Video Tour: Inside the American Precision Museum

Windsor, Vermont, is a sleepy town nestled between hills, forests and the Connecticut River. But in the middle of the 19^th century, something was born here that would go on to change our way of life: the American System of Manufacturing.

In late December 2024, I visited the town to see the American Precision Museum, which charts the course of precision manufacturing in the U.S. from hand-made parts to the modern day. The museum itself is housed in a historic site, the Robbins and Lawrence Armory, and it was on this ground that Samuel Robbins and Richard Lawrence (as well as, briefly, Nicanor Kendall) adopted and refined machine tools from across the Connecticut River Valley to create interchangeable parts.

The museum’s Executive Director, Steve Dalessio, was kind enough to give me and one of our videographers a tour, demonstrating old machines and walking us through the broad strokes of precision manufacturing’s rise and development into the present day. He and Dave Eastman, the museum’s director of development and communication, also spoke about their hopes for the museum’s impact and its future.

Find out the full story in the video below, or read on for the transcript.

Transcript:

Steve Dalessio, Executive Director, American Precision Museum: So we'll kind of take a step back in history, now.

Dave Eastman, Director of Development and Communication, American Precision Museum: We sit on Millbrook, and that's a tributary of the Connecticut River.

Dalessio: The next thing that happened was the railroad and that allowed goods to be moved back and forth. The US government puts out a tender for 10,000 rifles, and there was a clause in the contract: The parts must be interchangeable.

There was no system for manufacturing parts by machine to make everything interchangeable. And like all good manufacturers, we like to bid on jobs and then get them and say, “I guess I got to figure out how to make them now.”

It's now 1851 and it's the Great Exhibition of Industrial Works at the Crystal Palace in London. Robbins and Lawrence are invited to go over and show what they can do. They go over with six sets of guns, rifles. They put them on the table, and the Brits are absolutely amazed that all the parts can be interchanged.

So our goal here is pretty straightforward. We want to inspire a new generation of makers, engineers, innovators and so forth on the backdrop of history. You want to know explain to young people, particularly fourth, fifth and sixth grade students, that you came from someplace, right? All this modern technology just didn't happen.

So, a few years ago, myself and a board member got together and said, “Where do we start our story from?” And we realized that we started our story too late in history. We started our story talking about parts made by machine. But if you want to talk about manufacturing and its origins, you have to talk about parts being made by hand.

So in the 1840s, which is where we start our history in this building, guns, particularly guns, were all made by hand. You had a gunsmith that was making the parts, fabricating them. They were very local here. Some rudimentary machines did exist, but for the most part, the machines were made by hand. And each gun is unique.

And when you make a part by hand, every part is slightly different. No different than if a painter paints the same scene twice. It'll always be subtle differences between the pictures. And that's what happened here. So our first display is all about made-by-hand.

Okay. And there was two, two gentlemen here in Windsor, Kendall and Lawrence. And they were gunsmiths right across the river. And they were practiced to just making guns by hand, custom-made things. And that's where we started our story from.

Gentlemen at the board of advisors said, “Unless you become relevant to the people you serve, you'll cease to exist.” And we took that to heart. And our people that we serve as the manufacturing industry. We’re the beacon of precision manufacturing right there.

Eastman: We’re the holder of the history.

Dalessio: History! So we had to reinvent the museum again in order to make it relevant. And now we have this new, great opportunity in front of us where we're going to be—and Dave can talk more to it, but we're going to be renovating the back second half of this building to build an education center that will again reinforce the principles of manufacturing through STEM education and other kinds of education programs, to keep building on that.

As I mentioned before, there was two gunsmiths, Lawrence and Kendall. They were working right across the river. The US government puts out a tender for 10,000 rifles, and there was a clause in the contract: The parts must be interchangeable. Right. So along comes a third guy. His name is Samuel Robbins.

Samuel Robbins is a young guy. He made a lot of money timbering in Maine and Boston. He comes up to Lawrence and Kendall and says, hey, “There's a contender for 10,000 rifles that have to have interchangeable parts. I'll financially back you if we can do it.” And like all good manufacturers, we like to bid on jobs and then get them and say, “I guess I got to figure out how to make them now, make the parts now.” And that's basically what happened here.

There was no system for manufacturing parts by machine to make everything interchangeable. They take on the contract, they went in for $10.90 a gun, but the building you're standing in was not built yet, and nor were any of the machines necessary to make this thing happen, make this process happen, was even built up yet or collected yet. So take a look at this backdrop for this panel. This is what the compound looked like in the 1846-era. The buildings are apartments right across the river from here. These were the buildings. These were workman's quarters and foundries. They bring parts across the bridge into the building you're standing in now, where they were assembled, and the woodworking components were added.

Eastman: Part of our mission is, is to change that narrative, that manufacturing and manufacturing jobs are dark, dirty and dangerous. And dull.

But it's changed and, and, we're trying to highlight that change. And, you know, we see our mission is preserving the history of manufacturing, educating about it, and then the last piece is that inspiration, inspiring the next generation

Dalessio: If you are a young person and you say, I want to be a doctor or a lawyer or whatever, or engineer, you have only one choice, one path to go to. Right? And that's to college. But if you choose manufacturing, now you've got this, this path that has multiple places that you can go, with college education, without college education.

So, one of the first machines that we have on display is a horizontal mill. One of the big innovators at the time was Frederick Howe. And Frederick Howe, was a great machine inventor. And we'll be talking a little bit more about some of his other machines as well. But he invented this one. Frederick Howe, I think ultimately goes to Pratt & Whitney.

