there are differences in the way economists and historians discuss issues in particular. i would sort of say historians plays a great emphasis on archival information descriptive statistics and testimony that was contemporary to the time in contrast social scientists, especially economists look very much for big overarching themes or a framework that will connect it together and sometimes that means ignoring the the details of the specifics of historical events are involved. and what we're going to try to do is to try to bring both into today by looking at a debate or rather a literature on mass production and the assembly line. that as articulated by economists, but then using that framework to think about the issues by using an examples a couple of the major historical transformations in several industries in particular. we're going to talk about both the firearms industry as well as the typewriter. now one of the things we should probably first talk about is something called the american system of manufactory that is in the 19th century writers towards the end of the 19th century started using the term to refer to mass production as it developed in the united states, although of course in the early phases of that development. nobody actually used that term but there was also an awareness throughout the early part middle of the 19th century that the united states was developing along slightly different lines than britain in particular. they're emphasis on whenever possible assembly in mass production. and although as we know that term today a lot of what we're going to discuss barely qualifies as mass production. but of course we are going to talk about now the growth of that of that era and talk about the ways in which the assembly line. both built up and changed moreover. we're going to talk about the economic characteristics of things particularly the nature of demand the ratio of capital labor that affect the adoption or non-adoption of mass production we first need to realize. that when we think about mass production, we're thinking in its ideal form of full automation of the manufacturing process. right, and i think there used to be cartoons in the 60s or 70s. there may be some now in which people think about you know, the hypothetically what is mass production. they think the future somebody just presses one button and everything from the the corn or the material or the steel or the raw materials are picked up from something and robots push everything through through the outlet and even robots load the ships the ships are, you know piloted by robots all the way to your home. of course, that's not the way it works. so even today we don't literally have full mass production. however, we've come a long way relative to its beginnings in the early 19th century. and in particular what i want to talk about is i want to talk about the challenges faced by people engaging in math production both at that time and to some extent today in industries that are hard to to convert to mechanization. in particular let's think about we can break down this question of mass production into four general categories. the first is the assembly line itself. the very idea of the assembly line was of course enacted in primitive forms in many small workshops and stuff, but when we consider that idea today we think of a system in which the assembly or the production of a product is based upon different groups or individuals or teams working on specialized portion? of the production which are then inputs or which are then combined with other inputs other processed intermediate inputs are recombined into the final product. that's what we mean by the assembly line. right, and that's distinct that notion of the assembly line is very different from for example the second issue which is the mechanization of the process. the assembly line is something that became much bigger in american and britain which was the beginning of the industrial revolution mechanization, of course was something that the british pioneered in terms of things like the whole idea of the steam engine itself as well as the various machines used to improve both cotton spinning and weaving this is part of the mechanization process. for example early automation didn't necessarily mean the machine did everything but the machine engaged in multiple movements or multiple processes that it might have taken dozens of people to do but instead now a single worker by simply running the machine. could engage in production of things that multiplied the potential for the human labor to a much bigger set of output and notice that the reason you separate it is that you can have an assembly line without mechanization. and of course in the extreme case with robotics, you know, you can have mechanization without the human assembly line, but you have a different assembly but the idea is that usually it's easier to get the assembly line before you get the mechanization. although the more mechanized you are the easier it is to have an assembly line. third we can think of the importance of the creation of homogeneous parts for assembly. right so that england had the great deal of mechanization in the early phase of the industrial revolution, but these were not always producing homogeneous intermediate parts that could be assembled together. and the holy grail of homogeneization is full interchangeability. as we will see. these did not come easy and in some sense never really fully came about. till much later than this period but the point is that this period was the beginning of the attempt. to have mechanized assembly lines. that led to homogeneous parts which then were somewhat interchangeable. they were never fully interchangeable in many industries, but that partial interchangeability lowered the ratio of human labor to machine labor. and fourth and finally, there's a goal of the full machine assembly of the final part. think about the fact that even today what we think was relatively simple production say potato chips still needs a human as you'll see if you look at documentaries online a lot of potato chip factories still have people who stand there when the potato chips come out before they enter in the bags and their job is to look at ones that are burnt or undersized or particular broken and like throw them offline. that's something they could automate in theory, but they have found it's cheaper to hire somebody. to do that process at the end of what is essentially a fully mechanized automatic process. so and ultimately notice that even that choice of having a person there in the final period before the