New Mars

Will the colonists of Mars really make significant technological advances, as predicted in The Case for Mars? Examining the lessons history has taught us from the last great frontier humanity colonized, America, Vernard Foley believes so.

Lessons from Earth

In The Case for Mars, Robert Zubrin alludes several times to the creation by frontiers of labor shortages, and the consequent stimuli to technological advancement. These references do not discuss specific cases, and are accompanied by only a few quotations and one footnote, a grievous sin which, if presented before a jury of historians, would result, at the least, in pelting with tomatoes while he sat imprisoned in the stocks, and perhaps even in summary execution. But let’s not indulge as others might and proceed with a trial for spectacle. Let us, instead, proceed straightaway to mine the historical record for its applicability and usefulness.

The achievements made [in manufacturing], sometimes within just a few years, led to such episodes as British customs officials confiscating whole shiploads of clockworks, on the assumption that their low prices indicated that they were stolen goods.

The most famous example of the influence of frontier conditions on mechanization is, of course, that of the United States. The history of Russia offers a curiously parallel instance, but has been less investigated to date. The American case eventuated in the perfection of interchangeable parts produced by machines-the mass production process-or what was sometimes called the American system of manufactures. This breakthrough had roots in the colonial period where persons like Alexander Hamilton and Ben Franklin saw that an increase in national power could only come if the scanty population were equipped with machinery and other processes that could multiply their output manifold. The Scottish economist Adam Smith estimated that this labor shortage raised wages in the colonies to two and a half times their European level. Hamilton’s scheme for national development leaned heavily on this theme, and the largely untapped resources of a so-called virgin continent already producing something like 12 percent of the world’s iron offered a ready substitute of natural resources, quaintly called “land” by economists, for labor.

Areas in which early breakthroughs were made include woodworking, the manufacture of clocks, and most famously, firearms. The studies of Nathan Rosenberg are importantly pioneering in this connection. The achievements made, sometimes within just a few years, led to such episodes as British customs officials confiscating whole shiploads of clockworks, on the assumption that their low prices indicated that they were stolen goods. This stimulated very prompt reorders by the Americans, since customs, just to be safe, paid for the cargoes at face value. On the firearms side, manufacturing trends culminated in the Colt revolver factory, producing a thousand guns a day, with a three hundred horsepower steam engine; and the government of England, the self-proclaimed workshop of the world, buying machinery for their new Enfield Arsenal, from the Americans. And then bankrupting the firm involved, Robbins & Lawrence, because they screwed up on the specifications. By the end of the 1800s, many of the arsenals of Europe were making guns on American machine tools.

My own research in this area indicates that back in the colonial period the same economic forces were at work in the arms trade long before the days of people like Colt, Eli Whitney, and John Hall. Consider the case of the long rifle, a muzzle-loading single shot descended from the Jaeger, a hunting weapon developed in the Germanys. Because hunting was restricted to the upper classes there, Jaegers were built with little or no attention to cost. For the hard-scrabble American frontiersman, a rifle was a necessity, but so was economy. These rifles consisted of the familiar lock, stock, and barrel. The lock - the ignition system - was a small but complex and geometrically irregular device, containing almost half the total parts in the gun. Technologies common to the 1700s could not mechanize its production. Hence, most of the long rifle locks were imported from Europe, where labor costs were lower. Yet even so, their performance often lay at the low end of the scale. Unpredictable variations in ignition time would have made for inaccuracy, had this not been compensated for by other factors. By making the rifle “long,” chiefly by stretching the barrel, its inertial moment was approximately doubled (shooter’s shoulder taken as axis origin) and the needed compensating steadiness achieved. Fortunately, barrels are much simpler in form than locks, being essentially cylindrical, and internally threaded, and could be produced easily with simple mechanical help. Barrel mills were in existence in Pennsylvania as early as about 1719, and flourished thereafter, culminating in inexpensive arms, especially those made for the Indian trade even before the days of Whitney, Hall, et. al.

The American case has been worked upon in substantial detail, with newer included instances dealing with sewing machines, pocket watches, bicycles, and office machines, culminating with the automobile and Henry Ford. A subset of this literature talks of the shift in innovation direction that occurs when there is a shift in the natural resource mix, such as occurred when American settlement left the eastern woodlands and ventured out upon the treeless, grassy plains. The researches of Walter Prescott Webb made a beginning here, by considering such cases as barbed wire fencing, energy capture systems such as the windmill and the hay or manure -burning stove, the sod house, and the repeating pistol (so needed for the fluid warfare with the Osage, the Pawnee, the Cheyenne and the Sioux). Webb in a later volume predicted the end of the 500-year boom that began in 1492 as population soared, both nationally and globally, and natural resources began to run low. The historical community, flush with the complacency of the 1950s sneered at his conclusions. Historians are trained to look backwards …

Outside the American scene, trends in manufacturing innovation occurring at about the same time, show similar patterns. One famous British example centers on the Portsmouth pulley block machinery-arguably the first mechanized production line in the world-and combines strands from both the Russian and the American theatres. The credit for this integrated series of 43 machines, which increased output and raised quality while cutting the labor force needed by over 90 percent, usually goes primarily to Marc Isambard Brunel, the chief designer, and Henry Maudslay, the contractor who built the machines, adding his important production and detail touches in the process. Some of these devices lasted until our own mid-century and were shut down by the declining need for rope block and tackle, rather than by obsolescence, per se.

It is known that American influence had its effect on Brunel. As a refugee from the French Revolution he dined in New York with Alexander Hamilton, that great promoter of manufactures. Later he had firsthand exposure to the American wilderness, proceeding with axe, rifle and tent through the New England hinterlands. Hence, Brunel was well acquainted with the American departure from European industrial conditions.

