finished hulk. Robert died
in 1856. On the outbreak of the Civil War, Edwin tried to revive the
interest of the Government, but by that time the design of the Stevens
Battery was obsolete, and Edwin Stevens was an old man. So the honors
for the construction of the first ironclad man-of-war to fight and win
a battle went to John Ericsson, that other great inventor, who built the
famous Monitor for the Union Government.

Carlyle's oft-quoted term, "Captains of Industry," may fittingly be
applied to the Stevens family. Strong, masterful, and farseeing, they
used ideas, their own and those of others, in a large way, and were able
to succeed where more timorous inventors failed. Without the stimulus of
poverty they achieved success, making in their shops that combination
of men and material which not only added to their own fortunes but also
served the world.

We left Eli Whitney defeated in his efforts to divert to himself some
adequate share of the untold riches arising from his great invention of
the cotton gin. Whitney, however, had other sources of profit in his
own character and mechanical ability. As early as 1798 he had turned his
talents to the manufacture of firearms. He had established his shops
at Whitneyville, near New Haven; and it was there that he worked out
another achievement quite as important economically as the cotton gin,
even though the immediate consequences were less spectacular: namely,
the principle of standardization or interchangeability in manufacture.

This principle is the very foundation today of all American large-scale
production. The manufacturer produces separately thousands of copies of
every part of a complicated machine, confident that an equal number of
the complete machine will be assembled and set in motion. The owner of a
motor car, a reaper, a tractor, or a sewing machine, orders, perhaps
by telegraph or telephone, a broken or lost part, taking it for granted
that the new part can be fitted easily and precisely into the place of
the old.

Though it is probable that this idea of standardization, or
interchangeability, originated independently in Whitney's mind, and
though it is certain that he and one of his neighbors, who will be
mentioned presently, were the first manufacturers in the world to carry
it out successfully in practice, yet it must be noted that the idea was
not entirely new. We are told that the system was already in operation
in England in the manufacture of s