The Perfectionists Page 11

  THE NEWBORN MANUFACTURING community had other irons in the fire besides, and most of them of a decidedly nonbelligerent nature. One Oliver Evans was making flour-milling machinery; Isaac Singer introduced precision into the manufacturing of sewing machines; Cyrus McCormick was creating reapers, mowers, and, later, combine harvesters; and Albert Pope was making bicycles for the masses. And while the Northeast of the United States has long worn its still-surviving reputation for firearms making—the broad lowland reaches of the Connecticut River have long been known as Gun Valley, as gun makers were (and mostly still are) all here: Colt, Winchester, Smith and Wesson, Remington—it was soon to be known for other creations: for another high-precision industry had lately moved into the valley towns and cities of America at about the same time.

  Those who operated the machines that were locally bent to making the small components for the region’s armories (the triggers, the faceplates, the frizzle springs) found that they could with ease modify their lathes and milling machines to make small gearwheels and spindles and mainsprings, the necessary components for the intricacies of timekeeping. The region, in consequence, became famous for the production of clocks, for generations of precisely made, and occasionally accurate, plainly beautiful American timepieces.

  I write this to the steady beat of a Seth Thomas thirty-day kitchen clock, made in Plymouth, Connecticut, in the 1920s. It is a thing of solid utilitarian beauty, the sort of thing the Shakers would have made if they had concerned themselves with time beyond daybreak and dusk. It is not alone: there are many other clocks scattered around this old farmhouse, most of them eight-day clocks, five of which need winding every Sunday morning, one that has as its pendulum two cylinders half-filled with liquid mercury. In the hall there is a long-case clock made in Winchester, Connecticut, which I bought for reasons of eponymy and which is a little troublesome: it is more than a century old and has wooden gearwheels, which are inconveniently susceptible to changes in the ambient temperature and humidity. The others are more or less reliable, though, and so long as I wind them with an eye to synchronicity, they all remain ticking and chiming as they should, with the exception of one in the kitchen, a former British Railways station clock that has a mind of its own and sometimes demands winding in midweek, which I find confusing.

  Still, what I particularly like about old-fashioned clocks is that they may well have been made precisely (their gearwheels fashioned to tolerances of some thousandths of an inch, their springs tight-enable to precisely calculated and specific torques, their pendulum bobs precisely weighed, and their pendulum sticks of exactly measured lengths), but they are often anything but accurate. And part of the pleasure of my Sunday morning ritual is correcting them all, pushing this hand a little forward, that one a minute or so backward, putting the grandfather (which gains inordinately) back by ten minutes or more.

  One of the best-loved films of my childhood was The Fallen Idol, a genteel drawing room thriller made by Carol Reed, in which most of the drama takes place inside the French embassy in London. One scene remains in my mind: at the same moment as the details of what looks like a gruesome murder are being unpicked by a group of burly policemen, the Sunday morning clock winder makes his appearance, performing work on the embassy’s elegant clocks, all ormolu and cloisonné, just as I do on my much humbler collection. Hay Petrie, a diminutive character actor from Dundee, has the role, and checks the clocks by his own pocket watch, presumably an impeccable timekeeper. My own domestic standard timekeeper is a pocket watch, too, a Ball railroad watch wound daily and which keeps to about ten seconds a week. When, every month or so, I find it necessary to reset this, I telephone the time recording from the U.S. Naval Observatory master clock, which has as its own standard a series of cesium fountain atomic clocks in a secure building in Boulder, Colorado.*

  Though by Sunday breakfast all my clocks are in harmony, it takes only a day or so for them to fall slightly out of rate once more. By Wednesday, I head up to bed listening, just as Harriet Vane does when, in Gaudy Night, she listens to Oxford’s clocks, the various iterations of midnight being chimed out in “friendly disagreement.” In writing that line, Dorothy Sayers was celebrating a mild and meaningless inaccuracy from which one might well take (as I most certainly do) a considerable but inexplicable satisfaction.

