English and American tool builders

Well-informed persons are aware of the part which machinery in general has had on modern industrial life. But the profound influence which machine tools have had in that develop...

In the previous chapter it was stated that John Wilkinson, of Bersham, made the steam engine commercially possible by first boring Watt’s cylinders with the degree of accuracy n...

In the genealogical table shown in Fig. 5, Sir Samuel Bentham and Sir Marc I. Brunel are indicated as having originated the famous “Portsmouth Block Machinery,” which was built...

Maudslay was born in Woolwich in 1771. He was the son of an old soldier working in the arsenal, and had but little schooling. At twelve he was at work in the arsenal, first as a...

In almost no case is the crediting of invention more difficult than in that of the planer. Not only was this tool the product of many men but no single man stands out clearly as...

By 1830 the use of machine tools was becoming general; they were being regularly manufactured and their design was crystallizing. It was the period of architectural embellishmen...

With the improvement in machinery came improvement in millwork and power transmission. We quote in the next chapter Nasmyth’s description of the millwork of his boyhood.[67] Two...

We know more of the life of Nasmyth than of any of the other tool builders. Not only did Smiles give an account of him in “Industrial Biography,”[81] but fortunately Nasmyth was...

The work of the earlier generation of English tool builders may be said to have culminated in that of Sir Joseph Whitworth. For a man of his commanding influence, the informatio...

The phrase “Yankee ingenuity” has become a part of the English language. If New England no longer holds all the good mechanics in the United States, there was a time when she ca...

It is well, in beginning, to define what we mean by the interchangeable system. We will consider it as the art of producing complete machines or mechanisms, the corresponding pa...

In the last chapter we considered the rise of the interchangeable system of manufacture and saw that it started in the shops of Eli Whitney, at New Haven, and of Simeon North, a...

The city of Hartford has been more closely identified with the later development of interchangeable manufacture than almost any other city. The gun makers have been so vital an...

Mr. Richards was not primarily a tool builder, but his contributions to mechanical engineering are too great to pass without notice. About 1860 he helped Charles T. Porter devel...

A glance at the genealogical chart, Fig. 37, will show why the old Robbins & Lawrence shop, at Windsor, Vt., in the backwoods of northern New England, deserves a special chapter...

Two companies, both in New England, have been conspicuous for their leadership in tool building and the introduction of precision methods in manufacture. One of them, the Pratt...

At the close of the chapter on “Early American Mechanics” we referred to the spread of machinery building northward from Rhode Island to the Merrimac Valley and central Massachu...

The most casual consideration of New England’s mechanical development brings one squarely against a most interesting and baffling phase of American industrial life, the brass in...

Although the commercial manufacture of machinery began in New England, Philadelphia became, and for a long time remained, the largest tool building center in the country. Its la...

Prior to 1880 practically all of the tool building in the United States was done east of the Alleghenies. The few tools built here and there in Ohio and Indiana were mostly copi...