This is a great article on the history of machine tools and machine work. But it is also a history of the growth of early america and the United States. A Thank You needs to go, first to the author-unknown, to American Machinist for originally publishing this article, also to The Wayback Machine for archiving it, and to Pedro for finding it at The Wayback Machine and emailing me. My position here is that this article needs to be available for interested machinists and others to read, I don't think either of the other sites will be doing that. I gladly make it available while making no benefit from it -Note: The ads at the top of my pages are Angelfire's not mine. Enjoy, Pat McGuirk
Former link to the article at the American Machinist site. http://www.americanmachinist.com/library/features/aug96/lathes.html
Article was originally printed: American Machinist, August 1996
The American system of manufacturing based on interchangeable parts had been developed by arms makers. In the process, they had to develop and build machines that would give them the precision they needed. None of them thought of themselves as machine-tool builders. They were in the business of making arms, and they built the machines they needed for that purpose.
In the mid-1800s, there began to emerge firms whose main purpose was the development and building of machine tools. Some, like William Sellers, began with that purpose in mind. Others, like Brown & Sharpe, started in other fields and indirectly moved into machine-tool building.
Although capitalizing on the system of intechangeable manufacture created by the arms makers, these new firms did not grow out of arms makers. Rather, they developed out of the unique type of general machine shop that would develop and build any kind of machine that one might wish to order for any purpose. Such shops did not produce standard machines and go out and sell them; they innovated on demand.
These shops were a unique element of the New England scene in the early part of the 19th Century and constituted what has been call a "shop culture." It was an elite group in a day when a machinist was "one who invents, or makes, machines." The shops were usually individual or partnership operations, and they rarely grew very large. To sign on as an apprentice in such a shop in those days was the only route to becoming a mechanical engineer.
One of the most important groups of such shops grew up around Pawtucket, R.I., where Slater had introduced the factory system. By 1815, some 130 cotton-machinery manufacturing plants employed 26,000 people there. Larned Pitcher came to Pawtucket in 1813 and started a shop, later taking in Ira Gay. Pitcher & Gay became one of the larger manufacturers of cotton machinery.
In 1822, Samuel Slater, Larned Pitcher, and Ira Gay became interested in a small textile mill in Goffstown, N.H. They became partners with Olney Robinson (who had just bought the mill and had originally approached Slater), Willard Sayles, Lyman Tiffany, and Oliver Dean. The company became Amoskeag Manufacturing Co. and Goffstown became Manchester.
In 1840, Amoskeag built a larger machine shop to build and repair textile machinery. This shop included two buildings, each three-stories high and nearly 400-ft long. It was headed at first by William A. Burke and employed about 700 men. About 1851, a giant pit lathe was built at Amoskeag which could swing 33 ft and had a 21-ft diameter faceplate.
Nashua, N.H., may be the site of the first company exclusively devoted to the manufacture of machine tools. John H. Gage established a firm there in 1837 for that purpose and, in 1851, took in as partners David A. G. Warner and George Whitney. The firm of Gage, Warner & Whitney produced a wide variety of machine tools including iron planers of all sizes, engine lathes (from the smallest watchmaker's up to a size suitable for turning six or eight-foot locomotive driving wheels), hand lathes of all sizes, and chucking lathes of all sizes.
The early milling machines built in the Middletown gun shops and the later machine built at Whitney's shared a serious technical flaw: there was no convenient vertical adjustment. In effect, each designer seems to have approached the problem as though he were thinking of a lathe, and lathe castings were often a feature of these machines.
The first machine to have combined vertical adjustment and an adequate support for the spindle was made at Gay, Silver & Co. about 1835, some 17 years after the early Middletown machines.
Frederick Howe, who served his apprenticeship at Gay, Silver and worked there until he went to Robbins & Lawrence, developed an index milling machine in 1850. It still resembled a lathe, but the work could be positioned in rotation horizontally and could be adjusted vertically by a leadscrew. The design lacked rigidity, something Howe corrected in his design of 1852. This was the machine sold to the British for Enfield.
Also, it was this design that Richard Lawrence took with him to Hartford when he went to equip the Sharps rifle plant. And it was this design that was modified by Francis Pratt at Phoenix Iron Works into the famous Lincoln miller. The machine was named for George S. Lincoln who was then running the Phoenix shop started by Levi Lincoln.
In 1862, Joseph R. Brown solved the problem of having to file grooves in twist drills by developing the universal milling machine. This was a true toolroom machine. By creating the knee-and-column arrangement, he brought this new type of machine tool, which had been developed in America in a period of just 44 years, from Simeon North's first crude machine to a machine of universal, industrial caliber.
One of the characteristics that distinguished the machine-tool business in its early years was the relatively small capital with which a business could be started. Therefore, many people with ideas were able to start their own businesses at an early age.
In Worcester, this was made even easier by the plentiful supply of rental space. A number of large industrial buildings had steam engines and line shafts and were rented by the room, with power. In 1868, a group of manufacturers established the Worcester Free Institute of Industrial Science (later known as the Worcester Polytechnic Institute). They chose a draftsman at Washburn & Moen, Milton P. Higgins, to start a school shop to provide students with practical training. Higgins headed the Washburn Machine Shops, as they were called, for 28 years, producing machines commercially in the school shops. One of these was a drill grinder designed by a successful local mechanic, F. B. Norton. Higgins had established the Washburn Shops, with its work force of students, as a commercial producer of machine tools in a town that could boast then that it had about one-quarter of all the machine-tool builders in the United States.
