They outfitted it with machines - some brought in from elsewhere, some adapted for their own purposes - that in the hands of artisans could turn out identical parts. In consultation with a millwright, a craftsman in the business of designing water-power systems, they built a factory in 1846. With their financial backer, Samuel Robbins, they bought some land on the other side of Mill Brook, and the brook's central dam was rebuilt so that it could sustain a larger enterprise. Still, they knew that they would have to substantially increase production should they win the contract - which they did, in 1845. The two gunsmiths - Nicador Kendall and Richard Lawrence - already had a flourishing gun-making enterprise, known as "the works," on the north side of Mill Brook, where they employed 25 workers using hand and simple machine tools. Johnson on the armory's history laid out the context: Inventive machinists were part of the region's economic lifeblood, moving from shop to shop, swapping ideas and spreading technological innovations through the region.
#EMRIVER GEOMODEL UNO SERIES#
It was the northernmost in a series of such towns in the Connecticut River Valley, among them Hartford, Springfield, Northampton. Windsor, birthplace of the Vermont constitution and the state's largest town in the early 19th century, was something of an economic hotbed, humming with mills, small factories, machine shops and inventors. The idea that two Vermont craftsmen could fill such a large order might have seemed like a stretch, but not entirely. Army invited bids in 1844 for a contract to make 10,000 rifles, one of the contenders was a new partnership formed in Windsor - two local gunsmiths and a financier who persuaded them to field a proposal. It looks out of place, like a nose ring in a Victorian mannequin. In a nod to modernity, the museum has a 3-D printer on display on the shop floor among the antique-but-intricate contraptions that require antique skills to operate. What really completes the circle, from the armory days to now, is that a 3-D printer can be used - and has been used in Texas and Japan, controversially - to make a gun.
#EMRIVER GEOMODEL UNO FULL#
Equipment like this was once state-of-the-art and key to the production of the Union weaponry that won the Civil War.īut economic innovation evolves in unexpected ways, and the American manufacturing revolution has now come full circle, from mass production to the one-of-a-kind, customized output of a 3-D printer. Gun-stock lathe, drill press, and assorted milling machines are all on display, along with a rifling machine that cut spiral grooves inside gun barrels to improve accuracy. The native ingenuity that helped transform American manufacturing survives in a remarkable collection of factory artifacts in the old armory itself, now known as the American Precision Museum. Those machines had been assembled, refined, and in some cases, invented by Vermont craftsmen who not only set a standard other northern industrialists sought to match, but helped prepare the way for mass production of consumer goods that dominated manufacturing through much of 19th and 20th centuries. They'd been made not by hand, but by machines. When a rifle malfunctioned and needed a new part, that piece had to be custom-fitted by a gunsmith.īy contrast, parts made by the Robbins and Lawrence Armory were interchangeable, because they were precisely the same size. This represented a breathtaking departure from time-honored gun-making technology, in which a gunsmith would make one gun at a time, part by part, with no two guns exactly the same size. Here's what blew the fair's spectators away: When the armory's Vermont representative disassembled the guns and mixed up the parts, he could put each rifle back together with parts that had been in the others, and the mechanisms all worked the same as before. The rifles had been manufactured by a factory in Windsor called the Robbins and Lawrence Armory. WINDSOR – When six Vermont-made rifles went on display in 1851 at the first world's fair, in London's Crystal Palace, British engineers were impressed.
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