  To the ordinary and reasonable human, there can perhaps be too great a degree of, or reliance upon, precision, which is something the clockmakers of New England understood well. They knew that the use of interchangeable parts made the manufacture of things a great deal easier than before, and that they could make their goods both quickly and, most important for customers, cheaply. They knew also that accuracy was not of supreme importance in clocks, even though such a sentiment seems to fly in the face of what a clock is intended to do.

  Both precision and accuracy are crucial in the making of guns—a soldier’s life depends on his weapon, on its reliability and the honesty of its making—but a clock in a family home, in an early nineteenth-century home, that is, was there more for the decorative augmentation of the kind of daily events that marked time more conventionally: the passage of cows from meadow to byre, the children’s morning yearning for breakfast, the blast of the steam whistle, the peal of church bells. Clocks of the kind being made in America, necessarily very different from the kind of timekeepers John Harrison had been making for the Board of Longitude in England in the previous century, were offered as symbols of arrival into the middle class, much as were sewing machines and washing machines, also Connecticut Valley–made at around the same time.

  Clocks that were cheap, repairable, moderately accurate—these were the requirements of the customer, and it was the benefit of precision-based engineering that allowed them to be made so. Perhaps we should not be as surprised as the visitor to the American West in the middle of the century who remarked that “In Kentucky, in Indiana, in Illinois, in Missouri, and in every dell in Arkansas, and in cabins where there was not a chair to sit on, there was sure to be a Connecticut clock.” That was part of the triumph of a means of making that was already being called, to the envy of all industrialized nations around the world (including the British, who could still rightly lay claim to having been the pioneers of precision and perfection), the American system.

  Chapter 4

  (TOLERANCE: 0.000 000 1)

  On the Verge of a More Perfect World

  All of beauty, all of use

  That one fair planet can produce,

  Brought from under every star,

  Blown from over every main,

  And mixt, as life is mixt with pain

  The works of peace with works of war.

  —ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, “ODE SUNG AT THE OPENING OF THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION” (1862)

  On the warm and sunny midafternoon of Monday, July 2, 1860, in the then-leafy London village suburb of Wimbledon, Queen Victoria performed a task many of her subjects would have thought unsuited to her dignity, improper for her sex, and inappropriate to her station. She fired a high-powered rifle, and with a single shot over a range of a near–quarter mile, she scored a near-perfect bull’s-eye.

  It was all a little more complicated than it sounds. Her Majesty did not simply adjust her crinoline, fling back her veil, hurl herself to the ground, and let loose at a distant target. This was the opening moment of an international contest run by Britain’s National Rifle Association, of which the queen was patron, and she had been asked to inaugurate the event in an appropriate manner. There should be an opening gunshot, it was thought, and the queen should fire it. To the surprise of all, the Palace agreed—subject to certain conditions. Her Majesty was not going to lie on the royal stomach, or prostrate herself whatsoever.

  Joseph Whitworth’s name is memorialized today in the standard measurement of screw threads, BSW, for “British Standard Whitworth.” He also designed rifles much used by the Confederate side in the U.S. Civil War.

  Accordingly, on a crimson silk–swathed dais built n
ear the pavilion tent where the queen would arrive from Buckingham Palace, there stood a gleaming state-of-the-art Whitworth rifle. It wasn’t just standing propped up on the side; it had been firmly mounted on a stout iron stand and was pointing toward the leftmost of a line of targets that stood before a range of butts four hundred yards away across Wimbledon Common. The gun was set horizontally, at a height commensurate with the queen’s modest stature: mighty she might be to her subjects, but she stood just four feet eleven inches, a height of some significance, though, when someone fires a gun while standing up. A silk string with a tassel was attached firmly to the gun’s trigger. The safety catch was on.

  Nothing was going to be left to chance, and in consequence, Joseph Whitworth, the Manchester engineer who three years before had invented and designed this hexagonally barreled, .45-caliber high-powered weapon, was extremely nervous and concerned. Working with a team of assistants, he had spent two harried hours that afternoon adjusting his demonstration gun to bear precisely on its target. His reputation (stellar but, like all reputations, vulnerable) depended absolutely on the success of this firing. If the gun misfired, his hopes for high favor would be forever dashed. If the queen missed the target, he would be socially ostracized. And if, heaven forfend, Her Majesty’s bullet accidentally hit and killed someone . . .

