ABSTRACT

Cohen's assumption at first glance seems consistent with the standard view of the Civil War, which has been called the first great modern war largely on the strength of its technological innovations. Meanwhile the national armories and army contract specifications generated and spread the principles of the American system of manufactures—mass production of standardized, interchangeable parts by specialized machine tools. In the forties he made the earliest precise measurements by Americans of projectile velocities and the first laige-scale, controlled American gunpowder experiments. The army and navy experimentalists acted in the spirit of the age. The Army Ordnance Bureau accepted those constraints philosophically, even cheerfully. The individual efforts of Mordecai, Huger, Rodman, and Dahlgren seemed good enough research and development (R&D) for that peaceful time. Given the limited number of Ordnance Departmentof ficersand theburdens placed on those few, they can scarcely be blamed for having abandoned even such sporadic R&D efforts as had been made before the war.