The Dawn of Innovation (21 page)

North married at twenty-one and took up farming on a sixty-six-acre plot in Berlin, about fifteen miles south of Hartford. He added to his acreage whenever he could, and in 1795, he acquired a tract with a stream, a sawmill, a dam, and waterpower rights. A natural mechanic, he kept the sawmill, added a forge, and started making scythes and other farming hardware for the local market. It is not known when he gave up farming to concentrate entirely on manufacturing.

 

North himself left few records, and the standard source is a 1913 biography written by two of his great-grandsons that reproduces many of the key documents relating to his arms business. More recently, the late Robert Jeska, a collector of North pistols, spent years tracking down every North reference in national and state archives to put together a near-complete story of his early pistol contracts, which he privately published along with a large trove of important documents. Along the way, Jeska clears up many gaps and errors in the official records.
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North's first pistol engagement came in the spring of 1799, the year after Whitney's first contract. Like Whitney, North had no gun-making experience; he most likely purchased the contract from another craftsman, who was serving as the chief coiner at the Philadelphia mint. The contract
was for five hundred cavalry pistols (the 1799s), following a French design, at $6.50 a pistol,
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with $2,000 in advance.
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That was followed up in February 1800 by a second contract for 1,500 pistols (the 1800s) and an additional $2,000 advance. He did not meet his schedules on either contract, and an unduly large portion of the 1799s were marked as “unserviceable.”
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The 1800s were completed nearly on schedule, however, and delivered throughout the country.

In June 1808, North made a new contract with the navy for 2,000 naval pistols (the 1808s), which were heavier and of larger caliber than cavalry pistols, with an eighteen-month delivery schedule and an advance of $4,000. The contract correspondence included North's well-known statement that “by confining a workman to one particular limb of the pistol until he has made the whole two thousand, I save at least one quarter of his labor, to what I should provided I finish them by small quantities, and the work will be much better as it is quicker made.”
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In the near-term, that strategy caused him no end of trouble. North devoted most of the first contract year to erecting a new factory and acquiring sufficient inventory to make all the components before assembly. In February 1809, the navy asked North if he could expedite the deliveries, because they wanted to increase the order. North responded enthusiastically. He would have “the whole of my barrels made for this contract within eight or ten weeks,” and as many as 800 were nearly ready for inspection.
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Naval procurement officers were delighted and requested 500 pistols as soon as possible. North was horrified and wrote that he didn't have any pistols, he was still just making
barrels
. The navy sent Isaac Chauncey, a hard but fair man, to inspect North's progress. There were indeed no pistols, and the barrels were disappointing—many were of different sizes and most needed to be rebored. Under Chauncey's pressure, North continued
to overpromise and underperform. He did not get his production untracked until 1810, and finally closed out the contract in early 1811.
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It was a black time for North. The navy repeatedly told him that they were “very much disappointed.” Indeed, growing frictions with Great Britain had forced them to scramble up and down the coast scrounging up enough pistols to get the fleet to sea. But as the war scare eased, the navy relented, pronounced themselves happy with North's pistols, and increased the contract by another five hundred, which were shipped in small batches until 1814. A substantial number of the 1808s went to Chauncey on Ontario, who would not have accepted them if they were defective.

Chauncey's inspection report also makes clear that North had not yet reached the point of making standard parts. Although he made his lock forgings in bulk, they still required extensive hand-trimming and fitting work. Like the armories and Whitney, North was still at the stage of exploiting division-of-labor efficiencies, without changing basic craft processes.

By this point, North was well established as a reliable arms manufacturer, but for some reason over the next few years, his performance slipped badly. As the production of the 1808s got untracked in 1811, North negotiated a contract for 2,000 horse pistols (the 1811s) with staged deliveries over the next two years. A few months later, the record shows him soliciting the navy for further contracts, claiming he was gearing up to produce 4,000 pistols a year.

With the advent of the war, small-arms purchasing shifted to the Commissary-General of Purchases, a new office in the Treasury filled by Callender Irvine, who launched a vendetta with Whitney
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and adopted North as a kind of counterexample of a good arms contractor. In the spring
of 1813, although only a small number of the 1811s had been delivered, North and Irvine executed a huge contract for 20,000 pistols on a modified design (the 1813s). North got an advance of $20,000 and agreed to complete the contract within five years. He also agreed to a clause requiring that “the component parts of pistols, are to correspond so exactly that any limb or part of one Pistol may be fitted to any other Pistol of the Twenty Thousand.”
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Then, in the midst of a war that was going badly, North's output nosedived. By the end of 1814, when the war effectively ended, North had produced only 756 of the contracted 2,000 1811s, and none at all against the massive 20,000-pistol contract, despite furious letters from Irvine, who was sorely embarrassed. That was most uncharacteristic of North. While he was often late because of unrealistic contract schedules, he usually worked at a steady pace and stayed within shouting distance of the original deadlines.

