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 country wants to ride
The watershed year for automotive manufacture in the U.S. was 1897. The Stanley twins began to build their steam-driven cars; Alexander Winton formed his Cleveland company and built six 6-passenger omnibuses for that city; E. R. Fellows received a patent for his gear shaper of the mold-generating type; Ransom E. Olds formed his company to build autos; and Pope Manufacturing Co. started selling Columbia electric cars in Hartford, Conn. And a new style of manufacturing was born, one that would be the dominant shaping force of American industry for the next 20 years.
The claim to the title of originator of the automobile is actually shared by two different inventors; Belgian mechanic Etienne Lenoir, who patented a two-cycle, internal-combustion engine in Paris in 1860, and Vienna resident Siegfried Marcus, who drove his 1864 motorized cart a distance of 200 yards at 3 mph. And, in 1876, Nicholas Otto introduced his four-cycle internal-combustion engine to Germany. The first ancestors of modern cars and trucks are generally thought to be separate designs of two Germans, Carl Benz, with his first car in 1885, and Gottlieb Daimler, who introduced a high-speed single-cylinder motorcycle engine in 1886. Those designs lapsed into nonproduction and the title of first U.S. gasoline-powered automobile manufacturer is generally awarded to the Duryea brothers of Springfield, Mass.
Shortly before 1898, when Col. Albert A. Pope of Pope Manufacturing Co. (Hartford) placed his company's first automobile on the market, he declared, "You can't get people to sit over an explosion." His car, naturally, was an electric, and it carried the tradename Columbia, borrowed from his bicycles, the best-known and best-selling in the country.
Electrics enjoyed an early popularity. They were quiet, emitted no unburned hydrocarbons or oxides of nitrogen, and were free of Col. Pope's "explosion" danger. However, the weight of the battery and its power limitations proved the final drawback to the design.
Credit for the first U.S. commercial steam auto is generally accorded to the brothers Francis E. and Freelan O. Stanley, builders of the famous Stanley Steamer.
But, there were serious problems with steam designs, not the least of which was the unfounded public fear of boiler explosion. The steamer needed skilled maintenance and vast amounts of clean soft water. Moreover, the internal-combustion engine's greater thermal efficiency and later development into compact multicylinder, self-starting versions made for the slow disappearance of steamers from the market.
Production techniques among the early automakers followed, quite naturally, the methods used in other industries. Most of the car companies evolved from those other industries, most notably bicycle manufacture.
And not all early automakers had roots in bicycle manufacture. Ransom E. Olds had made stationary engines; White cars were produced in the White sewing-machine factory. William C. Durant, who was to found General Motors in 1908, became wealthy by manufacturing carriages in Flint, Mich. Cadillac's predecessor, Leland-Faulconer Co., built machine tools. The firm that built the Marmon started by making flour-milling machinery.
The Olds Detroit factory of 1899 saw the birth of the assembly line for car production. It was not the moving assembly line that Henry Ford was to introduce 14 years later, but it was oriented for systematic installation of one component at a time.
Ford's Model T: After two unsuccessful attempts at organizing auto companies, in 1903, a penniless inventor/racer, Henry Ford, swayed John W. Anderson and Detroit coal dealer Alexander Malcomson to support him in yet another venture, Ford Motor Co. "The way to make automobiles," said 40-year-old Ford, "is to make one automobile like another automobile, to make them all alike, to make them come from the factory just alike - just like one pin is like another pin when it comes from the pin factory." Ford wanted to design a car for "the Great Multitude." He successfully made and marketed eight models (A, C, B, F, K, N, R, and S) in six years, but his goal inched toward reality with the world-famous 1909 Model T, his universal car. The Tin Lizzie was mechanically simple and fairly durable. Moreover, it was inexpensive to operate and maintain.
The base price for the Flivver, as the Model T came to be nicknamed, continued to come down until, in 1912, a person could purchase one for under $600. But, at that price, demand exceeded manufacturing capacity, and it was this situation that led to experimentation with the moving assembly line. The assembly line: Early in 1913, Ford Motor Co. installed a moving line for magnetos. Prior to installation, each of the electrical components was assembled by one worker, and the best production rate was one assembly every 18 minutes. On an assembly line with 29 workers, each doing one function, a magneto could be assembled in 13 minutes. Refinements to the system brought the time down to five minutes.
The idea was expanded to the entire auto chassis almost immediately. At Ford's Highland Park plant, a rope with a windlass drive pulled chassis down a 250-ft-long line, and experiments were run on individual-parts insertion. When the line was completely in operation, working with an endless chain, a chassis that formerly required 121/2hours for assembly was completed in a little over an 11/2 hr. Applied to engine assembly, the methods cut the 12-hr job in half.
