find it to instruct new and inexperienced workmen, that he
uniformly preferred to do so, rather than to combat the prejudices of
those who had learned the business under a different system."*
This reliance upon the machine for precision and speed has been a
distinguishing mark of American manufacture. A man or a woman of little
actual mechanical skill may make an excellent machine tender, learning
to perform a few simple motions with great rapidity.

* Denison Olmstead, "Memoir", cited by Roe, p. 159.

Whitney married in 1817 Miss Henrietta Edwards, daughter of Judge
Pierpont Edwards, of New Haven, and granddaughter of Jonathan Edwards.
His business prospered, and his high character, agreeable manners, and
sound judgment won. for him the highest regard of all who knew him;
and he had a wide circle of friends. It is said that he was on intimate
terms with every President of the United States from George Washington
to John Quincy Adams. But his health had been impaired by hardships
endured in the South, in the long struggle over the cotton gin, and he
died in 1825, at the age of fifty-nine. The business which he founded
remained in his family for ninety years. It was carried on after his
death by two of his nephews and then by his son, until 1888, when it was
sold to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company of New Haven.

Here then, in these early New England gunshops, was born the American
system of interchangeable manufacture. Its growth depended upon the
machine tool, that is, the machine for making machines. Machine tools,
of course, did not originate in America. English mechanics were making
machines for cutting metal at least a generation before Whitney. One of
the earliest of these English pioneers was John Wilkinson, inventor and
maker of the boring machine which enabled Boulton and Watt in 1776 to
bring their steam engine to the point of practicability. Without
this machine Watt found it impossible to bore his cylinders with the
necessary degree of accuracy.* From this one fact, that the success of
the steam engine depended upon the invention of a new tool, we may judge
of what a great part the inventors of machine tools, of whom thousands
are unnamed and unknown, have played in the industrial world.

* Roe, "English and American Tool Builders", p. 1 et seq.

So it was in the shops of the New England gunmakers that machine tools
were first made of such variety and adaptability that they could be
a