  The hundreds in the audience waiting for the arrival of the queen didn’t see it quite that way, and were most amused as Whitworth’s test shots crept closer and closer to the red circle at the center of the target. “Much signalling with flags passed between the tent and the markers at the target,” wrote the reporter from the London Times. “Then more manipulation. Then another shot, till a short time only before Her Majesty’s arrival a satisfactory adjustment was arrived at.”

  Whitworth checked that a .45-caliber bullet was in the chamber. Finally, he set the safety catch to off.

  Queen Victoria arrived on the scene shortly before the appointed hour of 4:00 p.m. Her entourage included her beloved Albert, naturally; a gaggle of young princes and princesses; and a small battalion of top-hatted court officials and prim ladies-in-waiting. Functionaries of great seniority and solemnity greeted her, then escorted her and Albert to the Rifle Tent and its silk-swathed dais. Joseph Whitworth, nervously arranging and rearranging his tie, waited. The queen waited, too, the polished rifle beside her.

  From all around the Common, church bells then began their preludes to pealing the hour. It was 4:00 p.m., on the dot, and Her Majesty, not having even seen the target but fully briefed on what she should do, reached over, grasped the tassel, and tugged gently on the silk string. Nothing happened. Maybe she pulled too lightly, so she tried again. Then she was met with slight resistance, and as briefed, she then tugged harder, a third time. This did the trick.

  There was a sudden loud report—a crack!—and then a gust of black smoke from the rifle’s barrel, neither of which seemed to startle the royal personages. A few seconds went by, everyone keeping silent as the royal gunshot echoed and reechoed around the fields. Then, suddenly, in the far distance, a red-and-white flag was jauntily hoisted and could be seen waving in front of the target.

  A gale of wild applause and cheering immediately swept out from the loyal crowd. The queen, without either intention or challenge, had not just hit the target but had done so dead center. A small smile wafted across her face, as if she were faintly amused.

  She had scored a bull’s-eye. Close forensic examination showed that over the four hundred yards of travel, her bullet had deviated only an inch and three quarters in elevation and four-fifths of an inch from the direct line. She had been, or was believed to have been, both precise in her aim and accurate in her intended result.

  And with that single shot, the 1860 Grand Rifle Match of Britain’s National Rifle Association formally got under way, with all concerned, Joseph Whitworth most especially, happy and mightily relieved.

  QUEEN VICTORIA, PRINCE Albert, and Joseph Whitworth had met once before, nine years prior to this encounter in Wimbledon. (Victoria and Whitworth would then meet one further time, nine years later, when she conferred on him the honor of a baronetcy, a hereditary knighthood, for services to engineering. By then, the queen wore black; her adored Albert had died in 1861.)

  IN MIDCENTURY BRITAIN, there was a very real sense that the Western world was changing, and changing fast. The social revolution that had been begun by James Watt and his steam engine had by the middle of the century properly taken hold, and industrialization was affecting everyone’s life, for good or for ill. Cities were swelling, villages were wilting, factories were being thrown up, mines were being sunk, railways were snaking across the landscape, docks were busy with trade, chimneys were belching smoke into previously unspoiled air, wages were being earned, trade unions were being formed, and an extraordinary popular appetite for science and technology was discernible. Progress was the word on everybody’s lips, and the feats and possibilities of machinery were inspiring awe and apprehension.

  Halfway through the nineteenth century, humankind, Western and industrializing humankind most particularly, had somehow reached a hinge point, a time for some to stop and take stock. And in London, capital of the country that, at the time, was near-universally seen as the intellectual, spiritual, and scientific center of the Western world, it was decided, and decided essentially by royal command, that it would be meet and proper to savor the moment, to show off what had been achieved in the world thus far, and to offer some thoughts on what might be coming next.

