Unsung Hero's

     From time to time I like to stand up on a soap box and talk about things that I feel are not given enough attention.  One of my pet interests is men and women who have had a profound effect on history but rarely get credit for their accomplishments.  Being from the Harpers Ferry area of the country there is an individual, who after leaning his story has certainly earned my respect.  Of course I am speaking of John H. Hall.  What?  You never heard of John H. Hall, well don’t beat yourself up too badly, probably a good 99% of America couldn’t tell you who he was.  John Hall was born in the year 1781 in Portland, Maine and worked in his father’s leather tanning business until around 1810 when he borrowed $750 and opened up his own woodworking and boat building shop.  There aren’t any records of how John did with this business but we do know that he was fond of firearm design and was always tinkering with rifles in his spare time.  This led to a patent being issued to him to him in
1811 for a single shot breech loading rife, which he estimated he could produce at the rate of 50 per year.  Someone took notice of the rifle at the United States Army Ordnance Department and promptly ordered 200 rifles.  This was a case of too much too soon and John had to turn down the order for fear he could not produce the rifles by the delivery date called for in the contract.  But this proved to be providential since if got him to thinking that there had to be a better way to make arms than one rifle built by one man, one at a time, which was the only method of manufacture in use then.
     From this experience Hall became a disciple of the “Uniformity Principal”, or what would eventually become the process of assembling a finished product from “Interchangeable Parts.”  In 1816 Hall went back to the Army and convinced them of the future of his concept and was
awarded a contract for 1000 of his new “Model 1819 Breech Loading Rifle design.”  Hall established a factory on Virginius Island, in the Shenandoah River at Harpers Ferry Virginia (it didn’t become West Virginia until the end of the Civil War) and invested $150,000 of his own and the U.S. Government’s money in building “The Hall Rifle Works.”  This task was complicated by the fact that a Federal Armory already existed at Harpers Ferry that had been established by George Washington.  The men who worked at the Federal Armory saw Hall’s factory as a threat to their jobs, and to say that relations between the two armories were poor would be a gross understatement.  Undeterred by the infighting Hall accomplished what most believed to be impossible.  When Government Ordinance inspectors visited the Hall Rifle works Colonel George Talcott had this to say, “[Hall’s] manufactory has been carried to a greater degree of perfection, as regards the quality of work and uniformity of parts than is to be found elsewhere almost everything is performed by machinery, leaving very little dependent on manual labor.”
     Even for those who know who John Hall was and what he accomplished, little credit is given to him for his work on using hydro energy as a power source for his machinery.  He utilized the waters of the Shenandoah River and water wheels to power belt driven lathes and heavy drills that attained speeds of nearly 3000 rpms, a rate that was hitherto unheard of.  The old factory was burned at the start of the Civil War but men like Henry Ford, and Thomas Edison toured the ruins and gleaned a great deal of knowledge from the decaying machines which they used to create the great assembly lines of the future.  So now that you know the story it would be nice to think that the next time you buy a replacement part for an appliance, auto, or any of the thousands of other machines that use interchangeable parts, you might give a little thought to the man who started it all.