Blanchard’s Lathe and the Long Arc of American Manufacturing

Emerging from the chaos of supplying the U.S. Army during the War of 1812, the War Department sought to foster domestic production of standardized muskets. Out of this industrial project arose an invention that laid the foundation for automation and mass production. Thomas Blanchard’s copying lathe was a product of a fluid interchange between public and private interests, expertise, and capital. Born into the mechanical milieu of the nineteenth-century Connecticut River Valley, Blanchard embodied the period’s spirit of ingenuity. His creation enabled complex, irregular three-d