry, tinkering with his system until his death in 1841. His place in the story gradually faded into a mere footnote—as one popular history written in the 1950s put it, “. . . by 1820, Hall, using Whitney’s techniques of interchangeable manufacture, was turning out his rifles at Harpers Ferry.”

  The American Machine Tradition

  The American fascination with machine production is a distinguishing feature of its leap to the front ranks of manufacturing powers. The collection of manufacturing technologies developed by Hall, Blanchard, and, later, men like Thomas Warner and Cyrus Buckland at the Springfield Armory has been dubbed “Armory practice” by the historian David Hounshell, and was a key element in the American technologic gene pool. Merritt Roe Smith has traced the numerous skilled machinists who passed through Harpers Ferry in Hall’s day, did their stint at Springfield, and later became key managers throughout the pantheon of great Valley plants—Simeon North’s, Nathan Ames & Co., Robbins and Lawrence, Browne and Sharpe. The ties between North, who had replicated Hall’s system, and Robbins and Lawrence were very close; and the perfect interchangeability of the rifles that Robbins and Lawrence demonstrated at the Crystal Palace Exhibition were a textbook case of the Hall tradition. Browne and Sharpe, whose connections to Hall ran through Robbins and Lawrence, demonstrated their mastery of the technology in the 1850s by producing the Willcox and Gibbs sewing machines to Armory standards of exactness.

  More important than actually achieving parts interchangeability was the commitment to a total Hall-style precision-machining environment. Samuel Colt’s great factory at “Coltsville” in Hartford, Connecticut, which became the Mecca of the “American system” in the 1850s, is a case in point. Colt was a promoter, not an engineer, who once made his living staging laughing gas exhibitions. He devised his repeating firearms in the mid-1830s, but his breakthrough did not happen until the Mexican War (1846–48), when his pistol design caught the fancy of Samuel Walker, the legendary commander of the Texas Rangers. With Walker’s support, Colt won a patent renewal in 1849 and set up his own factory. To run it, he recruited Elisha K. Root, the manager of an axe and edge-tool factory. Colt made the announcement with his typical George Steinbrenner-like flair: Elisha Root would be “the highest-paid mechanic in New England, if not in the entire country.”

  Root was a great manufacturer, who made signal contributions to forging and milling technology, and he created one of the outstanding early American factory environments. As one historian has put it, “[C]redit for the revolver belongs to Colt; for the way they were made, mainly to Root.” Although he never drove down to that nthdegree of precision that Hall had achieved, all of the basic Armory production hallmarks were in place in Root’s factories—precise designs, special-purpose machinery, detailed gauging, multitier inspections. As a visiting British engineer noted of the Root factory, “[I]t is impossible to go through that work without coming away a better engineer.”

  The Valley’s influence reached far beyond metal fabrication. Alexander Holley, America’s greatest steel engineer in the 1870s and early 1880s, who was responsible for almost all American steel plant designs, was a true son of the Valley, and almost certainly knew Root. They were from the same area of Connecticut, and Holley’s father, who served a term as state governor, was a cutlery manufacturer like Root. Holley’s plants were a radical departure from those abroad, exhibiting all the features of the broader American machine tradition—continuous processing, the mechanization of unreliable hand processes, and John Hall’s style of reconceiving a process down through the finest-grained of production details. British visitors to American steel plants were astonished—not just at their scale and speed but by the “very conspicuous absence of labourers.”

  Strict Armory practice came into full flower with the rise of America’s mass consumer society in the 1880s; indeed, it made it possible. Isaac Singer was a marketing genius who achieved world dominance for his sewing machine. Although he did not manufacture to Armory standards of precision, he ran a well-organized factory
system that served until about 1880, when sales soared past the 500,000 mark and Singer suddenly found himself in replacement-parts hell. At his company’s rate of growth, the world couldn’t supply the craftsmen to keep up with his service and repair requirements. Other companies, like McCormick and the Ball Glass Co., faced up to their problems at about the same time as Singer, while Colt did so a full decade before. In case after case, the men they called on to retool their factories and clean up their processes were in a direct lineage from the old Robbins and Lawrence, Nathan Ames, and other Connecticut Valley tool companies, the true creators of the “American system” more than a half century before.

  The list of spinoff benefits could be extended almost indefinitely. Machining steam engine parts to the hundredths, rather than the sixteenths, of an inch greatly improved fuel efficiency and power output. The push toward precision spotlighted improvement opportunities in cutting steels, metal alloys, lubricants, machine power trains, and an ever-expanding host of other satellite industries. Perhaps most important was a style of problem solving. The fact that Americans typically thought of machine solutions as a first recourse, an integral part of almost any production process, was a major factor in the seemingly effortless move up to manufacturing scales previously undreamed of.

  The British Reaction

  The Crystal Palace demonstrations by Colt and Robbins and Lawrence came at a time when British civil servants and military officials were struggling with the dark side of imperial glory. Conquest required vast armies and massive supplies of ordnance, and British gunsmiths were not keeping pace. Production had greatly expanded, but at the cost of a distressing falloff in quality. The notion of interchangeable parts was especially attractive, since far-flung armies could not be reliably supplied with the skilled craftsmen to keep hand-crafted weapons in good repair.

