English mechanics were making machines for cutting metal at least a generation before Whitney.One of the earliest of these English pioneers was John Wilkinson, inventor and maker of the boring machine which enabled Boulton and Watt in 1776 to bring their steam engine to the point of practicability.Without this machine Watt found it impossible to bore his cylinders with the necessary degree of accuracy.* From this one fact, that the success of the steam engine depended upon the invention of a new tool, we may judge of what a great part the inventors of machine tools, of whom thousands are unnamed and unknown, have played in the industrial world.
* Roe, "English and American Tool Builders", p.1 et seq.
So it was in the shops of the New England gunmakers that machine tools were first made of such variety and adaptability that they could be applied generally to other branches of manufacturing;and so it was that the system of interchangeable manufacture arose as a distinctively American development.We have already seen how England's policy of keeping at home the secrets of her machinery led to the independent development of the spindles and looms of New England.The same policy affected the tool industry in America in the same way and bred in the new country a race of original and resourceful mechanics.
One of these pioneers was Thomas Blanchard, born in 1788 on a farm in Worcester County, Massachusetts, the home also of Eli Whitney and Elias Howe.Tom began his mechanical career at the age of thirteen by inventing a device to pare apples.At the age of eighteen he went to work in his brother's shop, where tacks were made by hand, and one day took to his brother a mechanical device for counting the tacks to go into a single packet.The invention was adopted and was found to save the labor of one workman.Tom's next achievement was a machine to make tacks, on which he spent six years and the rights of which he sold for five thousand dollars.It was worth far more, for it revolutionized the tack industry, but such a sum was to young Blanchard a great fortune.
The tack-making machine gave Blanchard a reputation, and he was presently sought out by a gun manufacturer, to see whether he could improve the lathe for turning the barrels of the guns.
Blanchard could; and did.His next problem was to invent a lathe for turning the irregular wooden stocks.Here he also succeeded and produced a lathe that would copy precisely and rapidly any pattern.It is from this invention that the name of Blanchard is best known.The original machine is preserved in the United States Armory at Springfield, to which Blanchard was attached for many years, and where scores of the descendants of his copying lathe may be seen in action today.
Turning gunstocks was, of course, only one of the many uses of Blanchard's copying lathe.Its chief use, in fact, was in the production of wooden lasts for the shoemakers of New England, but it was applied to many branches of wood manufacture, and later on the same principle was applied to the shaping of metal.
Blanchard was a man of many ideas.He built a steam vehicle for ordinary roads and was an early advocate of railroads; he built steamboats to ply upon the Connecticut and incidentally produced in connection with these his most profitable invention, a machine to bend ship's timbers without splintering them.The later years of his life were spent in Boston, and he often served as a patent expert in the courts, where his wide knowledge, hard common sense, incisive speech, and homely wit made him a welcome witness.
We now glance at another New England inventor, Samuel Colt, the man who carried Whitney's conceptions to transcendent heights, the most dashing and adventurous of all the pioneers of the machine shop in America.If "the American frontier was Elizabethan in quality," there was surely a touch of the Elizabethan spirit on the man whose invention so greatly affected the character of that frontier.Samuel Colt was born at Hartford in 1814 and died there in 1862 at the age of forty-eight, leaving behind him a famous name and a colossal industry of his own creation.His father was a small manufacturer of silk and woolens at Hartford, and the boy entered the factory at a very early age.
At school in Amherst a little later, he fell under the displeasure of his teachers.At thirteen he took to sea, as a boy before the mast, on the East India voyage to Calcutta.It was on this voyage that he conceived the idea of the revolver and whittled out a wooden model.On his return he went into his father's works and gained a superficial knowledge of chemistry from the manager of the bleaching and dyeing department.Then he took to the road for three years and traveled from Quebec to New Orleans lecturing on chemistry under the name of "Dr.Coult." The main feature of his lecture was the administration of nitrous oxide gas to volunteers from the audience, whose antics and the amusing showman's patter made the entertainment very popular.