However, there is a third figure In the pulley block line of descent, and that is Samuel Bentham, brother of Jeremy, the famous utilitarian philosopher and political thinker. Trained in the English admiralty as a master shipwright, he went to the Russia of the 1700s to seek advancement, particularly on its eastern (eastward-advancing) frontier. Eventually settling in a province newly taken from the Turks and very lightly populated, but with ample natural resources, he was charged first with building boats of whatever style, and then with constructing a scratch flotilla to battle the Turkish Navy on the Black Sea.

Having at his disposal only untrained soldiers, and having for skilled labor only a “Danish brassfounder, an English watchmaker, and a German schoolmaster,” he commenced the design and manufacture of simple woodworking tools, and an organizational plan that necessitated strong central supervision of the subsidiary workshops. The immediate outcome of this was a flotilla of small gunboats having each relatively large cannon on board-36 pounders, 48-pounder howitzers, and 13-inch mortars. These were installed without recoil slides, the whole boat lurching backwards when the pieces were fired. In this way, he converted boats that nominally could only carry three-pounders, into very formidable weapons. Bentham also introduced to naval war the use of exploding shells, and carcass, or flaming shot.

In battles that followed in June 1788, the Turks lost 11 ships of the line, and 8,000 of the 11,000 man crews. And control of the Black Sea as well. John Paul Jones observed this fight. Returning to England, Bentham took out a patent, granted in 1793, for woodworking machinery that was so fundamental that it may be seen as a guide to the development of the field for the next century or more. It Included things like circular saws, mortisers and routers, and the idea of interchangeability. Hence, it may be seen as ancestral not only to the Portsmouth pulley block machines, but such American advances as the wooden clockworks mass produced later by Eli Terry, Chauncy Jerome, and Seth Thomas; and to the whole American woodworking advance, from the mass-produced sash windows and prefabricated houses of the early 1800s, to the derived demand for more efficient hand-powered wood tools such as the axe; and the lavish, even wasteful use of wood in other areas, such as canal locks and gun carriages. One can trace direct lineages from this woodworking advance in other directions as well. Samuel Colt’s revolver factory was designed and set up chiefly by Elisha Root, who had begun at the Collinsville Edge Tool Works making axes, scythes, and so forth. It is well known that standardization in the arms industry achieved one of its initial easy successes with the wooden carriages for cannon, and one of its later ones with the Blanchard lathe, which mechanized the production of the wooden gunstock portion of the musket.

All these data support the idea that relative shortages of labor, with respect to natural resource supply, and energy, capital, etc. ,tend to historically support mechanization, one of the main past avenues of technological advance. Hence, Zubrin’s predictions for the Martian engineering future appear to be well grounded. There are, however, some unresolved issues in the historical scholarship to date. One of these concerns the economic feasibility of some of the early steps in mechanization, and again firearms has been the most deeply studied aspect. There are rather clear indications from both American and European history that the initial stages of the highly mechanized way of producing firearms resulted in more expensive products than the older hand method. After the process had been perfected, of course, it was another story. Today, without interchangeability, the assembly line, and automation, Chevrolets would all cost as much as Rolls Royces. But why then at the turn of the 19th century did war departments and private armories move toward the newer method?

Economics today is widely criticized-as by environmentalists-for neglecting what are called externalities, or, loosely speaking, costs and disadvantages that do not have to be borne by the firms narrowly involved. Similar considerations may have held in the late colonial and early national period in the United States. European colonists attempted to institutionalize warfare as they were accustomed to it in the old country. The indigenous life forms called savages, or Indians, proved to be adept at waging war by other means, with often extraordinary effectiveness. For instance, hauling bulky supply trains and creating formal roads as they went, the British expedition to seize Fort Duquesne, now Pittsburgh, from the French in the French and Indian War, took most of the summer and fall to cross about three-quarters of the state of Pennsylvania. Compare this to the habit of the Iroquois of raiding the Cherokee, in the Carolina-Georgia area, from their upstate New York base, and making the journey along footpaths, on foot, in five days. Burdened by such baggage as portable forges for gunsmithing broken arms, the creeping white armies could be tracked and then ambushed by Indians with ridiculous ease. Two defeats in the early 1790s nearly wiped out the entire American standing army at the hands of Miami chief Little Turtle. George Washington’s career spanned this period, and he seems to have learned the lessons well, urging American troops to travel lightly and to adopt the native “Skulking Way of War.” Interchangeable parts for guns, together with replacement parts for cannon carriages and wagons would enable white armies to travel burdened with pounds or ounces of repair parts, rather than tons of raw material needing to be worked up into repairs by hand. Work still in progress by Roger Strater, my graduate student, and myself, indicates that considerations such as this go far toward resolving the economic ambiguities of the onset of interchangeability.

Such episodes also suggest that we think about the wider ramification of finding life on Mars. The conquest of the New World resulted in the largest scale exterminations since the disappearance of the dinosaurs, considering such disparate and yet conjoined instances as the buffalo and what are called in political euphemisms Native Americans. Much of the focus of space exploration is on the technical needs of the voyage, or on the mere, sheer discovery of other life forms, rather than on the political or xenosociological aftermath. It is hard enough in some circles still, to push the idea that other life exists outside the Earth, let alone to consider what might happen next. But it would be well to move beyond the mentality represented in the Alien series, or such newer and narrowly tactical efforts as Starship Troopers. There is a joke widely current in Indian country which says that the first response of native life forms to the newly arrived astronauts should be, “Beware of these people. They will try to get you to sign a treaty.” In addition to thinking of the Klingons and the Ferengi, it might be well to remember Wounded Knee and Little Big Horn.

Vernard Foley is an associate professor of the history of science and technology at Purdue University.

Filed under: Articles on August 7th, 2001