From Under Iron Eyelids

Introduction

The 1991 Gulf War introduced the world to the idea of the “smart bomb,” a weapon with a guidance system to direct it to its target.  No longer was the missile’s trajectory the sole product of its weight and initial force of the propellant.  No longer was the missile passive, its flight influenced by wind, air density and gravity that could drive it off target.  Some ten percent of all the ordnance used to drive Saddam Hussein’s forces out of Kuwait was of this type, a bomb that could be guided to its target with some precision.  Twelve years later “Operation Iraqi Freedom” employed a much higher percentage of these “smart bombs,” whose delivery systems were much enhanced.  This improvement between 1991 and 2003 was a continuation of a goal that guided U.S. ordnance development for at least 150 years.  James Henry Burton, the main subject of this work, was an influential pioneer in improving military small arms, working to make them more accurate and better able to put the bullet on target.

The early 1850s may be selected as the practical starting date for official interest in improved small arms fire.  Writing to Secretary of War Jefferson Davis on May 27, 1856, Henry K. Craig, Colonel of Ordnance, reported on experiments conducted over the past several years that proved “the superiority in range and accuracy of fire of elongated balls, fired from grooved barrels . . .”   Working at Harpers Ferry Armory James H. Burton designed a much-improved hollow based, elongated, conical bullet known as the Harpers Ferry bullet.  In common parlance, however, it continued to be called the “Minnie ball.”  During his time at Harpers Ferry Burton worked to introduce machines to improve the manufacture of small arms barrels and the machines that rifled them.  These were important early steps in improved “weapons delivery systems.”  Symbolically perhaps, one of his last projects for the United States Ordnance Department was to work on the rear sight for the Springfield rifled musket, model 1855.  Though a long way from an electronically controlled “smart bomb,” Burton’s contributions -- the bullet, the rifled barrel and rear sight -- pointed the way to today’s technology that allows almost surgically precise placement of munitions on target.

When James Henry Burton, the future machinist, engineer and armorer to three nations, was born in 1823 the characteristics that defined nineteenth century America were forming.  Some critics measured the fledgling United States with the wrong scale.  American art and literature, admittedly sparse, was dismissed as trash.  “Who reads an American book?” Sydney Smith asked rhetorically as well as sneeringly.  Alex de Tocqueville wrote, “[I]n few [civilized nations] have great artists, distinguished poets, or celebrated writers been more rare [than in the United States].”  Ralph Waldo Emerson, advocating an American intellectual independence, wrote, “Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands draws to a close.  The millions, that around us are rushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests.”  However he condemned mechanical skills, low on his scale of the human achievements necessary to produce the complete Man Thinking, Emerson’s term for his idea of the wholly unified man.  “Perhaps the time is already come,” Emerson wrote in his “American Scholar” (that he presented to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, Massachusetts on August 31, 1841) “when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids, and fill the postponed expectations of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill.”

The sluggard intellect of America was not directed towards the creation of a literature to be appreciated by the few.  In fact it was not directed towards creating much of anything for the few.  The chief distinction of the emerging technology that went hand in hand with Jacksonian Democracy was production that could be sold at a low price to the many, rather than at high price to the few.  When clocks, for example, were hand made the wealthy few had good ones.  With early machine manufacture, the quality of clocks fell but more people had them.  In time, machine manufacturing produced a product of improved quality at a lower price.  Prices fell as quality rose.  By 1860 machine-made watches rivaled the ones made by European craftsmen.

Timothy Walker, a lawyer practicing in Cincinnati, Ohio, was less transcendental than Emerson and saw value in the machinery of industry.  His “Defence of Mechanical Philosophy” appeared in 1831 in the North American Review.  He was answering Thomas Carlyle, who saw cause for concern for mankind’s moral and aesthetic future threatened by the mechanical philosophy that had become a sign of the time.  Walker stated that leisure is what gives mankind the time to produce philosophers and poets.  In the past, Walker argued, the few enjoyed leisure at the expense of slaves, serfs or peasants.  “We maintain,” Walker wrote when James Burton was still a boy, “that the more work we can compel inert matter to do for us, the bett