David D. Buick turned to building automobiles from making plumbing supplies in 1899; in a short time, and for a variety of reasons, he went broke. William Crapo Durant didn't have that problem. The son of a wealthy manufacturer, Durant had made his own fortune as head of Durant-Dort Carriage Co., Flint, Mich., when he took over Buick's firm in 1904. Buick Motor Car Co. was moved from Detroit to Flint (where it stayed) and, by 1907, could be ranked with the top producers. In that year, Durant tried to combine the four leading automakers (Buick, Ford, Reo, and Maxwell-Briscoe) into a single combine, but the attempt failed.
The next year, 47-year-old "Billy" Durant succeeded in organizing General Motors Co., using Buick as a base and adding Cadillac, Oldsmobile, Oakland, Cartercar, Ranier, Rapid, and a number of smaller parts producers.
In 1911, both General Motors and US Motors began to founder financially, and Durant was kicked out of the company. Later, he bought control of a new automobile company. After two years of developmental work, Louis Chevrolet began building a massive, six-cylinder roadster, and, with Durant's backing, the new Chevrolet became a top seller. Durant shrewdly invested profits from the Chevy venture into General Motors, and his friends did the same. By 1916, he controlled enough GM stock that he was able to gleefully announce to the bankers who had driven him out that he was retaking control of GM.
If automakers in the first two decades of this century had an effect on assembly techniques, they made just as strong - if, at first, indirect - an impact on machine tools. The pressure and excitement of supplying car components spurred contract machine shops, and later the automakers themselves, to develop revolutionary production methods.
Arc welding: With widespread electrification after the turn of the century, welding was made more practical as a production technique, although full commercial acceptance was to wait until the joining procedure was to prove itself during the World War I production effort. By 1917, there were at least four well-established companies that built arc-welding equipment. One of these, Lincoln Electric Co., had started producing such equipment in 1912 after experimentation by its founder, John C. Lincoln, a decade earlier. In 1918, Lincoln applied for and received a patent for using carbon dioxide as a shielding agent for arc welding, a process that enjoyed minor popularity with contemporary automakers, but was revived in that industry in the 1950s.
Charles H. Norton, while working at the Brown & Sharpe works, conceived that, with a robust machine meant for stock removal rather than merely surface finishing, a grinding wheel could be used to its greatest potential efficiency. Further, he thought, a heavy-duty system could plunge the wheel into the workpiece; not only that, but the wheel could be formed into a contour and impart a profile into an essentially cylindrical workpiece. Finally, Norton thought that such a machine could act as its own micrometer, that it could size the workpiece accurately through the control of feed increments.
By 1905, both Norton Co. and Landis Tool Co. offered crankshaft-grinding machines. A further development, again from both companies at about the same time, was the camshaft grinder in 1911. This type of machine enabled engine designers to specify one-piece camshafts of a hardened alloy steel instead of having to build up these controlling mechanisms from individually ground pieces. What Norton and Landis did for external grinding of cylindrical shapes, James Heald did for grinding I.D.s.
Until Heald's 1905 planetary-motion I.D. grinder, engine cylinders were bored, then reamed and lapped. Inclusions in the castings often deflected the boring tool, producing uneven cylinders. Subsequent finishing operations did little to improve cylinder-wall straightness, and engine designers were hampered in the amount of efficiency they could squeeze out of the internal-combustion process. By operating a smaller grinding wheel eccentric to the cylinder axis, the planetary I.D. grinder could impose unprecedented straightness to the internal walls of the engine. Parallelism with Heald's prototype machine was held to within 0.00025 in. Heald opened Heald Machine Co. near Worcester, Mass., close to Norton Co. headquarters; today it is a division of Cincinnati Milacron.
The forerunner of Cincinnati Milacron - Cincinnati Milling Machine Co. - also figured in another grinding development of enormous significance to the motor-producing industry. It produced Heim's mass-production centerless grinder.
The centerless-grinding principle wasn't totally new in 1915 when L.R. Heim obtained his patent. The technique might even be traced back to David Wilkinson's spindle grinder of 1820. But what Heim did was provide precision to the system by making subtle, yet crucial improvements.
Cincinnati Milling Machine Co. acquired Heim's invention and, in 1922, introduced its first production centerless grinder. The machine gained immediate acceptance in the automobile industry, where its 20-in. diameter wheel was used to grind shoulder work like pushrods and valve tappets. Precisely ground pistons running in precisely ground cylinders could hold only as much compression as the piston rings allowed, and the flatness of those rings was essential for proper fit. This became the task of the disk grinding machine.
Milling: Integration of an electric motor into a machine did more than reduce the overhead clutter of leather belts; John Parker's 1901 universal milling machine for Brown & Sharpe was a good example. The first to have an all-geared, constant-speed drive from an independent electric motor, coupled with feeds that could be driven independent of spindle speeds, this machine permitted easy control of the cutting speed at the tooth, independent of cutter diameter.
