Simon Winchester

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A sultry afternoon In July , 1785, officials, media and a few angry gunsmiths have gathered at the Château de Vincennes, a magnificent castle in The East of Paris.

they were there to see The Demonstration of a new type of flintlock musket, designed by Honoré Blanc, a gunsmith from Avignon so despised by His colleagues for coffee, he was holed away in the dungeons of the château for His own protection.

Down in the cool of The Castle cellar, Monsieur Blanc 50 produces lock - The Lock will lock the mechanism at The Heart of a stone weapon.

Briskly, he took apart half of them, and with the carelessness for which the French are famous for, he threw their components in the boxes.

It was.

Like a master of ceremonies demonstrative of an urn of stirring, full of numbered lottery balls, Monsieur Blanc, together shook the boxes to mix your components. Then he quietly moved the Parts randomly and began to reassemble them in flintlocks.

What was he supposed to think?

Each of those present knew that each was handmade weapon unique. You could not only work jam a part of a gun in the other and expect to either. But she did it. Blanc in a lot of pain had taken over, in order to ensure that all the Parts were exactly the same.

It was a spectacular demonstration of The Power of interchangeable Parts .

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The consequences were not lost on a visit to the carrier: the emissaries of France and The Future President of the young nation of the United States of America, Thomas Jefferson would.

Jefferson excitedly wrote to US Secretary of state John Jay : "to improve is in the construction of the musket which it may be interesting to Congress to know. It is that every part of them so exactly alike that what belongs to one can be used for everyone to have a musket in the magazine.

"I put several together myself, the pieces in danger, as they came to hand, and they fit in The Most perfect way. The benefits, when arms need repair, are evident. see "

Thomas Jefferson was quick to the potential battlefield benefits Blanc approach

But perhaps these assets were so clear, as he said, since Jefferson fought to His colleagues on the idea to accept.

So, what were exactly the "obvious" advantages of this system? Jefferson focuses on the problem of the battlefield to repair a task which is a complex of equipment and hours of skilled labour.

But under Blanc's system, only a few minutes and some rudimentary skills required to tighten the screws of the musket, replace the defective part with an identical part and screw everything back, as good as new.

No wonder that Blanc were the fellow gunsmith concerned about The Future of their profession. And no wonder Thomas Jefferson was so interested in the problem of the repair of broken weapons.

While Jefferson fought to win support, Blanc was to fight: it was incredibly expensive to craft each piece, to the accuracy of The System to work required for.

The Solution was already there, If Only Blanc had understood it. It would not repair, only the quick of broken weapons, But a revolution in The World of business.

A decade ago, Blanc demonstration, a metal-worker the nickname " John "iron-Mad" Wilkinson had become well-known in Shropshire , on The Border between England and Wales. He was famous for His iron Boot, iron pulpit, iron-Desk - and even the iron coffin, he burst like to surprise the visitors.

In fact, he has far more fame for the invention, deserved, in the year 1774, a method of drilling a hole in a cannon-shaped lump of iron, so that it is straight and true, every single time.

That was the military of inestimable value. But Iron-Mad Wilkinson was not finished.

A few years later, he ordered one of those new-fangled steam machines from a neighboring business.

But she had problems to work with. The piston-and-cylinder, formed from the hand-held metal plates beaten, have not leaked a circular cross-section, and so steam anywhere on the piston crown.

Give it here, said John Wilkinson and His cannon-boring method to make a pleasant round piston-cylinder.

His supplier, never looked back. Equipped with Watt's efficient steam engines, and Wilkinson brilliantly-just-boring-cylinder, the Industrial Revolution entered a higher gear.

Wilkinson and Watt were not concerned about interchangeable Parts , as such. She wanted to cannon balls to fit in the cannons, and the piston fit in the cylinder.

But the engineering problem, they were The Solution to the held also The Key to achieve the interchangeability that Blanc will be appreciated, But found it too expensive.

Wilkinson had built a machine Tool - a Tool for the automation of a manufacturing process.

it consisted of a very sharp drill bit, a water-mill, and a system of margins is one thing, while they rotate smoothly another.

But as Simon Winchester notes in His history of precision engineering, these machine tools had a strange side effect: you make craftsmen out of work in large numbers.

Monsieur Blanc, the fellow gunsmith was afraid that she would lose the work on lucrative repair. But they were losing jobs in the production, also.

Not only machine tools are better than hand tools, they also do not require to swing hands, you.

It was a second unexpected consequence.

to produce If you could use machine tools, interchangeable Parts , which had not only Seen for simple battlefield repair, as Jefferson perfectly accurate - But it also made the Assembly easier and more predictable.

More things that the modern economy:

The Economist , shown for each employee to add a step to what was to come.

But with interchangeable Parts like a Production Line could process faster, more predictable and more automated.

across The Atlantic , The Americans had finally started listening to Thomas Jefferson .

The Promise which he had identified, was finally, he noted in an Armory at Harper's Ferry in West Virginia . In the 1820s, he began to produce, in Winchester's words, "The First really mechanical-production lines-objects made somewhere".

As Blanc had always thought they were guns: lock, stock, and barrel.

Henry Ford 's famous automated large Parts of its car-production

It was the beginning of what became known as the "American system" of production, and the produced Isaac Singer 'sewing machines s, Cyrus Mccormick ' s Reaper and harvesters, and about a century later, Henry Ford 's Model T.

Ford was an advocate of the interchangeability, and the model T Assembly line would have been unthinkable without precise interchangeable Parts to be processed.

As a Poor Honoré Blanc, he was undone, released by the French Revolution of 1789 - the dungeon workshop, by a mob directed its political support by the guillotine.

He fought, hopelessly in debt.

Blanc can have the birth to an economic revolution, But a revolution of another kind, he never saw His own ideas take shape.

The author writes the Financial Times Undercover Economist column. the show is on the BBC World Service. You can find and or.

firearms, manufacturing, engineering

Source of news: bbc.com