The Dawn of Innovation (12 page)

Some other difficulties, especially in the assembly of the machine, are instructive. Swade's words:

The team did not quite make their schedule. They had preannounced a test case, computing a table of the digits 1 through 80 raised to the seventh power. The machine readily made the calculations but repeatedly failed to get through the entire list before something jammed. Since the test case had been preannounced, they feared that their miss would make the whole project look like a failure. After shamefacedly explaining their shortfall at a crowded press conference, they started the engine and discovered, happily, that no one cared about their test. Swade writes that the crank handle was turned, and “the rhythmic clanking and the shifting array of bronze wheels begins. The helical carry mechanisms perform their rippling dance. There are murmurs as the motions enthral and seduce. The visual spectacle of the engine works its magic. As a static exhibit, the engine is a superb piece of engineering sculpture. As a working machine, even partially working, it is arresting.... The Engine has cast its spell, and later that day the coverage is ungrudgingly triumphalist.”
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Within some weeks, the DE2 was flawlessly executing the test exercise over and over again. All in all, the exercise was a stupendous success and a classic example of the contributions to history and science of the best science museums.

The experience may also suggest that the various authorities who declined to provide Babbage the open-ended support he had demanded made the right decision. In ten years of off-and-on work on the DE1, Clement completed some 12,000 gears, about half the required total. Swade and his subcontractors produced 4,000 such parts in just six months using a large number of subcontractors in pattern making, gear cutting, case hardening,
and many other subtrades. Gears were cut and parts were shaped with CNC (computerized numerical control) machines that can machine hundreds or thousands of parts to precise specifications with great consistency. At the level of precision that Clement was working to—2/1,000 of an inch, according to Swade's sample—it would have been very difficult for him to replicate the museum team's accomplishment. In 1830s the technology of precise working drawings and reliable dimensioning tools was still in its infancy. Identical parts were made so by laboriously fitting them to other parts. Drift away from uniformity would have been hard to avoid. And recall the problems Swade's team had in placing and orienting all the different parts, despite the high precision of CNC machining. It would have been much harder in Babbage's day. Even with the best of will and resources, it is easy to imagine the project collapsing in ignominious failure with finger-pointing and rancor on all sides.
^q

An intellectual achievement as monumental as the Analytical Engine is its own justification, and Babbage deserves a high place in history for it. But like Whitworth's millionth-of-an-inch measuring machine, it was another beautiful British dead end. Swade notes that Babbage never considered the cost-benefit aspect of his great projects, assuming that government officials would be as drawn as he was to “ingenuity, intricacy, mastery of mechanism, and the seductive appeal of control over number.”
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Babbage was undoubtedly at the extreme end of other-worldliness, but he had a large and responsive audience. A book he published in 1833,
On the Economy of Machinery and Manufacturing
,
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has an arid, academic tone; the first third is an exhaustive classification of machines as those for “Accumulating Power,” “Regulating Power,” “Extending the Time of Action
of Forces,” and much else in that vein. Yet the first printing of 3,000 copies was sold out within a few weeks, and there were two more editions the next year. (The first printing of Charles Dickens's
A Christmas Carol
, deemed “an immediate success with the public,” sold 6,000 copies.)

Babbage opens his book with a paean that played directly into the growing British self-satisfaction with their industrial triumphs:

The book positioned him as a thought leader in achieving a new synthesis of traditional culture and manufacturing. Instead of merely lamenting Blake's “dark Satanic mills,” thinkers like Carlyle extolled the coming of an “organic society” that integrated the “Dynamical” and “Mechanical” aspects of human nature.
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Babbage plays directly to that sentiment, emphasizing the utilitarian beauty of machines and the elegant objects of art—the machined rosettes, lithographs, and engravings—that they can produce, or reproduce, for the masses.

Great Britain's mid-century Crystal Palace Exhibition (see Chapter 7) was organized on much the same principle: it celebrated not only the nation's technical preeminence but also the new intellectual order it signified. The exhibition's royal patron, Prince Albert, organized a yearlong lecture series to explore precisely that theme: that industrial capitalism was allowing “man to approach a more complete fulfillment of that great and sacred mission which he has to perform in this world.” (There can be no doubt that by “man” he meant Anglo-Saxons.) The inaugural lecture was
delivered by the master of Trinity College, William Whewell, who eulogized “the Machinery mighty as the thunderbolt to rend the oak, or light as the breath of air that carries the flower-dust to its appointed place.”
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Self-satisfaction is a dangerous sentiment for any competitor but may be understandable in the British case, since with Napoleon vanquished, there were no obvious threats on the horizon. Yet the country's industrial revolution was advanced enough that both proprietors and workers were deeply invested in established methods. Scar tissue still remained from the fierce Luddite attacks against textile mills in the first years of the century, and the severely repressive response of the government. With the production machinery seemingly working well enough, it was seductively easy to ignore British industrial rigidities and concentrate instead on attractive challenges, like pushing out the boundaries of precision or defining a new aesthetic for an industrial age.

The Americans had no such inclinations, and since they were starting over, they faced almost no entrenched interests. Ironically, what became an American specialty, the extension of the textile-mill model of mechanized mass production to almost every major industry, was also pioneered in Great Britain, but the innovation was stillborn. The story requires winding the camera back to a critical juncture in the Napoleonic wars.

