Captain John H. Hall
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John H. Hall was born in 1781 in Portland, Maine. Hall worked in his father's tannery, then set up shop as a woodworker, machinist, and boat builder, but turned to the making of guns.
In 1811 he devised and patented a breech-loading rifle. In 1819 he signed a contract with the War Department to produce 1,000 M1819 Hall rifles. Under the terms of the contract Hall came to Harpers Ferry Arsenal, where he occupied an old sawmill on a small island in the Shenandoah River. The site soon became known as Hall's Rifle Works, and the island was called Lower Hall Island.
As an inside contractor, Hall spent several years tooling new workshops and perfecting precision machinery for producing rifles with interchangeable parts – a boldly ambitious goal for an industry which was traditionally based on the manual labor of skilled craftsmen. Duing this time the Rifle Works served as a development laboratory for the Army's Ordnance Department. Hall's innovation and management allowed truly interchangeable parts to be produced on machines operated by boys.
Through twenty years of rifle production Hall continued to design and build innovative drop-hammers, stock-making lathes, balanced pulleys, drilling machines, and specialized machines for cutting metal. Hall's straight-cutting machine is the forerunner of modern milling machines. In 1826, friction between Hall and the Superintendent of the Armory led to a resolution in Congress calling for a study of the "fabrication, cost & utility" of Hall's rifles. The detailed report on Hall's machinery and precesses said, "Arms have never been made so exactly similar to each other by any other process. Machines we have examined effect this with a certainty and precision we should not have believed, till we witnessed their operation." Hall, not Eli Whitney, was the man who truly perfected the American system of manufacturing which eventually led to mass production.
After this, Hall's ideas spread rapidly to the Springfield Armory and other private armories. He devised gaging systems to maintain accuracy and when Simeon North began building Hall rifles in Connecticut, the gaging system insured that parts were interchangeable between rifles from the two armories.
Hall died in 1841.
