As mentioned in the previous post, I’m going to log some of my thoughts as I pore through Dr. Kevin R. Spiker’s 2014 book, Erskine S. Allin, Director of the U.S. Armory in Springfield, Massachusetts: Inventing and Manufacturing the New Weapons that Won the Civil War. I brought the book with me on a family trip to Maui to read in the idle moments. The book raises a few eyebrows because it’s such an esoteric subject. For a gun nerd it’s also a great conversation starter.
“Who is Erskine Allin,” asks innocent curiosity, wholly unaware of the nerd assault about to befall them. “Why I’m glad you asked….,” says I. My mother-in-law happened to land on this snap trap as innocently as a gentle musca alighting after a few fly-bys. Her rejoinder to my enthusiastic explanation – “What did Springfield Armory do – did they store weapons, or make weapons, or both?” – tested my own knowledge. The mission changed a few times in the 100 years between its founding by George Washington in 1777, and Allin’s retirement in 1878. Spiker explains that the armory started out manufacturing and storing munitions (as an arsenal), began repairing weapons and uniforms, then manufacturing weapons and designing new ones, all while playing an important role in the innovation of manufacturing.
Spiker provides a great preview of the book’s scope in chapter 1, providing context for Erskine Allin’s accomplishments by stressing his technical inheritance from predecessors, tutelage, and the collaborating environment of arms manufacturing in the first half of the 19th century. Spiker gives a valuable hat tip to James B. Whisker’s compiled history on the Armory, The United States Armory at Springfield, 1795-1865 (Edwin Mellen Press, 1997). I’ll put that in the reading list.
I suppose all centuries are monumental in human history, but the first century of Springfield Armory found it responding to demands of the American Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the American Civil War. Nestled into the end of Allin’s tenure is the beginning of the most fascinating period in American history, gauged by the quantity of inventions and the rapidity of their integration into general society. According to Distinguished Professor Emeritus Vaclav Smil, of the University of Manitoba, by this measure the time period has been unrivaled in human history since the Han Dynasty in China about 1800 years earlier. Indeed, Smil refers to this period as, “the greatest technical discontinuity in history”1.
“In technical terms there are two saltation periods in human history that stand apart as the times of the two most astounding, broad, and rapid innovation spurts. The first one, purely oriental took place during the Han dynasty China (207 B.C.E-9 C.E.); the second one, entirely occidental in both its genesis and its nearly instant flourish, unfolded in Europe and North America during the two generations preceding WWI.”
Vaclav Smil, Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations of 1867-1914 and Their Lasting Impact, 2005, Oxford University Press
Smil’s book offers many examples solidly proving the case of how important this period of time was to technical achievement, which he refers to as the “Age of Synergy”. Fundamentally, Smil is differentiating this last half of the 19th century from the first by the development of scientific understanding leading to theory driving invention, as opposed to naked trial and error. Smil quotes another author’s work in noting that in the early 19th century, we had a chemical industry without the science of chemistry (it was only in 1869 that the periodic table was established). I cannot do his argument justice in small space – this post is about another book, after all – but it’s hard not to find the transition into this age of synergy – the period of inflection and gnarly growth itself – quite interesting. Erskine Allin was right in the middle of this, inheriting, innovating, & inventing.
