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
Putting machines on wheels
Machinery Hall at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition opened the eyes of America, and of the world, to the industrial progress being made by the "American system."
During the last 25 years of the nineteenth century, inventions crowded one upon another. In 1880 alone, 10,000 patents for labor-saving machines were granted. Machine shops were a maze of lineshafts and belts. Machine tools were still hazardous affairs with exposed gears and uncontrolled drives, but the need for them continued to grow, and new firms in such distant places as Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Rockford began to compete with the original New England and Philadelphia firms. More miles of railroad track (nearly 70,000) were laid in the 1880s than in any decade before or since. For shorter trips, the new trolley cars introduced a new way of life.
Profound changes were brought by the bicycle. In a few years, millions were built. Better roads were needed and built. Competition stimulated rapid improvements both in bicycles and in the machine tools that produced them.
Before the practicality of steam locomotion had been demonstrated, the Baltimore and Ohio Co. had already built 25 miles of roadbed. Chartered in 1827, the company experimented with horses, a manually turned winch, a sail, dogs, and a steam locomotive (Peter Cooper's Tom Thumb) before settling on horse-drawn vehicles. Development came so fast, that by 1831, the B&O had converted to steam.
For awhile, it seemed that every machine ship in the country was trying to build locomotives. Paterson, N.J., the first locomotive-manufacturing center, had the Rogers, Danforth, and Grant firms. Also, Schenectady (N.Y.) Locomotive (which with Rogers Locomotive) formed the eventual nucleus of American Locomotive Co.
A company founded in Philadelphia by Matthias Baldwin to bind books and produce copper printing cylinders was so successful that, in 1828, it had to move into larger quarters. Unable to find a steam engine to meet his requirements, Baldwin designed and built his own. Soon the firm was building nothing but steam engines and, in 1832, built its first locomotive, Old Ironsides.
In 1892, the electric motor first began to be noticed as a drive for machine tools and, in 1895, Baldwin converted the lathes in the wheel room to individual drives so the overhead lineshafts could be removed.
The Pennsylvania Railroad shops in Altoona were so impressive that, in the summer of 1881, the year-old American Society of Mechanical Engineers held its summer meeting in Altoona to be near them.
When John Deere, on a hunch, used a wooden mallet to shape a moldboard plow from the steel of a discarded saw blade, he solved a basic problem facing farming in the West: the sticky soil of the prairies would cling to iron and wooden blades. Deere, a blacksmith in Grand Detour, Ill. moved to Moline, opened a factory, and started producing plows. The "singing plow," so called because of the way it hummed as it vibrated from the scouring action of the soil on polished steel, began to break the plains.
Reaping the grain had been done with the scythe, in the improved version developed by Joseph Jenks, but that was inadequate for the endless field of the prairies. There were many attempts at reaping machines on both sides of the Atlantic; the patent of Cyrus McCormick in 1834 was only one of many. McCormick's machine did not work at first, but he kept making improvements until it did. Then, in 1847, he moved from Virginia, where he was working on his father's farm, to Chicago and opened a factory to build the machines. McCormick was in the right place at the right time and, by 1851, was producing a thousand reapers a year.
Many other Midwestern companies went into the expanding business of building agricultural machinery. Horses pulled the early harvesters but, by 1890, J. I. Case was producing a steam tractor in Racine that could pull the harvesters through the fields.
Although there were many predecessors of the bicycle, it was the invention of the crank with pedals on it attached to the front wheel that created the first popular vehicle - the velocipede. The velocipede, invented in France, became fashionable in America about 1869. It had a wooden frame and two wood wheels, the front slightly larger than the rear, with an iron shoe around them.
In England, the velocipede got some major improvements. The wheel was made of metal that was lighter than wood, the iron shoe was replaced with a solid rubber tire glued to the rim, and the front wheel was made larger so that a greater distance was traveled for each revolution of the crank. Thus, the bicycle was born.
