SPEAKER_03: Amazing, fascinating stories of inventions, ideas and innovations. Yes, this is the podcast about the things that have helped to shape our lives. Podcasts from the BBC World Service are supported by advertising. 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy with Tim Harford
SPEAKER_01: One sweltering afternoon in July 1785, officials, dignitaries and a few infuriated gunsmiths gathered at the Chateau de Vincennes, a spectacular castle to the east of Paris. They were there to see the demonstration of a new sort of flintlock musket, designed by Honoré Blanc, a gunsmith from Avignon so despised by his fellows that he'd been holed away in the dungeons of the chateau for his own protection. Down in the cool of the castle cellars, Monsieur de Blanc brought in 50 locks, the lock being the firing mechanism at the heart of a flintlock weapon. Briskly, he took apart half of them and with the insouciance for which the French are famous, he tossed their component parts into boxes. There was a box for the mainsprings, a box for the hammers, a box for the faceplates and a box for the gunpowder pans. Like a master of ceremonies, ostentatiously agitating an urn full of numbered lottery balls, Monsieur Blanc shook these boxes to mix their components together. Then he calmly pulled out the parts at random and began to reassemble them into flintlocks. What was he thinking? Everyone present knew that each handcrafted gun was unique. You couldn't just jam a part from one gun into another and expect either to work, but they did. Blanc had taken enormous pains to ensure that all the parts were precisely the same. It was a spectacular demonstration of the power of interchangeable parts. The implications weren't lost on one of the visiting dignitaries, the emissary to France and the future president of the fledgling nation of the United States of America, Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson excitedly wrote to the US Foreign Secretary John Jay.
SPEAKER_00: An improvement is made here in the construction of the musket, making every part of them so exactly alike that what belongs to any one may be used for every one musket in the magazine. The advantages of this when arms need repair are evident.
SPEAKER_01: But perhaps they were not evident, since Jefferson struggled to get his colleagues to embrace the idea. So what exactly were the evident advantages of this system? Jefferson focused on the problem of battlefield repair, a task requiring complex equipment and hours of skilled labour. But under Blanc's system, only a few minutes and some rudimentary skill would be required to unscrew the musket, replace the faulty part with an identical component and screw it all back together, good as new. No wonder Blanc's fellow gunsmiths were worried about the future of their profession. And no wonder Thomas Jefferson was so interested in the problem of repairing broken guns. But while Jefferson struggled to win support, Honoré Blanc was struggling too. It was impossibly expensive to handcraft each piece to the precision required to make the system work. The solution already existed if only Blanc had grasped it. It would not only allow the swift repair of broken weapons, but a revolution in the world economy. A decade prior to Blanc's demonstration, a gentleman nicknamed John Iron Mad Wilkinson was becoming a local celebrity, local being Shropshire, on the border between England and Wales, for his iron boat, iron desk and even iron coffin out of which he would burst to surprise visitors. He deserves far more fame for inventing, in 1774, a method of boring a hole into a cannon-shaped lump of iron so that it was straight and true every single time. That was militarily invaluable. But Iron Mad Wilkinson hadn't finished. A few years later he ordered one of those new-fangled steam engines from a neighbouring business. They were having trouble making it work though. The piston cylinder, formed of hand-beaten panels of metal, didn't have a perfectly circular cross-section and so steam leaked out everywhere around the piston head. Give it here, said John Wilkinson, and he used his cannon-boring method to make a pleasingly round piston cylinder. His supplier, a Scotsman named James Watt, never looked back. Equipped with Watt's brilliantly efficient steam engines running with Wilkinson's precisely bored cylinders, the Industrial Revolution entered a higher gear. Wilkinson and Watt weren't worried about interchangeable parts as such. They wanted cannonballs to fit into cannons and pistons to fit into cylinders. But the engineering problem they were solving also held the key to the interchangeability that Blanc prized but was finding it expensive to achieve. Wilkinson had built a machine tool, a tool that automates a manufacturing process. Wilkinson's comprised a very sharp drill, a water mill, and a system of clamping one thing while smoothly rotating another. But as Simon Winchester observes in his history of precision engineering exactly, these machine tools had a curious side effect. They put skilled craftsmen out of work in large numbers. Honoré Blanc's fellow gunsmiths had been worried that they would lose out on lucrative repair work, but they were about to lose manufacturing jobs too. Not only were machine tools better than hand tools, they also didn't require hands to wield them. There was a second, unlooked for consequence. If you could use machine tools to produce perfectly precise interchangeable parts, that not only made for simple battlefield repair as Jefferson had seen, but it also made the process of assembly simpler and more predictable. Adam Smith's famous description of a pin factory, nine years before Honoré Blanc's demonstration, depicted each worker adding a step to what had come before. But with interchangeable parts, such a production line could become a far quicker, more predictable and more automated process. Across the Atlantic, the promise of the system was eventually realised at an armory at Harpers Ferry in Virginia, which in the 1820s began to produce, in Winchester's words, the first truly mechanically produced production line objects made anywhere. As Honoré Blanc had always intended, they were guns. Lock, stock and barrel. It was the beginning of what became known as the American system of manufacturing, and which produced Isaac Singer's sewing machines, Cyrus McCormick's Reapers and Harvesters, and about a century later, Henry Ford's Model T. Ford was a champion of interchangeability and the Model T production line would have been inconceivable without precisely machined interchangeable parts. As for poor Honoré Blanc, he was undone by the French Revolution of 1789, his dungeon workshop sacked by a mob, his political support guillotined. He struggled on, hopelessly in debt. Honoré Blanc had given birth to an economic revolution, but thanks to a revolution of a very different kind, he never saw his own ideas realised. Simon Winchester's history of precision engineering exactly was an indispensable
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