American Invention

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American Invention

Potential. Revolutionary-period America was hardly a technologically advanced society. Nevertheless, several inventors proposed or produced ingenious innovations that foretold the “know-how” that later became Americans’ famous reputation. Just before the Revolutionary War, John Hobday of Virginia designed and built a machine for threshing wheat, ordinarily a laborious and time-consuming task that separated the kernels from the chaff. A farmer usually beat no more than a few bushels of wheat in a day; Hobday’s threshing machine could beat sixty bushels in the same time. What was more, Hobday claimed that his invention would cost only fifteen pounds to duplicate, easily affordable by wealthy planters such as George Washington who had turned from tobacco to wheat agriculture. In Connecticut at about the same time silversmith Abel Buell developed the first type fonts made in America. The colonial printers, who had presses in virtually every major urban center, produced regular issues of newspapers, almanacs, and books, but they had to import type from Britain. Buell’s work presaged the end of that dependence.

Science at War. During the Revolutionary struggle patriotic men of science put their minds to inventions to aid the war effort. David Bushnell built a submarine designed to attack British warships. Clockmaker David Rittenhouse tried to develop a rifled cannon and collaborated with painter Charles Wilson Peale on a telescopic sight to make America’s famous rifles even more deadly. None of these inventions had any real effect on the war though all would have a serious and profound impact on future conflicts.

Mass Production. Although Americans imported most of their clothing, many, especially in rural areas, produced wool for homespun clothes. To do this, however, required that the wool first be “carded,” or combed between paddle-shaped “cards” hand-set with hundreds of wire teeth. Around 1780 Oliver Evans of Delaware (who would build America’s first steam engines after the war) invented a machine that inserted the wire teeth into cards at the rate of three thousand per minute. Although he had developed the technology of mass production, the process was never a success; the finished cards were simply not as good quality as the handmade kind, “owing to the shape & largeness of the pierced holes in the leather & consequent looseness of the teeth.” Jeremiah Wilkinson of Rhode Island developed another manufacturing process in 1781: a machine that cut nails from an iron plate far more quickly than any black-smith could forge them. As with other scientific and technological efforts in America, factory production would get its real start after the war.

DAVID RITTENHOUSE’S “ORRERY”

New discoveries concerning planetary orbits inspired gifted artisans to build orreries, clockwork or hand-cranked models of the solar system used as teaching aids. Several English and American examples were already in the colonies in 1767 when David Rittenhouse, a Pennsylvania clock maker and amateur astronomer, began one of his own. Rittenhouse wanted to make a name for himself in the scientific community: what he had in mind was something not to instruct beginners but, as he put it, “to astonish the skillful.” He succeeded admirably with an orrery exceeding any other in sophistication. Not only did it properly simulate the elliptical (not perfectly circular) orbits of the planets, it even incorporated a “curious contrivance” for illustrating the appearance of a solar eclipse from any point on earth. So meticulous was Rittenhouse’s mechanism that his orrery could display the relative positions of the planets for any time over a five thousand-year period, with a margin of error of less than one degree. After Thomas Jefferson had seen the device, he commented that if Rittenhouse had not actually created a world, then he had “by imitation approached nearer its Maker than any man who has lived.” Two of Rittenhouse’s orreries survive; one at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia and the other at Princeton University in New Jersey.