The history of standardization

For most of human history up to this point, everything made was custom. The Singer Sewing machine at that time was perhaps the most complicated item mass-produced. Every part of the Singer Sewing Machine, every bolt, every nut, every gear, was all custom-made. This meant if it broke, you had to recreate that nut used from that particular machine. There was no such thing as interchangeable parts. Screws were not universal. Nothing could be mass-produced until there was standardization in place. This all changed in the mid-eighteenth century when a French artillerist named Jean-Baptiste Vaquette de Gribeauval was experimenting with ways to make artillery parts interchangeable. By standardizing how cannons and shells were produced, The Gribeauval System changed the course of history by assisting French armies in the French Revolutionary War and Napoleonic Wars. Honoré Blanc, a French gunsmith, saw what Gribeauval was doing and applied the same techniques to muskets. When Blanc tried to convince the craftsman to try standardizing production, he was met with resistance. Craftsmen and manufacturers were skeptical about the process and even more worried that if standardization could work their jobs and future would be in jeopardy. 

So Blanc eventually meets none other than Thomas Jefferson who immediately sees the potential of this process. Jefferson tries to recruit and relocate Blanc to the U.S. who turns him down. Instead, Jefferson eventually came back to the United States, lobbied for the idea, and secured the funding with George Washington’s stamp of approval. Before you know it, in 1798 a contract was issued to Eli Whitney for 12,000 muskets to be built under the new system of standardization. Interchangeable parts were born.