Guns sold better than all other products. Orders came from greater distances. By and by shipments were made on the new Erie Canal. For a while, as packages were small, they were taken to the canal bridge, a board lifted from the floor, and the package dropped onto a boat as it passed under. There was no bill of lading. Remington took down the name of the boat and notified his customer by mail, so the latter would know which craft was bringing his guns.
When the trade had extended into all the surrounding counties, however, the new business needed another prime essential of industry—transportation facilities. Shipments were growing larger, and materials like grindstones, bought outside, had to be brought from the canal to Ilion Gulph. In 1828, therefore, the elder Remington bought a large farm in Ilion proper, and there, on the canal, the present plant was started. This was also the beginning of Ilion, for at that period the place was nothing more than a country corner. In 1828 the elder Remington met his death through accident and the business was carried on by his son, who brought water for several power wheels from Steele’s Creek, built a house to live in, and installed in his wooden shop quite a collection of machinery for gunmaking—the list names a big tilt hammer, several trip hammers, boring and rifling machines, grindstones, and so on.
The Beginning of Precision in Mechanics.
Not so many years before that, in England, James Watt was complaining about the difficulty of boring a six-inch cylinder for his steam engine with sufficient accuracy to make it a commercial success. No matter how he packed the piston with cork, oiled rags and old hats, the irregularities in the cylinder let the steam escape, and it was believed that neither the tools nor the workmen existed for making a steam engine with sufficient precision. When a young manufacturer named Wilkinson invented a guide for the boring tool, and machined cylinders of fifty inches diameter so accurately that, as Watt testified, they did not err the thickness of an old shilling in any part, it seemed as though the last refinement in machinery had been achieved. That was not very accurate by present-day standards of the thousandth part of an inch, for a shilling is about one-sixteenth of an inch in thickness.
Old Boring Tool
Remington was right in the thick of development with a gunmaking plant, of course, for as his business grew he had to invent and adapt machines to increase output. The lap-welded barrel was standard until 1850, and he got together a battery of trip hammers for forging and welding his barrels. Finer dimensions became a factor in his business when the output grew large enough to warrant carrying a stock of spare parts for his customers, and so he improved those parts in ways that gave at least the beginnings of interchangeability.
Materials were very crude. There was no buying of foundry iron by analysis, no high carbon steels, no fancy tool steels—nor any “efficiency experts” with their stop watches and scientific speed-and-feed tables. Iron was secured by sending teams around the neighborhood to pick up scrap, and when the scrap iron was all cleaned up, fresh metal was brought from ore beds in Oneida County. Coal was scarce, and charcoal made the chief fuel, burnt in the hills round about Ilion.
And the world was fairly swarming with inventors!