[GreenKeys] Miniature Teletype

[Bryan Brodie]

Google makes everyone smart, or at least a smart ass!

The history of interchangeable parts, via wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchangeable_parts

Eli Whitney, a false start
In the U.S., Eli Whitney saw the potential benefit of developing
"interchangeable parts" for the firearms of the United States
military, and thus, July 1801, he built ten guns, all containing the
same exact parts and mechanisms, and disassembled them before the
United States Congress. He placed the parts in a large mixed pile and,
with help, reassembled all of the weapons right in front of Congress,
much like Blanc had done some years before.

The Congress was immensely impressed and ordered a standard for all
United States equipment. With interchangeable parts, the problems
centered around the inability to consistently reproduce new parts for
old equipment without the aid of significant hand finishing that had
plagued the era of unique weapons and equipment passed, and if one
mechanism in a weapon failed, a new piece could be ordered and the
weapon would not have to be discarded. The hitch was that the guns
Whitney showed Congress were made by hand at great cost by extremely
skilled workmen.
Whitney was never able to design a manufacturing process capable of
producing guns with interchangeable parts. Fitch credited Whitney with
successfully executing a firearms contract with interchangeable parts
using the American System, but historians Merritt Roe Smith and Robert
B. Gordon have since determined that Whitney never achieved
interchangeable parts manufacturing. His family's arms company,
however, did so after his death.

Brunel's Sailing Blocks
Mass production using interchangeable parts was first achieved in 1803
by Marc Isambard Brunel in cooperation with Henry Maudslay, and Simon
Goodrich, under the management of (with contributions by
Brigadier-General Sir Samuel Bentham, the Inspector General of Naval
Works at Portsmouth Block Mills at Portsmouth Dockyard for the British
Royal Navy during the Napoleonic War. By 1808 annual production had
reached 130,000 sailing blocks.

Terry's Clocks
The first mass production using interchangeable parts in America was,
according to Diana Muir in Reflections in Bullough's Pond, The world's
first complex machine mass-produced from interchangeable parts", which
was Eli Terry's pillar-and-scroll clock, which rolled off the
production line in 1814 at Plymouth, Connecticut. Terry's clocks,
however, were made of wooden parts. Making a machine with moving parts
mass-produced from metal would be much more difficult.

North and Hall
The crucial step in that direction was taken by Simeon North, working
only a few miles from Eli Terry. North created one of the world's
first true milling machines to do metal shaping that previously had to
be done by hand with a file. Diana Muir believes that North's milling
machine was online around 1816. Muir, Merritt Roe Smith, and Robert B.
Gordon all agree that before 1832 both Simeon North and John Hall were
able to mass-produce complex machines with moving parts (guns) using a
system that entailed the use of rough-forged parts, with a milling
machine that milled the parts to near-correct size, and that were then
"filed to gage by hand with the aid of filing jigs."

Historians differ over the question of whether Hall or North made the
crucial improvement. Merrit Roe Smith believes that it was done by
Hall. Muir demonstrates the close personal ties and professional
alliances between Simeon North and neighboring mechanics
mass-producing wooden clocks to argue that the process for
manufacturing guns with interchangeable parts was most probably
devised by North in emulation of the successful methods used in
mass-producing clocks. It may not be possible to resolve the question
with absolute certainty unless documents now unknown should surface in
the future.

> From: "George B. Hutchison" <w7tty at olypen.com>
> To: <nagle at animats.com>, <greenkeys at mailman.qth.net>
> Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2011 00:27:37 -0800
> Subject: Re: [GreenKeys] "Miniature Teletype"

>
> Question/quiz...  Who in history came up with  the concept of interchangeable parts, and what was the first device that used truly interchangeable parts??
>
> Just somthin' to tweak minds..
>
> W7TTY
>