The greatest gunmaker in American history was not, as you might expect, someone like John Garand or John Browning, but another John – John Hall – a cranky, plucky Yankee from Maine. During his lifetime, few knew his name; today, still fewer do. Yet it was Hall who laid the foundations for the United States' economic supremacy by developing a truly interchangeable rifle. Think of him as the Alexander Graham Bell of firearm technology, the Steve Jobs of rifle design, the Henry Ford of the gun industry.

Hall was born in 1781 and had married a respectably well-off widow (aged 24) when, in 1810, he established his own small carpentry firm. In his spare time, Hall tinkered with guns – an interest he had acquired during militia service. "Among those things which appeared to me of the greatest importance and particularly attracted my attention," he later wrote, "was that of improvement in firearms regarding their accuracy and dispatch."

Hall focused on enhancing a rifle's dispatch by accelerating the speed of reloading. He experienced his great Eureka! moment in the winter of 1811. Historically, the main factor retarding the number of shots per minute a rifleman could fire was the ramrodding of ball-and-powder down a lengthy, tight barrel. Hall circumvented the process by inserting into the breech a solid metal block-the receiver – containing a flintlock mechanism and hollowed-out chamber. Hinged, this block was kept in place with a spring-catch that the shooter released to raise it. All the rifleman had to do then was pour in powder, drop a bullet on top, snap the receiver back into place, prime the pan and fire.

Boldly, Hall started a new business to concentrate on making his innovative rifle. Even with around seven employees, however, the workshop never managed to produce more than 50 rifles a year – but even for that modest number there were insufficient customers. Hemorrhaging money, Hall desperately sought a government military contract.

In 1813, his proposal finally reached the desk of Colonel George Bomford, a West Point-trained engineer serving as Colonel Decius Wadsworth's deputy at a new agency, the Ordnance Department. Intrigued by Hall's design, Bomford ordered 200 rifles just before Christmas 1814. There was one problem: Bomford wanted them delivered by April 1, 1815 – an impossibility. Hall reluctantly turned down the offer. Nevertheless, he focused, with his characteristic beetle-browed intensity, on cranking out Bomford's rifles by increasing the speed of production.

The greatest time-waster, Hall noticed, was the handcrafting of each individual piece of a gun to mesh snugly with its neighbors. While every hammer or trigger looked similar, on closer inspection they weren't. That was because a gunsmith constructed a gun from scratch, including carving and polishing the wooden stock, boring and rifling the barrel, fitting the sights and firelock, and fashioning each piece as best his skills allowed.

This age-old mode of production resulted in grave disparities in performance and reliability. The barrel lengths of the government's Model 1803 rifles, for instance, could be an inch shorter or longer than regulations stipulated depending on the maker's whim, while the style of rifling and quality of materials varied widely.

The solution, Hall deduced, lay in removing this randomness by perfecting the manufacture of each rifle's components. Since it was the human factor causing the trouble, the simplest fix was to replace fallible people with infallible machines to produce the parts. Even so, there remained several major problems, not least of which was that these extraordinary contraptions, since they did not exist, still needed to be designed and built.

In June 1816, trying again to interest the Ordnance Department, Hall, undaunted, penned one of the most important letters in American history. He proposed "to bring the rifles to the utmost perfection [by making] every similar part of every gun so much alike that it will suit every gun, e.g. so that every bayonet will suit every barrel, so that every barrel will suit every stock, every stock or receiver will suit every barrel, and so that if a thousand were taken apart and the limbs thrown promiscuously together in one heap, they may be taken promiscuously from the heap, and will all come right."

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