pplied generally to other branches of manufacturing; and so it was
that the system of interchangeable manufacture arose as a distinctively
American development. We have already seen how England's policy of
keeping at home the secrets of her machinery led to the independent
development of the spindles and looms of New England. The same policy
affected the tool industry in America in the same way and bred in the
new country a race of original and resourceful mechanics.

One of these pioneers was Thomas Blanchard, born in 1788 on a farm in
Worcester County, Massachusetts, the home also of Eli Whitney and
Elias Howe. Tom began his mechanical career at the age of thirteen by
inventing a device to pare apples. At the age of eighteen he went to
work in his brother's shop, where tacks were made by hand, and one day
took to his brother a mechanical device for counting the tacks to go
into a single packet. The invention was adopted and was found to save
the labor of one workman. Tom's next achievement was a machine to make
tacks, on which he spent six years and the rights of which he sold for
five thousand dollars. It was worth far more, for it revolutionized the
tack industry, but such a sum was to young Blanchard a great fortune.

The tack-making machine gave Blanchard a reputation, and he was
presently sought out by a gun manufacturer, to see whether he could
improve the lathe for turning the barrels of the guns. Blanchard
could; and did. His next problem was to invent a lathe for turning the
irregular wooden stocks. Here he also succeeded and produced a lathe
that would copy precisely and rapidly any pattern. It is from this
invention that the name of Blanchard is best known. The original machine
is preserved in the United States Armory at Springfield, to which
Blanchard was attached for many years, and where scores of the
descendants of his copying lathe may be seen in action today.

Turning gunstocks was, of course, only one of the many uses of
Blanchard's copying lathe. Its chief use, in fact, was in the production
of wooden lasts for the shoemakers of New England, but it was applied to
many branches of wood manufacture, and later on the same principle was
applied to the shaping of metal.

Blanchard was a man of many ideas. He built a steam vehicle for ordinary
roads and was an early advocate of railroads; he built steamboats to ply
upon the Connecticut and incidentally produced in connection with these
his most profita