A critical improvement was made in England in 1876 when the crank was moved from the front wheel to its own axis and was connected to the rear wheel by a chain. Now gear ratios were determined by the size of the chain sprockets as much as by the size of the driving wheel. The two wheels could be made the same size and could be suited to the height of the operator. The pneumatic tire, invented by John Boyd Dunlop in Ireland in 1879, completed the new design, which was called a "safety" bicycle. New machine-tool builders sprang up, especially in the West. Two graduates of the E. W. Bliss shop in Brooklyn went to Chicago in 1892 planning to build presses. Rudolphi & Kremmel was soon building bicycle machinery.
Hubs were not yet free-wheeling, but they did have ball bearings. The ball bearing had originated about 1877 but was not widely used on bicycles at first (the royalty being $10 per bicycle). But, in the '90s, ball bearings were universally used.
Three companies made the balls used in bicycle bearings: Simonds Rolling Machine Co., Fitchburg, Mass., which started to make balls about 1885, Excelsior Co., Buffalo, and Cleveland Screw Machine Co. The first two formed balls by rolling hot metal; the third, by turning them from bar stock on special screw machines. All three finished by grinding on special machines.
The years from 1892 to 1894 were glorious years for cycle makers. Good cycles, which could have been profitably sold at $75, sold for $150. Such a good thing brought new machine-tool builders at a rapid rate. In 1895, Pratt & Whitney completed a new forge shop and pressed it into temporary service as an assembly floor for 200 "screw machines for bicycle work."
The logical descendant of the turret lathe was the automatic screw machine, probably best described as a specialized lathe used to make small components like, but not limited to, screws.
One of the first, however, was indeed limited to screws. It was in 1871, in Brattleboro, Vt., where Frank Curtis ran a bicycle-making shop, that one of his customers picked a screw up off the bench and, after looking at it for a moment, asked, "Frank, why don't you make a machine for making these screws automatically?" Curtis thought for a moment, then casually replied, "I can, and I will."
The Curtis screw machine was built and later exhibited at both the Centennial Exhibition in 1876 and at the Paris Exposition in 1878. It relied on a hollow spindle and an inner tube that fed wire up in short lengths. A three-jaw chuck held the wire as it was rotated into a die stock, and a screwdriver removed the completed screw from the die.
Other accounts trace the screw machine to Christopher Miner Spencer, builder of the Spencer rifle used by Union forces in the Civil War. After the war, Spencer teamed with C. E. Billings, an old Robbins & Lawrence mechanic, and formed a company in Amherst, Mass. to build a special automatic lathe for turning sewing-machine spools.
Modern gear manufacturing begins Gear mathematics developed through several centuries without having much practical effect on the way mechanics actually cut gears. One reason for this was that wooden gears could not carry enough load to make tooth form critical. Much of the credit for bridging this gap is given to three "scientific mechanics."
The earliest of these, Edward Sang, produced a treatise in Edinburgh in 1852 that ultimately laid the groundwork for the generating type of gear-cutting machine. The other two were Americans, George B. Grant and Oscar J. Beale. Grant, who was from Maine, had trained at Dartmouth and Harvard rather than taking the apprentice route to mechanical engineering. After graduation, he started a gear-cutting shop in Charlestown, Mass. in 1873 and eventually operated gear works in Boston, Philadelphia, and Cleveland.
Beale, also from Maine, gained practical experience in shops in Portland and the Portsmouth Navy Yard and then joined Brown & Sharpe in 1869. Among the significant early machines were two that operated on the "describing-generating" method: one developed by Grant in 1889, and an earlier one developed by Ambrose Swasey for Pratt & Whitney in 1880.
Hugo Bilgram developed the first bevel-gear-generating machine in 1884 to meet the need for bevel gears for chainless bicycles. In 1898, James E. Gleason invented a machine that generated bevel gears by using a rotary cutter and a combination of motions - rotary, swinging of the cutter carrier, and lateral. Gleason's machine, unlike Bilgram's, was fully automatic.
Edwin Fellows was working for his friend James Hartness at Jones & Lamson when he invented the gear shaper in 1896, when he was 31. Hartness and some others in Springfield raised the money to start Fellows Gear Shaper Co. and the machine was introduced in 1897. The other machine of significant commercial importance at this time was the bevel-gear generator designed by Oscar Beale for Brown & Sharpe in 1900.
