The furniture of George Jacob Hunzinger. (19th-century American furniture designer)

In 1855 Samuel Colt (1814-1862) remarked that there was "nothing that could not be produced by machinery."(1) This enthusiasm for the nascent machine age was widely endorsed in the United States, and although it began to have the expected effects of standardization and efficiency on the manufacture of Colt's firearms, the furniture industry remained tied to the old methods.(2) Machine-powered lathes and saws were used for simple tasks and for making furniture at the low end of the market, but the American furniture trade still relied on handwork in the second half of the nineteenth…