packing of the potato chips essentially is about the fact that you're weighing the relative costs. of machines which both involved the development of the machines the maintenance of the machines the testing testing of the machines and the continued use and you make a new machines. that will be performed exactly the same task. one of the big problems always faced by inventors, especially in the earliest part of the industrial revolution in late 18th century. the 1700s was the lack of insufficient polish and sufficient quality in parts so that they could be used together. and of course the previous issue the problem interchangeability. you can guess was a very big issue for which industry what industry is a very big thing? what happens around the 1800s early 1800s? real no, the big catastrophic event that everybody worried about. no, no event. not production. who was around after the french revolution? napoleon then the polyonic wars then the paleonic wars were very important right and they involved huge armies far beyond the scale of wars in the 17th and 16th century. these are gigantic armies. involving often conscripts or volunteers which were of a scale that what had not been seen, you know, since roman times perhaps and perhaps never seen before the huge scale and maybe the only thing just to compare them with me, maybe some of the struggles in asia particularly those involving the chinese empire and say the mongols and one of the bugaboos of that period of the napoleonic war was the interchangeability of parts. for example, even with the early steam engine people took for granted that there would be a lot of final fitting parts didn't always fit together nails were not uniform. people often had the machine and they had to sort of bang it together. even if it's sort of work. they had to constantly be tinkering with it to get it to work all the time. we're so used to cars that rarely break down today that we forget that even as late as the 60s and 70s most cars were really unreliable. you had to bring him the shop very often. against that fact however cars in the say 50s and 60s were more purely analog there weren't these digital parts to worry about so many of those things were easy to work on by people who were mechanically inclined at home. but this is the way almost everything was even more. so earlier on when every machine had to be adapted moreover when your machine broke down, you have to accept the fact that when you bought a new part. you had to be able to work with that part to get it to fit right and you couldn't simply take another machine. that was not broken or a broken machine in cannibalize it for parts and use it on yours without quite a bit of wood or metal work. so these things were part of the issues people worried about and in war this was a really big deal because one of the basics of war is to apply arms so that the polyhonic wars you start to seeing arms really used in mass quantities, but the problem you have is many of the guns were very different and so what you have problems that even though the basic design of the gun is very simple the parts were not at all interchangeable. there was neither harmonogeneity nor interchangeability of the parts and this is one of the areas in which the us pioneered so i want to talk about that. behind this of course at the background considerations which include labor and capital markets with the overall capital equal to the labor ratios. driving a lot of the adoption right you would expect for you for example even today in many countries where labor is very cheap. it's often easier to hire people to perform parts of the menial tasks in contrast in high wage economies like you see in the united states or western europe. things that in other countries should be taking for granted. why did i just get somebody to do it? it's easier to create the machine. and remember that machines often started out by being less. effective at producing things than humans that is early machine created products tended to be of lower quality. it is only later as the machines evolve and become more specialized the precision and uniformity that can be created with machines allows you to produce things that are far more reliable and in certain things get higher quality in other things humans are still better. so for example, take something like for all the accomplishments of machine processing. right ocr systems don't work very well yet. you still have a fair number of errors when you're scanning books. and in order to make them clean you actually have to pay a human being to look through them and correct the ocr errors a machine makes right. i remember when in the early 90s people said oh another 2025 years. this will essentially be perfect. it's 20 25 years later. it's not perfect yet. not by a long shot right. so these are the kinds of things in which humans still have a major advantage relative machines. nathan rosenberg in particular looked at this literature. and was one of the ones to look at the system of manufacturers in america from the standpoint of thinking about the diffusion of process. one of the things we don't realize is that the diffusion of process may be as important as the inventions within the industry itself. in fact rosenberg claims the really big innovation of the 19th century was not the steam engine nor the railroad nor any specific product, but rather the system of machine production and the way in which the leading economies of the world generalized from that they use the processes to make other things. so for example, we're going to look at the way in which firearms developed and became more refined in the processes and over time those processes became so generalized that many of their systems could be used to make things like typewriters. indeed rosenberg who studied a lot the problem of development in the third world. often stress the fact that the third world was not always ready these countries that were poor and less developed. either because of policy choices or unwillingness were simply unable to adapt a lot of you as technologies or western technology in general one of the most naive things about the post-war era particularly in the 1950s was the belief that all poor countries needed was help with financing and capital and you know, how but it turns out know how it's very difficult to transfer. you see today that even in china you many of the things that are outsourced to their you know, things like made by say the iphone or something that are often considered to be better made in chinese factories run by us managers. then chinese factories making similar phones