Other strides being taken by Cincinnati Milling were not limited to the design of the machine tool itself. Research work on the design of milling cutters carried out at that company by A.L. De Leeuw profoundly influenced productivity and the subsequent design of the machines themselves. Broaching: Broaching as a production technique probably dates back to Englishman Joseph Whitworth's method of cutting internal keyways. It was redeveloped in 1873 by Anson P. Stephens in America, but it took automotive-style mass production that began at the turn of the century to propel the method to its potential.
What Norton was to grinding and De Leeuw was to milling, John N. Lapointe became to pull-broaching. Until his 1898 patent, obtained when he was a foreman in the Pratt & Whitney machine shop in Hartford, virtually all broaching was done by pushing the serrated tool through a hole in the workpiece. It became obvious to Lapointe and others that this method was severely limited by the physical strength of the broach under compression.
The National Machine Tool Builders' Association (NMTBA) was formed in early 1902 during a meeting of various lathe builders in New York City. On June 15 of that year, members assembled in Niagara Falls, N.Y., to finalize a constitution; in mid-October, at the Hollenden Hotel in Cleveland, Joseph Flather, of Flather & Co., Nashua, N.H., became the group's first president. Vice presidents were named: William Lodge, of Lodge & Shipley, Cincinnati, and W.P. Davis, of Davis Machine Co., Rochester.
By the turn of the century, Cincinnati had become the leading machine-tool center with 30 establishments in that business. Philadelphia was second with 11 establishments reporting an aggregate output of $3.09 million; Rhode Island was third with 14 establishments reporting $2.92 million. Hartford, Conn., had 11 machine-tool firms with a total output of $2.29 million; and Worcester, Mass., ranked fifth with 24 companies producing $2 million in output. Two other major centers for the machine-tool industry - Rockford, Ill., and Milwaukee - were just beginning to emerge.
One of the first toolmakers in Rockford were the Greenlee twins, Ralph S. and Robert L. In 1876, the brothers' partnership, then in Chicago, had perfected a woodworking hollow chisel mortiser - "the machine that bores square holes" - and later the power-feed rip saw. The company moved to Rockford in 1904 and prospered there. In 1908, a significant development took place: a special machine to automatically adz, bore, and trim the ends of railroad ties. This machine is claimed to be the forerunner of the automated transfer machine.
Another pocket of the machine-tool business was growing in Wisconsin. In turn-of-the-century Fond du Lac, near Lake Winnebago, Giddings & Lewis Manufacturing Co. had already sold the sawmill line of the business it had conducted as DeGroat, Giddings & Lewis and was building shapers, lathes, small planers, and VTLs.
Sixty miles southeast in Milwaukee, Frank Kempsmith was building milling machines at Kempsmith Manufacturing Co., which he started in 1888 after serving as superintendent at Warner & Swasey in Cleveland. A Kempsmith employee, a young draftsman straight from Iowa State College named Edward Kearney, became acquainted with Theodore Trecker at the Kempsmith shop. In 1898, the two young friends decided to form their own company, a firm that grew to employ 600 people by the end of World War I.
World War I had a profound effect on both the automobile and the machine-tool industries. And vice versa. The productive capacities of both the Allies and the Axis powers were called on to sustain the fighting. According to rough NMTBA estimates, unadjusted for price fluctuations, the value of American machine-tool shipments jumped from less than $40 million in mid-1913 to slightly more than $200 million by the time the U.S. had entered the conflict.
Production in the automotive industry, on the other hand, remained stable during the first years of the war. Automobiles for civilian use continued to be produced without interruption through 1918, when the War Industries Board decreed that passenger cars be cut back to enable emphasis to be placed on trucks.
With emphasis shifted toward full utilization of capacity - in late 1918, over 60% of employees of machine-tool plants regularly worked ten-hour-plus days, according to one estimate - the development of totally new manufacturing methods was generally slowed.
World War I also borrowed technology and capacity from a segment of the automotive industry, the farm-equipment manufacturers. The tank was the product of a collaboration between British Col. E. D. Swinton and Benjamin Holt, inventor of the Caterpillar tractor. New Hampshire-born Holt named his tractor for that wormlike larva because of the vehicle's "platform" wheels, a smooth flexible track of steel that was able to bridge over irregularities in the ground.
The Caterpillar tractor was put into production at Holt Manufacturing Co. in Stockton, Calif., where its inventor had devised some ingenious building techniques. The track chains were made up of drop-forged links carrying plow-steel shoes, which were formed in a press to a special shape and then sheared to size. Special machines and fixtures also worked on the chain studs and the driving-gear arms.
Benjamin Holt died in 1920, but not before his brother, Pliny E., moved East and organized Holt Caterpillar Co. in Peoria, Ill. The two companies were the forerunners of the present-day Caterpillar Co. which was organized in 1925.