Now before going down the other rabbit holes of Chapter 1, I want to dwell a bit more on this latter period of Allin’s career, ever so briefly. I haven’t even gotten that far in Spiker’s book, but it’s a time period of particular interest to me personally. After the Civil War, what new conflict do you think Americans were preoccupied with? The Plains Indian Wars would be a good guess, but if you read East Coast newspapers of the time, all the ink was dedicated to daily reports of the war in Europe, telegraphed regularly. Napoleon III was busy constructing the Second Empire in Europe, and this was occupying a lot of mindshare for Americans. In point of fact, the The Evening Post on September 22nd, 1870 published the following (emphasis my own):
“Even the “improved Springfield rifle” (muzzleloading), which stood the test of our civil war so well, and was thought so lately as 1865 to be the most formidable gun with which an army could be trusted, is now antiquated; and a regiment carrying it would be merely subjects for butchery by a company supplied with the best breechloaders. Thus the army of the United States, in comparison with the French or German army of to-day, is an unarmed body of men; and, what is worse, the arsenals of the United States contain no arms which would be worth anything in a war with a great European power. We have not even the machinery to make the arms our citizen soldiery would need; nor is it fully decided what arms they ought to have.“
“Small Arms for the Infantry”, The Evening Post, September 22nd, 1870
The European powers are at each others’ throats, employing the Zündnadelgewehr (Dryse needle-gun), the Fusil Modèle 1866 (Chassepot), both of which were compelling breech-loading rifles. In fact, only about a month later, Gen. Dyer, the Chief of Ordnance, is including in his annual report a recommendation to refortify the Eastern sea coast, primarily in the Southern states. So, the happenings in Europe are definitely catching the attention of those back East. But out West is where the action is – and where Allin is focusing his attention for a compelling contest to select the next service rifle of the US Army. In fact, the United States is up to its eyeballs in breechloading designs arguably better than anything in Europe. The Dryse needle-gun was itself thirty years old at this point, and came with plenty of its own problems in the field. The retort by the Springfield Daily Republican highlights the rapid pace of technical change occurring in the era:
“The Post acknowledges that the gun made for our soldiers five years ago is now antiquated, and would it have the government go on and make and store up half a million or a million of guns of the best model at present, to find them equally antiquated, perhaps, five years hence?”
“Arms for Infantry”, The Springfield Daily Republican, October 17th, 1870
You can’t help but notice that what’s happening out West – literally a full-on war – is rarely showing up in the papers given what’s going on in Europe. As it happens, this is precisely the time that Allin had submitted his latest trapdoor “conversion”, along with several other skunkworks conversion rifles, to the trials the Army Board was conducting in St. Louis to select the new Army service rifle. What’s more, this is three years after the Wagon Box Fight, where breech-loading rifles played the decisive role in a skirmish against Lakota Sioux warriors. The rifle trials of the 1870s are a topic I hope to write much more on at a later date. The story is FASCINATING, so am really looking forward to seeing what kind of treatment it gets in the book.
What’s my point? Well, illustrative of Smil’s remarks about the period from 1867 onward, Erskine Allin was tabling no less than five (technically six) Springfield conversion designs in 1870, including a repeater (Morganstern), a bolt-action rifle (Ward-Burton), a trapdoor (Allin conversion), and a falling-block (Sharps). The trapdoor was of his own design and would eventually be selected as the Army’s service rifle. I think we can see over the course of Allin’s career not only how mechanized milling and shaping influenced rifle design improvements, but also how improvements in our understanding of material science were enabling the industry to implement new designs.
Stepping back a bit, Spiker sums up the transitions that Allin oversaw:
“It was during Erskine’s tenure that arms making went, first, from flintlock to percussion, from the simple percussion cap to the Maynard strip primers, and from muzzle-loading to breech-loading. Allin had a major role in the introduction of each new technology or, in the case of the breech-loading system, as the inventor.”
Spiker, Erskine S. Allin, Chapter 1, pages 10-11
Wrapping Up
Something I really enjoyed about reading Chapter 1 was how often it triggered a desire to go learn more. Spiker provides some interesting endnotes to Chapter 1, including the factoid that “the earliest dated original percussion arm we have seen bears the year 1828.” News to me as my interest in firearms has been more focused on post-Civil War guns, but the more I read about the 18th century and early 19th century, the more fascinating it’s becoming. I’m going to include some interesting citations from the book and some of my own recommendations as well – stuff I’ve been looking at while reading the book that you may find interesting as well.
Reading List
- The United States Armory at Springfield, 1795-1865, James B. Whisker, The Edwin Mellen Press, 1997
- Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations of 1867-1914 and Their Lasting Impact, Vaclav Smil, Oxford University Press, 2005
- Period newspaper articles from The Springfield Daily Republican are always fascinating reads. One laments that local papers aren’t of this style anymore.
- Manufacturing Advantage, Lindsay Schakenbach Regele, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019
