Honoré Blanc

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Honoré Le Blanc or Honoré Blanc (* 1736 in Avignon ; † 1801 ) was a French master gunsmith who lived in the second half of the 18th century and who revolutionized weapon manufacture by introducing the first series production of standardized musket parts.

Honoré Blanc has been the controller of the Royal Arms Manufactory of Louis XV since it was founded in 1763 . in Saint-Etienne . He was promoted by the "Inspecteur général de l'artillierie" Jean Baptiste Vaquette de Gribeauval , also an inventor. In the following years he became General Inspector of the weapons factories Charleville-Mézières , Maubeuge and St. Étienne, where he introduced new manufacturing methods such as drilling jigs and sheet metal stamping processes. With the introduction of this process in series production, parts were already exchangeable.

Around 1785, Honoré Blanc introduced the mass production of individual parts, which were then assembled into muskets. The components of a musket could now be exchanged without impairing the entire functionality of the weapon (so-called exchange construction ). The dimensions of the parts were checked by gauges .

A visitor to Honoré Blanc's workshop, who was given parts of fifty locks, "put some of them together myself by picking them out at random, and they fitted perfectly".

The turmoil of the revolution from 1789 onwards disrupted production. Thomas Jefferson , who was the United States' ambassador to France until the end of 1789 , tried to persuade Honoré Blanc to emigrate to America.

Le Blanc tried unsuccessfully to sell his weapons to the French government. It was not until the Americans Eli Whitney and Simon North used a similar manufacturing process in 1798 to apply for a government contract that included the delivery of 10,000 standardized muskets to the USA at a unit price of $ 13.40 . Whitney and North referred to the process as the Uniformity System and it was implemented on a large scale in the Springfield Armory under Colonel Roswell Lee between 1815 and 1825 .

With Whitney's success, interest in Honoré Blanc's proceedings waned. Honoré Blanc died in 1801. At the time of his death he had great financial difficulties due to his projects.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Jean-Louis PEAUCELLE, UNIVERSITÉ DE LA RÉUNION, LABORATOIRE GREGEOI-FACIREM in DU CONCEPT D'INTERCHANGEABILITÉ À SA RÉALIZATION 2005, ( accessed on 18 Aug. 2009) (PDF; 520 kB)
  2. ^ A b Didier Nourrisson, Jean-François Brun, Marie-Thérèse Avon-Soletti, Bernard Bacher, Histoire contemporaine et patrimoine - La Loire, un département en quête de son identité, page 104, footer 27, ISBN 978-2-86272-478 -2
  3. ↑ William Reid: The Great Book of Arms. From the stone age to the present . Orbis Verlag 1991, ISBN 3-572-02098-0
  4. ↑ Stuart Crainer: The 75 Greatest Management Decisions Ever Made: ... and 21 of the Worst . AMACOM 1999, ISBN 0-8144-0491-X
  5. ^ A b Wallace J. Hopp and Mark L. Spearman (2000) Factory Physics: Foundations of manufacturing Management - Chapter 1: Manufacturing in America ; 2nd edition, McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2000, ISBN 0-256-24795-1
personal data
SURNAME Blanc, Honoré
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Le Blanc, Honoré (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French master gunsmith
DATE OF BIRTH 1736
PLACE OF BIRTH Avignon
DATE OF DEATH 1801