The prototype for all plants engaged in mass production of heavy industrial goods by self-acting machinery is the famous British ship-block factory at Portsmouth. It was the creation of the young Henry Maudslay and two other extraordinary men, Samuel Bentham and Marc Isambard Brunel, and was in full operation the first years of the century.
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Bentham, the younger brother of the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy, was a naval architect, an inventor, and something of an adventurer. He traveled to Russia as a young man to examine mining and engineering works, was a social hit at the Russian court, fell in love with a young noblewoman, and became the close friend of the Most Serene Prince Grigory
Alexandrovich Potemkin, himself a special favorite of Catherine the Great. Bentham created Western-style factories on Potemkin's estate, built a fleet of warships, distinguished himself in Russia's sea battles against the Turks, and may have been the first to use shells in naval artillery. On his return to England, his top-drawer connections helped secure him an appointment as inspector general of the navy. Among his many talents, he was an inventor with strong ideas about mechanizing the shipyards.

Brunel, a native of France, was a royalist naval officer forced to flee the avenging angels of the French Revolution. Landing in America, he worked for a half-dozen years designing canals and harbor fortifications, building a cannon foundry, and serving as chief engineer of New York City. Brunel was also a machinery inventor who filed many patents over his lifetime. At dinner at Alexander Hamilton's home, a guest held forth on Great Britain's struggle to produce ship blocks—a problem that Brunel was convinced he knew how to solve. Not yet thirty, he embarked for London, the home of his fiancée, a well-connected young Englishwoman, whom he had courted during his flight from France. He duly married on his return and became one of London's leading engineers, most famous for his pedestrian tunnel under the Thames at Rotherhite. (It took more than twenty years to complete and nearly brought him to ruin.)

Ship blocks—the enclosed pulleys that managed the miles of rope on a warship—were made of solid blocks of wood, with slots, or mortises, for one to four sheaves, or rotating pulleys. The shells were cut from logs of elm, while the sheaves were made of imported lignum vitae, a very hard and durable wood. The sheaves turned on pins made of either lignum vitae or iron, encased in friction-reducing brass bushings, or coaks. Major warships needed somewhere between 1,000 and 1,400 ship blocks, ranging in size from single-sheaved blocks a few inches long to four-sheaved blocks standing nearly four feet high. Badly made blocks could snag rigging, slow maneuvers, and endanger a ship. A single family had enjoyed an effective monopoly over naval ship-block making for nearly fifty years. Their factories were partially mechanized, but Bentham thought them excessively expensive; he had himself developed designs for more efficient machine production.

Brunel arrived in England with fairly complete drawings for four block-making machines and with a working model of at least one of them. He first met with the contractors, who had little interest in his plans, and then secured an appointment with Bentham. Before the meeting, he contracted for two more working models, fortuitously with Maudslay, who was only recently set up in his own shop. (A French acquaintance in London regularly strolled by Maudslay's shop and told Brunel of the beauty of the display pieces in the window.) Brunel was worried about premature disclosure and at their first meeting refused to tell Maudslay the purpose of his designs. But at the second meeting, Maudslay said, “Ah! Now I see what you are thinking of; you want machinery for making blocks!”
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The Bentham-Brunel meeting, when it took place sometime in mid-1801, was a vendor's dream. Bentham examined the drawings and the models, generously pronounced them superior to his own, and arranged an early demonstration before the naval board. A contract was awarded in 1802, and Brunel was appointed manager of a new works to be erected at Portsmouth. Maudslay began delivering machines before the end of the year. The new plant was in full production and the old contractors were out of business before the end of 1805. There were two production streams, one for the blocks and one for the sheaves. The metal pins and coaks continued to be produced by traditional methods.

The block production line started with a phalanx of saws of different sizes to cut elm logs into square blocks, followed by a succession of boring, chiseling, sawing, and shaping machines to place and cut the mortises and pin channels, trim and shape the blocks, and cut the channels for the straps that secured them in the rigging.

The sheave line began with specialty crown saws, which looked like a king's crown lying on its side, with a saw size for each type of sheave. A succession of three machines centered and cut the coak holes in the rough-sawn sheaves, placed and riveted the coaks, and reamed the coak holes into true cylinders. Finally, the sheaves were turned in a lathe that trimmed the face and edges to flat surfaces, and cut the pulley grooves for ropes.

There were just two manual processes in the woodworking: sand-finishing the blocks and the final assembly of the shells and sheavings. The total of all machines, including the saws, was about forty-five.

The machines themselves were classic Maudslay: precision slide rests, screw drives, and gear changers resting in a heavy cast-iron base. Cutting tools were of the best tool steel, and almost all of the machines were self-acting. When a mortise was cut through, for instance, an automatic stop triggered a new sequence to reposition the tool and move the block to the next cut. Only the facing machine required the presence of a skilled turner.

The factory was in full operation for more than fifty years, and no machine was ever replaced. A brochure from 1854 reports that “the only noise arises from the instruments actually in contact with work under execution, and none from the working of the machinery,” but that's the way all Maudslay machines worked.
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The plant phased down as the age of iron and steel warships dawned, and the machines were gradually moved to museums, although some of the original machines ran for up to 145 years.