The Dawn of Innovation (60 page)

Hence the phrase “striking while the iron is hot.”

If there was insufficient powder in the pan, or the touch hole was fouled, the powder in the barrel would not ignite—and the soldier would get only “a flash in the pan.” If the sear or the tumbler was worn or improperly aligned, a primed, half-cocked gun might discharge by accident—“going off half-cocked.”

A “Stand” of arms was a musket and necessary auxiliary equipment, which in federal contracts usually included the musket, bayonet and holder, and the ramrod. Other equipment like ammunition and accessories was purchased separately. Musket contracts also often outsourced the bayonet knives to specialists like Nathan Starr.

Two thousand muskets were delivered to the New Yorkers in 1810, another 2,000 in 1813, and the final 1,000 upon Tompkins's intervention in September 1814.

Pistols were usually contracted in pairs (by the “brace”). North's first contract specified 250 brace of pistols at $13 a brace. References in the sources are not always consistent, however, so I use a single weapon as the basic unit.

By this time Whitney had long since closed out his initial contract and was steadily turning out muskets under both federal and state contracts. Irvine was pushing a new musket design, in which he may have had a financial interest. Whitney was properly scornful: this was wartime, and supply problems were rife; pressing for a revised musket design was idiotic. The muskets Governor Tompkins bought from Whitney for the 1814 Niagara campaign had been sitting in a warehouse because Irvine and his favorite inspector, who was the designer of the new musket, refused to inspect them.

Standard sources list some model 1813 production, but Jeska shows convincingly that the apparent 1813s are really 1811s.

Simeon North's 1813 pistol contract, for instance, came with a pattern and a list of exceptions, e.g., “Hammer pin [is] too large ... the threads on the small lock pins to be increased about one size . . . the cock pin and jaw too loose.” Even that was more precise than any of Whitney's contemporary contracts.

Prompting the reasonable complaint from a competitor, “I should not think of gitting a patent for . . . applying a trip to welding a gun barel any moure than plating a scythe or a hoe it seems to me that a strange fanatism has operated on sum peope for gitting patents for some simple things.” The complaint anticipates today's controversies over software “business process” patents. The trip-hammer had been around a long time, so Waters appears to have patented the application to barrel welding, rather than the tool.

The frame arrangement described here was used for gun stocks. The original patent application shows a shoe last, a more compact shape, and is arranged differently. The application identified a variety of possible arrangements for different product types.

As Robert Gordon has pointed out, interpreting such results is uncertain without knowing all the context of the tests, the target audiences, and hidden agendas. Note the wide variance between this report and the one at West Point.

Hall hypothesized a man cutting a plate exactly square. Normally he would “Square the 2d side by the 1st, and the 3d. by the 2d., and the 4th by the 3rd., but on comparing the 4th side with the 1st, it would still be found that they are not square; the cause is that in squaring each side by the preceding side, there is a slight but imperceptible variation and the comparison of the 4th with the 1st gives the sum of the variations of each side from a true square. And so in manufacturing the limb of a gun,” and he explains the process of measuring every operation on a part from the same fixed point.

Milling machines evolved from older rotary filers. A flat workpiece was clamped to a movable table under a fixed vertical spindle-cutter with a rasp end. In operation, the table moved the workpiece rapidly back and forth on one axis and more slowly on the other to achieve an even reduction. Miller cutting tools rapidly evolved into a great variety of shapes including both end cutters and side cutters to cut drill flutings or screw holes. Workpieces could be rotated as they were cut or fixed at various angles against the tool, using either vertical or horizontal spindles. By the 1870s, “universal” milling machines could cut metal into almost any shape at all. Almost all the development took place in the United States.

The Minié ball was shaped like a bullet, with a hollow base that expanded on ignition to grip the rifling grooves. Loose-fitting Miniés could be easily pushed down the barrel but still have a tight spin for good range and accuracy.

In this chapter, I use “West” in this sense, for it was the usage of the time. In the next chapter, which is more centered in mid-century, I will call the same region the Midwest, in accord with the newly current usage.

The Bank was a private, federally chartered, institution, with a fifth of its shares held by the government. Biddle assumed the presidency in 1822.

Gouge insisted that Biddle's success in managing monetary crises was a compelling argument for withdrawing the BUS charter, since it necessarily implied an excess of power and discretion vested in a single individual.

Dickens's description of America and Americans is much more savagely satirical in
The Life and Times of Martin Chuzzlewit
, which began serialization in 1843, not long after his return.

Besides his engineering accomplishments, Shreve spent fifteen years as superintendent of western rivers. In that capacity, he invented several large engines for clearing debris from river channels. His greatest accomplishment was to clear the Great Raft, a 150-mile-long tangle of submerged logs and fallen trees that closed off the Red River to navigation and, as it silted, threatened to turn the river basin into a giant swamp. Shreveport, located where the far end of the raft had been, was founded and named in his honor.

Ironically, the
Clermont/Steam Boat
was of a western-style flat-bottom design. Fulton, indeed, seems to have targeted the western rivers from the start. But as the Hudson trade expanded, Fulton/Livingston adjusted designs to fit the local market and then transferred them wholesale to the West.

Although Oliver Evans was the co-inventor of the high-pressure engine and opened a Pittsburgh factory in 1812, he and his son, who ran the western business, won little steamboat business. The Evanses dominated western mill and factory engines, but Shreve and French, who were steamboat men first and engine makers second, were far ahead in adapting engines to the special demands of western steamboats.

