FSB Author Article
America's Greatest Gunmaker?: Nobody You Know
By Alexander Rose,
Author of American Rifle
Who was the most important gunmaker in American history? There must be
at least half a dozen -- and maybe up to a score if you thought hard
about it -- leading contenders. Let me get into the spirit of things by
naming, off the top of my head and in no particular order, Oliver
Winchester, Samuel Colt, Messrs. Horace Smith and Daniel Wesson,
Christopher Spencer, John Browning, Christian Sharps, the Remington
brothers, John Garand, Eugene Stoner . . .
Each and every one of these individuals could with some justice claim
the mantle of America's Greatest Gunmaker. But I'm giving the laurel to
someone you've probably never heard of. In my view, instead of
languishing in obscurity his name should be not merely a household one,
but a national one celebrated each year with a parade, a day off work,
a monument, and some fireworks. For it was he who almost singlehandedly
laid the foundations for the United States's economic supremacy by
developing a first truly "interchangeable" rifle in the first half of
the nineteenth century. Think of him as the Alexander Graham Bell of
weapons technology, the Steve Jobs of rifle design, the Henry Ford of
the gun industry. Only completely obscure. And who never made any
money.
So who is this illustrious Unsung Hero already? Blessed with the
anodyne name of John Hall, he was Maine born (in 1781) and was obsessed
from his early 30s with creating machines -- humans were not up to the
task, thought he -- that would make rifles, thousands of them, each
perfect and indistinguishable from the others. Hall dreamed that one
could manufacture a batch of rifles, dismantle them, randomly mix each
gun's parts -- from the tiniest screw upwards -- and then reassemble
them. They would function immaculately, or so the theory went.
Now, to us this might not seem so extraordinary a dream; after all,
factories around the world today produce many millions of identical
television sets, microwave ovens, Barbie dolls, and so forth. Even the
computer you may be reading this on is the same in every particular to
a vast horde of others. There is nothing inherently individual about
it.
At the time, however, what was called "interchangeability" was
considered the Holy Grail. So high were the obstacles confronting
inventors that few believed it could ever be achieved -- for any
product, let alone anything as sophisticated as a rifle. It was
destined, they thought, to remain a fool's quest. Only Hall, who had
set up a Rifle Works at Harpers Ferry Armory, thought otherwise. For
decades, he worked all hours of the day, struggling against
disbelieving superiors, costcutting beancounters, and incompetent
bureaucrats, to build the world's first mass-produced rifle. Indeed, so
driven was Hall that he not only wanted to win the prize but to do it
with a highly advanced breechloading weapon. (These then-newfangled
guns loaded through an opening behind the barrel and above the trigger,
which increased speed of loading and fire, as opposed to muskets, which
were charged with ball and powder at the muzzle).
It's difficult to communicate the vaulting ambition of Hall's
objectives to modern readers. Just as there was no mode of transport
faster than a horse in pre-industrial America, everything, absolutely
everything, was made by hand, some elbow grease, and a few tools in
small workshops scattered around the country. Take a gunsmith, for
instance. Following a lengthy apprenticeship, he would establish his
own shop in which he fashioned for himself every part of a gun, from
boring the barrel, to molding the screws, to carving the buttstock, to
attaching the sights.
Even with an apprentice of his own to help, he could turn out only a
few guns a month and owing to the vagaries of construction, his level
of skill, his preferences, and the quality of materials, each was
slightly different from the one before. To the naked eye, they might
look outwardly similar, but in a piece of equipment subjected to the
titanic thermo-dynamic forces that a gun is, even an imperceptibly
loose nut would eventually shake free and and cause a potentially
lethal explosion. Worse, as there were no yardsticks to standardize
performance or measurements, one gunsmith's weapon would be profoundly
different from that made in an adjacent county or even across the
street: Some would be heavier, some would have longer barrels, some fit
larger calibers . . . Everything about them was individual, in other
words.
Hall was, in the end, a tragic figure. By 1830, after nearly twenty
years of toil, he finally had his machines ready, had produced a
limited number of rifles, and had acquired a sheaf of admiring reports
from the army's trials. On the cusp of worldly success, Hall fell
victim to his insistence on working alone, aided only by a team of
hand-picked, superbly trained mechanics. Time had caught up with him.
His breechloader mechanism, once revolutionary, lagged behind newer
entrants to the gun market and upstart rivals (like Colt) were
discovering for themselves the secrets of interchangeability. He had
always been "difficult to get along with" but he was too old, and now
too reluctant to listen to advice or to introduce changes, to keep his
fiefdom at the Rifle Works. Gently, he was pushed out of Harpers Ferry
by a younger generation of engineers and ordnance specialists.
His health rapidly deteriorated and he died on February 26, 1841.
Hall's rifle was shelved shortly after and the world moved on and
forgot about him. Today, not a single likeness of the great man exists
and just a few specimens of the great Hall breechloader are kept in
museums. In fact, while I was writing the book, American Rifle: A Biography,
I was allowed to enter the Smithsonian Institution's hallowed Gun Room
-- a vast storehouse of deadly weaponry not open to the public. After
donning white gloves, I picked up a Hall, still a magnificent piece of
engineering after all these years, and marveled at the beauty of its
mechanism.
Hall, however, did enjoy a posthumous last laugh. The mechanics to whom
he imparted the secrets of interchangeability went forth into the
world, multiplying and prospering. In their vast diaspora, they applied
the teachings of their high priest to every sector of the country's
business enterprise, bringing to an end the era of individual
craftsmanship and small-scale manufacturing. Hall's rifle, in short,
heralded the shock of a new industrial age and the rise of the American
superpower.
The names of Colt, Smith & Wesson, Winchester, and Remington
resound still today -- but they owed their all to this plucky, cranky
Yankee from Maine.
©2008 Alexander Rose
Author Bio
Alexander Rose earned his doctorate from Cambridge University,
where his prizewinning research focused on political and scientific
history. He is the author of Washington's Spies: The Story of America's First Spy Ring, and his writing has appeared in the Observer, the Washington Post, and many other publications. He lives in New York City. His latest book, American Rifle: A Biography, is available October 2008 from Delacorte Press.