3 The English System of Manufacture.

The first change in the technology of manufacturing firearms occurred some 300 years after Beretta began making guns. It came in the form of the English System of Manufacture, which was introduced at Beretta as a result of the Napoleonic conquest of the Venetian Republic and the establishment of a state-run arms factory at Brescia, the capital of the province around Gardone (c. 1800).

The machine tool industry was born in England in the late 18th and early 19th centuries through the agency of English mechanics who devised tools that added greater precision to the process of metal cutting and introduced accurate measuring instruments that helped them achieve a high class of workmanship. The building and use of tools was the focus of their attention. The tools themselves, being general purpose, could be used to fabricate a variety of workpieces. The apprentices who trained in the shops of the great English mechanics were much sought after, having become skilled in the use of instruments and machines. Their skills being applicable to the building of many different workpieces, apprentices focused on the tools they used rather than on the products they fabricated.

With the development of machine tools, the functionality of a product need no longer be viewed together with the process used to make it. The process took on a life of its own, enabling process improvements to be made independently of product constraints. This was the intellectual leap that freed the development of technology from the constraints of the product. Once it occurred, the flowering of technology was rapid. Within 50 years the technological landscape was revolutionized.

The seeds of the new system of manufacture that would utilize the new technology were sown by a young mechanic, Henry Maudslay (1771-1831), who worked at the Woolwich Arsenal. Much of our understanding of how the nature of work changed as a consequence of the introduction of the English System derives from a description of Maudslay's shop; sufficient records of the work of this founder of the machine tool industry survive to enable us to paint a picture of what the workshop of the late 18th and early 19th centuries looked like.

The effect of the English system on Beretta, when it was implemented around 1810, are summarized in Table 3.1. Products were still infinitely varied as before, and all employees worked with their hands on the actual objects being made (no separate staff activities), but in other respects it marked the birth of what we now know as process control.

3.1. Tools for the Woolwich Arsenal

The tools being built by Maudslay in the 1790s were a source of great wonder to his fellow workers. A born craftsman whose skill was the pride of the entire shop, Maudslay supplemented dexterity with an intuitive power of mechanical analysis and a sense of proportion possessed by few men. He exhibited a genius for accomplishing his ends by the simplest and most direct means.

Of all his phenomenal inventions, Maudslay is best known for the development of the slide rest and its combination with a lead screw operated by change gears (Figure 3.1). One of the great inventions of history, it is still used in almost every machine tool.

[FIGURE 3.1 OMITTED]

Like most great inventions, the slide rest was a product of many minds. Leonardo da Vinci had made crude drawings of it. Besson's screw cutting lathe, built in 1569, shows a lead screw. Diderot's Encyclopedia shows an early slide rest. Samuel Bentham anticipated the combination of slide rest and lead screw operated by change gears. [30, p 28] "When the motion is of a rotative kind," Bentham wrote in his 1793 patent, "advancement [of the tool] may be provided by hand, yet regularity may be more effectually insured by the aid of mechanism. For this purpose one expedient is the connecting, for instance, by cogged wheels, of the advancing motion of the piece with the rotative motion of the tool." (British Patent 1951, April 23, 1793) But it is to Maudslay that the distinction of actually designing and developing the first power-driven and controlled lathe belongs.

To take the place that it did in industry, the lathe had to possess a number of features, enumerated by Robert Woodbury below, which Maudslay was able to synthesize.

An industrial lathe must have: first, the ability to machine an iron

or steel workpiece of a substantial industrial size. In order to

meet this requirement, the lathe must itself normally be made of

iron or steel and have its various parts of dimensions such that it

can withstand the stresses set up in it by cutting the ferrous

metals.

Second, the industrial lathe must also be supplied with a

source of power and means of its transmission to the workpiece

and to the cutting tool adequate for cutting iron and steel at rates

which are economical. This requires a suitable headstock spindle

with means for its drive, and a tool carriage with its feed.

Third, the industrial lathe must itself be constructed with

adequate rigidity and precision so that it is capable of producing

a precision nearly equal to its own in the workpieces turned upon

it ... Rigidity in a lathe is provided partly by the material of

which it is made and partly by the design of its parts, but

precision depends also upon the accurate construction of certain

of its features, especially the spindle bearings, the guideways,

and the lead screw. The precision actually needed in the industrial

lathe at any given period is somewhat greater than that required

for the work to be done on it.

Fourth, the industrial lathe must have flexibility. Only a few

machine shops in the mid-19th century could afford to have

specialized machine tools, such as a boring engine, a

screw-cutting machine, or a gear-cutting machine. Most shops had to

depend upon a lathe, a planer or shaper, and a drilling machine ...

To achieve flexibility the lathe needs at least change gears for

both screw cutting and longitudinal feed of the tool, cone pulleys

or some other means of varying the speed of the workpiece and the

cutting rate, a sliding tailstock to take work of different lengths,

and a chuck or a face plate for boring or for other turning not

possible with the workpiece mounted between centers. [37, pp 96-97.

Italics added]

The machine that Maudslay built in 1800 (Figure 3.2) was, according to Roe, "distinctly modern in appearance. It has a substantial, well-designed, cast-iron bed, a lead screw with 30 threads to the inch, a back rest for steadying the work, and was fitted with 28 change wheels with teeth varying in number from 15 to 50." [30, p 104]

[FIGURE 3.2 OMITTED]

The lathe of 1800, however, was the beginning rather than the

end of Maudsley's work on the screw. In the course of the next 10

years he made exhaustive studies of the problem of screw cutting

and succeeded in placing this fundamental aspect of metalworking

upon a solid foundation ... Every resource was exhausted in the

development of accurate original screws. Beginning with the best

of the hand methods, numbers of screws were prepared and the

best of them selected for further work in specially constructed

lathes. "A very excellent brass screw about 7 feet long" was finally

constructed, "which was less than one-sixteenth of an inch false

in its nominal length." A device was then constructed to remedy

this error and the new screw produced was examined with micro-metric

apparatus ... [It and another screw] were then subjected to

further corrections until they became accurate within any margins

of error then significant for mechanical or even scientific purposes.

[34, p 369]

Upon such precision lathes Maudslay cut some of the best lead screws to that time. One of these "was principally used for dividing scales for astronomical and other metrical purposes of the highest class. By its means divisions were produced with such minuteness that they could only be made visual by a microscope." [30, p 41] "I believe it may be fairly advanced," wrote Holtzapffel, "that during the period from 1800 to 1810, Mr. Maudslay effected nearly the entire change from the old, imperfect, accidental practice of screw making to the modern, exact, systematic mode now generally followed by engineers." [16 p 647]

His many inventions notwithstanding, Maudslay's importance lay less in the development of machines than in the founding of the machine tool industry and the radical transformation of shop floor practice. "Maudslay's standard of accuracy," Roe observes, "carried him beyond the use of calipers." In his workshop, Maudslay kept a highly accurate bench micrometer, which he referred to as "The Lord Chancellor." About sixteen inches long, the micrometer had two plane jaws and a horizontal screw, a scale graduated in inches and tenths of an inch, and an index disk on the screw graduated to one hundred equal parts. "Not only absolute measure could be obtained by this means," remarked James Nasmyth, "but also the amount of minute differences could be ascertained with a degree of exactness that went quite beyond all the requirements of engineering mechanism; such, for instance, as the thousandth part of an inch."[28, p 150]