Stealing a Page from Eli Whitney’s Playbook – Part 2 of a 2 Part Series

SCENE TWO

Eli Whitney would show up again in the annals of history with another innovation that would revolutionize the modern industries. This time Whitney would turn his attention to the manufacturing of guns.  As the need for inexpensive but reliable firearms grew, he saw the potential for mass production using interchangeable parts. He demonstrated this concept in 1798 with the production of 10 muskets. He ably showed the interchangeable aspects of the gun in front of the US congress by assembling and disassembling the guns from a pile of gun parts and randomly selecting the parts for assembly. This culminated in an order from the US military for the manufacture of 10,000 muskets at a price of $13.40 each.

Until Whitney’s time, guns from stock to barrel were made entirely by hand, by craftsmen one at a time who cut, filed, polished and fitted them properly. The great quality and dependence on skilled labor made them expensive and time consuming to manufacture. As a result, parts of one gun did not fit another one. The spare parts for each gun were made on an “as-needed” basis essentially the same way — handmade one at a time.

Drawing on a concept developed by Honore Blanc in France, Whitney set out to make all the parts of the guns identical so that they were interchangeable.  This idea was a serious departure from the conventional wisdom on firearm manufacturing. Whitney designed a rifle and created a template for each part of the rifle. Metal parts were cut, formed, or machined using the template. Towards this end, he invented many machines for cutting, milling, drilling, grinding, etc., which would transform the manufacturing industry.

Whitney re-invented the American manufacturing system by questioning the conventional wisdom of dependence on talented or gifted craftsmen. As a result, he faced opposition from trade guilds who promoted the specialized hand craft industry. Whitney’s objective was to create a system and process that could produce standard and interchangeable parts in a few weeks with semi-skilled persons. He was on a journey to create a process that was repeatable, scalable and systematic.  Although the production of his first order was late due to schedule overrun, he achieved success and planted the seeds for the industrial revolution led by Henry Ford and others.