  A Great Exhibition was proposed and conceived, a celebration of achievement to be entitled in full the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations of 1851. The French had been holding modest but fairly regular displays along these lines in Paris since the end of the century; Berlin similarly staged a small celebration of achievement a few years later; and in London, the Society of Arts* held a competition, with prizes, dedicated to industrial design in 1845. What was planned for 1851, however, was a spectacle intended to blow all its predecessors memorably out of the water. And Joseph Whitworth, though little known beyond his particular calling, was to be one of those invited.

  The Great Exhibition of 1851, staged in London’s Hyde Park, allowed the Western world to consolidate under the enormous roof of the Crystal Palace the inventions of the Industrial Revolution to an enthralled public.

  It was Queen Victoria’s imaginative consort, Prince Albert, who remains most publicly associated with the idea of staging a Great Exhibition. With a degree of foresight still admired two centuries on,† he came to recognize the time’s extraordinary zeitgeist, and he wished to capture its uniqueness for one shining summertime, and present it, in a grand and spectacular manner, to his public. He wished the world to hold up a mirror to itself and see just how memorable was its history, then so busily unfolding. Moreover, so confident was he of the popular fascination with what so enthralled him that he was sure such an exhibition would in time pay for itself. Accordingly, as he painstakingly selected the members of the commission that would plan it, and as he meticulously planned who should be invited and what kind of creations should be on show, he made a single stipulation: that the exhibition be financed privately, and not from the public purse.

  “We are living,” Albert declared at the banquet that inaugurated the fund-raising effort, “at a period of most wonderful transition, which tends rapidly to accomplish that great end—to which all history points—the realization of the unity of all mankind. Gentlemen, the Exhibition of 1851 is to give us a true test of the point of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived in this great task and a new starting point from which all nations will be able to direct their further exertions!”

  By way of making such stirring addresses, Albert soon managed to find all his money in double-quick time, and he then had a polymathic gardener named Joseph Paxton design and then throw up on the southern side of Hyde Park an enormous structure built almost entirely of glass and iron, 1,851 feet long to ce
lebrate the year of the exhibition and 108 feet tall at its highest point such that it could accommodate three of the park’s ancient and best-loved elm trees, which now needed not be felled. The Crystal Palace, as it came to be called, took only six months to build. With nearly a million square feet of glass panels, it looked like a truly fantastic greenhouse, a greater version of the hothouse that Paxton, as gardener, had built for the Duke of Devonshire’s collection of lilies.

  And here, for only a modest price—“The World for a Shilling” was the slogan that attracted visitors by the tens of thousands—were gathered, among myriad marvels, a collection of enormous, heavy, impressive, fully working, and frequently roaring-hot ironbound inventions that were the most up to date, the most important, and among the most visited items on show. They were machines, great big British iron machines; machines that showed, and with a certain sense of disdain, that however obsessed America might be with the cleverness of her precisely made interchangeable parts, however pleased with the consequent beginnings of mass production and, if yet some way ahead, with the makings of the assembly line, this was a moment in British history when mechanical brute power and might were the things to be displayed and deployed. For America, such display would come later. For now, this was Britain’s time, and presentations of national endeavor built on a grand scale would mark the moment.

  Patriotism, together with a pervasive sense of jingoism, had naturally much to do with the local popularity of these British machines. While British people of the time certainly liked to be titillated by the trivial and the amusing, of which the exhibition had plenty, it was clear also that it was through the making and use of these monumental inventions that Britain, soon to be at her imperial apogee, at her proudest and most powerful, would continue to prosper, dominate, and rule.

  For a time, at least. If there was a faint drumbeat of doubt, Britons of the day were quite deaf to it. They were happily fascinated by the steady march of their constructions—the huge ships, the great guns, the soaring iron bridges, the canals, the aqueducts. The still very new sight of steam locomotives, the best of them gleaming in their green and red and black enamel paint and with highly polished brass, could be guaranteed to draw crowds at any railway terminus, and the swelling number of water pumping stations and printing presses, and the solemnly rocking iron beam engines that powered them, never failed to capture the popular imagination.