“American System” of Manufactures

“American System” of Manufactures. American manufacturers stole the show at London's 1851 Crystal Palace Exposition. Several American products especially impressed the British, among them Cyrus McCormick's reaper, Alfred C. Hobbs's unpickable lock, and most of all the guns: Samuel Colt's revolver and the Robbins and Lawrence rifle. These items impressed exposition visitors not only because of their excellence, but also because they were produced in large quantities, and in the case of the guns, with interchangeable parts.

While historians debate the precise meaning of the American system of manufactures, most define it as the system of production that originated in the arms industry to manufacture guns with interchangeable parts. In nineteenth‐century America, this system was often called the “armory system.” The process was dubbed the “American System” by a British commission sent to the United States in 1853 to learn about the system that produced the articles displayed at the 1851 exposition.

The idea of parts' interchangeability, which originated in France, was novel at the beginning of the nineteenth century and not important to most manufacturers. The American government, however, recognized the potential advantages of guns with interchangeable parts that could be easily repaired on the battlefield. At the urging of several Presidents and secretaries of war, the Ordnance Department and Congress supported efforts by inventors and entrepreneurs to manufacture such arms. A number of armsmakers claimed to achieve interchangeability in the early nineteenth century, but as historian Merritt Roe Smith has shown (Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology, 1977), the first truly interchangeable arms were the rifles made by John Hall at his shop at the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia.

The American system of manufactures is vital to an understanding of the development of U.S. industry. Precision manufacture of interchangeable parts led to greater and greater division of labor and the invention of self‐acting machines that could be operated by workers with less training and experience than traditional craftsmen. The system of modern mass production first introduced by Henry Ford at the Ford Motor Company can be traced directly to the armory system.
See also Factory System; Industrialization.

Bibliography

Nathan Rosenberg, ed., The American System of Manufactures: The Report of the Committee on the Machinery of the United States 1855 and the Special Reports of George Wallis and Joseph Whitworth, 1969.
Otto Mayr and Robert C. Post, eds., Yankee Enterprise: The Rise of the American System of Manufactures, 1981.
David A. Hounshell , From the American System to Mass Production, 1984.

Lindy Biggs