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The History of Interchangeable Parts in the Industrial Revolution
The industrial revolution thoroughly changed the
world. It turned economies upside down and reinvented how society gets
by. One of the most important, perhaps the most prominent, of inventions
to come out of the industrial revolution was the idea of
interchangeable parts.
Prior to the industrial revolution,
there was no standard for creating machine parts. That meant that every
machine was essentially its own custom design that was built in a
"one-off" production style. This obviously meant that replicating
machines to enhance their spread across the world was quite hard.
Eli Whitney's demonstration
In 1801, a man by the name of Eli Whitney pioneered a new manufacturing method. He had successfully demonstrated the concept of interchangeable parts.
First conceptualized by French General Jean-Baptiste
Vaquette de Gribeauval in the mid-18th century, the idea had been around
for some time. Gribeauval even started producing firearms with
interchangeable flintlocks in 1778. However, the idea never really made
it much further than that.
The idea was simple, if individual pieces of a machine were
produced identically, then the final product would be identical to
others. This would also allow for easy fixing of broken parts, allowing
machine owners to simply order a replacement.
The first testing ground for interchangeable parts by Whitney was demonstrated within firearm production.
It was at this moment that the idea of interchangeable parts started to take hold of the entire industrial revolution.
Ironically, Whitney's demonstration was all a lie.
Whitney's contract for guns
In 1797, the U.S. Congress voted to prepare to go to war with France. First, they needed to order a massive amount of weapons.
At this time, Eli Whitney was already well known for his
invention of the cotton gin and played off of this to win a contract for
10,000 muskets from the government. By 1801, Whitney hadn't produced
and delivered a single weapon to the government and was thus called to
congress to justify his use of funds in front of John Adams and Thomas
Jefferson.
Whitney came prepared though with his 10 "interchangeable rifles".
He put on the demonstration we mentioned before, but it was all a lie.
Whitney had marked the parts prior to the demonstration so that he could
reassemble them correctly. Nothing was interchangeable – but Congress
didn't know that.
The demonstration by Whitney earned him major federal
support at the time and his efforts were no longer in question. While
the display might've been fake at the time, the idea wasn't.
Whitney eventually delivered the last of his 10,000 muskets
8 years later and due to their quality, he was ordered to produce
another 15,000 over the next four years.
Historians actually believe that Whitney never actually
achieved the process of interchangeable parts in his lifetime, but
rather his Gun Manufacturing Company was able to after his death.
Other efforts to create interchangeable parts
While Eli Whitney's highly public displays pushed
interchangeable parts to the forefront of industrial culture, he wasn't
able to achieve major success in this realm.
In 1803, Marc Brunel, famous engineer, along with the help
of others was first able to mass-produce interchangeable parts. He
streamlined a process of creating pulley blocks for naval shipyards
using metal machines and a crew of only 10 men. These pulleys were made
of wood and demonstrated that interchangeable parts were achievable on a
large scale.
By 1816, a man by the name of Simeon North had created the
world's first metal milling machine. This machine allowed manufacturers
to create parts with tight tolerances, which would've been a key aspect
needed to create metal interchangeable parts on a large scale.
Historians now believe that at some point prior to 1832,
North was able to create metal interchangeable parts using his milling
machine. The process would have involved a rough-forged original part
that would've then been milled down to exact specifications.
By the mid-1800s the concept of interchangeable parts was
spreading across the entire world of manufacturing. Surprisingly, it
would take another century to become widely prominent in the industry.
Interchangeable parts and their effect on the world
The process of interchangeable parts transformed
manufacturing from a high-skilled artisan-based profession into one that
was low/ lower-skilled and in more of an assembly line production
style. This ultimately increased productivity in the industry, lowered
costs, and increased the number of jobs that were available to the
public.
The unfortunate side-effect of interchangeability was that
it practically wiped out the world's class of skilled craftsmen. These
skilled workers could no longer compete with high-volume manufacturing
methods. Thus the professions were either completely eliminated or
craftsmen were relegated to high cost artistic based labor.
Today, interchangeability and high-tolerances on
manufactured parts practically define the entire world around us. If it
wasn't for this, we wouldn't be able to fix practically anything around
us without the help of expensive craftsmen. If your car broke for that
matter, you'd have to leave it at a shop that would custom design a new
part for it. Interchangeability changed the industrial revolution and
thus changed the world.
Every single other invention that came out of the
industrial revolution benefited from interchangeability, the steam
engine, sewing machines, telegraphs, and more.
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