  But even civil servants who believed the American claims were stymied by the radicalism of the innovations. The workings of the British gun industry were reasonably typical of mid-nineteenth-century manufacturing. It was craft-based and included at least forty trades, each with its own apprenticeship system and organization. The gunsmiths were concentrated in Birmingham; there were about 7,500 in all, about half of them parts makers, with the rest employed as “setters-up,” or finishers, generally the most skilled men. Under the typical contract, each of the trades produced its own type of parts, which were shipped to the government for inspection before being assigned to the finishers for assembly. The most labor-intensive finishing task was stock-making, which consumed about a fourth of all the finishers, while the most skilled men were the lock-filers. The gunlock, the key firing mechanism, was the most complicated part, and lock-filers spent years as apprentices learning to painstakingly hand-file the forty or so separate lock pieces to create a unified assembly with a smooth and consistent action. When the Americans breezily described machine-made stocks, and locks that required no hand fitting, they sounded as if they were smoking opium.

  Parliamentary and military advocates for reform were greatly bolstered by the opening of Colt’s British factory in 1853. It was the first Colt plant designed entirely by Root, and drew a continuing stream of industrial pilgrims. The awestruck comments of British engineers are strikingly reminiscent of the comments of American automobile executives upon first visiting Japanese plants in the 1970s and 1980s. One visitor reported to an official inquiry that Colt’s factory

  produced a very impressive effect, such as I shall never forget. The first impression was to humble me very considerably. I was in a manner introduced to such a masterly extension of what I knew to be correct principles, but extended in so masterly and wholesale a manner, as made me feel we were very far behind. . . . In those American tools there is a common-sense way of going to the point at once, that I was quite struck with: there is great simplicity . . . no ornamentation, no rubbing away of corners, or polishing; but the precise, accurate, and correct results.

  The second important event of 1853 was a major industrial exhibit in New York, planned as a riposte to the great exhibition at the Crystal Palace. Parliament authorized a delegation for a firsthand look, and the two men chosen as delegation leaders attest to the seriousness of the trip: they were George Wallis, England’s leading industrial arts educator, and Joseph Whitworth, arguably Britain’s greatest machinist.

  To history’s lasting benefit, the American exhibition was an organizational fiasco, and was still months from opening when the Whitworth-Wallis delegation arrived in New York. Rather than waste the voyage, the two men divided up their research priorities and undertook separate tours, attempting to gain a comprehensive view of American industrial prowess. They covered thousands of miles, with each man making several return trips, visiting factories throughout the country in virtually every major industry, carefully noting production statistics and methods, the organization of work, the use of advanced machinery, the attitudes of tradesmen, and the social conditions of factories. Both made written reports and supplied extensive supporting testimony to a parliamentary inquiry. The total body of the reports are uniquely informative surveys compiled by unusually well-qualified and disinterested experts.

  Their primary conclusion, as summarized by a parliamentary body, was that:

  [I]n the adaptation of special apparatus to a single operation in almost all branches of industry, the Americans display an amount of ingenuity, combined with undaunted energy, which as a nation we would do well to imitate, if we mean to hold our present position in the great market of the world.

  Whitworth was especially impressed with American prowess in woodworking machinery—Blanchard’s gun-stocking machine being merely a leading case:

  In no branch of manufacture does the application of labour-saving machinery produce by simple means more important results than in the working of wood. Wood being obtained in America in any quantity, it is there applied to every possible purpose, and its manufacture has received that attention which its importance deserves. . . . Many works in various towns are occupied exclusively in making doors, window frames, or staircases by means of self-acting machinery, such as planing, tenoning, morticing, and jointing machines. . . . In one of these manufactories twenty men were making panelled doors at the rate of 100 per day.

  For Parliament’s purposes, however, the most important findings came from Whitworth’s visits to Connecticut Valley gun makers and the federal armories, where he fully documented the reality of strict interchangeability. At Springfield, he insisted on repeated demonstrations of disassembling rifles from different annual production runs, mixing up the parts and then reassembling them without special tools. He also minutely documented the armory’s production schedules and manning. Jaws dropped when he reported the elapsed time to produce a finished rifle stock at about twenty-two minutes, including about two minutes of manual interventions, compared to a half day or more of work by a skilled team of craftsmen in England. Final assembly—the job that in England was spread among more than a dozen different “finisher” craft types, each requiring years of training—took only three to three and a half minutes, with no special tools and no files. One could scoff at Yankees who made such claims, but Whitworth could not be so easily dismissed, even though he was effectively consigning entire proud branches of the British metal trades to the scrapheap.

  To their credit, Parliament and the military establishment, in the face of outraged political outcries from Birmingham, grasped the nettle and created a new government armory, located at Enfield. It was built entirely on American Armory principles, and outfitted with a full panoply of American machinery purchased primarily from Nathan Ames and Robbins and Lawrence. A measure of the commitment to correct principles was the hiring of James H. Burton, an American who learned his trade under John Hall, to set up the Enfield plant and initial operations. It was Enfield, of course, that produced the famed Enfield rifle that was the mainstay of the empire throughout the Victorian era.

  The man who adroitly managed the entire process—
from organizing the initial visits to America, through the successive parliamentary inquiries, the commitment to Enfield, and its construction and launch—was a splendid civil servant named John Anderson. With Enfield safely underway, he proudly stated his view of what was at stake:

  The American machinery is so different to our own, and so rich in suggestions that when fully organized it should be thrown open to the study of the machine makers of the kingdom. . . . A few hours at Enfield will show that we shall soon have to contend with no mean competitors in the Americans, who display an originality and common sense in most of their arrangements which are not to be despised, but on the contrary are either to be copied or improved upon.

  Anderson lived a long life; he made many other contributions to British armory practice, and was eventually knighted. But he must have been disappointed by the impact of the Enfield experiment. Outside of the military, British manufacturers were far less eager, and moved much more slowly, to adopt Armory practice, or the “American system.” The divergent experiences were a source of much comment by contemporary British and American observers, and remain of continuing interest to historians.