William Sellers was a mechanical engineer, manufacturer, and inventor who filed more than 90 patents. Here is an article about him in WIRED magazine from Janurary 2002. You can scroll down this page and click on page 2,3 etc. I am related to this man and that is amazing to me.
We live in a standardized world. Whether made by the Gap or American Eagle, a pair of khakis with a 32-inch inseam and a 34-inch waist will fit you just about the same. A Panasonic phone will plug into the jacks in your home as easily as a phone from AT&T. A new CD from the smallest record label in Holland will sound as good in your car stereo as the latest release from BMG. And Diablo II will run just as well on a Dell as on a PC from IBM. We take this kind of standardization for granted, but without standardization, there would be no mass production or mass communication. Which is to say, without standardization there wouldn't be a modern economy.
Today, according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, there are close to 800,000 global standards. But go back a century and a half and you find an American economy in which there were literally none. On April 21, 1864, a man named William Sellers began to change that. Sellers initiated the first successful standardization fight in history, over the humble screw. That struggle was not just about a particular standard. It was about the importance of standardization itself. To win, Sellers relied on technical savvy - as well as political connections, clever strategy, and a willingness to put progress ahead of the self-interest of his own friends and colleagues.
On that April evening, a crowd of Philadelphia engineers and machinists gathered in the lecture hall of the Franklin Institute, the professional society to which they belonged. Sellers was the institute's new president, and they were there to hear him speak publicly for the first time. In the world of these men, Sellers was a legend, the finest tool builder of his time. After starting as an apprentice machinist at 14, Sellers had his own shop by the age of 21, and a decade later he was the head of the most important machine-tool shop in Philadelphia, the city at the center of America's machine-tool industry. If Sellers was going to insist that national standards were necessary, then it was definitely an idea worth taking seriously.
The speech, "On a Uniform System of Screw Threads," played against the backdrop of war between North and South, which added resonance to Sellers' call for a national standard. "In this country," Sellers noted, "no organized attempt has as yet been made to establish any system, each manufacturer having adopted whatever his judgment may have dictated as the best, or as most convenient for himself." At the time, American screws, nuts, and bolts were custom-made by machinists, and there was no guarantee that bolts made by shops on different streets, let alone in different cities, would be the same. "So radical a defect should exist no longer," Sellers proclaimed.
But even if Sellers was right and the nation needed to adopt a standard, what should it be? Sellers acknowledged that something called the Whitworth screw standard was rapidly gaining ground in England, and that some American machinists were using it as well. But Sellers believed America needed a benchmark of its own, one that met the needs of a fast-growing, rapidly industrializing economy. So he spent the bulk of his speech unveiling a new, and all-American, screw of his own design.
The key to that design - which applied to nuts and bolts as well as to screws - was the shape of the threads, the raised metal ridges that run around the body of a screw. The threads determine the strength and durability of the screw, as well as ease of production. In cross section, virtually all screw threads were triangular, but the particulars of that triangle were matters of intense debate. The two sides of a Whitworth thread formed an angle of 55 degrees, and its tip was rounded off at the top. The Sellers thread, by contrast, had a 60-degree angle, but its apex was flattened.
These differences may sound minor, but in practical terms they were revolutionary. The 55-degree angle of Whitworth's screw was difficult to measure accurately without specially designed gauges. By contrast, Sellers' 60-degree thread - one angle of an equilateral triangle - could be measured with ease. Similarly, the rounded top of Whitworth threads made it more difficult to fit nuts and bolts together, since the threads often did not match perfectly. Flattening the threads made it easier to ensure that they locked into place with one another. Finally, producing a flat thread was something any machinist could do quickly and efficiently by himself. Building a Whitworth screw required "three kinds of cutters and two kinds of lathe," Sellers noted that night. His screw required just one cutter and one lathe.
Sellers won over the crowd. After the speech, C.T. Parry of the Baldwin Locomotive Works announced that he hoped Sellers "planned to do more than just talk." Then a machinist named Algernon Roberts proposed that a committee be formed to weigh the Sellers standard against the Whitworth. A month later, Roberts' committee voted unanimously in favor of the Sellers standard. Machine-tool shops and government agencies across the country soon received word urging them to adopt it.
The American machine-tool industry was to the second half of the 19th century what the computer and networking industry was to the second half of the 20th: the country's most important driver of technological innovation. The machinists of the Franklin Institute, and their colleagues in cities like Cincinnati and Providence, Rhode Island, built lathes and planers and drills and screw cutters so that other companies could build rifles and clocks and sewing machines. They provided the infrastructure that allowed the Industrial Revolution to take off.
James Surowiecki (jamesuro@aol.com) writes a financial column for The New Yorker.
Page 2 >>
