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Innovation and Amnesia: Engineering Rationality and the Fate of Interchangeable Parts Manufacturing in France KEN ALDER At the Hôtel des Invalides on November 20, 1790, a gunsmithinventor named Honoré Blanc stunned French academicians, politi cians, and military men. Under the sponsorship of the artillery ser vice, Blanc had manufactured some one thousand gunlocks at an experimental workshop in the Vincennes dungeon, just outside Paris. Now, in front of these august dignitaries, he demonstrated the interchangeability of their parts. Selecting pieces from bins, Blanc reassembled several functional gunlocks. This publicity stunt coin cided with his pamphlet to the new National Assembly, proposing a centralized state-run workshop that would run to the rhythm of uniform production. Such a workshop would sweep away the "an cien régime of the manufactures" and satisfy all of France's need for muskets. It would lower the price of making and repairing guns and prompt further innovations from a new breed of machine-tool makers. It would also provide work for the unskilled vagabonds who troubled the countryside.1 Historians of technology have long been aware that the method of interchangeable parts manufacturing originated in 18th-century France—and of the role played by Thomas Jefferson in bringing word of this method to the United States. Forty years ago, Robert Woodbury called attention toJefferson's letter toJohnJay ofAugust Dr. Alder is assistant professor in the Department ofHistory, Northwestern Univer sity. He thanks the various reviewers of this article and especially Merritt Roe Smith for his guidance into this subject and beyond. Some of the material in this article is a revised version of material presented in Ken Alder, Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763-1815 (Princeton, 1997). Abbreviations: A.D.L. = Archives Départementales de la Loire, Saint-Etienne; A.M.StE. = Archives Munici palesde Saint-Etienne;A.N. = ArchivesNationales, Paris; B.M.R = Bibliothèque Muni cipale de Roanne; S.H.A.T. = Service Historique de l'Armée de Terre, Vincennes. 1 Honoré Blanc, Mémoire important sur lesfabrications des armes deguerre (Paris, 1790).© 1997 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/97/3802-0001$01.00 273 274 Ken Alder 30, 1785, which reported on the demonstration Jefferson had wit nessed in Blanc's workshop.2 Since Woodbury's time, Edwin Battison , Merritt Roe Smith, and David Hounshell have told the subse quent history of interchangeable parts manufacturing in the United States: the tentative efforts of Eli Whitney, the technical achieve ments of the American armories, the practical successes of the pri vate New England gun factories, the adaptations of the sewing ma chine and bicycle makers, and ultimately, the triumph of the assembly-line methods of Henry Ford.3 This history, we have been told, addresses one of the "big questions" in the history of technol ogy for two reasons: because of its centrality to the development of mass production, itself the ideal form of rational production, and, paradoxically, because it constituted a specifically American style of production.4 But the French story of the invention of interchangeability has gone largely untold, and this silence is revealing both of our persis tent assumptions about the nature of technological change and of our reliance on the official guardians of technological memory.5 When, in the 1850s, English investigators brought word back to Eu rope of the "American system of manufacturing," they found that the French military had never heard of the method—let alone of Honoré Blanc.6 Hence, historians too have never felt any need to investigate further. But this strange technological amnesia should 2Jefferson to John Jay, August 30, 1785, The Papers of ThomasJefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton, 1950-), 8: 452-56. Robert S. Woodbury, "The Legend of Eli Whitney and Interchangeable Parts," Technology and Culture 1 (1959): 235-53. 'Edwin A. Battison, "Eli Whitney and the Milling Machine," The SmithsonianJour nal of History 1 (1966): 9-34. Merritt Roe Smith, Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology: The Challenge ofChange (Ithaca, 1979). David Hounshell, From theAmerican System to Mass Production, 1800-1932: The Development ofManufacturing Technology in the United States (Baltimore, 1983). See also Carolyn C. Cooper, Robert...
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