There are enough straws of evidence to prompt a guess as to what was happening. North had spent $100,000 on a new factory, a high price for the day. He had also indirectly complained to Irvine that the market price of pistols had risen well above his contract price. And there were also several instances of his selling, or trying to sell, pistols to various state militias. Finally, after the war he wrote to a naval procurement officer that he had 1,400 1811s in inventory that had never been inspected.
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Taken together, the evidence suggests that North may have been in financial trouble and was withholding pistols from Irvine in the hope of selling them on the open market, where he could get a better price without a deduction for advances. That wasn't illegal, but it was the kind of sharp practice not usually associated with North. Nevertheless, as we saw with Connecticut clock salesmen, the rest of the country had learned to be wary when doing business with Yankees.
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The war ended in early 1815, with the 1811s in limbo, and the 1813s in complete abeyance.
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Irvine was dismissed and Decius Wadsworth central-ized
army weapons procurement within the Department of Ordnance. He renewed North's big 1813 contract, with some design changes (the 1816s), and approved a $25,000 advance (North had asked for $60,000). Wadsworth cautioned North against accepting any other contracts and warned other branches of the government that North had all he could handle. By mid-1817, North was back on track producing the 1816s, although he did receive one sharp warning from Ordnance in 1818 about “the far inferior workmanship” of some deliveries.
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Before approving the new contract, Wadsworth asked the superintendents of the Springfield and Harpers Ferry armories to inspect North's plant, where they suggested that North may have made progress on the famous “interchangeability” clause in the 1813 contract—although neither Irvine nor anyone else seems to have mentioned it again. According to the superintendents, North was using a standard die to make all lock plates the same size, or very nearly so, with the various lock pieces individually fitted to the standard plate. Presumably, if part of a lock broke, the whole lock could be replaced by another of the same plate size, and most of the time it would work. That would have been near-interchangeability at the subassembly level, a very intelligent approach. Modern tests of several 1811s, 1813s, and 1816-model pistols produced in this factory, however, did not find that their locks interchanged. But in the longer run, as we will see, North did play an important role in achieving strict uniformity and interchangeability of firearms parts.
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The 1815 decision to centralize all small-arms procurement in the Ordnance Department was the product of intense personal lobbying by Wadsworth. He and his deputy, Lt. Col. George Bomford, had been at the epicenter of the wartime procurement chaos—the multiple overlapping lines of authority, the turf wars and infighting, the lack of standards. Irvine at Treasury had been a constant disruption. He seemed almost to enjoy overruling military specifications and frequently refused to pay for emergency field purchases.

Wadsworth, forty-seven years old in 1815, was a member of one of Connecticut's most prominent families, with many high-ranking military men in the family tree. Moderately wealthy, he was a career artillery officer and a creative engineer and inventor. As a young officer, he had worked under the great French artillerist Louis Tousard, the godfather of American artillery practice, author of the American artillerists' field manual, designer of West Point, and a devotée of French pioneers of interchangeability in arms making.

Bomford was twelve years younger than Wadsworth, of obscure provenance. His mother is unknown to history, while his father was apparently a British artillery officer. A chance acquaintance with an influential West Point graduate who recognized Bomford's talents opened the door to an appointment at the academy. Wadsworth recruited Bomford ten years after his graduation, when he had already distinguished himself as a fortification engineer and had invented a new type of cannon.
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At Wadsworth's death in 1821, Bomford replaced him as Ordnance chief, serving until 1842. He married well, gaining the political connections that were essential for success within the tightly knit ruling circles of the early United States.

Wadsworth and Bomford were bound together by their shared experience of the war. One or the other was constantly traveling during the war years, and their extensive correspondence illuminates the frustrations behind their reform agenda.

In Washington, Wadsworth's desk was awash in matters picayune and crucial alike. He personally ordered a drum, a fife, and dress swords for a recruiting party and then rushed to Albany to inspirit a dithering Dearborn amid the military calamities of the first summer. He created the first working inventory and reporting system for army weapons, oversaw the procurement of artillery carriages at Pittsburgh through a local contractor, intervened with Irvine to get the contractor paid, and then sent Bomford out to customize the carriages. Throughout the war he dispatched a stream of illustrated instructions for younger artillery officers: how to set up a mortar bed, how to organize cannon transport, and much else.
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Bomford's letters brim with ideas: designing a standard pattern for caissons (munition wagons), creating a new howitzer, proposing standards for shot, for stocks, and for muskets.
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Constantly lamenting the lack of “System,” Bomford worked on specifications for musket balls, tried to grade iron quality by its specific gravity, developed empirical standards for powder charges to extend musket life, and proved that mobility was to be preferred over throw weight in choosing field howitzers. He raged over the lack of professionalism among the quartermasters—“Waggons picked up here and there,” then followed a supply train, and found weapons strewn all over the road. Nearly every letter fumes over one absurdity or another. Repair procedures damaged good weapons. The quality of swords and bayonets was execrable: One sword will “fly into pieces at a blow ... while another bend to a quadrant.” Both he and Wadsworth spent substantial amounts of their own money setting up “laboratories”—repair depots—and tiding over unpaid contractors.
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During the very tough 1814 campaign on the Niagara peninsula, Bomford ran a musket repair operation, driving the craftsmen to keep up with the flow of arms from the front and complaining of how the soldiers misused the equipment.
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That same summer, Wadsworth prepared the defenses on the Chesapeake peninsula and at Baltimore against the raiders who had put the torch to Washington. He was almost certainly involved in arranging the successful artillery defense against a determined British assault on Fort McHenry in Baltimore harbor, the episode immortalized by “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Ordnance files don't show his precise location at the time, but he was on the peninsula and had long been mentoring the McHenry artillery officers. The British mounted a serious twenty-five-hour attack, and the defense is widely acknowledged as a masterpiece.
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