Merritt Roe Smith - Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology: The Challenge of Change

For Wilson N. Smith (19061962),
father and friend

The labouring classes [of America] are comparatively few in number, but this is counter-balanced by, and indeed may be regarded as one of the chief causes of, the eagerness with which they call in the aid of machinery in almost every department of industry. Wherever it can be introduced as a substitute for manual labour, it is universally and willingly resorted to. It is this condition of the labour market, and this eager resort to machinery wherever it can be applied, to which, under the guidance of superior education and intelligence, the remarkable prosperity of the United States is mainly due.

These comments by the noted British engineer and machine builder Joseph Whitworth typified European opinion of American industrial development in the mid-nineteenth century. By 1854, the date of Whitworths special report to Parliament, many observers had detected similar trends in the American economy. What fascinated them was not so much that the people of the United States had adopted the new machine technology, but rather that they had done it with such little difficulty. Whitworth, whose memory of labor riots and machine breaking in Regency England remained vivid, expressed amazement at the propensity of Americans to favor the adoption of machinery. The workmen hail with satisfaction all mechanical improvements, he wrote, the importance of whichthey are enabled by education to understand and appreciate. In Whitworths judgment a liberal system of public education coupled with a scarcity of labor in the United States

Other visitors witnessed the same phenomenon, but advanced different explanations. To the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, by no means an uncritical observer, Americas industrial potential rested with her democratic institutions and inbred utilitarian attitudes. Charles Dickens detected similar traits, while C. L. Fleischmann, a German bureaucrat who spent several years in the United States as an employee of the Patent Office, and his compatriot Francis Grund ascribed industrial progress to the countrys wealth of natural resources and enterprising spirit of its citizenry. Others found the seeds of industry deeply implanted in the lure of the wilderness, the majesty of personal freedom, native genius, disdain for liberal science, economic necessity, a compulsive search for national identity, vanity, love of change, and an unabated eagerness to get on. Yet, whatever the reason, everyone agreed that mechanization had found a most favorable environment in North America.

By the 1850s the United States no longer remained the relatively simple, homogeneous society once exalted by Thomas Jefferson and other disciples of agrarian democracy. Having achieved a high degree of mechanical proficiency and having entered a period of sustained economic growth, the young republic had relinquished its abject dependency on European technology and no longer stood in awe of the Old Worlds industrial prowess. So thorough was this transition that European enterprisers, impressed by American manufacturing

Even more indicative of the changes taking place was the impressive debut of American metalworking technology at the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition in London. Here for the first time little-known manufacturers impressed visitors with the precision design and functional simplicity of their machine-made products. Exciting considerable comment and admiration were the unpickable padlocks of Alfred C. Hobbs of New York, Samuel Colts revolving pistols, and six completely interchangeable rifles made by Robbins & Lawrence, an obscure firearms and machine company in Windsor, Vermont. All three firms won prizes at the exposition, but more significantly the excellence of their wares prompted the British government to send Joseph Whitworth and five other commissioners to New Yorks Crystal Palace Exhibition and, from there, on a fact-finding tour of the northeastern section of the country during the summer of 1853. The following spring Her Majestys Ordnance Board, eager to take advantage of the so-called American System of interchangeable production, dispatched another three-man Committee on Machinery to the United States for the express purpose of introducing similar improvements at the Enfield armory near London. By the time the investigators returned home in August 1854, they had placed orders for over $105,000 worth of machinery with seven different firms, five of which were located in New England. Within four years several other foreign governments sent similar investigatory teams to the United States. Although little noticed at the time, these events signaled Americas coming of age as an industrial power.