Re: Change (was: (TFT) Jobs table: ...)

[raito@raito.com]

Quoting gem6868 <gem6868@verizon.net>:
> the link didn't work for me.  Is there a fun story about power-crazed
> scientists in this somewhere?  You may change names to protect the
> innocent... 
> :)

Depends on what you mean by 'power-crazed' and 'scientist', doesn't it?

Anyway, here's the copy from the link. The author is an emeritus 
professor of engineering. 

No. 1252:
INTERCHANGEABLE PARTS


by John H. Lienhard
Click here for audio of Episode 1252. 

Today, a brilliant invention is forgotten. The University of Houston's 
College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that 
make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them. 

Manufacturing with machine-made, interchangeable parts isn't the same 
as the modern assembly line. Interchangeability had to be well 
developed before we could begin mass-producing goods. The idea of 
interchangeability goes back to Gutenberg's invention of precision 
type. Clock-makers had started making certain parts interchangeable in 
the 18th century. And Americans like to credit Eli Whitney with 
inventing the idea in 1803 to make muskets. 

But, for the first whole product whose parts could be interchanged, 
historian Ken Alder takes us to Paris in 1790 [1]. Gunsmith HonorC) 
Blanc had made a thousand muskets and put all their parts in separate 
bins. He called together a group of academics, politicians, and 
military men. Then he assembled muskets from parts drawn at random from 
the bins. By then, Jefferson had already visited Blanc's workshop and 
written back to America about the method. 

Jefferson was president when Eli Whitney duplicated Blanc's 
demonstration 18 years later. No one realized it then, but Whitney was 
faking it. He'd carefully hand-crafted each part so they'd fit 
together. Whitney sold the government a huge contract for four thousand 
muskets. He took eight years to deliver them and then the parts weren't 
interchangeable after all. 

But other Americans went on to make the method work. Before the Civil 
War, we had rifles with parts that could be swapped. After the war, we 
began making complex merchandise like sewing machines and typewriters 
with interchangeable parts. 

So what became of Blanc and his method? The answer's a surprise. For 
one thing, Blanc wasn't first to make muskets this way. Various French 
makers had worked on the idea since 1720. Furthermore, Blanc went into 
business and, by the time Whitney made his demonstration, was producing 
10,000 muskets a year for Napoleon. 

Then, in 1806, the French government sacked the whole process. Why? By 
using unskilled labor, Blanc's method had made manufacturers 
independent of government control over the old crafts. The government 
raised the arcane argument that workers who don't function as a whole 
can't produce harmonious products. They simply declared that Blanc's 
method wasn't working and they scrapped it. 

Meanwhile, America built upon Whitney's scam. By 1850, English visitors 
back from America described what they now called the American System of 
Manufacture. When they told the French about our use of interchangeable 
parts, they found the French military had never even heard of it. The 
French had buried it that completely!

The story grimly reminds us that technology doesn't progress in simple 
logical ways. Our choices depend on a hundred subjective matters, and 
they are only thinly influenced by what works best. 

I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we're interested 
in the way inventive minds work. 

Neil Gilmore
raito@raito.com
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