The engineering concept of standardization plays a part in American history as taught in high school. Early in US history, say in 1800, the country had little industrial capacity and relied heavily on trade with Europe for advanced manufactured items. By 1900, the US had become an industrial powerhouse; the 1876 Centennial Fair in Philadelphia is usually taken as the moment when rapidly-growing industry in the US was noticed by Europeans. How do you connect those points in time? What changed? Part of the story is the immigration of skilled artisans, partly in the normal course of events and partly encouraged by nascent industries in the US that encouraged, for example, skilled iron workers from the UK to move here. The other part of the story, which I first heard about in maybe seventh grade was the “American System” of manufacturing. The system reduced the importance of skilled labor – always in short supply in nineteenth-century America – by using machine production as much as possible and by standardizing the parts of machines. The later aspect is usually referred to as the use of “interchangeable parts” and is always (at least in high school textbooks) illustrated with a story about swapping interchangeable parts in guns made for the army. That story apparently involved some fakery – the guns used for the demonstration were chosen specifically because they could have their parts swapped and still function – but since the story is still being told nearly 200 years after its origin, it obviously has a powerful message regardless of accuracy.
What does this have to do with buildings? The issues that are discussed in the history of technology in general apply to the history of building technology as well. Even if we start with the simplest house of the nineteenth century US, a log cabin, you can see engineering required. Log cabins, like the 1900ish fake above, could be pretty much built with nothing but an axe and a supply of trees. But for the construction to work, the trees used for logs had to be roughly the same diameter, or they wouldn’t stack well, and the cuts to allow the lapped ends that hold the corners together had to be the same size or the corners wouldn’t fit properly. The cuts obviously depended on the skill of whoever had the axe, but there was a known way of making the cuts – a standard.
Similarly, we don’t think of brick walls as requiring much in the way of technology, but they do. A big advantage of brick over stone is that the bricks are literally modular and fit together in any combination. That’s only true if the bricks are, within a certain tolerance, close enough to being the same size that it doesn’t matter which brick you grab to put in the wall next. The tolerance is how much the wall can afford to have a mortar joint a little wider or a little narrower than it should be, which historically is one-third the width of the joint or maybe a little less. For modern bricks, that’s plus or minus 1/8 inch, which is reasonably precise. So the bricks within a wall are standard, but the real innovation comes when all of the brick manufacturers in an area, or in a country, agree on a standard size, allowing any bunch of bricks to mixed together in construction. This first happened thousands of years ago.
The story gets more interesting, tomorrow, when this idea spreads to industrial components in construction…