run by chinese managers. part of that is because the whole package of goods and services that go into. what is a modern tool or a modern product often involves things that are outside the simplistic manufacturing requirement. so today we take for granted a lot of the product is the look the design we care about the warranty we care about the nature of customer service we care about the guarantees of on-time delivery the network of suppliers. all these things are part of that innovation. well in the 19th century much of what you were seeing? was an attempt to get one of the four pieces. so let's write them on the board so that we recognize them. all right, so we're talking let's just simply called assembly line. second we're going to talk about mechanization. third homogeneity leading to a degree of interchangeability and fourth final assembly so rosenberg's claim is that machine production and all the accompanying support products of machine production in particular measures propaguges power measures proper tools in some sense for measuring and producing copies of other tools. is part of what allowed for a rapid diffusion in the united states of these growing manufacturing techniques? and also we're going to talk about the difference between government demand for product and private department. private demand is could either be more or less demanding of quality then then the government demand the government has specific political purposes. they have such as winning a war or needing something for policing or needing something for the building of certain types of structures. these are very specific and they are less driven by market forces and more by political forces than the private market where the private market is going to balance out what the consumers tastes are with what they can afford. and it makes a big difference whether you're selling to a mass market or whether you're selling to highly specialized market. we'll talk about that in a second too. and so we're going to talk about the firearms industry because that's a lot of where the earliest assembly lines that were successful were seen. you saw people like ili with eli whitney claimed to have engaged in mass production techniques early, but in fact, he didn't really do that for the most part as most of his stuff was still very much hand made. he claimed to you know, he his work with other a variety of products including the firearms things that he had often claimed a pioneering success in the assembly line, but in fact most historians now say most of his ideas were buncombe and of course, i will see here. there was a tendency for successful american manufacturers to exaggerate the extent to which they had succeeded in creating a functioning assembly line, even the ones we now see who are relatively successful. so the first thing we're going to talk about is firearms, but before that we need to review what is goes on into a firearm. right and the two most common firearms that had to be produced are rifles and handguns. in both of them you need a barrel you need a means of loading the bullets. and you need a trigger action mechanism a mechanism that allows you to fire. the bullet so that it is charged and sent off. furthermore the bullet itself is very complicated. right early on the bullets were mostly a system of putting powder inside the long rifle barrel and then putting a ball that was dropped into it. that was a little bit tight and you jammed that ball. into the musket into the barrel of the musket and then you had what was called the flintlock that is you had the mechanism which struck a flint which then lit something which was easily combustible and that sometimes something like a stick. i mean, let's take a string say in oil or something, which is then transferred the fire. to the powder which exploded and fired the gun. unsurprisingly, this was not very accurate very often early on but throughout the 19th century. improvements were made in both rifles and handguns. and for example the rifle. eventually developed rifling into which we use for handy. i mean right the united to say you're using grooves that go through the bore of the rifle which are used to spin to the bullet. so that they are not the bullet is not destabilized the creation of the conical ball. so for example the balls that look like this and early ones were like this by minier. in europe became essential because they were much more accurate than the simple round balls that being used earlier. in fact the medieval which in america was known as the mini ball. the mini wall was very in some sense essential to the civil war part of the many wall and the improved rifling and improved muskets are part of what made the civil war vastly more if you like sanguinary it was easier to kill people in the civil war that had been in napoleonic times. very often in napoleonic times you had to come with quite close. before you got reasonable hits with their system of rifles and that allowed you to charge people in contrast by the civil war one of the things people learned was that rows of muskets alternately fired. one row at the time was almost like machine fired was like a rolling machine gun, except it was just different rows of men firing that would often stop. people marching up to you in at speed. before they even got within a hundred yards. this is why you got many charges to uphills or something like the famous pickets charge which led to very many deaths. but to get there. they had to figure out improved ways of manufacturing and demand who did a lot to push the assembly line for guns was someone who was working not in rifles, but in handguns and that man was samuel colt. samuel colt interestingly enough was a kind of huckster. he had a lot of good ideas, but he always like to embellish his life. so it's always hard to figure out which parts of his claims are true and false. so for example, he claimed he thought of the idea of a rotating cylinder while he was working on a ship for a year and some people doubt with that's true or not moreover. he was not the only one to experiment with the rotating siller when when samuel called developed his first firearm, which is known as the patterson called because it was main, patterson, new jersey. samuel colt did not in fact patent the cylinder because he knew that was not patentable at that time. in fact a lot of what the patented was the way in which the cylinder fit in the gun and the loading of the bullet. you may not realize this we're so used to thinking of the six shooter. as they later on something you just load six bullets and fire that the early patterson cult.