American System

American System, production of many identical parts and their assembly into finished products. Though Eli Whitney has been credited with this development, the ideas had appeared earlier in Europe and were being practiced in arms factories in the United States. (See armoury practice.) Marc Brunel, while working for the British Admiralty (1802–08), devised a process for producing wooden pulley blocks by sequential machine operations, whereby 10 men (rather than the 110 needed previously) could make 160,000 pulley blocks per year. Not until London’s Crystal Palace exhibition (1851) did British engineers, viewing exhibits of machines used in the United States to produce interchangeable parts, begin to apply the system. Within 25 years, the American System was being widely used in making a host of industrial products. See also assembly line; factory.