Trollope was “forcibly” reminded of Milton's lines:

In a famous analysis, Robert Fogel made a case for the potential economic equivalence of railroads and canals. The capital costs of canals were considerably less than railroads, but they externalized their equipment and services costs. The Erie Canal was almost as long as the Erie Railroad, but was completed in less than half the time—which speaks more to the turmoil at the railroad than the inherent difficulty of the projects.

Data assembled by Robert Fogel show that in 1700 an average American male consumed 2,300 calories over and above that required for basal metabolism and vital maintenance functions, like eating. A French or British worker's diet would have furnished only 400–750 “extra” calories, respectively, if they had been the same size as Americans. How much their smaller statures compensated for the gap is not known. Anecdotally, British sailors noted their own superior staying power against French sailors during the Napoleonic wars, presumably because of the poor diets of the Frenchmen.

The study I am relying on here is a careful one, by two respected economic historians, an Englishman and an American. Inevitably, as data are collected and filtered and run through spreadsheets, they produce output at second-decimal precision. But given the nature of the data sources, any such conclusions are very approximate. Their study concludes that American worker productivity across all industries was about 95 percent that of British workers, which is tantamount to equality within reasonable margins of error.

Nugent and Bird remained in touch after she left. Within a year, however, Nugent was shot and killed by Griff Evans, another friend of Bird's, whom she had characterized as “weak.” Evans was hoping to open a tourist hotel; Bird was his first and possibly only guest. The lemon-gloved Englishman who had arrived on the stage represented a British investor, the fourth Earl of Dunraven, who hoped to create a private British hunting preserve. Evans became his agent and was strongly opposed by Nugent and the majority of the locals, who justly regarded it as a land steal. Evans was reportedly drunk when he killed Nugent, and the shooting has been labeled “cowardly,” although the details are murky.

Business historians have shown that Chicago's giant postbellum meatpacking plants were far larger than scale efficiencies warranted. Competition should have led to a redistribution of slaughterhouses around interior rail centers, closer to the herds. The packing oligopoly led by Armour and Swift colluded to forestall such a redistribution.

The normal practice was to use reciprocating (up-and-down) blades, which could not cut nearly as rapidly. The large surface area of the circular-saw blade, its high speeds, and temperature differences between the center and the periphery created sufficient complexities to require a highly skilled operator.

A compound engine, often called a “double engine” in this period, combined both a high-pressure (expansive) and low-pressure (vacuum) engine. The excess steam from the high-pressure component was piped into a Boulton & Watt–style apparatus, improving the power-to-fuel consumption ratio.

High-quality iron was much more expensive in the United States than in Great Britain, making iron ships uneconomic except for military uses. Rough iron and steel price / quality parity was not achieved until sometime in the 1880s.

The “Master Mechanic” problem was the industry's name for the proliferation of design shops at the larger railroads. In fact, few of the customization demands were frivolous but rather reflected the steadily improving engineering capabilities at the bigger lines. Different lines operated over quite different terrains, often with different average-weight loads. Procurement engineers were learning to specify optimum power outputs and other features to suit their operating environments.

I have so far used “Baldwin” as if the man and the company were the same. After his death in 1866, however, the company had many different names, as the successive partners changed. “Baldwin Locomotive Works, Inc.” was adopted only in 1909, but for convenience I use “Baldwin” throughout the text.

The Corliss arrangement did look ungainly, but that was partly because he put almost all the connections outside the engine, where they would be easier to adjust and repair.

Pilot boat captains provided pilots to guide large ships into the New York Harbor. Each captain had a stable of pilots and competed by being the first to the best customers. The trade was well-paid, so large rewards went to the daredevil captain with the fastest boat. Brown's
Mary Taylor
was a sixty-six-foot ocean schooner.

They got used to it. Stevens's syndicate donated the cup to the New York Yacht Club in 1857, on the condition that the club would accept international challenges from time to time, with the cup to be held by the winning nation under the same stipulation. The first challenge, from a British syndicate, was in 1870. Competitions continued intermittently, usually against British challengers. The Americans turned away all comers, until an Australian team captured the cup in 1983, ending a 132-year winning streak.

Root and Colt had met when Root was still an apprentice. Colt was giving a demonstration of an underwater torpedo, which then went awry and sprayed water and mud on the crowd. Root prevented the crowd from inflicting bodily harm on Colt. Colt also paid a visit to Collinsville before he set up his first gun venture and took notes on the machinery, so he would have formed a good impression of Root's capabilities.

The investors complained that Colt had fraudulently concealed the problem that multiple firing chambers often ignited simultaneously. The board was dominated by Dudley Selden, a friend of Colt's father, who had acted as Sam's lawyer in forming the company. He engineered a cash call among the investors, and cut off Colt's salary. Colt had no money, and his failure to meet the call would have triggered the loss of all his stock and control over his patents. (Venture capitalists often resort to such devices to squeeze out inconvenient founders.) Colt's alleged fraud was to demonstrate his weapons with only a single chamber loaded. But these were all professional investors, and Colt was a fast-talking twenty-two-year-old. If they were gulled that easily, it is hard to feel sorry for them. The dispute petered out after the bankruptcy, and Colt kept control of his patents.