As the United States Semiquincentennial approaches, you might notice some scattered information here and there about where this country started and, just as significantly, how it grew.
[You also might here conversations such as this: “July 4,1776 was when we adopted the Constitution of the United States, right?“ “No, that was in 1787.” “Oh, so it’s when we signed the Declaration of Independence?” “No, actually that didn’t happen until August of 1776.”]
Just in case you are a little rusty on your history, July 4, 1776, is the day of the official adoption of the Declaration of Independence; in other words, Congress approved the final text of the document, which is the date we celebrate today. And by the way, the revolution was still raging and Great Britain did not formally acknowledge the United States as a sovereign nation until September 3, 1783.]
But you don’t need a history lesson from Rhino Tool House. Instead, today we are starting a series on the history of manufacturing in the United States. Manufacturing, after all, is where we as a company exist and it is a topic that at least most of us can agree helps make this country the greatest in the world. (250 year old USA is second only to China in global manufacturing, a country that has been around for over 4,000 years.)
But instead of looking at this as a history lesson, we’re breaking this five-part series down into something more practical. That is, what actually changed on the manufacturing floor over time, and what problems were getting solved when.
In the late 1700s, manufacturing in the US, driven by technologies developed primarily in Europe, wasn’t limited by demand. It was limited by human hands. One person, one setup, one output rate. A skilled operator could make a great product, but there was only so much they could produce in a day. If something broke, a tool or a finger, the work stopped. If orders picked up, there wasn’t much you could do except work longer hours.
That constraint shaped everything. Processes stayed simple because they had to. Tools were built for durability, not speed, because replacing them wasn’t easy. And most operations lived or died on the skill of a few people who knew how to keep things moving.
We don’t operate that way anymore, but you still see versions of it.
Walk into the wrong plant and you’ll find a critical process that hasn’t been touched in years. It works, but nobody wants to change it because it’s tied to one person, one method, or one piece of equipment that “just gets us by.” When it goes down, everything around it feels the consequences.
That’s a constraint problem, and it’s the same one that manufacturers have been working to remove for the last 200+ years. Getting more power, more throughput, less dependence on any single point of failure. The tools changed, the systems changed, but the goal stayed the same.
You still see it play out on the floor today. A team finds a way to take something fragile and make it repeatable. They reduce the guesswork, tighten up the process, and suddenly the whole operation breathes a little easier. Sound familiar?
Okay but then what happened? Next post in this series? – Getting Power in Early Factories.