"One of the things that made it so fun to research my book was the way that it kept leading me to interesting digressions. One of those digressions was the history of interchangeable parts, which I embarked upon when I was writing about vehicles, and specifically about Henry Ford's Model T-an eminently maintainable car, whose manufacture depended on its parts being truly interchangeable."
"It turns out that the story of interchangeable parts is tied up with military innovation. In the late eighteenth century, English and French engineers had invented new ways of casting cannons that made them more uniform and more accurate. Applying that technique to James Watt's steam engines made them efficient for the first time. The Industrial Revolution took off from there."
"Then the French started to standardize their muskets. At that time, muskets were all made by gunsmiths, and the parts of one couldn't fit another-if a soldier's firearm broke on the battlefield, he couldn't fix it himself. A French gunsmith named Honoré Blanc devised a way to make each part of a gun to a standard model."
A do-it-yourself ethos promoted learning how things work and how to fix them, reframing maintenance as essential rather than merely a chore. Maintenance functions as a driver of technological and scientific progress by enabling longevity and iterative improvement. Interchangeable parts emerged from military-driven innovations in uniform cannon casting and were applied to steam engines, increasing efficiency and fueling the Industrial Revolution. Standardization of muskets solved problems caused by bespoke gunsmithing, which prevented battlefield repair, by creating parts that fit uniformly and allowed practical maintenance and rapid replacement.
Read at The New Yorker
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