The Dawn of Innovation (59 page)

Canadians long mistrusted American designs on their country, not without reason. As late as 1935, the American military had a “War Plan Red” for an invasion of Canada, including poison gas attacks on Halifax. There was at least one formal exercise.

Frigates, with just one gun deck, did not rank as ships of the line. Used mostly for detached duty, they were glamor commands because officers and crewmen could make large amounts of money by taking enemy prizes. American frigates were typically much heavier and better armed than their British counterparts. More importantly, overconfident British captains plunged into the early encounters as if the Americans didn't know the rudiments of fighting. In the last of the frigate-to-frigate battles, however, the two were evenly matched, and it was the American captain who was reckless. It took only minutes for the British
Shannon
to destroy the
Chesapeake
.

The throw-weight calculation assumes a single shot from all the guns, each using a ball of the rated weight. In battle, gun crews often stuffed their cannon with multiple cannon balls, bags of scrap metal, grape shot (a half dozen small iron balls on a rod or a chain), and almost whatever else came to hand. Overweighting the payload reduced a gun's punching power, but at close range it could increase its shattering impact on a wooden hull, and if you were attacking a ship's crew, a deck-top blast of flying shards of metal was viciously effective.

Captains usually preferred to go into battle with the wind, since they could maneuver more easily than a ship beating windward.

The scavenging of army forts explains Barclay's high proportion of long guns. Perry was likely stuck with carronades because Chauncey was picking off new long guns for himself. Perry also bought cannon in Pittsburgh, where there were two new cannon foundries, but newer foundries naturally focused on carronades, since they were easier to make.

In a “raking position” the attacking ship was positioned perpendicularly to the target, so fire was directed lengthwise along the deck, wreaking havoc on the crew.

He subsequently got the required clearances and more. The Admiralty even came up with the idea of prebuilding hulls in England and shipping them to Kingston. Yeo and Prevost agreed it was a terrible idea. Building hulls wasn't a bottleneck, and transporting them would require completely new St. Lawrence barges and severely disrupt already-strained logistics. Wary of rejecting an Admiralty gift, they convened an advisory committee that, after an appropriate deliberation, recommended against it. By that time, the Admiralty had already started on one, which was delivered in late fall and launched at Kingston in December 1814 as the
Psyche
, a big sixty-gun frigate, although it never sailed on the lake.

Sackets Harbor was a cul-de-sac, unlike Kingston, which was on a free-flowing channel. The substantial permanent population created “excrementious” conditions in the harbor, plaguing the force with gastroenteral disease.

Different Iroquois tribal groups fought on both sides, and tribal elders were appalled at how fearfully they were being ground up. Indians and whites had very different ideas on the value of a soldier's life. Whites were horrified at the Indian penchant for killing prisoners and roasting and eating their hearts and livers. But the Indians were shocked at the whites' habit of lining up at close range in full view and firing away until one side or the other crumpled. Indians, one chief said, fought “to kill the enemy and save our own men.” A white could never “lead a war party with us.”

Most historians would accept that list, or one much like it. Scholars differ on whether one particular factor, like the early spread of a scientific outlook, the rise in British wages, or an underlying culture, was the ultimate trigger. While there is much to learn from examining each strand separately, in the real world they were tightly intertwined.

Coke is the almost-pure carbon residue from slow burning of coal. Iron ore is smelted in direct contact with the fuel to facilitate carbon binding with the mostly oxide impurities in the ore. Subsequent processing steps, like creating wrought iron or steel, also involve manipulating the carbon content of the product and are most easily accomplished by direct-contact heating. Great Britain made the shift to coke roughly a century before the rest of Europe and the United States. In part because of its greater heat potential, coke is the superior fuel for large-scale processing, so all serious competitor countries were eventually forced to follow the British lead.

Dava Sobel's best-selling
Longitude
may be too hard on the astronomers. They certainly rallied against Harrison's solutions, and several may have been motivated by personal animus toward Harrison (who was easy to dislike). But one could fairly argue that his clocks were not a true solution, despite their clear qualification under the rules. They were resounding proof that clock-based solutions were
possible.
But each took years to build, and at least through their first three versions, the designs were secret and not obviously reproducible. In short, they were not of much use to the navy, which was the whole point of the exercise.

That same value is reported in American and British machining texts from both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The machine is of a class of instruments called “comparators,” meaning that they measure only the differences between objects rather than the dimensions of the objects. Maudslay's micrometer was of the same type. The British were quite late to shift to dimensional measuring, leaving that development primarily to the Americans. The Providence firm of Brown & Sharpe was the world leader in dimensional measuring in the second half of the century.

The name came from Babbage's adoption of a subtraction algorithm for computing tables. For example the sequence of squares 1, 4, 9, 16, 25 shows first-order differences of 3, 5, 7, 9, which in turn have a constant second-order difference of 2. To compute the square of 6, the engine would take the previous first-order difference (25–16 = 9) and add the constant: 25 + 9 + 2 = 36; 7
²
then is 36 + 11 + 2 = 49. Higher order exponents required finding higher-order differences before arriving at the constant.