Finally came hobbing. The first attempt to cut gears by using a worm with teeth on it may have been by Ramsden in England in 1768. In 1835, Joseph Whitworth produced a machine that would hob spiral gears. There followed a succession of improvements by others, but the hobber did not become practical until Pfauter, working in Germany in 1897, built a machine with a cutter axis that was not at 90° to the gear axis. There were many problems in developing the process, but by 1909, there were at least 24 firms manufacturing gear-hobbing machines.
John Steptoe arrived in Cincinnati from Oldham, England, in the 1840s and went to work at Miles Greenwood's Eagle Iron Works, which included a foundry, a machine shop, and a hardware factory. Steptoe left Eagle Iron Works in 1860 and formed his own firm with Thomas McFarlan. It was the first machine-tool company in Cincinnati, and Steptoe's first machine tool was a copy of a Putnam lathe. Much of the Cincinnati machine-tool industry got its start with workers from the Steptoe plant. William Lodge became the most important Steptoe alumnus, and the immediate success of Lodge, Barker inspired a wave of other new firms in the next few years. One of Lodge, Barker's first designs was a small turret lathe.
One of the most famous names in machine building - Niles - comes from two brothers, James and Jonathan Niles, who did not build machine tools themselves. They left Connecticut in 1845 and established the Niles Works in Cincinnati to do repair work on Ohio riverboats. As their shop grew, it began to build steam-powered sugar mills which were sent by boat to the plantations in Louisiana. By 1853, the firm was employing 400-500 people.
During the Civil War the firm needed another lathe but was unable to get one. So, two young mechanics at Niles - George A. Gray Jr and Alexander Gordon - built one. It wasn't long before the two were running a department to build machine tools. A partnership of Gaff (a wealthy distiller in Aurora, Ill.), Gray & Gordon bought out the Niles brothers in 1866. They retained the Niles name as the Niles Tool Works since they intended to concentrate on machine tools. Because the Niles shop in Cincinnati stood on the site of the new Pennsylvania Railroad station, a new site had to be found. The partners moved to Hamilton, Ohio, where they could buy water power from an existing canal along the Miami River.
Niles Tool Works expanded enormously, soon rivaling the Sellers firm in Philadelphia as a builder and exporter of large machine tools. In 1898, Niles purchased control of the Pond Machine Tool Works. Then, the next year, a great consolidation took place. The Niles-Bement-Pond Co. was formed from several major builders of large machine tools including Niles Tool Works; Bement, Miles & Co.; Pond Machine Tool; and Philadelphia Engineering Works. Two years later, Pratt & Whitney Co., then racked with internal dissension, was purchased.
Among the companies acquired later were John Bertram in Canada; Ridgeway Machine Co., which built boring mills in Pennsylvania; and Milwaukee Machine Tool Co., a lathe builder; as well as many smaller firms. At the time, Niles-Bement-Pond was the largest machine-tool firm in the world. German immigrants began coming to Cincinnati in such large numbers after 1805 that the city became virtually bilingual. Many of the people who built the drilling-machine companies were German.
In 1880, Frederick Holz, who came to Cincinnati in 1872 after serving an apprenticeship in Vienna, began operating a small shop, with George Mueller, to make models and do repair work. They also built paper-bag machinery and began manufacturing screws and taps.
They incorporated in 1884 as Cincinnati Screw & Tap Co. with Holz as president. The firm made screws, taps, dies, and universal milling machines which they built to flute the taps. Three years later Fred A. Geier, a young bank clerk, became friends with Holz and joined the company. Two years later, the screw and tap part of the business was sold to other stockholders, and the name of the firm was changed to Cincinnati Milling Machine Co. Holz, who was president, took on the design and building responsibilities while Geier handled the general business side as secretary/treasurer.
Holz designed and built positive feed for milling machines, soon adopted by others. He may have been the first to apply unit construction and to centralize control levers. One of his major contributions was the tool and cutter grinder. He produced the first design in 1889 and a second, improved version, in 1894 that became famous throughout the world.
In 1905, 52-year-old Holz disposed of his interest in the company and retired. Fred A. Geier became president, and the company went on to become the world's largest producer of machine tools.
