Precision Manufacturing

At the end of the 1700s, gun making was still a handcraft. It required skilled labor by individual artisans who could make and assemble every part of the gun mechanism. Guns were custom objects, no two exactly alike.

Eli Whitney wanted to create a manufacturing system using industrially-produced, identical parts that could be assembled into guns by everyday laborers. This concept was known as “interchangeable parts.” Each part would be manufactured to a precise standard and could then be switched out (interchanged) with its corresponding part on any other gun.

While Eli Whitney is often associated with the creation of interchangeable parts and the milling machines that made precision manufacturing possible, he was not the inventor of either system, nor did he work alone. Rather, he was part of a large group of inventors, manufacturers, and laborers who were all working towards similar goals in the first decades of the 1800s. He often exchanged ideas with other industrialists and inventors. Laborers also moved between the Whitney Armory and other factories like Simeon North’s Armory in Middletown, Connecticut, bringing ideas and techniques with them.

Whitney’s plan to use interchangeable parts to manufacture guns was never a total success in his lifetime. However, the systems developed at the Whitney Armory and other Connecticut factories in the early nineteenth century led to the development of true interchangeable parts, one of the major innovations of the Industrial Revolution.