Sticking with technology a bit longer, From Delancey Place, September 28:
Today's selection -- from Exactly: How Precision Engineers Created The Modern World by Simon Winchester.
The revolution that came from interchangeable parts:
"Lewis Mumford, the historian and philosopher of technology, was one of the earliest to recognize the major role played by the military in the advancement of technology, in the dissemination of precision-based standardization, in the making of innumerable copies of the same and usually deadly thing, all iterations of which must be identical to the tiniest measure, in nanometers or better. The stories that follow, in which standardization and precision-based manufacturing are shown to become crucial ambitions of armies on both sides of the Atlantic, serve both to confirm Mumford's prescience and to underline the role that the military plays in the evolution of precision. The examples from the early days of the science are of course far from secret; those from today, and that might otherwise be described in full to illustrate today's very much more precise and precision-obsessed world, are among the most secure and confidential topics of research on the planet -- kept in permanent shadow, as the dark side necessarily has to be.
"It was in the French capital in 1785 that the idea of producing interchangeable parts for guns was first properly realized, and the precision manufacturing processes that allowed for it were ordered to be first put into operation. Still, it is reasonable to ask why, if the process was dreamed up in 1785, was it not being applied to the American musketry in official use in 1814, twenty-nine years later? Men were running, battles were being lost, great cities were being burned -- and in part because the army's guns were not being made as they should have been made. There is an answer, and it is not a pretty one.
"Two little-remembered Frenchmen got the honor of first introducing the system that, had it been implemented in time and implemented properly, would have given America the guns it should have had. The first, the less familiar of the pair, despite the evidently superior nature of his name, was Jean-Baptiste Vaquette de Gribeauval, a wellborn and amply connected figure who specialized in designing cannons for the French artillery. He supposedly came up with a scheme, in 1776, for boring out cannons using almost exactly the same technique that John Wilkinson had invented in England, that of moving a rotating drill into a solid cannon-size and cannon-shaped slug of iron. Wilkinson had patented his precisely similar system two years earlier, in 1774, but nonetheless, the French system, the système Gribeauval, as it came to be known for the next three decades, long dominated French artillery making. It gave the French armies access to a range of highly efficient and lightweight, but manifestly not entirely originally conceived, field pieces. (Gribeauval did employ what were called go and no-go gauges as a means of ensuring that cannonballs fitted properly inside his cannons, but this was hardly revolutionary engineering, and it had been around in principle for five centuries.)
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| French gunLock (true Flintlock) as that made by and improved upon by Blanc |
....MUCH MORE
Also at Delancey Place:The Marquis de Lafayette
