The image above is an old engraving of a scene at one of the most important places in American history, the McCormick reaper works in Chicago, in the early second half of the 19th century. It was there that the building of complicated products with interchangeable components on a very big scale got underway, establishing principles that were vital to the auto industry a generation later.
Before any of that could happen, tooling and machining experts, many of them from Vermont, invented interchangeable-part manufacturing, first with firearms. The business and consumer worlds were changed forever. Those early post-artisans are celebrated at the American Precision Museum in Springfield, Vermont, whose new exhibit, From Muskets to Motorcars, sketches out the story. Find out more at www.americanprecision.org.