Today, a brilliant invention is forgotten. The University of
Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the
machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them. machine-made, interchangeable parts
isn't the same as the modern assembly line. Interchangeability
had to be well developed before we could begin mass-producing
goods. The idea of interchangeability goes back to Gutenberg's
invention of precision type. Clock-makers had started making
certain parts interchangeable in the 18th century. And Americans
like to credit Eli Whitney with inventing the idea in 1803 to
make But, for the first whole product whose parts could be
interchanged, historian Ken Alder takes us to Paris in 1790 .
Gunsmith Honoré Blanc had made a thousand muskets and put all
their parts in separate bins. He called together a group of
academics, politicians, and military men. Then he assembled
muskets from parts drawn at random from the bins. By then,
Jefferson had already visited Blanc's w