When was honore blanc born

But during the summer of , epidemics of scarlet and yellow fever swept New Haven with dying in the city, forcing Whitney to close the shop; workmen were scarce.

A year later, , while Whitney was away from the shop, the men, taking advantage of the easy working atmosphere, went out for a late breakfast. A fire broke out which destroyed all but a new building in the back. Whitney rebuilt. In his new shop, he had each worker make only one part of the gin—a crank, a spindle, a wheel, etc. If all the parts were similar, the gins could be assembled faster.

Whitney wanted to make all his gins alike according to his single plan. From his experience of watching clock makers, he knew that if the gears were identical you could exchange them and, with the proper machines, the parts could be made faster.

Any part can be used in any gin. They fit into any pocket. But the inventor had no water power for his machines on Wooster Street. The contested patent fight would last until , involving about 60 lawsuits. However, the time and money spent on the suits meant little profit on the invention. By the late s, Whitney began to search for a new business in which he could use his abilities and make money.

One institution that might risk money on his ideas was the U. The government had made other arrangements, but it was in need of muskets. The government at that time was contracting with private arms makers to supply it with muskets. Threat of war with France in seemed near, and importation of muskets from Europe stopped as those nations prepared for war. The government had established a federal armory at Springfield in , but by it had only made 7, muskets. Thereafter, with improved machinery, only 9 man days instead of 21 would be needed to produce the weapon; and by , 4, were made yearly.

Gun making was a complex craft; the gun was a precision instrument whose making was the work of a single highly skilled craftsman. The gunsmith fashioned each part and assembled the gun, which was a distinctive hand-crafted object. The number of guns produced depended upon the number of craftsmen available. Because of its need for weapons, the government had to let private contractors help meet the demand. The near bankrupt Whitney saw an opportunity to apply his idea of using identical parts to gun making and to do it with secure government money through a contract.

Yet two years passed without the delivery of even one musket. Instead, Whitney spent the time building and equipping his factory at Mill Rock about two miles outside of New Haven. The summer after he signed the contract, he visited the Springfield armory and noted that the water supply was a distance from the factory.

He bought a house from Captain Daniel Talmage into which he moved, and also property that included a barn and a blacksmith shop. Winter snows delayed work and the shipments of materials, but by May of , his main factory building was completed and the waterworks nearly ready. Men still had to be trained on the machine tools that he was designing and building.

Whitney provided houses for his workers as an inducement to draw skilled men out of the city. However he couldn't keep them and found the unskilled easier to train. The houses that he built for the workers on Armory Street in could be termed the earliest model housing project.

During the slack periods at the factory, the men farmed the nearby acres. Work was slow, but Whitney used his experience gained from his gin shop and his observations at the Springfield operation and added his own ingredients.

Whitney fixed mechanical stops to his lathe, which prevented the worker from turning the piece too far or not enough. As well as fashioning the dies and molds for various parts, Whitney was busy arranging for the shipment of metal, wood and more tools.

He seemed to be making more and more machines rather than guns. His ten year old nephew, Philos Blake, described the factory in a letter to his sister Betsy in September of There is a drilling machine and a boring machine to bore barrels and a screw machine and two great large buildings, one other shop and stocking shop to stocking guns in sic , a blacksmith shop and a trip hammer shop, and five hundred guns done.

I have seen a great many ships since I have been here, and I have seen the cannon. Despite his hard work, resourcefulness and innovations, the original schedule proved unattainable; by January , Whitney needed money and an extension on his contract. Going to Washington, he demonstrated to President Adams and the military that his system of uniform parts worked. With the election of Jefferson as President, further problems with extensions or advancements were solved.

He was famous for his iron boat, iron pulpit, iron desk - and even iron coffin, which he liked to burst out of to surprise visitors. In fact, he deserves far more fame for inventing, in , 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. But they had trouble making it work. 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 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 and 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. It 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.

Monsieur 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. 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.

Killed for spying: The story of the first factory. What the dynamo reveals about technological innovation. Why the falling cost of light matters. Can a computer fool you into thinking it's human? The economist Adam Smith's famous description of a pin factory, nine years before Blanc's demonstration , depicted each worker adding a step to what had come before. While European gunsmiths were not impressed by the idea, he did interest the American Ambassador to France, Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson quickly saw that mass production of weapons parts would free America from dependence on European sources for parts. He could not get Blanc to move to the United States but he did convince President George Washington it was a good idea. In , Eli Whitney got the first contract for 10, muskets to be delivered within two years.

Whitney used a large force of unskilled workers and machinery to produce standardized identical parts at a low cost. This was the first time in the US Blanc's ideas of mass production were put to use. Congress had already decided to pattern the new musket after the French Charleville musket.

This was one that Blanc had worked on early in his career. What resulted was the Springfield Model Musket , the first military musket made in the United States.