As a machine, it's not very remarkable. It's really just a horizontal spindle. But what is kind of remarkable for 1846, 1850 is the form cutter. In the vise here we have a lock plate that was cast near-net shape. And prior to this machine, a gunsmith would file the shape until you get it to fit the way you want it. Now with this form cutter, they would be able to take all the material in one pass and be able to have the form that they needed without filing.

We started out our story with made-by-hand, and now we're transitioning ourselves to what is known as made-by-machine.

So the next machine, you have a lock plate. The lock plate has to fit into the gun stock very accurately. So again, using the same kind of principle, same kind of thinking. Now they stack up a number of plates. This is the pattern stack here, with each one of these being a different pattern. Here is the follower that would follow one of these shapes. The cutter goes along for the ride and it would cut the pocket into the wooden stock.

Now the magic happens. The belt, which is driving the spindle here, the operator moves it to the next position, which is now an idling position. The operator moves the indexes, the turret brings in another follower with another cutter to pick up another spot on the pattern stack. So what this becomes is one of the first examples of tool changing that you see on the history chain.

So the next machine we have here is a gun stock lathe. This one was from Thomas Blanchard. Thomas Blanchard was another one of these inventors that in the Precision Valley that just started figuring things out. A gun stock, again same principle again that we've been talking about. We have to take the human hand out of the equation.

So here they made a pattern of a gun stock. This follower would follow the pattern, the cutter goes along for the ride, and then this as it's turning, follows the pattern and cuts the gun stock.

So the big question that comes in next is “Why? Why are we doing all this? Why was this so important in the evolution of machining and manufacturing?” Well, the first benefit of course, was part accuracy. By taking the human hand out of the process, either through templates or form tools or patterns, we begin to get better accuracy of our parts. Parts become repeatable, they’re consistent. So that was the first big benefit.

The next big benefit that we have is process improvement. If we were able to bring the — make it become more efficient, the cost would come down. Bringing the cost down suddenly made the products more avialable to more of the masses.

Then the last big benefit. Factories were the center of community, right? If you had a factory in your community in the 1850s, early 1900s or so, it was a big deal, right? These factories took care of their workers. They paid them well, they gave them new opportunities. They formed the companies, formed local relationships with suppliers and banks. They held picnics for their employees, concerts on the green. All those kinds of things were suddenly very important to your community by having a factory there. So, again, not so much so different today.

We're going to fast forward a little bit and time. It's now 1851 and it's a Great Exhibition of Industrial Works at the Crystal Palace in London. Ronbins and Lawrence are invited to go over and show what they can do. They go over with six sets of guns, rifles. They put them on the table, and the Brits are absolutely amazed that all the parts can be interchanged. They can just put them out there and do it and everything is great.

They get all excited and they order another 10,000 guns. But what's more important to the Brits is they want the machine tools. They want the process, the set up at the Enfield Armory. And so now suddenly, this factory starts not only producing rifles, but producing the machine tools as well. So, I don't know if it's the beginning or it's pretty close to the beginning of the machine tool exporting industry from the United States.

So 1856 rolls around. Robbins and Lawrence overexpands and goes out of business. Okay. But all is not lost because the Brits had coined the phrase the American System of Manufacturing at that point. So this really becomes an incubator site.

Eastman: After, the armory broke up, Robbins and Lawrence, all the folks, the apprentices and those that have been trained or created and invented things right here, they started moving downriver.

Dalessio: They bring along the American System of Manufacturing with them. So we do have a kind of a genealogy here of Robbins and Lawrence. You could see things like Sharps Rifle, Weed Sewing Machine, Providence Tool Works — which was Frederick Howe again—Brown and Sharpe all had their origins here. All coming out of Robbins and Lawrence.

We believe the Precision Valley runs from around Windsor, Vermont, down through Hartford, in New Haven.

Here at this point in history that we've kind of transitioned ourselves from made-by-hand to made-by-machine. And now we have to start talking about machines that begin to make more machines.

1938 is a big period of time in the history. Bridgeport comes along. And there's of course, Bridgeport becomes a name. Rudy Bannow is the inventor of the Bridgeport. They're making heads that fit on various types of machines, and then he invents the rest of the machine. This one is serial number one. People literally come from around the country to see Bridgeport serial number one.

Eventually, the wars end. And so, what do you do with your factory that was making guns all this time? So you now retool it for what we talk about as the consumer culture. Suddenly bicycles, sewing machines, kitchen gadgets, all these things become needed. But you enter into all that with all of the knowledge you've learned from the American System of Manufacturing, right? You learned how to make parts repeatable and interchangeable and all that kept the consumer prices down, and allowed the masses to start having all these conveniences, as we called them.

Here we'll have, we have more machine tools of course. But at this point we want to start introducing other processes. Additive, specifically. We try to explain the difference between subtractive and additive. Get people into the idea that there's other things out there.

We make all different parts. We give parts away. We do things. Different materials.

At some point, you have to start thinking about what's—how do you move forward in time? So thanks to our partnership with Haas and Midaco and lots of different — Renishaw — we've been able to put together an innovation station, so we can demonstrate CNC machining right here on the museum floor.

We make some widgets. Chiron Engineering is another partner of ours, so we have probing and we have its detection software on here, auto-comp software.

In this area too, now, we're starting to introduce robotics. Thanks to Gosiger and to Universal Robots, we now can demonstrate robotic technology as well as more 3D printing, five axis machining from — that was Okuma.

Again, it's a whole idea of “how do you inspire the next generation?”

So that's our little museum.