The original Pratt & Whitney Company was created before the American Civil War by Francis Pratt and Amos Whitney. These “Yankee mechanics” learned their trade as inside contractors at Samuel Colt’s armoury, opened in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1855. They produced the individual parts needed for Colt pistols and rifles, hiring their own workforce but using Colt’s plant and tools.

Of central importance to our story, Pratt and Whitney also built many of the four hundred machine tools and the gauges Colt needed to achieve his goal of totally mechanized gun production in which parts were interchange­able and handwork for “fitting” was eliminated. This approach became known as the American System, in comparison with the European System in which parts were individually handcrafted, with each part fitted to those already in place to create a completed product.

When Pratt and Whitney left Colt in 1860 to establish The Pratt & Whitney Company, they took with them a fundamental set of ideas about manufacturing practice which dominated the company until very recently. They believed that best practice called for the creation of special-purpose machines able to perform specific operations on specific parts, if possible, at high speeds in high volumes. They further believed that machines performing similar types of tasks should be grouped together in departments and that simple logic called for setting up a machine to make a given part and then making a batch of them before setting up the machine for the next part. In other words, they built the precision machinery needed for the familiar world of batch-and-queue and, over time, organized their own factory in accord with these principles.

Over the next sixty-five years, Pratt & Whitney grew, from a small work­shop under the direct management of the two founders into a massive and highly successful organization. In its many departments focused on specific processes—casting, drilling, tapping, heat treating—Pratt produced the parts needed for lathes, grinders, millers, cutters, and borers for metal­working industries. The firm also pioneered extremely precise gauges to check the accuracy of parts and sold these along with their tools. Over the years, Pratt’s machines became more complex and capable of more delicate and sophisticated tasks. In addition, advances in metallurgy made it possible to work pre-hardened metals so parts could be made to net shape without fear that subsequent hardening steps would interfere with inter-changeability. However, the basic philosophy of production did not change.

Excerpted from page number 153 of ‘Lean Thinking’ by Womack and Jones