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From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932

by David A Hounshell

The United States was famous in the 19th century in Britain and Europe for something called the “American System”, which predated the mass production of the 1910s and 1920s, and which is associated with Henry Ford and the introduction of conveyor belts and electrified factory production. The American System involved the assembly of manufactured goods – originally rifles and muskets – using interchangeable parts, which led to an enormous increase in efficiency and productivity. Before then factories were essentially sweatshops or common spaces where individual craftsmen sat and assembled each item piece by piece completely from scratch, which was enormously time and resource consuming. So, even before you had electrified conveyor belts and the modern idea of mass production, there was this vision of simply having this pile of parts and you could take any of those parts and assemble it into a single device. This seems easy, but it was not. You had to have machine tools which were capable of cutting the individual parts so that each one could fit into any product. The irony, as David Hounshell points out, was that the American System was invented in France. The French military in the 18th century, like most European countries, manufactured their own weapons, and some generals came up with this idea and they experimented with it with some success. Thomas Jefferson, while he was America’s ambassador to Paris, was given a demonstration, and he encouraged the development of this later on in the United States. From that point, all the way up to the Civil War, federal arsenals pioneered this kind of assembly, based on interchangeable parts, which became known as the American System. And again, this goes against the idea that the government should just stay out of the economy. In fact, the federal arsenals were the leading sector in American technology and the innovations that they came up with at taxpayers’ expense were then diffused throughout the private sector, as some of the same craftsmen and contractors that they used would then go off and start their own private shops. So in the same way that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, in the present day Defense Department, spun off the Internet and computers and so on in the late 20th century, these federal arsenals diffused this highly efficient new technique of manufacturing. It was superseded in turn by what we know as mass production. Essentially, it’s having a moving conveyor belt and people in different stations working on part of an object. This required electricity to power the conveyor belt and the tools used by the workers. So the American System developed in the steam era. The next wave of technological innovation based on electricity made possible the system of mass production. It’s of historic importance in the field. It is the most thorough scholarly study. It’s very heavy going, so scholars may find it more readable than general readers, but it is the basis of all subsequent research since it was published a few decades ago. It’s based on very extensive primary research. It’s also a great work of intellectual synthesis, covering everything from the late 18th century up until the age of the [Ford] Model T. So it’s a masterpiece of scholarship.

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