A History of Standardized Part

Not so much a story this week, as a rambling about one of my favorite topics: Standardized Parts. The advent of standardized parts drove the creation of Mass Production which led to using Statistics in Business. This led to the work of Deming, Juran, and other quality gurus. Which drove the creation of Lean and Six Sigma. Which ultimately created the field in which I work. So, I find the topic quite fascinating and love to talk about it?(and I wonder why I don’t get invited to more parties).

One of the earliest examples of interchangeable parts, a concept needed to set the stage for standards, comes from a surprising source: The Terra Cotta Army of the first Qin emperor of China. When the Emperor was buried in 201 B.C.E., he had an army of 7,000 warriors made from terra cotta clay created to help him in the afterlife. Researchers believe artisans specialized in creating various body parts: hands, bodies, heads, etc. They made them to exacting specifications, then assembled them in the burial area. An amazing feat, but not exactly standardization, and not for consumer use. Standardization in manufacturing came centuries later.

Standardized parts for mass production came with the first industrial revolution. It all started with an odd combination of the United States Founding Fathers, Inspiration from cats’ claws, and the British Navy

In the late 1700’s, Thomas Jefferson, as Minister to France, saw the Système Gribeauval, a new idea for producing cannons and muskets using standardized work and interchangeable parts.?Jefferson, sensing the potential, tried to get Honoré LeBlanc, who had used the system to create standardized flint locks for muskets, to move to America. Blanc refused to move, instead, it was an American, Eli Whitney, who helped bring Jefferson’s vision to life.

Whitney was best known for his invention of the Cotton Gin.?The cotton gin was a machine of wooden cylinders with spikes that cleaned newly picked cotton of seeds, allowing it to be spun into thread.?Rumor has it Whitney got the idea by watching a cat trying to grab chickens through a fence and only coming away with claws full of feathers. His machine revolutionized cotton production; greatly increasing output throughout the southern United States.?Unfortunately, with an increase in cotton came an increased demand for labor to grow, harvest, and process it…which at the time were slaves.?Increased demand for slaves led to further reliance on owning them and intensified the strains between free and slave states. The cotton gin is sometimes claimed to be an indirect cause of the Civil War.

Despite the widespread use of the Cotton Gin, patent disputes (caused by Thomas Jefferson’s failure to timely process the patents) left Whitney broke. In 1798, the US Government anticipated war with France and sought to purchase muskets. Jefferson sought out Whitney to make up for the patent fiasco and shared with him the idea that interchangeable parts could be used to manufacture muskets.

Whitney took a government contract to produce 10,000 muskets within 2 years.?An absurd number given that up to that point, the normal process was for one craftsman to carve the stock, create a barrel, fit it, then build the firing mechanism. The main armorer of the time, The Federal Arsenal, was creating only 245 muskets every two years.?People laughed when they heard Whitney thought he could make 10,000 muskets in the same time span.

After two years, Whitney had not produced a single musket. He was busy creating jigs, stencils, and \other devices to create standard parts. He was also busy setting up water wheels to power his workshops and reduce need for labor. But for the labor he did need, he actually create a town, Whitneyville to house his workers and workshops.

But the government wanted results, as Whitney was called before Congress in January of 1801 to explain how he was spending federal money.?Whitney explained the idea of interchangeable parts with a display. He brought a supply of musket parts. Whitney randomly choose parts and used them to assemble muskets before their eyes. The performance provided renewed government support and he was allowed to continue the contract.?He did eventually fulfill the contract, but not until 1809; nine years overdue. It was also later revealed that Whitney's display in front of Congress was not all it appeared.?The various parts had small markings, and the selections were not so random, as the parts were not fully interchangeable. But it bought enough time for Whitney to continue to improve his methods to achieve standardization.

At about the same time, across the ocean, Britain, with its Royal Navy ruling the seas, was having supply issues with blocks and pulleys. These were the wooden contraptions used with ropes to raise and lower canvas sails. A typical ship of the line required 1,000 such blocks pulleys. In a year the Royal Navy went through 100,000 of them. Up to the 1800’s they were made by hand; resulting in a wide variety of sizes and shapes, and taking quite a bit of time. But as the Napoleonic Wars drove a huge increase in demand for ships, and pulleys, the British Admiralty sought better solutions.

Britain began upgrading its Portsmouth Dockyard, installing steam engines to power pumps for the dry docks and the saw for woodworking. Leveraging the use of the steam power tools, the engineers at the Dockyard created plans to create standard blocks and pulleys. They laid out three sizes, small, medium, and large and created mass production lines for manufacturing. They continued to tweak the process, and by 1805 they were building 130,000 blocks and pulleys a year for the Royal Navy.

Also around this time, back in the United States, another piece of the puzzle was being developed: continuous production. Oliver Evans, an often overlooked genius of the 18th century, had gotten into flour mills. Looking at the overall process, he realized that flour was often contaminated by workers and product moving about the mill. He created a method to automate the mill: wheat in one end, and flour out the other, with no human interaction in-between. While the machinery was complex, it was not revolutionary. There was nothing new invented. But Evans’ contribution was a radical shift in thinking about manufacturing, treating it as an integrated continuous whole rather than a series of isolated processes.

As many wise people have stated, we stand upon the shoulders of giants…learning and building upon the works of the past. Eli Whitney, The Royal Navy, and Oliver Evans with their work in standardization and improvement are all just small blocks which have been used to build the Assembly Line, Total Quality Management, Lean, Six Sigma, and so much more.

And now, after reading this, you’ve got some stories to tell at your next party.

#quality #lean #leansixsigma #operationalexcellence #processimprovement #totalqualitymanagement #storytelling #innovation?#lean #leantraining?#leanthinking?