The original award notice from the Exchequer said that the grant was “to enable Mr. Babbage to bring his invention to perfection, in the manner recommended.” By “the manner recommended,” the Exchequer presumably meant Babbage's own estimate of time and cost, while Babbage insisted the phrase was an open-ended commitment to fund development until the engine reached his recommended level of perfection.

Twenty years later, Swade is heading another team to attempt to build the Analytical Engine (AE), a much more complex challenge. Since the working drawings are not complete, they will have to reconstruct them from Babbage's “Mechanical Notation,” which team members can read fluently. Tentatively, the project will be completed in distinct stages—completing the drawings, creating a virtual AE entirely in software, and finally constructing the engine itself. Indeed, if they actually succeed in building just the virtual AE, it would answer all of the remaining questions of whether Babbage actually created a workable computer design.

The biography is an admiring memoir published in 1862, almost sixty years after the plant opened, so it is unlikely that the author had accurate information on previous contractor manning levels. At the plant's volumes, the sheer physical work of loading logs and moving parts from station to station probably required more than ten men, not even including machine tenders.

Iron is one of the most common elements on earth, and ground water is often rich in dissolved iron. In swamps and bogs, the iron is precipitated by oxidation and bacterial action, forming low-grade ore deposits that sink into the mud. Ore raisers recovered the iron by dredging. It was then roasted and thoroughly dried (steam could explode a blast furnace) and pulverized in a stamping mill to reduce the impurities before smelting. Most ancient iron was from bog iron, but it is no longer used for industrial purposes. New Jersey's iron bogs now produce cranberries.

John Harrison used wooden gears in the first longitude chronometers because the oils in the wood made them self-lubricating. Brass was harder and more durable but needed external lubrication, which trapped dust and other contaminants. Harrison feared that their accuracy would degrade on an extended voyage. As he shrank his chronometers, small-dimension machining mandated the switch to brass components. His prize-winning chronometer was watch-sized and had all brass works.

Because of nuances of the earth's orbit, the length of a day differs from the canonical 24 hours by + 16 to–14 minutes throughout the year. Mechanical clocks are based on solar mean time, which treats all hours and days as if they were the same length. When most time was taken from sundials or solar reckonings, mechanical clocks were glaringly out of sync with “real time”—hence, the equation clock. The conversion formula is both complex and tedious, although it is likely that Terry worked it out for himself. As mechanical clocks proliferated, the industrial world quietly chose to forget about solar time.

Americans were painfully retaught that lesson by Japanese manufacturers in the 1970s and 1980s. Japanese products were designed for manufacturability from the start. In America and Europe, by contrast, product design engineers and manufacturing engineers rarely talked to each other. Part counts in Western products were invariably far higher than in Japanese versions, and welds and fittings often in unnecessarily awkward places.

Terry's patents refer to the escapement mechanism as the “verge,” an older term that actually referred to a different escapement type but reflected the usage of wooden clockmakers. I've used the modern term to avoid confusion.

Nineteenth-century upper-class work schedules were generally quite leisurely, but commercial business was inherently stressful because of the large fraction of one's wealth constantly at risk. Ships were lost, commodity prices see-sawed, trade bills defaulted. Cycles of credit expansion and contraction regularly wreaked havoc in all merchant communities.

It does not dim Lowell's accomplishment to doubt the conventional tale that he returned from England with a complete design of a power loom in his head. It is more plausible that he returned with a few sketches and a firm conviction that power weaving was readily achievable, and that Paul Moody then designed and built the looms. Moody, after all, was both a skilled weaver and a great machinist, who probably needed only Lowell's backing to develop a working loom.

The primary advantages of the breast-fed wheel were, first, that it was always moving in the same direction as the water, whereas in the overshot wheel, race water could spill down its back and slow the returning wheel buckets. Secondly, the diameter of an overshot wheel was limited by the height of the mill race, while the breast-fed wheel could be of almost any size, and the water entry point could be adjusted to different levels of water flow.

Burden was most famous for his horseshoe making machine. A continuous stream of hot bar iron was fed into a round contraption two and a half feet in diameter that executed a dozen high-speed swaging and punching actions that produced a finished horseshoe
every second
. During the Civil War, Burden supplied all the horseshoes for the Union army at a price only pennies above the cost of the iron.

The naming convention for Francis turbines was established by others, mostly after his death, in recognition of the consistent impetus he provided over many decades toward smaller and more compact turbine designs with ever higher energy-conversion ratios.

The phrase “lock, stock, and barrel” was a favorite of my grandmother, as in “She left and cleaned him out lock, stock, and barrel.” I knew what she meant, but the phrase conjured up an odd pastiche of door handles and wooden kegs.