Most of the Worcester plants built light machine tools, but only a few miles away at Fitchburg was a plant that went in for much heavier designs. Salmon W. Putnam and his older brother, John, started their company in Ashburnham, Mass., in 1838. The brothers moved to Fitchburg in 1839 and began developing a gear cutter, sustaining themselves in the meantime by repairing cotton machinery. They gradually developed a full line of standard machines and also devised a swinging and rotating table for drills so that work could be positioned under the drill without unclamping.
The first machine-tool builder in New York City was A. M. Freeland, who opened a shop on Morgan St. about 1845. Ten years later, he moved to Yonkers but stayed only a few months, returning to build a shop on 34th St. near Tenth Ave.
In 1857, he went to England and visited Whitworth, studying his methods and returning with a set of Whitworth plug and ring gages and a master screw. Freeland was the first person to introduce the Whitworth practice of scraping the ways, which was done to match surface plates that were made in the works.
After Freeland died in 1871, the company was bought by some of his employees and continued to produce lathes until about 1880. The company began to produce rock drills and air compressors for Rand Co., which later bought it and operated it as a plant until 1906. When Ingersoll-Sergeant and Rand merged into Ingersoll-Rand, the Freeland plant was closed.
At an early date, hardware became associated with New Britain, Conn. This is remarkable because these is no water power available at New Britain and, in the 19th Century, water power was considered indispensable for any kind of manufacturing.
Perhaps one reason hardware manufacturing developed there was that, in 1839, Frederick Stanley bought a steam engine from William Burdon in Brooklyn and took it up the Connecticut River to Middletown, then across he hills by ox cart to New Britain.
If Frederick Stanley showed the people of New Britain that a steam engine was as good a source of power as falling water, the same lesson was being learned in many other towns at about the same time. It would be another two decades before George Corliss would make the steam engine a really satisfactory substitute for water power.
As the steam engine began to replace the water wheel as the basic source of power, it brought new opportunities to industry. But steam engines required boilers, and boilers brought a new hazard. Boiler explosions became a matter of increasing concern.
One organization that discussed the boiler explosion problem was the Polytechnic Club, a group of young Hartford men who had organized in 1857 to discuss the relation of science to the practical aspects of life. It was a remarkable group whose members included Elisha K. Root, superintendent at Colt's Armory; Francis Pratt; Amos Whitney, who had worked for Root before going to Phoenix Iron Works; E. M. Reed; Charles F. Howard; Joseph Blanchard; J. M. Allen; and Charles B. Richard, who developed a steam engine indicator, served as engineering supervisor at Colt's, and became a professor at Yale.
Hartford had become the insurance center of the country by that time. It was probably natural that the Polytechnic members began talking of the idea of combining periodic inspection as developed in England, with the idea of insurance as a guaranty in case of failure.
The first few years were very sickly for Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection & Insurance Co. but it eventually began to catch on. It published exhaustive studies of boiler accidents and their causes. In 1889, the firm was insuring 29,000 boilers and averaging about three explosions a year of inspected boilers. Its 95 field inspectors discovered some 90,000 defects per year in the course of inspections. Despite this relatively safe corner of industry, the number of boilers and boiler explosions continued to mount rapidly. It would be many years before the problem was brought under control.
When South Carolina seceded from the United States on December 20, 1860, machine-tool building had already become a specialized business, none of it in the South. Tools and accessories began to develop along the same lines. In the end, the lack of manufacturing capacity and the inability to build it was a handicap to the South that no combination of brilliant generals and dedicated soldiers could overcome.
During the Civil War, manufactures were expanded rapidly in the North and West. Not only were arms contracts let, but the need for steam engines, locomotives, and all kinds of machinery grew. It was a time when new machine-tool builders - such as Pratt & Whitney in Hartford, Garvin in New York, and Betts in Wilmington, Del. could grow rapidly.
Although most machine-tool builders were in the New England and Mid-Atlantic states, a few had begun operations in Ohio and Indiana. The need for soldiers drew men from Farms, and that translated into a need for agricultural machinery. The new reaping machines assumed new importance, and the companies that made them expanded rapidly.
Despite the recent war and the resulting panic of 1873, plans went ahead for the great Centennial Exhibition to be held in Philadelphia in 1876. William Sellers, one of the key figures in planning it, had seen to it that the exhibition would show off the American achievements in machinery - locomotives, typewriters, sewing machines, printing presses, reaping machines, and the machine tools used to build this machinery.
At the very center of the 1,402-ft long, 360-ft wide Machinery Hall, stood the dramatic 1,400-hp, slow-speed Corliss engine. The engine drove an underfloor drive shaft, which was 352-ft long and ran across the center of the building. Greared directly to this shaft, and at right angles to it, were four lines of jack shafts, each 108-ft long. These jack shafts, in turn, drove the eight overhead shafts that distributed power to the machines.
The immense hall, filled with operating machines of all types, made a profound impression on visitors. Even people involved in building one type of machine had no idea of the extent of development in other areas.
One of the visitors to Machinery Hall was a brilliant mechanic working for Pratt & Whitney by the name of John Grant. He was astounded at how many different things were going on in machinery development, and he left Philadelphia convinced that some method of spreading the word on these developments was needed to handle the intervals between Centennial Exhibitions.
Grant aroused the interest of two young journalists in new York and in November of 1877, the firm of Miller & Bailey published the first issue of a new paper it called American Machinist. Its editors were optimistic, "for indications are strong and positive that the fog which has for four long years enveloped the commercial progress of our country is about to lift . . . and will show a development of American machinery such as the world has never before witnessed . . . rapid improvements will be wrought, the adoption of which will leave far behind those who cling to old ways and processes."
