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At the Turn of a Screw: William Sellers, the Franklin Institute, and a Standard American Thread

1969; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 10; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/3102001

1097-3729

Bruce Sinclair,

Historical and Literary Studies

At a time when the superb drama of exploiting a new continent filled the minds of most Americans, nineteenth-century technical arguments about the shape and number of threads on a screw often have a remote, somewhat comic quality-a bit like Jonathan Swift's mock epic struggle between the Little Enders and the Big Enders. But the issue was not a matter of satirical trivia. Industrial development on a national scale demanded that nuts and bolts of the same diameter be interchangeable. Interchangeability, in turn, required that manufacturers conform to a standard system which fixed the contour of screw threads and established for each diameter the number of threads per inch. For America, in 1860, no such standard existed. Since that era also marked the emergence of this country into the arena of international industrial competition, the search for a standard cast reflections which illuminate such related considerations as a national style of engineering, American industrial practice, and the role of government in technological change. The most prevalent system-where system was used at all-was that which had first been proposed in 1841 by England's Sir Joseph Whitworth.' Whitworth's standard was a synthesis of the best English practice and answered the general case well enough so that it was widely employed. American usage was disuniform, however, varying from manufacturer to manufacturer and from locality to locality. Some firms developed systems to fit the particular requirements of their own processes. Others purposely used special threads to prevent outside repairs on their own machinery, in the same vein as the Erie Railroad's ill-fated use of wide-gauge track. By the 1860's, the appalling lack of national uniformity clearly called for reform. If there is any one thing in the transac-